Question of Performance
Our CIOs tell us how they perform, particularly their effectiveness in keeping IT budgets within forecast restraints, is a big and growing factor in their salary and performance appraisal. So is project performance, including ability to deliver on time and on budget. Leadership and the impact of their initiatives on the company are almost as important.
And that business orientation is very much reflected in how CIOs spend their time. For instance we caught RACV CIO Charles Burgess - who says the major factor in his salary and performance appraisal is his ability to meet the budget - right in the throes of planning for next year's budget. "The question of where I spend my time is an easy one to answer just at the moment," Burgess says. "The vast majority of my time currently is spent on my business plan and budgeting activities.
"There's a peak now leading into our management committee budgeting reviews. It's a normal budget cycle, but it's driven by the fact that because we sell our services internally we have to spend a lot of time negotiating with our businesses to get the volumes that they are going to consume of our services agreed. We then convert those into revenue and then work out our cost base to be able to meet that revenue target. That's a quite extensive set of activities that we go through at the RACV that I sort of 'drive' between March and the end of May."
Burgess says part of his leadership response to the exercise is to encourage and get the businesses to take ownership for their volume consumption of IT services. "We're going through the exercise at the moment for our management committee, and the management committee reviews and signs off the budget and makes whatever adjustments it sees appropriate, and then I manage it," he says. "I have got to say I don't find that too hard. It's time consuming, but it's not hard."
All in a Day's Work
When it comes to how they spend their days, Australian CIOs say managing IT staff takes up more of the time (29 per cent) than anything else, closely followed by communicating with other business executives (26 per cent). Understanding technologies (14 per cent) and interacting with outside business customers, partners and suppliers are the next most time-consuming parts of the role (13 per cent.) Talking to IT vendors takes up about 10 per cent of their total time.
Rebbechi says a large percentage of his time - perhaps as much as 30 per cent - goes into working with the senior people in the institution in relation to the university's online learning activities on committees and in organisations relating to online learning. That work is simultaneously satisfying and frustrating, depending on progress. And he spends perhaps another 30 per cent of his time communicating with staff, particularly in working to change the attitudes and approaches of staff to both service culture and to technical design, for instance in changing views about the way in which an overall information architecture should work.
"I do this by making sure everyone is involved and trying to make them feel like they are part of a change process, and that they're part of change rather than having change imposed upon them. This is certainly a much slower approach to achieving a result, but I think it's probably one that is likely to stick," Rebbechi says.
But how much of the CIO's day is spent doing what, seems to be very much a factor of the type of organisation they are in. For instance Burgess estimates he would spend as little as 20 per cent of his time managing his IT staff. The members of his team are "a very mature group", he says, many of whom have been in their roles for a considerable period of time. Their resultant ability to be reasonably self-managing is a substantial improvement over other places he has worked.
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