"When I came in there was the remnants of a very good team here and I managed to supplement that with some good choices," Burgess says. "I suppose my management is about leadership, not about management with the team - about setting direction and getting people's KPIs lined up rather than actually worrying about their day-to-day activities."
Having such a mature staff also frees up more of Burgess' time to communicate with other business leaders. And that can only be for the good. RACV has a governance model that puts an IT steering committee and executive committee in charge of the governance of IT. Burgess hence spends much of his time talking to senior executives about all kinds of matters relating to IT.
"In fact at the moment there's a really good example on the table: I'm going through looking at all of the disaster recovery capability we have because we're changing our systems," he says. "And the way I approach that is I go and talk to the businesses and give them a clear understanding of the implications and challenges of IT in disaster recovery, and encourage them to think about their needs. Really mine is an advisory role, of going in and talking to the businesses, rather than the control and command role of saying: 'You will have disaster recovery.'"
Reporting to the board ICT committee is a big part of Gravell's job too, but so is liaising with his fellow CIOs through the vehicle of the Department of Human Services (DHS), which hosts monthly meetings of CIOs to agree on common issues and oversee the running of shared services. He says it is an excellent way to gain peer support and to facilitate the exchange of ideas. "Those meetings are reasonably orchestrated to DHS' agenda, but having said that, the CIOs probably now set the agenda more than DHS does," he says. "It is a good group. It's probably been more productive over the last six months than perhaps it had been previously."
Meanwhile Ash says overall management of the IT department is at the top of his time tree. Blockbusters manages its budget monthly, so he spends plenty of time managing budgets line by line, but managing staff members' day-to-day performance and ensuring they are meeting key objectives and key KPIs is also time consuming.
But CIOs increasingly find that business leadership means being held accountable for high-profile projects with a big impact on their company. Ash says the bulk of his time would be spent on project management, closely followed by a raft of day-to-day issues, from managing the business from an everyday perspective to putting out bushfires when they occur.
"Our business is very dynamic; it changes daily, and it is not the same in every state, so we need to be very nimble. I think you've got to be more agile in an extremely dynamic company," Ash says. "In a less dynamic company you set your goals and objectives and you sort of work towards them at a reasonably even pace. Here, you can set them, but the goalposts move regularly. And that is the thing: you need to be agile, you need to be nimble, and you need to be very flexible."
And most Aussie CIOs would say "hear, hear" to that .
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