Just Exactly What Should A CIO Do During Their First 100 Days?

CIOs need to go into their first 100 days on the job with a plan
CIOs need to go into their first 100 days on the job with a plan
Image Credit: jbraine

Being a CIO is an exciting job. Starting a new CIO job can be both exciting and just a little bit daunting. When the person with the CIO job gets ready to start a new job, they need to make sure that they are going in with a clear plan. Hitting the ground running can be key to establishing themselves at a new firm and laying out a path to success so that the company can realize the importance of information technology. What you are going to need is an 8-part plan for the first 100 days.


Administrative

As the person in the CIO position, you will be formally introduced to the company through employee communications. However, that’s not going to be enough to let everyone get to know the real you. The entire IT organization will want to know more about you, so your bio has to make a good impression. A key part of your administrative work is to make sure your vendors and partners are aware of your new role. You need to keep in mind that this is the kind of work that new leaders should be doing before day one, but one that they often overlook.


Organizational

For a new CIO, your most important work will be a series of executive interviews. You need to meet with every single key leader – line of business presidents, CFO, controller, CHRO, everyone, for at least 30 minutes. During these meetings you will need to ask them “What’s working? Where do we need to improve? How do you want to interact?”

During the meetings, you will need to plant the seeds for your transformational IT roadmap. You can start pulling ideas out of those conversations and shaping the strategy from one meeting to the next. In addition to the one-on-ones, you may want to consider conducting an executive roadshow. If you did this, then you would end up visiting sites all over the country and meeting with people, walking the shop floors, and seeing how people interact with customers.


Strategic

Once you have been successful at completing your large and small group conversations, your next task is to develop an IT strategy, along with a detailed integration roadmap with clear milestones for integrating teams, processes, systems, and infrastructure. When you create a plan like this, it is going to have to include three primary objectives for IT:

  • Guide strategic business decisions
  • Inspire employees
  • Drive sustained profitable growth

The roadmap that you’ll put together will be detailed with a targeted list of projects on a three-year timeline; however, the strategy is a one pager: Youi will use it to explain your strategy to your team, your leadership and to your board. You need to keep in mind that it is needs to be succinct enough to explain to someone on an elevator ride.


Governance

CIOs need to understand that they can’t do it all by themselves. What you are going to need to do is to convene a steering committee with senior leaders from the business units and major functions. With your roadmap and strategy already on the intranet, your committee will be able to start prioritizing projects right away. A key part of your job as CIO will be to establish the board of directors’ expectations. By having the steering committee prioritize the major initiatives, which then tie back to the company’s success criteria, you will be able to present a streamlined strategy to the board.


Contracts and Procurement

No it’s not exciting, but it is part of the job. As the new CIO you need to realize that in IT, you are often paying for technology that you are not using or paying too much for what you have. This means that you’ll have to consider closing data centers and rationalizing staff. At the same time you will need to focus on reviewing existing contracts.

This kind of internal review can provide you with opportunities. You can use the synergy targets as an opportunity to develop a vendor management capability in IT. Use this as an opportunity to teach your team about SLAs, vendor scorecards, and cost optimization.


Operational

One of the most critical things that you’ll have to understand in your new role will be how the infrastructure is set up. You can make this happen by doing a risk assessment to understand your single point of failures; look at SLAs, processes, outages, and your delivery model. You can use this operations review stage as a staffing review.


Cybersecurity and Compliance

As we all know, securing the company’s IT assets is one of the CIOs most important jobs. As the new CIO you are going to discover that your new firm both provides and consumes technology services. This means that cybersecurity is especially critical to the company. As the new CIO, you are going to have to meet with the CISO, board, and risk officer during your first hundred days.


End User and Customer Care

A good place for CIOs to spend time is on customer satisfaction metrics to learn where IT is delivering great services to employees and where they are not.


What All Of This Means For You

The goal of creating a 100 day plan as part of a new CIOs job is to come up with a way to organize a huge amount of work that needs to be accomplished in a mere 100 days. When you do this, you will be able to ensure that you are covering all of your bases.

CIOs have to not underestimate how long it takes to learn your new IT organization. Bring in an external partner, early in the process, to help you with this part of the plan. You need to learn how to resist firefighting. On your first day, you will be pulled in 100 different directions, but you have to resist solving problems right away.

It is key for CIOs to understand that your first 100 days is not about technology. While your plan does include an infrastructure and applications review, you need to spend very little time on technology during your first 100 days. Keep in mind that driving transformation is all about people, culture, process, and strategy. Your technology decisions can come later.

I think that we can all agree that when you are coming into a new CIO job you will have a lot to manage in your first 100 days. By having a formal plan that you consult every week, you will have a better shot at moving forward on every front and establishing yourself early as an enterprise leader. When you accept the new CIO job, start creating your 100 day plan!


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™


Question For You: What’s the best way to measure the success of your 100 day plan?


Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!
(The CIO job is to use the CIO position to communicate the importance of information technology) Caption: CIOs need to go into their first 100 days on the job with a plan
Image Credit: jbraine

Being a CIO is an exciting job. Starting a new CIO job can be both exciting and just a little bit daunting. When the person with the CIO job gets ready to start a new job, they need to make sure that they are going in with a clear plan. Hitting the ground running can be key to establishing themselves at a new firm and laying out a path to success so that the company can realize the importance of information technology. What you are going to need is an 8-part plan for the first 100 days.


Administrative

As the person in the CIO position, you will be formally introduced to the company through employee communications. However, that’s not going to be enough to let everyone get to know the real you. The entire IT organization will want to know more about you, so your bio has to make a good impression. A key part of your administrative work is to make sure your vendors and partners are aware of your new role. You need to keep in mind that this is the kind of work that new leaders should be doing before day one, but that they often overlook.


Organizational

For a new CIO, your most important work will be a series of executive interviews. You need to meet with every single key leader – line of business presidents, CFO, controller, CHRO, everyone, for at least 30 minutes. During these meetings you will need to ask them “What’s working? Where do we need to improve? How do you want to interact?”

During the meetings, you will need to plant the seeds for your transformational IT roadmap. You can start pulling ideas out of those conversations and shaping the strategy from one meeting to the next. In addition to the one-on-ones, you may want to consider conducting an executive roadshow. If you did this, then you would end up visiting sites all over the country and meeting with people, walking the shop floors, and seeing how people interact with customers.


Strategic

Once you have been successful at completing your large and small group conversations, your next task is to develop an IT strategy, along with a detailed integration roadmap with clear milestones for integrating teams, processes, systems, and infrastructure. When you create a plan like this, it is going to have to include three primary objectives for IT:

  • Guide strategic business decisions
  • Inspire employees
  • Drive sustained profitable growth

The roadmap that you’ll put together will be detailed with a targeted list of projects on a three-year timeline; however, the strategy is a one pager: Youi will use it to explain your strategy to your team, your leadership and to your board. You need to keep in mind that it is needs to be succinct enough to explain to someone on an elevator ride.


Governance

CIOs need to understand that they can’t do it all by themselves. What you are going to need to do is to convene a steering committee with senior leaders from the business units and major functions. With your roadmap and strategy already on the intranet, your committee will be able to start prioritizing projects right away. A key part of your job as CIO will be to establish the board of directors’ expectations. By having the steering committee prioritize the major initiatives, which then tie back to the company’s success criteria, you will be able to present a streamlined strategy to the board.


Contracts and procurement

No it’s not exciting, but it is part of the job. As the new CIO you need to realize that in IT, you are often paying for technology that you are not using or paying too much for what you have. This means that you’ll have to consider closing data centers and rationalizing staff. At the same time you will need to focus on reviewing existing contracts.

This kind of internal review can provide you with opportunities. You can use the synergy targets as an opportunity to develop a vendor management capability in IT. Use this as an opportunity to teach your team about SLAs, vendor scorecards, and cost optimization.


Operational

One of the most critical things that you’ll have to understand in your new role will be how the infrastructure is set up. You can make this happen by doing a risk assessment to understand your single point of failures; look at SLAs, processes, outages, and your delivery model. You can use this operations review stage as a staffing review.


Cybersecurity and Compliance

As we all know, securing the company’s IT assets is one of the CIOs most important jobs. As the new CIO you are going to discover that your new firm both provides and consumes technology services. This means that cybersecurity is especially critical to the company. As the new CIO, you are going to have to meet with the CISO, board, and risk officer during your first hundred days.


End user and Customer Care

A good place for CIOs to spend time is on customer satisfaction metrics to learn where IT is delivering great services to employees and where they are not.


What All Of This Means For You

The goal of creating a 100 day plan as part of a new CIOs job is to come up with a way to organize a huge amount of work that needs to be accomplished in a mere 100 days. When you do this, you will be able to ensure that you are covering all of your bases.

CIOs have to not underestimate how long it takes to learn your new IT organization. Bring in an external partner, early in the process, to help you with this part of the plan. You need to learn how to resist firefighting. On your first day, you will be pulled in 100 different directions, but you have to resist solving problems right away.

It is key for CIOs to understand that your first 100 days is not about technology. While your plan does include an infrastructure and applications review, you need to spend very little time on technology during your first 100 days. Keep in mind that driving transformation is all about people, culture, process, and strategy. Your technology decisions can come later.

I think that we can all agree that when you are coming into a new CIO job you will have a lot to manage in your first 100 days. By having a formal plan that you consult every week, you will have a better shot at moving forward on every front and establishing yourself early as an enterprise leader. When you accept the new CIO job, start creating your 100 day plan!


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™


Question For You: What’s the best way to measure the success of your 100 day plan?


Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

As the person with the CIO job, it is expected that you’ll manage an IT department that can successfully complete software projects in order to show the company the importance of information technology. However, this is not always the case. In fact, sometimes the software projects that our department are working on fail – and may even fail spectacularly. As the CIO it is expected that you will be the one who keeps an eye on things. When a project starts to get in trouble, it is expected that you’ll be the one who steps in and fixes things. However, you can’t do this if you don’t know what to look for. As the CIO, you need to make sure that you fully understand why software projects fail.