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Making Time for Strategy
Finding the time to think and act on strategic initiatives -- let alone win approval for them -- is still a huge challenge for midmarket IT executives.
By Michael Ybarra
When Tim Buffo, the IT director at First Morris Bank and Trust, realized he needed to think further ahead than the next server hiccup, he went to management and made the case for doubling the size of the company's IT department: that is, hiring a second person. His time could be better spent on enterprise-focused projects, Buffo explained, rather than mundane custodial tasks. He wanted to be more strategic.
"I needed to take the everyday support issues off my plate so that I could focus on a wide area network and phone system upgrade," he says. "Not to mention that the additional help would lend itself to my giving even more time to being proactive. They went hand in hand."
No time to be strategic: It's a common lament of technology executives at midsized companies. Nearly 60% of respondents to the 2007 CIO Decisions Midmarket Salary and Careers Survey say they need more time for strategic activities. The majority of respondents at all but the largest midmarket companies report that they spend less than 50% of their time on them.
The challenge is twofold: finding the time to think about the big picture and then convincing business executives that the vision is worth the investment it requires. "The more strategic-thinking the CIO is, the better off they're going to be," says Kirsten Smith, a partner in the technology practice at the Battalia Winston International recruiting firm in New York. "The first thing a client asks for is a strategic business thinker. It doesn't matter what the industry is. They want the CIO to understand the marketplace, the industry, how to sell to customers, how to do it efficiently. Instead of having a CIO who understands just tech, they need a strategist who understands process."
For Buffo, finding time first meant getting a grip on infrastructure problems. A front-end client application that accessed data from a mainframe was difficult to set up, full of memory leaks and other software-related issues, and prone to freezing up user operating systems. It required a complete power-off to recover.
"What was key for us was trimming back the mundane things, taking care of those, migrating away from systems that were causing the most problems," he says. "What were the most time-consuming distractions? We fixed [them] or created workarounds. Before, I spent all day long trouble-shooting legacy problems. Now I can spend 70% of my time trying to increase the bottom line of the company."
Some of these projects include building an intranet and installing Microsoft's SharePoint as well as creating workflow processes that lend themselves to improved business productivity and operational efficiency. He's also been able to get a better handle on security.
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