Congratulations! You are now the CIO of the company. You might be extremely happy because it was your lifelong dream to become the CIO of the company but all this excitement can quickly go away when you come face to face with the challenges. Being a CIO of the company can be a thankless job.
You are responsible for leading digital transformation initiatives, protecting your business-critical assets from cybercriminals, negotiating with vendors, presenting your case in front of board members, and much more. This can be tough even for veterans who have been in this role for years let alone for a newcomer who is just starting out.
So, how can a new CIO make a positive first impression? What activities and tasks should he or she focus on during the first year? That is exactly what we will be discussing in this article. In this article, Anti DDoS will highlight seven important things every CIO must do during their first year at the office.
7 Important Things CIOs Must Do During Their First Year
Here are seven key tasks every CIO must perform during their first year in office to lay a solid foundation for themselves.
- Set The Right Expectations
When you become the CIO of a company, you might replace an outgoing CIO or you will be the first CIO of the company. In both cases, it is important to set the right expectations. If you are replacing the previous CIO, you need to identify the decision-making process and accountability structure.
Once you know how things work, be realistic about what you can achieve. This starts with setting realistic goals for the first year. Know what metrics are used to track performance. Always follow the formula of promising less and delivering more instead of the other way around. Instead of briefing the board members about the progress at the end of the project, keep them engaged at every stage of the project and let them know how much progress you have made towards the end goal.
- Listen More, Talk Less
Most CIOs are raised with the mindset that they need effective communication skills in order to succeed as an IT leader and that’s true. The problem starts to occur when you try to pass on orders and start communicating with stakeholders without developing a solid understanding of their pain points. This causes more harm than good.
When you are new to the CIO role, try to talk less and listen more. Absorb as much information as you can and understand how things work before passing out orders. The better you understand the internal operations of the organization, the more effectively you can communicate. Talk to experienced employees and top management and listen to their perspectives. This will help you learn a lot about the organization and help you understand the challenges it faces.
- Build Relationships
New IT leaders struggle to find their feet in a new environment because they don’t try to build long-term relationships. By forging long-term relationships with the board members and other departmental heads, it will make it easy to get support for your IT initiatives. This allows them to achieve common goals of the organization and create a shared vision of the organization. Additionally, it will also help you to influence key stakeholders of the organization.
- Create a Strategy That Delivers Business Results
Once you know how your organization operates and have built relationships with key stakeholders, now is the time to craft a well-thought-out IT strategy. You can get a better idea from IT strategy followed by an outgoing CIO but avoid copying it. Create your own strategy and give it your personal touch.
The focus of your IT strategy should be to facilitate the organization in achieving its overarching goals not just on achieving IT goals. A good IT strategy should cover all the bases from human resource requirements to financial requirements, hardware to software and risk management to vendor management.
- Change Your IT Priorities
New IT leaders should avoid following in the footsteps of their predecessors. That is why it is important to create a new IT initiative portfolio and change the IT priorities soon after you take over as a CIO. Convey the value of the IT projects you are undertaking to convince top management. Clarify the unique selling proposition these IT projects offer and how it can help your organization gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. If you can prove that to them, they will start supporting your technology initiatives such as adopting DDoS protected dedicated servers instead of opposing them.
- Have Decision Makers In Your Corner
Just building relationships with key influencers and decision-makers is not enough. You have to win them over. You need their support to drive your IT initiatives toward success. Without their support, your IT initiatives will hit too many roadblocks and obstacles and are more likely to fail than succeed. Find people who enjoy influence not only on the board of directors but also in the eyes of the CEO of the company. Spend time with them to understand what their vision is and values are. This will make it easy for you to get them in your corner.
- Identify and Fix Operational Issues
Most new IT leaders tend to take a long time to adjust in a new environment so much so that they could not focus on fixing the operational issues. You should not do that. Focus your energies on identifying issues that are holding your organization from achieving its full potential and fixing them as soon as possible. Take all the steps you can to resolve these issues and it will not only help your organization, its employees, its customers and even its vendors and stakeholders. If your projects are experiencing delays, identify the root cause and address them before they fail.
Which activities would you undertake in your first year as a CIO? Share it with us in the comments section below.
