Say It Once and Say It Again

The reason for Ecolab's high CIO turnover rate was clear to Kubacki the first time he met with the company's executive committee. "They all said that [IT] spends too much money and we don't get any value for the investment," he recounts. They were right to a certain extent, and Kubacki made it his number-one priority to cut and shift costs. But the comment also showed that Ecolab's executives were more aware of what IT wasn't doing than what it actually was accomplishing. Kubacki knew that in order to change this perception he would have to improve communication between IT and the rest of the company.

And during his first three months on the job, that's what he did. Kubacki and Ecolab's vice president for solutions development conducted extensive interviews with the company's general managers, asking each about his perceptions of IT. Responses ranged from the general - IT doesn't understand the business - to the specific - the help desk isn't very good. Kubacki then formed an IT steering committee that included these business leaders, along with Ecolab's COO and CFO, to discuss and help formulate the company's IT priorities - something none of his predecessors had done.

Tabb, the current CIO, who also holds a vice president title, is at pains during committee meetings to explain IT in terms that business executives understand. For example, one IT project that will save the company money is standardizing on one kind of laptop. But the executive committee doesn't care if IT standardizes on laptops - that doesn't materially change the way they do their jobs - and so Tabb just talks about it briefly and only in terms of dollars and cents.

The application environment is another story, however. Ecolab has several manufacturing systems and multiple finance systems. The heads of the various business units would like to be able to cross-promote and get a unified view of external customers, but that's impossible in the current application environment. Tabb says that application consolidation is the sort of project that CIOs should discuss with other execs, provided they stick to the business impact - the cross-promotion opportunity. "Applications are complex," he says. "But this goes right to the heart of the business strategy."

Discussing the business goal of each IT project with the IT steering committee has gradually helped business execs better understand the role IT plays in the company, Kubacki says. This, in turn, has built trust and credibility for IT. To make sure other people throughout the company also got the message, Kubacki started sending out a weekly multipage e-mail newsletter that describes everything IT is doing and how it helps the business. "Someone in finance recently said that he felt weekly was overkill," says Kubacki. "But at this point I don't think there is such a thing as overcommunicating" - especially if he wants to keep his job. After all, it's harder to fire someone whom you know well than someone who's a remote presence.

Lesson Learned: Be visible.

Raymond Karrenbauer, CTO at ING Americas, the US subsidiary of the $US97 billion Dutch financial giant, hasn't had to face a revolving-door role per se, but he joined the company during a similarly chaotic time in 2001, as ING Americas was centralizing the IT departments of the 20-plus companies it had bought during the previous decade. His take: No matter how tangled the business-IT disconnect has become, "the CIO has the ability to make a difference. It is up to him. But he can't just sit in the back room saying: 'The business doesn't understand.' You have to make them understand."

Karrenbauer cautions that communication is important, but making sure it is the right kind of communication is even more important. "Let's say you walk some people through a data centre," he says. "They may think that it is pretty slick - they see some lights flashing - but they don't understand the complexity of what is going on." Rather than explain what each little gizmo is, the important thing is to explain why the data centre exists, how it works and show its reliability. Karrenbauer uses the analogy of a car showroom: Someone buying a car, he says, wants to know that it is reliable, that it gets good petrol mileage and that it can go zero to 100kph in five seconds. They generally don't look under the hood, and they never cut it in half with a chain saw so that they can examine each little part. "You are buying a car on metrics," he says. "They buy IT the same way."