CIOs’ executive brief: three ways to update IT skills for digital transformation

Keep your own IT skills current. “Read, read, read as much as you can,” advises Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions and former White House CIO. “Then ask yourself, ‘what am I going to do—while I’m transforming the business—that allows me to transform myself in my role?’” Take a multi-tactic approach to building IT staff skills. Wondering whether to train, hire or outsource? All of the above, advise IT leaders. “The skills of those who report to the CIO are much more technical than they used to be,” says Marc Probst, CIO of Intermountain Healthcare. Engage with tomorrow’s IT experts today. Jaguar Land Rover, anticipating a shortage of skilled engineers, has engaged with more than 2m young people in the UK, encouraging them to consider STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education through its Inspiring Tomorrow’s Engineers initiative. Next, the company plans to engage with 2m more young people, this time worldwide, by 2020.

 

The pace at which new technologies—cloud, big data analytics, virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and more—are developing is breathtaking. But if you really want to hear CIOs gasp for air, ask them about the new demands CIOs face as they seek to turn clever IT innovations into real-world business transformation.

CIOs must manage increasing IT complexity and the growing demands of business stakeholders. As Simon Bolton, CIO of UK-based Jaguar Land Rover also notes, modernising business strategies and aligning them with emerging technologies remain a CIO imperative: “My biggest aspiration is to help Jaguar Land Rover to be seen as a technology leader outside of the company within the automotive space.

“We’ve seen the industry changes: electrification, connected cars, autonomous driving, etc. We need to transform our business so that we’re ready to maximise those opportunities. In today’s world, where customers’ expectations are changing very quickly, we need to have systems that can respond to those changing requirements.”

CIOs face the dual challenge of maintaining business critical systems while adapting the business to leverage new technologies. Renata Marques, Latin America CIO of Whirlpool, advises CIOs to “have a very solid and stable foundation that doesn't consume the agenda of innovation and digital transformation.”

And yet many CIOs and their staff are not necessarily prepared for all of this change and the major implications for the workforce and skills. In a recent survey conducted by McKinsey, more than 60% of business executives said that due to advancing automation and digitisation, they’ll need to retrain or replace more than a quarter of their workforce between now and 2023 [1]. 

To make many of these changes successfully, integration of business and IT knowledge will be essential. Ritesh Sarda, CIO of Sun Life Financial Hong Kong says:

“Technologies without the business acumen or those that fail to solve the relevant business problem are absolutely useless. I think CIOs have to become more business savvy and have to be integrated and engrained into the business so that we know how we can use technology to resolve business challenges and make things forward-looking from an industry perspective."

 

New demands = New opportunities

Although balancing traditional business needs with the desire for innovation is always a challenge, the same changes that have reshaped the role of the CIO have also created new opportunities for workforce transformation.

Indeed, one reason CIOs need new skills is the way IT has moved beyond the back office and into customer-facing products and services. Consider today’s new cars. Essentially rolling data centres, they’re equipped with computerised engine components, Wi-Fi networks, GPS navigation, backup cameras, lane-departure warning systems and more. Tomorrow promises even more onboard IT, including electric batteries, voice-activated controls and self-driving capabilities.

Alongside these new tools, customers’ growing IT savvy puts even more pressure on CIOs. At Jaguar Land Rover, designers work on a seven-year product life cycle. For traditional automotive designers and engineers, to create a highly complex vehicle, that may seem like the blink of an eye. But for today’s consumers, it’s more like an eternity.

One path forward may be the adoption and implementation of Agile practices. “We need to do all we can to remain agile,” Mr Bolton says. “That’s becoming ever more challenging as technology moves faster and faster. As a company, we need to wrap our heads around this and make sure we’re all going forward at that speed.”

Ms Marques of Whirlpool brought in an Agile coach into the IT function to train her team once a week: “We started to transform our projects by adopting Agile methodology and delivering technology to the business in a different way. This is something that we’ve worked on a lot, not to just to speed up our process, but to create this future of innovation.”

Mr Bolton of Jaguar agrees that these changes bring new opportunities for workforce organisation. Historically, Jaguar Land Rover’s strengths have been engineering, manufacturing and design. Today, the company seeks to add to those strengths by placing greater emphasis on technology.

“Increasingly, we’re going to have to demonstrate real leadership around technology,” Mr Bolton says. “That requires a shift in skills, not just in the technology function, but across the company.” 

That said, non-IT employees aren’t as far behind as they used to be, and like many consumers, both IT and non-IT staff have gained technological sophistication too. “One of the changes we’re going through,” notes Mr Bolton, “is we’re insourcing—not for every skill—but we’re bringing back in certain areas of technology that we’ve outsourced over the past few years”.

Marc Probst, CIO of Intermountain Healthcare, a not-for-profit health system based in Salt Lake City, Utah, has had a front-row view of the dramatic changes in overall familiarity with technology. Technical positions at Intermountain that formerly reported into IT and Mr Probst have shifted to its clinical and financial business units.

For Mr Probst, that means assuming a new role. “I’ve become more of a co-ordinator,” he says, “and a technical resource to make sure the things they’re doing fall within our security parameters and don’t blow up the system. It’s really different.”

Ms Marques of Whirlpool similarly describes the importance of being a technical resource for the business and understanding its strategic needs: “Our role as CIO is to be the conduit—to convert all the technical knowledge into a single strategy and not have a lot of different technologies everywhere not in conversation with our business.”         

                                                                         

The value of reskilling and mentorship

Though IT employees still generally have a better understanding of technology than other employees, given the fast-changing nature of technology, many CIOs find that their current IT staff members still struggle to keep up with consumer or colleague expectations. It’s a rare IT department that employs experts in big data analytics, AI and VR. Yet these skills are increasingly in demand. Some even say the IT industry faces a talent shortage.

Two ways forward may be hiring for greater diversity and improving mentoring and internal training. In theory, that should not be difficult. One person advocating for those changes is Theresa Payton.

“Recruiters tell me, ‘there’s a war for talent, and we just can’t find qualified people.’ I reply, ‘Well, maybe it’s because you and the hiring managers are all looking for the same people. There are only so many unicorns to go around,’” says Ms Payton, CEO of cyber-security firm Fortalice Solutions. Ms Payton was also formerly the CIO at the White House under George W Bush’s presidency from 2006 to 2008—and the first woman to hold that position.  

Instead, Ms Payton recommends that CIOs start by considering the personal qualities they’re looking for in new hires, what she calls “non-negotiables”. The rest, she maintains, can be gained with training.

Ms Payton practices what she preaches and has implemented a mentor-protégé programme at her cyber-security firm. She explains the rationale: “Take advantage of your own amazing people and have them be responsible for some of the retooling and retraining of your workforce. Make it part of their workday. Build it into your resource plans that you’re going to train, coach and mentor the next generation. Doing that creates that cross training, that esprit de corps.”

Ms Payton also works hard to keep her own skills and knowledge up-to-the-minute. While working in Washington, DC, she got into the habit of waking at 3:30 am to read and make other preparations before the day’s first briefing. “You have to constantly be a student of the job,” she says. “Stay close to the business, and stay close to the technologies.”

 

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[1] McKinsey, “Retraining and reskilling workers in the age of automation” January 2018. https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/future-of-organizations-and-work/...

Today these changes require going beyond simply introducing new technologies to digitise the company.  As a result, we asked leading CIOs globally from across industries to explore how they are pioneering successful digital transformations to accelerate innovation and strategic enablement across their businesses.

In this Q&A, we ask Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions and former CIO of the White House, about the changing role of the CIO, today’s cyber threat landscape and best practices in security and IT operations.

Theresa Payton is a leading expert in cyber-security and IT strategy. Ms Payton is currently CEO of Fortalice Solutions, a cyber-security consulting firm, and was the first woman CIO at the White House, serving under president George W Bush from 2006 to 2008. Ms Payton also previously held leadership roles at Bank of America and Wachovia. 

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EIU: How do you think the role of the CIO has changed since your time at the White House? 

When I was CIO, which was from 2006 to 2008, we were right at the beginning of the social media revolution. People forget that the first iPhone was released in 2007. We can’t remember life without smartphones, but that was really a huge transformation in technology. 

The things that have stayed the same are you absolutely have to have operational stability and resiliency. In an age where cybercrime constantly changes, as does the technology in the hands of people, the CIO has to foster the ability to adapt processes, people and security strategies to accommodate these changes. If the CIO ignores this, they will actually face outages in the long run and will not recover quickly from natural or man-made disasters.

You always have to walk that balance between how do you make sure that operation is resilient and secure, but at the same time, enable the staff that’s on the front lines of doing critically important business.

EIU: You were the first woman CIO in the White House. Tell us what you think about diversity and bringing more people into the technology industry.

A lot of progress has been made, but we still have so far to go. First of all, I am so grateful that president Bush made diversity and inclusion such a high priority during his administration.

I was equally thankful that I was the first female CIO at the White House. There was a wonderful level of professional courtesy and respect, and when you’re working 18-hour days with people, you tend to break down most barriers pretty quickly. And I am very proud of improving the overall technology and security platforms at the White House, as well as being able to recruit really great talent, including women and minorities, into the CIO team at the Executive Office of the President. 

Within our own company, Fortalice, we do a mentor/protégé programme. When people come in and they haven’t done cyber before, they get assigned somebody in the company that’s their coach and mentor. 

If you’re the best at what you do, you can do a lot of the training internally. Take advantage of your own amazing people and have them train and be responsible for some of the retooling and retraining of your own people. Make it part of their workday. Build it into your resource plans that you’re going to train, coach and mentor the next generation. It’s succession planning, and it’s, again, team talent, resiliency and operational stability. Doing that creates that cross training, that esprit de corps. 

Of course, you’re going to have to spend some money on retooling and retraining, but you’re going to have an incredibly loyal employee that you’ve created in that process.

EIU: The White House is clearly a sensitive environment with a lot of mission critical information. How were you able to successfully manage security?

One of the strategies that I think was so successful at the White House, and the reason why we did not have a data breach while we were there, is I always think about things in zones of information, zones of protection and zones of need-to-know. We zoned off different parts of the operations within the White House. By creating those zones, you can create behavioral-based analytics about events. 

The job of being CIO and responsible for security really has to start with the end-user case first, because then that’s how you will understand how cyber-criminals will actually try to take advantage of vulnerabilities in those use cases, and that’s at that level where you have to be thinking about protection. Once you know the critical assets the business must protect, you have to set daily battle rhythms for the team. This allows you to help the overall organisation stay focused on their day jobs while integrating security into the culture. The CIO can’t see security as a discrete function or a project, it has to be part of the service delivery. 

EIU: What advice you would give to CIOs today?

The CIO job can be a little overwhelming because it is a massive undertaking in today’s day and age. You have the legacy systems that you have to maintain and operate, and the less sexy side of the CIO job: “Did you run payroll?” “Yeah, we made sure payroll ran.” There’s that least sexy side all the way to, are you actually transforming the business with really cool, cutting- and leading-edge technologies? 

My counsel to CIOs is you need to be a constant student of your job.  Whatever you thought made you successful to be here, throw some of that out the window, and reinvent yourself and reinvent your job on a regular basis. 

Why are some companies successful? It’s because they’re reinventing themselves constantly as they see what the market demands are and what their competitors are doing. Then they can decide to be a fast follower, a total follower, a “no, I’m going to do my own thing”, or a leader. The CIO needs to be thinking about that. 

EIU: Any best practices CIOs should remember when balancing these challenges and trying to reinvent themselves?  

You have to stay close to the business and stay close to the technologies. Being a constant student of your job is easier said than done, but it’s actually never been easier than it is right now. Here are a few examples:

Pick something that along your career you were good at, and find ways to constantly keep learning. I started out as a developer. I’m not going to be as good as the developers I have working for me today because that’s what they do all day long. But just to make sure I keep my edge, I do online programming classes. Recently, I did one in Python. 

Talk to smart people. I call them walk-abouts. I spend time talking to my team, and then our own CIOs and CISOs as clients. I ask them if you had to say what are your biggest three challenges this year, what are they and how are you going to tackle them? And you learn so much from other people. Conferences can be helpful as well. Take advantage of the information sharing that goes on at conferences. 

Read, read, read as much as you can. I get up extra early in the morning. I got in the habit of getting up at 3:30 in the morning when I was in the White House to make sure that I could plan out my day and start reading before daily briefing started. If I wanted to make sure I had my day planned out and that I was being a student of my job, I had to get up extra early. 

My biggest recommendation to CIOs everywhere is, every week, be thinking about what am I going to do that, as I’m transforming the business, allows me to transform myself in my role.

To learn more about The EIU’s Pioneering Leadership programme, find a full range of insights, including more Q&As, upcoming articles and an in-depth report, click here.