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Ideally, a CIO should use his first 100 days on the job to learn about his industry and company culture in order to make intelligent strategic decisions. "That clear understanding can save a technology leader a lot of heartache," says Tim McCracken, vice chair and technology practice leader for Tatum LLC, a technology consultancy based in Atlanta.
To put it another way, the first 100 days are all about "looking and seeing why are things like they are," says James Bottum, CIO and vice provost of computing and information technology at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. "It's easy to describe the water we're drowning in, but it's maybe a little harder to describe what the fundamental problems are."
A trigger-happy CIO, on the other hand, can introduce new, fundamental problems. McCracken recalls one client company whose new CIO immediately decided to shift the entire company to a different enterprise resource planning software. He chose a brand he had worked with at a previous job. Unfortunately, "he found out about halfway through that it wasn't going to work for the organization, and more important, the organization wasn't ready for the change. His approach to the implementation was centralized, and the organization and its culture were very decentralized from the top down. [The CIO's] approach was a big-bang rollout. In a decentralized environment, it was just a recipe for disaster," McCracken says.
To get a better idea of how CIOs should manage their first 100 days, we interviewed consultants and CIOs from several industries, including technology, apparel, education and retail. They differ on their approaches but agree on a basic course of action: A new CIO should have a shut mouth and open ears and make it a top priority to learn the industry, the company and the company's culture.
At a midmarket company, a new CIO better move especially fast to learn the politics of how things get done. That's because smaller companies often lack mature IT governance processes. Some might not even have written policies on how to launch new projects. So CIOs better quickly court the people who control budgets and meet with senior-level business executives to figure out their complaints and needs.
"If those relationships don't work, everything you want to do is going to be more painful -- and you need to know that up front," says Wes Kahle, a principal at Kahle Partners LLC, an IT consultancy in Washington, D.C.
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