Today, there are higher expectations of CIOs, but whether this will lead to change for the better is debatable. Michael Fagan, chief transformation officer at Australian film and theme park company Village Roadshow, said the positive change in the role of the CIO is that it is less focused on cost and more on value-added delivery.
Village Roadshow owns and operates the Coast's theme parks such as Warner Bros. Movie World, SeaWorld and Wetlands Waterpark, as well as owns and operates a number of cinemas in Victoria and Tasmania with its partners, making it Australia's largest cinema exhibitor.
Fagan has held a number of senior IT leadership roles with well-known brands in Australia, Europe, the US and Asia. But when it comes to leadership, the modern CIO who succeeds in any organization has one key attribute, and that is that they are well focused on the business. "You need to adapt to the business world as you would in IT, and you always need to play the role of 'translator' between the two worlds. And as Chief Transformation Officer, I also have a number of business functions. But every time someone says they need an IT system to do something, I wonder if they actually do it. The first question is not how do I have an IT solution, but how do I have the best solution. ”
Efficiency and value are always at the heart of the best solutions, but reaching consensus isn't always straightforward. Therefore, working with other executives and boards and influencing them to agree with them is another essential skill for this role.
"In most organizations, the leadership team has the answers, but they don't have the questions," he said. So, they're looking for someone to help them ask the right questions and then help them achieve that. The cost of strategy is low, but the cost of execution is high and difficult to implement, and that's my role, I'm able to combine the chain role, audit payroll, etc., while being good at all areas of network transformation or cybersecurity, and I can help extract value from each of these areas. ”
Transition, though, can be a difficult thing to do, because on the one hand people are agitating for change, and on the other hand, people are resisting it. Overcoming these challenges requires a combination of culture, heritage and communication, and Fagan's approach is to provide the tools needed to innovate.
By innovation, I mean doing things differently, so I always encourage teams and ask them what they're doing, how they're doing it, and get them to consider different ways of delivering. In addition, there is an attempt to diversify as much as possible in terms of recruitment, so as to attract talent from different industries. We create cross-functional teams to enable collaboration and convergence of ideas. In a way, we celebrate small failures, because if everything goes well, you may not be able to innovate or that you haven't tried enough. ”
Recently, Fagan talked to us about pushing the boundaries of innovation, staying customer-centric, and the value of a good mentor.
About the Transformation Approach:Transformation is large-scale change, not continuous improvement – striving to achieve one percent every day. Transformation means major breakthroughs, and today's breakthroughs will be tomorrow's standards. So what we've done is we're trying to figure out a big, tough problem and make it a routine part of our day-to-day operations. Change is difficult, and even for the better, it can be difficult for many people. There will be a lot of people in the organization who are agitating for change and major transformations. If you appoint a chief transformation officer and that change doesn't happen, you risk alienating the people who want to change, and the people who don't, so it's hard. Without that many chief transformation officers, the role can feel lonely. I think the main characteristic of this type of role is that it is resilient and needs to be able to overcome obstacles, which can be difficult within an organization. It's a process of continuous improvement.
About the new ownership:We were held by BGH Capital Private Equity in 2020, but we needed more than just a transformation, or a platform that needed to transform. Our new owners, who want everything to run a certain way and see significant changes in a very short period of time, will look at the income statement in detail from top to bottom, looking at every part of the business. So we've made significant personnel changes. From a headquarters or office perspective, we're a smaller, leaner organization because we're about half the size we were three years ago. We have also completely changed our partner structure, with a reduction of about 40% in partners. So we're more meaningful to them, and we're more meaningful to us, which affects the value that we get from these partnerships, and the cost to us of that value. The most important of these is speed, which is very important for transitioning roles.
About Delivering Value:The obstacles encountered in this process vary from organization to organization. Then, you can have different strategies for each company or the type of obstacle encountered, and the most important thing is the actual delivery. When you start delivering, you'll gain reputation and trust for it, especially if it's fast. So, convincing people of change and delivering it quickly is the best thing in your toolkit. Doing so builds trust with the owners of the company and convinces the leadership team that things can and will make a difference, and it can also provide an example or a new paradigm for the people in the organization. So it's important to be quick, then transparency, communication, and to get the rest of the leadership team on that journey together. If you're caught up in a debate about whether it's really valuable, or looking for ways to capture it, it's not a good place.
About simplification:Say "no" to some good ideas. You can say yes to great ideas, and if you look at to-do lists, there's a myriad of things to do in any organization – and that list is bigger than your resources can do, so you need to be able to say no to certain things, and you're going to do the things that really matter. Even within an organization, there is the Pareto Law, which states that we can do a small amount of things that bring great benefits. There's a lot of noise that distracts us from the things that are important to our customers and we can't deliver. I can think of a lot of examples of this, but in every IT team I've worked on in the last 10 years, when I join, I ask what we're doing. I've helped coach a lot of different businesses that have more projects than people, so it is impossible to deliver them all.
About Leadership:One of the things I'm seeing with middle managers or young managers now is that the biggest obstacle to their success is themselves. The way to address this is to listen to feedback, get advice from it and take action by building a strong mentoring relationship. When I was younger, a lot of my success depended on what I did personally, so I saw it as a work ethic. It took me a lot of time to get things done. But if you want to be a leader of 1,000 people, you can't do it all. I guess I didn't really believe that when I was younger. So, one of the things I've learned in my career is to be able to bring out the best in others so that you're more valuable to the organization.