IT Leadership & Strategy Case Study

Business Situation

Our client is a household name retailer with a ÂŁ900m turnover. The CIO had left the organisation 8 months prior and at the time a decision was taken not to replace the role. The Board felt the IT team was stable, and given market conditions, they could save on significant cost. However, due to the current onset of a significant period of IT investment and a number of upcoming transformation initiatives, the client approached Trinity for advice on organisational development and how to approach appointing a new CIO.

Issues

• IT department had been without leadership for 8 months
• Current IT management team lacked direction and were losing focus on core business activities trying to cover CIO responsibilities
• They needed to recruit someone quickly given major IT projects were stalling
• CIOs have 3-6 month notice periods to serve – client was concerned the business couldn’t wait this long
• Ongoing problems managing 3rd party suppliers
• The business had not recruited a leadership role for 4 years
• Various confusing reporting lines into Supply Chain, Finance and Logistics
• Difficult business location – how would they attract top talent into the area?

Resolutions

• Trinity conducted 4 face-to-face meetings with key stakeholders and Board members to fully understand the issues and role expectations for the new hire
• We organised and ran a business values and behaviours workshop to understand the company culture and required behavioural competencies for the new CIO
• We compiled a job specification for the HR team and senior stakeholders as they had no experience of writing role profiles or hiring at this level
• Conducted an interview techniques workshop, and provided subsequent interview questions roadmap to enable the leadership team to perform appropriate competency based interviewing
• Performed a classic headhunt search given limited talent pool in the local area – when conducting the candidate interviews, Trinity met with an outstanding candidate who was immediately available.  We subsequently advised an interim recruitment solution to eradicate troublesome notice periods, ensuring the interim solution still came within the agreed project budget and the candidate started within 2 weeks
• The IT projects are now back on track, issues with 3rd party suppliers are being resolved and the interim CIO is currently developing a new organisational IT/reporting structure and appropriate succession planning
• The business now work exclusively with Trinity given the level of service they received. We are currently recruiting a new permanent CIO and a number of IT leadership roles to report into the incumbent interim CIO.