The CIO Paradox by Martha Heller

Author:Martha Heller [HELLER, MARTHA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937134280
Publisher: Bibliomotion
Published: 2012-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Pick the right leader

“It is a common mistake among less experienced CIOs to believe that all business partners are interchangeable,” says Jones. “Left alone, the business will give you the mediocre but reliable person who has never rocked any boats, where taking them out of their current role and putting them on this program is not much of a loss.”

Your challenge, then, is to build on the trust you’ve established through consistent delivery and negotiate for the business leader who commands deep and profound respect among her peers.

Ralph Loura, CIO of The Clorox Company, learned the importance of choosing the right sponsor the hard way. “When I was in my first CIO role, we were delivering a huge CRM project and the VP of sales operations was the project sponsor. We built requirements for the project, and delivered it on time, on spec, and on budget. It was so perfect it made you weep. We built great functionality around opportunity management and the deals desk. And it was connected to the marketing channel. It was just beautiful. We rolled it out and in the first week we had something like a 2 percent adoption rate. The field refused to use the tool. We were devastated.”

The problem was that the VP of sales operations had sponsored the perfect solution to allow his sales team to spend two or three hours a day doing detailed forecasting and rolling the numbers up to him so that he had the information he needed. But the sales people had no interest in spending their time that way, so they did not use the tool. “We designed the perfect system to meet the requirements,” says Loura, “but it completely missed the mark.”

There are two lessons to be learned from Loura’s tale of woe:

The choosers are not the users: “You always have to remember the difference between the users and the choosers.” The chooser, in this case, was the VP of sales operations. “We listened to him,” says Loura, “but we lost sight of the users. We never thought about how we were going to get the salespeople to be excited about the technology.”

Talk to everyone: “Regardless of who your sponsor is, don’t take your advice in terms of platform or strategy or value creation from one source,” says Loura. “Make sure you have built broad alliances throughout the business. When it comes to delivering value, don’t pin your hopes and dreams to one executive leader. Make sure you’re checking with other functions to anticipate the downstream effects of what one leader wants.”

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