Have you created new roles or teams as a CIO?

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I think it depends on the places I've been, different solutions to different companies. But I remember in the 2010-2014 time, I started talking about how we're not in Kansas anymore in terms of the SaaS proliferation and the change this is bringing to IT teams. At that time, I brought in a cloud broker. That was way before the SaaS sprawl we have today, which now I call it managing SaaS at scale. So I remember that this was very new and we were figuring the role out. We kind of figured out what it should start with and evolve. We initially focused on value generation. So that was one thing that was pretty innovative for that time. Fast forward to today, I don't have a business relationship manager role but a responsibility of my staff to play this role. I do want my business partners to have one person to go to that they can count on for prioritization and everything that needs to get done. The IT sausage-making behind the scenes, they don't need or should need to understand and navigate that. It's one key person that they know to go to, and that they build a strong relationship with. I think that works out really well.

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I don't think I was particularly innovative in terms of the types of roles. Very similar relationship models. I could never build out a full sort of business liaison team or anything like that, but definitely made it as straightforward as possible for the organization to engage. At least they knew who to go to, even if that person wasn't ultimately going to solve the problem. I'd say where I probably got a little more creative was on the more business operations side, where it was like, &#34;Hey, look, we need to really focus on people that have that M and A experience.&#34; So we kind of created some roles that were very much like, &#34;Hey, this is the role you play&#34; and then built out capacity underneath them as ... If it was working, right, and the business was like, &#34;Yeah, this is working. This is helpful,&#34; then we would get the opportunity to do more. So I think that's probably where we got a little more creative. Again, I'm not saying it was rocket science, but it was certainly new to the company.

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I just knew that data seemed to always be the point of tension eventually. So if I could attack that early, before doing so, I basically said, "I'm going to do a data management team and bring that in place." I just discovered that the person with the plan seems to be listened to in some way, shape, or form, even if that plan is not a fully baked one. So what I basically thought about us doing, I said, "Look, I just know this is going to be a problem. I just think we should basically put good data management at a fundamental level with some systems. I'd like to start that."

So I remember getting budget for that and getting assigned, essentially, a set of data analysts who were going to basically start to focus on data cleansing and then start to come up with rules and all of that sort of stuff. I think the result of that was just education. Let's just get the basics absolutely right, and guess what? I'm willing to take that on." People were like, "Okay, well, that team wants to basically do it. I've never seen that before, but okay. That's a bit of a plan. We should basically move towards that."

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Agree that it depends on the place and the existing org. Sometimes it was an enterprise architecture group. Other times I would realign based on function or process. It is always about understanding current state, pain points, future state needs, and then making the changes needed for the unique nature of each org. There is no one size fits all solution or silver bullet.

Have you created new roles or teams as a CIO?

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