Was Gray tempted to spend her last year treading water while she waited to leave? Not at all, she says, describing 2004 as "creative and productive". "John [Mulcahy] would in no way waste my year - he did the opposite and got the most out of me."

Gray also believes that to some extent she will be judged by the success of her successor. There is an adage that successful and confident Type A managers hire other Type A managers, while Type B managers hire Type C managers to make themselves look better. Gray has little time for Bs or Cs. "It's hard to excel as a leader without a strong team," she says.

While harbouring no illusions that Kogekar is any form of Mini-Me, she says that "for me, if in 12-18 months I found my successor had failed in the job, I'd see that as my failure as much as his or hers. If people are saying in 12-18 months that he's a great CIO then I will say that's good I hired him."

Sometimes, however, even when the CIO attempts to ensure a smooth transition, their efforts are thwarted. For example when Kate Carruthers decided on a career change, out of the CIO role at Flexirent Capital and into a marketing role with Westfield, she gave Flexirent plenty of notice. It was not as though Carruthers was going to another CIO role, or indeed to another financial company. She was off for a complete career change in a non-conflicting sector and was happy to tell Flexirent she was leaving several months before she went so that a replacement could be found in good time.

There was, however, no chance to perform a smooth hand-over and when Carruthers left there was no replacement lined up. Why? "Because they didn't do anything about it until last week," she said in her last couple of days at Flexirent.

Search & Employ

Mark Lelliott, a principal at executive search firm Highland Partners, says that the way companies tackle succession planning is linked to the scale of the organization and the number of employees. "The larger the organization the stronger your internal succession planning bench should be," Lelliott says.

He says that in the past two years his firm has worked with four of the top 10 listed companies in Australia looking at their succession plans, identifying potential internal candidates and keeping a watch eye on other external prospects. His view is that companies are looking for possible successors with demonstrated capability and competence who fit the culture of the organization.

He suspects that in the future more companies will look closely at internal candidates before going to the market. However, he recommends that even the internal candidates be benchmarked against external prospects to ensure that due diligence is performed and the organization really is getting the best person for the job. That said, there are clear benefits from making an internal appointment. "These people have a knowledge of the system and the complexity of the projects," he says, adding that internal candidates' understanding of legacy systems should also be factored in to the appointment process.

But what happens when there are no obvious internal candidates?

After four-and-a-half years with Sydney Water, CIO Vicki Coleman saw that the bulk of the job she was brought in to do was completed. Her task had appeared Sisyphean to outsiders. She arrived when IT projects were off target and off budget, when there was little cooperation, understanding or trust between IT and the business.

It had been a tough job, but by the beginning of 2004 Coleman felt that she was almost at the stage where her role had reached its logical conclusion, "which was to determine and implement an IT organization that cost less, but delivered increased value, better business alignment and successful projects".

Coleman says that her preference is for more challenging roles than the day-to-day management of information technology, and so recognized it was nearing the time to move on. "But with the sort of role I wanted you can't go out to the market and say: 'I'm here, come and get me'," she says.

She realized that she needed to keep an eye out for work that interested her, but at the same time leave Sydney Water in good shape so that when the time came for her to leave it would not plunge back into chaos. "I focused on completing some of the activities and putting together a high level plan of what I believed to be an appropriate replacement strategy, given where we were in our evolution, before they sought to recruit to replace me. I felt that they needed an interim person in the short term," she explains.

She envisaged a bridging role, with a manager who would largely oversee the final stages of programs already under way. "That would allow the new [permanent] person to come in, start afresh and look at the next generation of IT rather than tying up the loose ends."

Although Coleman did not involve herself in the selection process for the interim CIO, she says that she had indicated that she did not think there were any suitable internal candidates for the role. "I think that the workload of my managers was so important, so highly visible and labour intensive, that the organization was better suited with them remaining in their roles."

Coleman put forward her recommendations when she told Sydney Water she would be going in September 2004. A month later she was gone, and Sydney Water agreed with her suggestion, appointing John Cunningham as interim CIO. Cunningham, who had been working as an independent consultant, took the position, which was initially scoped for three to four months. He has since, however, applied for the position of permanent CIO of Sydney Water along with a series of other hopefuls.