Class Leadership Exercise

Situation: You just took over as the CIO of a $500 million/year manufacturing company. The company hired you because the previous CIO never grew past being just a mediocre IT Director. Recently the company just settled a $2 million liability suit out of court relative to some customer credit card numbers getting into the hands of some ID thieves through a hacker attack on our customer accounts database. That was the final straw that got the previous CIO an invitation to seek employment elsewhere. The CEO tells you he has hired you because he knows you are a CIE and will know how to leverage IT to provide strong strategic business advantage, as well as shore up the past performance gaps in IT. As you look into the situation, you assess the general morale of the 100 IT people to be medium to low, there are some not-up-to-par performers at all levels, and the general impression of IT by most of the rest of the company is that of a mediocre services provider. The IT budget was $10 million last year. The IT Infrastructure expenses are $1.5 million/year (not including employee payroll), the payroll is $8 million/year. The other $500,000 was used to purchase licenses, contractor support, training, travel, etc. mostly to develop new IT products for internal corporate consumption.

Questions:

  1. What are your first priorities?
  2. What questions do you need to get answered?
  3. What will be your primary contributions and activities over the first 12 months?
  4. How will you accomplish those primary contributions? (Specific plans, tools, activities, etc.)

What will you do relative to:

  • IT alignment
  • IT Governance
  • Leadership responsibilities over the IT Department
  • Vision
  • Stable Environment
  • Motivating the workforce to excel
  • Management issues
  • Providing resources
  • Removing obstacles
  • Offshoring strategy
  • E-commerce activities and initiatives
  • Metrics
  • Business case
  • ROI
  • Post project audits
  • Others
  • What does the current & proposed IT projects list look like and what will you do with that list?
  • How will you begin to manage the budget?
  • How will you begin to forge the relationships you will need to cultivate between you and the other CXOs?
  • What will you do about the InfoSec problem?
  • What sort of training initiatives will you put in place in the near-term (next six months) and mid-term (6- 24 months)?