Power Down
When you are at the top of the IT pile, it is a long way down. "You have to manage the visibility and you tend to be more careful with what you say," says one of the CIOs who wished not to be identified, when they were asked about the downsides of having power and influence over enterprise IT. "Politics exist in every company and you have to ensure that you don't expose a weakness that can be used against you. Most CIOs I talk with agree that they find that very challenging.
"Also the CIO - probably even more than the CEO - has to understand the whole of the business, where the CEO can delegate down. That broad knowledge responsibility is a lot of hard work."
Suncorp's Kogekar says the main risk is that "the buck stops with you, even if you're not the one who made the mistake". To try to avoid mistakes being left unseen, Kogekar has one of his direct reports who "plays adviser" to him. "They always say if they think there is a better way of doing something. That diversity reduces your blind spots and I encourage that."
At IBM, Wee agrees that once you reach the top level of IT, it is important to have "feedback, not flattery". To the same end he says it is important that people do not try to mystify IT in a bid to retain control; rather, they need to make IT as transparent as possible so that any looming problems can be nipped in the bud.
Wee quotes Peter Parker, the alter ego of Spider-Man: "With great power comes great responsibility. If you become the centre of the universe then the whole operation will come unstuck. It is easy for IT guys to mystify things and if you do that you can quite easily become the centre of gravity, which is a back door way of holding onto their power. I came across one peer whose way of exercising control was to lock down the workstations. If you hold and wield that power then your users feel very restricted.
It is this thinking that Wee encourages among his team - they are there to serve the business. And rather than try to become the centre of gravity he attempts to "lower the centre of gravity - push down the decisions.
"The key to sharing power is sharing responsibility."
With his bent on making big changes a priority, IAG's Issa is aware that "if you want to make big changes and you get it wrong then you make big mistakes". Nonetheless he feels it important that while he is in the role (and head-hunters please note, he is quick to point out that could be another "three, five, 10 or 15 years"), it is the big strategic changes he is gunning for. He is also very wary of outsourcing, believing it can be one of the greatest threats to a CIO's power, especially for an organization where information technology needs to be a core competency.
However, the real power of the CIO role is that when you get it wrong the buck rests with you, as Kennedy confirms. "You can always make the wrong call. With explicit power your risk profile is very high. With implicit power the risk profile is lower because you are planting seeds, so the risk is lower and you are more powerful."
At Challenger, Goh says that the power of the CIO - just like in any other political system, can be nice. "But if it's overused then it can create distrust and a barrier which keeps people distant. Power is a great thing - but the greatest thing is not to use it." v
SIDEBAR: Having Cut through the Glass Ceiling . . .
Gender influences how CIOs view - and wield - power
Karen Bard, CIO at Santos, is by profession a petroleum engineer and came to the CIO role in August 2004 out of the business. Despite her relative newness to the position, Bard is in no doubt that her responsibility for strategy, policy, process and making the budget means she ultimately holds her company's IT power in her hands,.
However, she readily admits to being uncomfortable with the "P" word. "I find it very negative. It makes me think of people with power who abuse it, who always put their thumbs down. It's a negative, controlling type word.
"In fact I asked myself when you rang: 'Do I really want to be part of this?', because power has such a negative connotation for me."
Maybe it is a gender thing. On a recent visit to Australia, Laura Tyson, who as an economic adviser was the highest ranking woman in the first term of the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, also explored power and her relation to it. "If you ask me do I want to have power, I would say no. I have never aspired to power for its own sake. But I would like to think I had influence - that is, I would like to have my ideas influence the organizations and the people for whom I work."
Moira Rayner, who with Joan Kirner wrote Women's Power Handbook in 1999, claims that power is a term which women do tend to avoid using, in part because of its occasionally negative connotations. However, her definition of power, which is the ability to set your own agenda, not reacting or responding to or resisting others' opinions, paints power in a more positive light.
Mike Kennedy, now a Gartner analyst but a CIO until late 2005, says that in his experience, "this is an industry where the glass ceiling is not there. Women and men have explicit and implicit power just the same. There are a lot of strong, powerful female CIOs - particularly in government, such as, Jane Treadwell [Victoria's CIO] and Anne Steward [the federal government CIO]. And there's Michelle Tredenick [NAB] and Fiona Balfour [ex-Qantas and now Telstra].
"They have a lot of explicit power and implicit power too. There is no real difference," Kennedy says.
Broadly, Bard still believes that women are less likely than men to be overt in their use of their power, while adding the rider that there are exceptions. "I've seen women who are draconian and thrive off their use of power," she says. In the main, though, Bard thinks women are less likely than men to use their power and ride roughshod over colleagues.
Like Tyson, it is a less hairy-chested definition of power with which Bard is more comfortable. Bard says when thinking about "power" in preparation for her conversation with CIO magazine, she looked it up in the dictionary. "It said it was the ability and capacity to perform effectively."
That she can handle, but for Bard the real power comes in persuasion.
SIDEBAR: Power Lessons
Power is a potent drug. Sometimes a reality check is the best antidote . . .
One of the things that power has provided David Issa, CIO at IAG, is the opportunity to pursue private passions, notably working with public schools in disadvantaged areas. Issa has forged a relationship with Lurnea High School in Sydney's south-west, which has led to his company providing some technical support to the school and inviting students in for work experience. In return he believes the relationship provides IAG with a better understanding of the communities it serves.
It also pulls him back in line when he is in danger of a power puff-up. Thinking about the salary he earns, the role he performs and how that compares with the salary of the deputy principal at Lurnea, and the role she performs is a great leveller of the ego, according to Issa.
Julian Wee, IBM's general manager of technology and transformation, has more conventional power mentors, nominating former GE boss Jack Welch as his business hero. He has spread Jack's word by buying a copy of Welch's latest book for each of his management team.
Derek Goh, CIO at Challenger Financial Services, says he has learned a great deal about power from conversations with older people, with their experiences teaching him that "people you meet on the way up you also meet on the way down. When you are modest you respect the power that is given to you, and that power can be taken from you. You need to see yourself like any other professional doing your duty professionally."
If he ever is in danger of overdosing on power, his two young sons keep him in check. Goh says that the relationship he has with his sons is different to the traditional Asian parent-children relationship where parents are respected as a matter of course. "You do not have to earn their [children's] respect."
With his children, he says "if you want to be their friends then you don't exercise power", instead he crafts the relationship based on trust and mutual respect. Nevertheless, he notes that however good the systems families establish, good parents still have to exercise power about 5 percent of the time.
SIDEBAR: Power and the Professor
It's all about influence says AGSM professor Mark Griffin
CIO magazine provided a draft copy of this article to Professor Mark Griffin, who teaches leadership and organizational change at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), and sought his interpretation of CIOs' reactions to the concept of executive power.
He said that while the responses were broadly in line with other C-level executives' experiences, "if there is a difference, it is a greater tentativeness around the notion of power itself. There is more attention to the negative connotations of power".
According to Griffin, power is "having influence". "You can ask three big questions about this notion of having influence that seem relevant to the article: What is being influenced, how is it being done, and why?
"Let's start with the last one first: Why does someone exert power or influence in a corporation? There's a deep suspicion of power that is exerted for personal or egotistical reasons, so you naturally see a lot of emphasis on reasons such as improving shareholder value, increasing productivity, keeping up with market demands or creating a social benefit. These are all legitimate reasons why people in corporations might manifest power or influence," Griffin said.
"The second question is: How is power manifested - that is, what does it look like? One big issue now is justice and the perception of justice. People need to see that influence happens for fair reasons. Let's take the issue of networks. There is no doubt that someone with a large network of business connections is seen to have more power and is able to have more influence. But how is that network used? Fairly or unfairly?
"Making contacts to develop new business lines and open up opportunities is likely to be seen as fair. Using contacts to get a more powerful job you're not qualified for would generally be seen as unfair. So a really big issue for the 'how' of power is the fairness of the way influence happens.
"Finally, power is about what you can influence. This is probably why those who influence key financial strategies are often seen as having more power than those who influence technology or human resources, for example. In the long run, these perceptions might be either right or wrong, but in the short term they clearly influence how power is manifest."
And what about the perception that female CIOs might be less powerful than their male counterparts? Griffin warns that just as it is dangerous to stereotype women, it is dangerous to stereotype men, since "not all men operate the same way".
"Overall, I think women help to bring a stronger emphasis to the 'what' and 'how' of influence. In terms of what is influenced, the range of bottom-line outcomes that are seen as important can be broader. In terms of how, women often have to exercise their power in different ways because the same behaviour by women - for example putting forward a strong point of view - can be perceived differently than if a man did the same thing. The woman might be considered 'pushy', where the man might be perceived as 'assertive', when they are both acting in the same way."
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