Distilling the noise
Mid-tier law firm, Sparke Helmore, has more than 600 staff working from eight offices across Australia, a situation which brings its own challenges, says CIO Peter Campbell. “I’ve been here for seven years and I do find a partnership a very interesting structure to work in,” he says.
As with many Australian firms, the c-level roles have the same responsibilities but very different titles at Sparke Helmore. The COO role is known as the national executive officer (NEO), while the CEO role is titled national managing partner.
Campbell works closely with both roles and said that working relationship is crucial in getting context around his own priorities. “They might give me information about the broader context of some change happening outside the firm, a change we’re going to go through, or something on the horizon that hasn’t really been talked about widely yet,” he says.
“Colleagues who are elevated above the level of departmental responsibility have a wider breadth of stuff they look at. It forces me to distil the noise out of something I need to communicate and target it down to a small amount of information but with a lot of background in case it’s needed.
“We focus on the business because that’s the priority. We don’t talk about the nitty-gritty of IT.”
Campbell says his staff are somewhat bemused when they see the information he presents to senior executives. “One of my engineer’s members saw a proposal I was putting to the board about a project he had been working on and said: ‘There’s no content left in this, how can they make a decision?’
“I said, ‘They don’t make decisions on the features you’ve based your decision on, they’re making a decision on the business benefits and this is what I’ve told them about here’.”
While working together is important, CIOs need to remember a good relationship with the COO can’t replace their relationship with the business, Campbell says. “You can’t make your COO the go-to person for your instructions on what to do, what to focus on and adjudicating all those sorts of issues because you’re going to miss ideas.”
He points out a lot of the information to resolve business problems or to prioritise technology comes from further down the ranks. “I get ideas from within the business about how they want to improve the way they do things, then feed that back up,” Campbell continues. “If I haven’t got the right support in the business, there’s no point in going to talk to the COO about it.”
Another key to the COO relationship is trust, and that’s something built up over time. “Top of the agenda is trying to understand what’s keeping my COO up at night,” Campbell explains. “It’s not usually IT-related, and I don’t want to talk about IT, but there is eventually some connection I’ll make that means we can add more value.”
Presenting pie-in-the-sky proposals is also counter-productive. “I don’t take the approach of presenting three or four things and hoping they’ll choose one or two,” Campbell says. “I restrict the amount of options I present, distil it down to the essentials.
“The few times when I have to say, ‘Look, you need to trust me on this’, that works because I haven’t come up with a dozen lame-brained ideas along the way.”
Playing the facilitator
CIO at Calibre Global in Perth, Jason Cowie, agrees the relationship with his COO, Andrew Rowe, is extremely important in ensuring IT and the business work together as one. “IT more than ever can improve business process and enable growth, irrespective of the industry you are in,” he says. “The CIO must develop strategies to take the business to the next level rather than keeping everything running.
“To do this, however, you need information to ensure your strategies will benefit the business as a whole, are in line with the overall business strategy and appropriate for the current market conditions for now and the term of your plan. There is no one place better to provide you this than the COO.”
The core ingredients for a good relationship with your COO are open communication, trust, sharing ideas and a willingness to listen. “A strong relationship becomes mutually beneficial, and a good strategy allows the CEO to achieve his or her goals which then puts more faith and trust in the CIO for future plans,” Cowie says.
For those CIOs who haven’t achieved the same level of mutual respect, Momdjian’s advice is to understand the COO’s primary pain point. “Every operational problem will end up on the COO’s desk – they are usually the bottleneck. Go to your COO with technological solutions that solve his big operational problems.”
The two roles have the potential to make a great partnership, he says, and together can develop the best and most effective technology solution focused on business priorities.
“The COO is the person you want on your side when you are trying to get technology embraced and supported and adopted at grassroots level,” he adds.
Do you understand your COO?
An organisation’s COO often defies a one-size-fits-all description. Ernst and Young’s recent report, The DNA of the COO, argues those in this position continue to fight to justify their existence, despite having a clear rationale. The consulting group also identified several particulars about the COO role:
• The COO is one of the c-suite’s toughest roles. The need for a figurehead in the operations role is more pressing than ever. One in three COOs strongly agree that their role is among the most difficult in the management team. Their peers in the c-suite are even more certain: Half of them think that few other roles are as tough.
• COOs thrive on the adrenaline of complexity and change. For COOs, the inherent challenges of the job are part of its appeal. Overall, six in 10 say the complexity and diversity of the role makes it worthwhile.
• It’s a stepping stone to the top job. Forty per cent of COOs aspire to be promoted to CEO within the next five years. Among respondents from rapid-growth markets, the proportion aspiring to become CEO is as high as 54 per cent.
• As a role, the COO is not yet strategic enough. Beyond the mastery over operational issues, which is a given, COOs have a clear opportunity to help define the strategy that underpins a CEO’s vision, and to then take the lead in implementing it. Seventy per cent of their peers also consider the ability to participate in strategic discussions a vital skill for the job.
The Ernst and Young report was based on analysis of a February 2012 study of 200 COOs, and a survey of 306 COOs and senior operations professionals across Africa, the US, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East in April 2012. A further 43 respondents from across the c-suite were polled.
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