Educate You

There is no prescribed educational route to the profession; no undergraduate course from which one emerges with the letters "CIO" freshly stamped on the forehead. CIOs emerge from teaching, from accounting, from the armed services, from computer programming. All are educated, but none have been trained to be CIOs, they have learned their craft from a combination of experience and judiciously selected education and training programs.

When CIO magazine asked CIOs what educational programs delivered the greatest career value, it uncovered a diaspora of opinion. Some CIOs favoured formal education from august institutions, returning to university to study for MBA or diploma qualifications. Others found nuggets of value in joining Toastmasters. Yet others studied their "ideal" CIO for clues, stealthily employing them as mentors. Each approach has served the CIOs well at different times in their careers.

Nick Brant is the head of information technology for Virgin Blue based in Brisbane. He has a Bachelor of Science degree, having majored in computer science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Brant's degree was courtesy of the educational programs run by the Duntroon military academy where he spent four years, and which he believes equipped him with many of the management disciplines critical to a CIO.

After graduating he became a lieutenant in the Signals Corps, supplying the voice and data communications for the brigade in Brisbane.

Looking back on the undergraduate study, Brant says that it gave him a good knowledge of programming and systems, of database design and a good theoretical knowledge. What was lacking, he says, "was project management, contract negotiations, which might have been useful but are very difficult to teach".

Brant, now 40, left the army in 1992 to work in the private sector, initially for IT vendors and then migrating into IT management, moving to Virgin as director of information systems in 2001. Although Brant started an MBA course by correspondence, he never completed it. "One of the reasons was the lack of time," he says. "You know, to get x per cent of information from a one-hour lecture you need five hours of reading in a correspondence course." So much of Brant's management learning has come through mentoring, with him seeking out managers he has worked with and tapping them for knowledge and understanding.

Mentoring also played a key role in the career of Ben Walker, a 35-year-old CIO in the finance sector who, like Brant, has a defence connection. Walker studied science/physics at Flinders University in South Australia. After graduating with honours he started working in information systems for the Defence Department, focusing on military intelligence. During his time with Defence, Walker was sent on a wide range of training courses to hone his technical skills. Today, though, having made the switch into the CIO role, he believes that reading and mentoring are his best sources for information and knowledge.

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In his first IT management role at Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), Walker identified the managing director of a business unit as having management skills he valued. "You study the person and how they've done something, how they've achieved it. Anyone can wave their arms around and talk strategy," Walker says, "but it's the one who understands how to get traction who achieves real results."

But not every mentor is able to showcase the full portfolio of skills that a CIO needs. For example Walker's mentor at BNP was very good on business expansion, but less skilled at managing the day-to-day business. So Walker fleshed out his understanding by identifying other individuals and studying them. One, a CIO at a financial institution, was known for a particularly brutal management style, a style Walker thought he might occasionally find useful. He studied how the CIO operated and what techniques seemed to deliver what results.

In each mentoring instance Walker wasn't setting out to emulate his unofficial guide, instead he was looking for specific skills and traits to add to his management repertoire. This informal mentoring approach has stood Walker in good stead, and is likely one of the reasons he's less than enthusiastic about formal education programs, although time seems the major inhibitor.

"In the last five years I've looked at it [an MBA]," Walker says, "but in the jobs I do I burn through 60 hours a week. To do an MBA you need 15 hours a week, which is pretty considerable given that I'm trying to earn a living. It's all to do with the growth of your career. I've got a reputation as someone who gets things done." Walker believes that if he had invested energy into an MBA program then he may have done fewer things more slowly.

Although he's shelved ideas of a paper qualification, Walker has not abandoned education itself and has for the past five months been working with a business coach, a former executive with about 20 years experience. "There are some challenges in your career and one is the ability to influence people and explain topics. I'm working on that with my business coach," he says.

Up-to-Date Knowledge

While Walker is clearly a fan of the informal education approach, other CIOs, like Dairy Farmers' Tony Talbot, believe it is critical to be able to point to recent qualifications to demonstrate currency of ideas and knowledge.

"Some people have degrees from years ago, but they are not relevant. I have a graduate diploma in technology management, which I got about five years ago. But it wasn't about IT management; it was about manufacturing technology," says Talbot, who is the group information services and solutions manager for Dairy Farmers. "CIOs now need to be totally aligned with the business. That is, they need the full spread of sales, finance, manufacturing, human resources and marketing understanding, so that when they are talking to the heads of these departments CIOs know what they need.

"[Furthering your] education ensures that you look at things differently. There's a saying that when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Education helps ensure that you increase your skills to obtain a considered result," says Talbot. "Yet it might not be a technology solution for every issue - maybe a process change is required. For that, the currency of your education is paramount."

Talbot believes a lot of the technical knowledge CIOs need is picked up on the job, "but taking the time out to do appropriate business courses really helps in information management".

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Jozefa Sobski agrees. As CIO of NSW Health, Sobski would be the first to agree that her technical knowledge is limited. Her real skill, she says, is in knowing what she does not know, and knowing whom to ask which important questions. Sobski believes that she was brought into the CIO role because of her broad management experience, and supervision of often complex and political entities. In addition she has valuable policy experience gained during her time working in the education sector.

A former high school history teacher, Sobski's undergraduate degree was a Bachelor of Arts in English, which netted her honours from UNSW. After a stint working in policy advisory, Sobski became a TAFE principal. She also did a masters in Adult Education, which she says had a very strong industry focus. The masters, she says, equipped her with a "strong workplace reform focus that has been very valuable then and now, and helps [me] to understand how to achieve cultural change through business process reform". She also undertook an exchange program in Germany, exploring how business had used training to achieve reform. All of these efforts, she says, have served her well in her current CIO role, especially her experience on the IT user side when she was involved in developing business-focused IT strategic plans.

"I also have what many CIOs lack, and that is the ability to communicate at many levels and to be accessible, comprehensible and enhance the credibility of the CIO and increase the awareness of the priority of IT as a business enabler," she says. Technical training she admits has been "mostly learned on the job".

"I have come to an understanding of the elements of computing and telecommunications indirectly. I have never done a training course on technology. It is an area of ignorance for me, but not a barrier because conceptually I understand the issues. I read, I attend conferences, I listen and I learn on the job," Sobski says. "What I do is learn most from doing, listening, exchanging ideas and reading. There is no time for formalised courses with my workload."

Some CIOs, however, believe that formalised technology courses do offer enormous value if time permits. Frank Coogan is the CIO of George Weston Foods. Now 52, Coogan has a business studies degree from the College of Business Studies in Belfast, Northern Ireland. But he points to the three-year Master of Science in Information Science course he studied at the University of Technology, Sydney as his launch pad to CIOdom. "Prior to that I was in more junior, data processing management roles," he says. "The masters really was a springboard into the level that I'm in now. It was a combination of IT and business skills."

For all its merits, the three-year, part-time course did put pressure on Coogan and his home life. "Working and studying does put a load on the family. It's difficult to sustain all three," he says. "I was lucky as my family allowed me to dedicate time to work and study. The family supported me with that." That support continued through Coogan's MBA, which he attained through the University of Queensland. A lighter load than the masters, Coogan thought the MBA was important because he "wanted to be up to date with the business thinking". More recently, however, he has not pursued further courses, "partly because the older you get the lazier you get", he says.

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To B-School or Not to B-School

MBA courses are certainly a popular option for CIOs, with many of them starting, some concluding and nearly all wishing to do one if they could go into a state of suspended animation career-wise and study full-time for a while. David Johnston, the newly appointed CIO of the SA Department of Human Services, and until recently the CIO of SAWater, followed his commerce undergraduate degree in accounting and business law from Melbourne University with an MBA, after a four-year stint as the corporate treasurer for Bunge Industrial in Melbourne for four years. He believes the ability to understand how business ticks and finance flows is vital to the CIO role.

"The financial side is absolutely critical," says Johnston. "If I did not have a strong finance background it would be very difficult to do the job. You need to understand cash flows, balance sheets and management of IP [intellectual property]. I personally found the MBA also very useful from a strategic thinking perspective." By comparison he believes that "most of my counterparts are technical; rebadged IT managers and CIOs with a business background [who] tend to view the world quite differently".

That said, Johnston did begin a PhD in information systems strategy a couple of years ago, but found the academic focus did not suit his needs. His next course is one being run by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), about corporate governance, which Johnston believes does not receive sufficient attention, particularly corporate governance as it relates to information technology. "Too many people responsible for business governance - boards - have an insufficient understanding of technology and this has implications for the proper execution of their fiduciary duties," he says.

Which returns us to the currency argument again as proffered by Dairy Farmers' Talbot - that skills need boosting regularly. But Talbot admits willingly that there is a price to be paid for that refresh, and it's the usual bugaboo - time. His graduate diploma from Macquarie University was a tough course with up to eight MBA-level units.

"I would finish work at five [pm], be at Uni by six, in lectures to 10 then home at 11. If I was working on projects I'd work until one or two in the morning. Or I'd wake at four or five and then study for a couple of hours, and that was seven days a week. I didn't have any weekends," Talbot says. "Macquarie is a very demanding university. I'd recommend to anyone that if you're going to give up this amount of time make sure it's a very highly accredited centre."

All that said, Talbot believes the sacrifices and commitment were worth it. "I'm in a better position now. When you're being headhunted to these positions and they ask: 'What qualifications do you have?' you can say: 'Here's a current one.' And their eyebrows pick up because it shows you're current and your tenacity is there."

In addition Talbot has been a member of Rostrum and Toastmasters, and both have helped him hone the presentation skills he says are critical to the CIO role. Weston Foods' Coogan is another advocate of public speaking clubs. He says the seven months he spent with Toastmasters helped improve his presentation style, which he agrees is an important skill in the CIO toolkit.

Talbot says he would love to have followed up the diploma with an MBA, "but it's a huge commitment and [has an impact] on the family. In my circumstances - and I have a very tolerant wife and stable family life - I chose not to go on for two more years because it would have been selfish."

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All in the Family

Family commitments remain a significant factor for CIOs when it comes to deciding what, if any, education programs to take up.

A baby hijacked Joe Abraham's intention to study for a postgraduate qualification in information management at the University of Western Sydney. The commitment to three years of formal studies was too great for the new father and acting director of finance and information systems for North Sydney Health.

Already armed with a Bachelor of Business from the then Institute of Technology (now UTS), Abraham majored in accounting with a sub-major in computing, which helped equip him for the IS role he took on at North Sydney Health in an acting capacity in May 2000. He broadened that knowledge via a number of technology training courses with private firms. "It's not in-depth knowledge," says Abraham, "but I have a number of senior managers I rely on for that." And with a new baby there is little spare time for formal education to expand his knowledge base.

Walker agrees that CIOs can only divide their time to a certain extent, after which the fabric of life starts to tear. "I think you only have one life and you have to make certain sacrifices at certain stages and have less commitments," he says. "I have a wife and two children, so I head off other social functions and focus on work and family."

Brant's family focus is such that he thinks if he could take time out to attend another course or program it might not be related to IT or management. Instead, he'd look to take a financial management course that might help him better provide for his family long term. But then Brant's a Duntroon man and that, he believes, has stood him well in terms of preparation for the CIO role itself.

"At Duntroon you get good leadership skills. That's not to say that everyone should go in the army but it stood me in good stead, certainly with respect to leadership and management and big picture strategies," Brant says. "You get a lot of experience at a young age."

And management experience is key according to most CIOs. "This is all about managing people and large projects and communications," says NSW Health's Sobski. "People make things happen, not systems."