First Step for the New CIO: Outside Assessment

Guest blog by Tom Pettibone, Founder and Managing Partner at Transition Partners, a management consultantcy. Tom served as SVP and CIO at several large corporations, including Philip Morris and New York Life.

Many congratulations as you transition to your new leadership and management role. You are embarking on an exciting and challenging journey that can be a career-boost or setback, depending on your early moves.

As a “C-level executive,” management depends on you to run your operation well. But this is just “table-stakes”. In order to be successful you must establish strong relationships with the rest of the management team, and that takes effort on your part.

I see CIO’s struggle and fail because they don’t spend enough time outside of IT developing these relationships.

You are in trouble if the Marketing SVP asks the CEO: “Didn’t we recently hire a new CIO”?

Early on, you must win the confidence and support of management and peers by spending time with them, learning the business and their operations, internalizing their concerns and issues, knowing the key players and politics, seeking advice, spending time in the field, and building close relationships. This will take a lot of your time and only you can do it; it cannot be delegated.

But you can – and should - delegate an Assessment of the department to others and free you to learn the company and build peer relationships.

To do the Assessment, you should consider an outside, independent firm that has no stake in the outcome. By using outside experts you get a quick and dedicated effort with no internal bias. Plus, users are more responsive to independent professionals. Done immediately, the staff will not be surprised since they expect change with a new CIO; and your best people will respect that you are quickly and professionally addressing the issues.

[Full disclosure: My firm, Transition Partners, offers this assessment service, but so do plenty of other firms, including Accenture and the "big four" accounting firms.]

In 4 to 6 weeks you will get a comprehensive view of:

• the organization,
• the costs,
• issues and opportunities
• what’s working well and what’s not,
• your strong and weak people,
• the company’s business direction, and
• a high level roadmap of next steps to enable you to jump out quickly with “early wins.”

An Assessment will empower you to quickly shape your environment for success rather than allowing it to shape you. For all these reasons it is normal for other new “C-level” executives to commission external audits--why not you?