Want a better CIO job? One with real clout, a proper Top Table position? Then, my friend, you need to become your organisation’s in-house M&A domain expert.
That’s the intriguing advice from Gartner’s ‘Executive Programmes’ CIO education practice, which has suggested that ambitious CIOs are more likely to get somewhere in a historically very, very tough recruitment and promotions market by getting down and dirty with all things mergers and acquisitions.
"Head-hunters have told us M&A exposure is a key differentiator in the current CIO job market," one of its VPs, Dave Aron, told CBR this week.
M&As are among the biggest challenges for enterprises and their IT organisations to navigate and Gartner thinks "conventional" leadership and management techniques often are not enough. "There is no established governance body spanning the whole enterprise, there are normally aggressive goals and time frames, and there are often many surprises along the way, as each side learns about the other," says Aron.
At the same time, the business – in fact both – need to continue to run, e.g. serve clients, keep operations ticking over and execute in the face of major, often disruptive, integration activity.
This is where IT could be really helpful, he argues – claiming not just that roughly 25% of a typical M&A integration effort will come from IT: "While successful M&A integration does not rely exclusively on the CIO and IT, they bear a large part of the burden, since integrating people, operations, information and processes requires significant technology investments," he believes.
The group has come up with a quite full taxonomy of different sorts of M&A phases and what role IT can play in them, and if interested in such specifics check out it out here ( http://www.gartner.com/resId=1384319). But we were less grabbed by that as by the suggestion, surely a first, of what specifically the CIO can do in a real, tough business situation.
What do I mean by that? Well, we are eternally being lectured that the key to the executive washroom door for a technologist lies in becoming more fused into "business," learning to speak "the language of business," and all the rest of it.
Fine… but not that helpful, to be frank (and let’s be honest, Gartner’s been as guilty of this waffle as anyone has). What exactly would that look like? What do you want me to do – do an Accounting degree at night school, do some Sales calls in me lunch-hour, what?
But becoming a process expert on making an M&A work – now that could be a really useful way to get the attention of the Board. That’s partly, to be frank, because it’s very bloody tough to do: M&A integrations are among the most challenging situations that CIOs and their IT organisations will ever face, fraught with risks. But as Aron says, they also "present a powerful opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities and business value of IT, and to stretch the performance of IT team members".
CBR recommends you look at the M&A phases Aron and his team have detailed to see if they make sense to you as a practitioner. Why? Because they could not only help your firm get through the next M&A you may need to do to survive – it might be the nuclear motor your career needs.
