CIO Career Advice: Moving Up the Business Ladder
- Details
- Written by Dave Carey
Over the past couple of decades I’ve met many CIOs with aspirations to move out of IT and up the corporate ladder. Some succeeded; many more did not.
Despite the advantage of being an executive with a view across the entire business, it’s simply not an easy task for the CIO to break out of IT. The reasons for this are many: the CIO is a relative newcomer to the executive suite; in many organizations there’s a lack of connectedness between the business and IT; many see IT as a cost centre rather than a strategic tool for innovation and revenue generation; IT has a long history of project failure and underperformance in the eyes of the business; and the list goes on.
Two of the most successful people I know who’ve made big strides up the corporate ladder are Hao Tien and Sav DiPasquale. CIOs with eyes on advancement could learn a lot from them.
I had the opportunity to interview Hao Tien in 2007, when he was CIO of Toyota Canada. Advancement came quickly. Soon after I met him he took on the role of Chief Operating Officer at Toyota Canada. Then he moved to Japan and became GM of Toyota Motor Corp. and today he is VP Lexus China.
When I met Hao, he was doing a great job of keeping the IT house in order, but he was also a ‘big picture’ guy, intent on making IT a strategic contributor to the company. That helped him a lot in his rise through the company.
Hao’s career got a big boost when he implemented an IT-based customer problem-resolution system called Customer One that vastly improved communications between Toyota Canada’s dealer network, call centres, engineers and warranty department. The system not only had a huge impact on Canadian customer satisfaction, its early-problem-detection capability became a global best practice, enabling Toyota to identify problems and fix them early in the manufacturing process, saving huge amounts of money and improving customer satisfaction around the world.
Even with some strategic success under his belt, Hao knew that it would take more to make it to the next level, and so he took every opportunity to enhance his business skills, diligently accessing the company’s online best practices library, enrolling in Toyota’s executive development programs, networking with the company’s global business executives, and availing himself of executive coaching.
The results speak for themselves. His career has been exemplary.
When I first met Sav DiPasquale in the late 1990s, he was Director eBusiness at Glaxo Wellcome Canada (see my blog ‘Cracking the Alignment Nut’ ). By 2002 he had taken over as VP IT & CIO of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Canada, winning Canadian CIO of the Year honours in 2006. Continuing his rise through the organization, he became GSK Canada’s VP Business Development & Corporate Planning in 2009. After nearly four years in that role, he left GSK to become President and CEO of medical research firm Orgenesis Inc.
It was apparent to me from the outset that Sav was an IT executive of a different stripe. He didn’t talk about the things IT execs usually talked to me about. He spoke at length about making IT extremely visible to the business and using a myriad of marketing techniques to promote better project change management and to raise awareness of new IT-enabled capabilities for the organization (see ITMG’s Strategic Insights report, Marketing IT to the Business, ideas that many CIOs would cringe at.
Not only was Sav a marketing guru and out-of-the-box thinker, he was also a smart businessman. He knew that as a CIO, he’d better be very well attuned to the priorities of the CEO. This became one of his big passions, and it served him well in his career in IT. It’s hard to go too far wrong when you’re in lockstep with the CEO.
As he told me when I interviewed him for the above-mentioned Strategic Insights report, “If you are not working on what the CEO cares about, you're kind of in no man's land. The first order of business is to find out what the CEO wants from IT. If the CEO doesn't initiate it, you have to go to the CEO. Probe, probe, probe until you can figure out what levers to pull with that CEO.”
The CEO at GSK Canada wanted IT to help the company be more productive, more agile, to be a smarter working company. So that’s what Sav spent his time on – IT innovation that would result in competitive advantage. Among the many excellent results of this focus was the creation of a digital marketing capability for the company that is world-class, and built-in-Canada e-forms that are used in 48 countries around the world.
Sav also worked hard at enhancing his business skills. He successfully completed the Schulich School of Business’s Executive Program and he earned a green belt in Six Sigma, a data driven methodology that can be applied to any aspect of business and is used to improve customer satisfaction, eliminate waste and increase profit. As well, he learned all aspects of GSK’s business inside out.
Like Hao Tien, Sav ran the IT organization at GSK Canada like clockwork, leveraged strategic IT success, worked closely with executive management, and applied himself diligently to improving his business skills to take his career to the next level.
These are some of the keys that CIOs need to focus on if they are to climb the corporate ladder. There are several others. If you want to learn more about them, a good starting point is the whitepaper “CIO to CEO: Barriers and Success Factors”, published by the CIO Association of Canada and Ryerson University.
For more career advice, see my previous blogs Underutilized IT Execs, Get Your Career Working for You , and When You’re Gone, Make Sure You’re Not Forgotten .
That’s all for now. Good luck in moving your career forward.
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