The purpose of this document is to capture and share the essence of the discussion of a specific roundtable forum in an effort to provide food for thought to further nurture the advanced technology industry in Canada.

Where possible, credit has been given to individual participants in the discussion, with the acknowledgement from the conference organizers that everyone who participated has contributed a great deal to solving a heartburn issue for Canada.

Forward: The Kitchen Table Conversation

In response to an invitation from the CIO community across Canada, a group of 40 senior executives from leading companies met around a figurative “kitchen table”, to find ways to deal with an issue of heartburn importance to CIOs: finding a way to bridge the silos between IT and the business itself.

The kitchen table conversation was seeded by a feature panel, which included:

• Tim Armstrong, Vice President of Corporate Systems, Canadian General-Tower Limited (CGT)
• Michael Davidson, Vice President, Chief Information and Privacy Officer, Apotex
• Andrew Dillane, Chief Information Officer, CNC Global Limited
• Doug Lennox, Vice President of Technology, Inscape Corporation
• Andrew Lyszkiewicz, Information and Technology Division, City of Toronto
• Jim McDade, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Purolator

Rick Wolfe, PostStone Corporation, acted as the host and facilitator.

The session was opened by Access Group Managing Director Taimour Zaman.

IBM’s Tom Vassos provided interactive voting devices that allowed opinion-taking throughout the event. The polling graphics in this paper are courtesy of IBM Canada.

About the Access Group

The Access Group is a unique management consulting firm specializing in strategic business development for Fortune 500 organizations. Some of its clients include Microsoft, Accenture, Siemens, IBM, and KPMG. The Access Group's unique approach allows companies to get access to senior decision makers in various target markets and get the opportunity to hear candid insights into key challenges facing target prospects. It also provides a unique way of building relations with these decision makers.

The Kitchen Table Game Plan was developed by PostStone Corp. The Access Group uses it with permission.

In A Nutshell...

Forty CIOs and senior executives gathered in the Second City studio in Toronto on November 27th, 2007.

They described a tsunami hitting the CIO function today:

• A global shortage of qualified workers is making skilled labour the biggest bottleneck to economic growth today. “In Canada, some 30 per cent of the work force will retire in the next few years,” said Taimour Zaman.

What recent changes will have the biggest impact or cause the biggest challenges to your organization?

To join the list of those interested in follow-on CIO Roundtables, please send an email to Taimour Zaman: taimour@accessgoup.com.cn

• There will be increased pressure on CIOs to automate the lower functions, forcing IT staff to move into the realm of business support.
• This pressure will confront them with the need to “speak the language of business”.
• At the same time, the IT infrastructure needs to be made robust enough that firms with differing “languages” — such as a legal firm dealing with an international client — can interconnect despite the disparities of business functions.

In a nutshell, CIOs have to speak many “languages” to keep up with the changes that are coming into the company from abroad, and the corporate objectives that are part of the CIO landscape today.

The Key: Providing Business Value
CIOs at the heart of competitive differentiation

The increasing value of the IT department is reflected in the swiftly-rising salaries of IT professionals. The competition for IT talent is global. Good middle managers are rare: annual wage increases for project managers in IT have averaged 23% a year over the past four years, and salaries for skilled workers will rise fourteen and a half per cent, a sure sign that demand for skilled labour is outstripping supply.

CIOs can provide their companies with the key to competitive advantage. In considering their companies’ productivity against global competitors, Canadian CIOs reported that they were concentrating on providing value-add capabilities for their corporations — capabilities like the speed of reaction time. The low-priced labour of their competitors cannot prevail against the ability to move fast and change business solutions quickly.

To help both business and IT become bilingual, the CIOs advised IS functionaries to change places with other departmental personnel, to get a feel for the operating lines’ business problems. An equally effective and often complimentary strategy was to have the operating lines join the IT department — the VP of Marketing would join the IT staff, for example, or the VP Legal would help resolve an IT approach.

IT could, in these cases, take the active role of change-maker. Because IT is a relatively new function in comparison to ‘Marketing’, IT could be the department that sees things in a different way, and initiates the change.

In an extreme example of ‘fitting into the business mould’, a CIO noted that he had in fact turned over key IT functions to departments like Finance. Others cautioned against it, because there are issues that only an IT specialist knows about and can resolve. Line departments don’t have the knowledge to solve IT problems. Latency problems, for example, can be solved by an IT person but not by a Financial Analyst.

Leadership, however, is a responsibility that devolves on all departments, and must be encouraged. It is especially a challenge for a department like IT, where the new entrants to the skills pool do not share the corporate culture. Being in an IT department can be an isolating experience for these new hires, and the CIO must actively lead them into understanding the business lines.

Matching IT to the Business - The Gulf

A measure of the gulf that remains to be conquered was illustrated by the poll on how IT should be benchmarked.

The CIOs felt that half of what they achieved should be measured by IT success, and half by business success.

How does IT feel it should be measured?

The business people felt that the IT department should be measured mostly on success in business accomplishments (76%).

How does the business think the IT should be measured?

Executive Conversations

Points made by the roundtable of the CIOs included:

• IT is the key enabler for global technology. INFORMATION is the critical element in breaking down silos within a business. Information can provide the linkage points…the measure of success.
• Security in IT depends on transparency to avoid problems. The importance of issues such as the archiving of email messages correctly is vital, for newly-emerging legal purposes regarding corporate accountability.
• Preparing for succession planning of a CIO can be difficult. If it takes 20+ years to become a three-star General, how long does it take to become a CIO? The key questions to ask to filter out the best candidate are:
• Who best knows what we’re trying to achieve as a business?
• Who can get things done?, and
• Can someone from somewhere else give another experience that might be more useful to your organization?
• The change of work style to mobility today is very challenging for the IT department. The CIO has to be an exceptionally good motivational leader, to implant the corporate culture in young workers who are not ‘plugged in’ to the corporation. They are more interested in their quality of life…social networks are more important than money. Only after the leadership side is developed should the CIO worry about being an IT expert. The ‘soft skills’ are the really important thing.

• “Success comes when IT provides a business solution. IT must understand where the business is going. The business units don’t want to be bothered by IT; they just want to use the tools. To make meaningful tools we have to work as closely as possible with our ‘customer’ - we have to provide something that is meaningful to the customer." Andrew Lyszkiewicz, Information & Technology Division City of Toronto

  A CIO’s skills are similar to what you want in a CEO, except that a CIO can have fun.
• Recruits for IT come mostly from the business side. CIOs look at people with Masters degrees or PhDs because of their different and higher level of conceptualization. It’s the thought process that is really being bought. The observation was qualified with the thought that MBA grads had an unfortunate entitlement mentality.
• The technology has advanced to the point where you don’t have to look after the bytes; you can concentrate on higher things.
• The issue about hiring people with university degrees was qualified with the observation that the real quality was the ability to solve difficult problems. Formal education is not as valuable in business as motivation.
• CIOs also need people who have experience delivering what you’re hiring them for — people who can understand your industry and speak business.

Overall, there was a consensus that CIOs in general had better become good at really attracting people! Young entrants to the work force have many competing opportunities, and CIOs have to be fighting for those entrants.

About the Author

Barry Gander has been working as a business growth expert for three decades, specializing in advanced technology. He has created compelling business development and advocacy programs around the world. His specialty is the invention of effective, creative new ways to expand a company’s business, either through selling more product, positioning it more forcefully, or establishing a better public policy environment. He was the author of a best-selling book on how to lobby the federal government, a second best-seller called “Fast Lane”, which crystallized the growth ideas of the pinnacle CEOs from across Canada, and a landmark book called “SUCCESS”, which highlights the views of 100 of Canada’s top executives. In his work with CATA, Barry has created and executed the “TechAction Town Hall Program”, a pan- Canadian drive to increase the effectiveness of a community’s use of advanced technology. Barry is currently working on a drive to increase Canadian exports throughout the Commonwealth, in a program called the “Commonwealth Advantage”, and to expand the network of Canadian companies into NAFTA, by forming the “NAFTA Advanced Technology Alliance” with his American and Mexican counterparts. Barry can be reached at: bgander@cata.ca