Women CIOs take the lead

WHILE THE number of women in top executive positions internationally remains low, there seems to be a less-daunting glass ceiling for the role of the chief information officer – the CIO.

According to a survey earlier this year by the Wall Street Journal, women make up nearly a quarter of CIOs (24 per cent) in Fortune 100 companies, compared to only 10 per cent of chief financial officers (CFOs) and 7 per cent of chief executives (CEOs).

The figure is lower for Britain – only about 10 per cent of CIOs there are women, says Judi Edwards, who has held the position at several companies, including Levi Strauss Europe, and is now a vice-president and executive partner at analyst Gartner.

Ireland, she says, is similar. Currently there are 18 female CIOs in the top 200 companies here.

Do women have a particular talent for the broad-ranging CIO role, a position that encompasses oversight of information systems as well as strengths in managing human relations and, ideally, a role in top-level strategy planning?

“Well, that’s tricky, because you need to be very careful as it’s very easy to overstate things,” says Edwards, on a recent visit to clients in Ireland.

“In any organisation, what we’re all looking for is balanced teams and, unfortunately, what you don’t see is a lot of young women going into IT. I hate generalisations, but women do have some unique skills, I think, which can make them especially good in the role of CIO.”

She has gained great insight into this particular issue, both from her 10 years of experience as a CIO, most recently with Burberry and before that Levi Strauss, Europe – and because she runs a regular women’s CIO forum for Gartner.

“My first CIO role was in 1996, and, as a woman, I was a very rare creature then,” she laughs. Her background has been CIO work in the retail sector, starting out as it adopted point-of-sale IT systems, an area she found very interesting.

“Ninety per cent of profit came in four weeks of the year (around Christmas), so systems had to be at peak.”

At Levi Strauss, she said, “you’re as much caught up with the circumstances of the moment”, not just focused on a specific sales period. She found the role exciting because she came in as CIO just as the company was preparing for global expansion, and she had the major job of helping design and construct a global supply chain.

In that role, she was part of Levi’s European board, where “it was much easier to contribute to the global business”.

At Burberry, the CIO role reported to the CFO – generally less ideal then reporting directly to the CEO, she says. Nonetheless, she notes the chief financial officer involved was “very visionary, and I felt I was able to make a difference even without reporting to the CEO. But most chief information officers report to the CEO, and it definitely makes the job easier.”

If the CIO reports to the CFO, the role can be suppressed, becoming more about managing IT rather than higher-level corporate strategy, she argues.

The primary role for any CIO, setting aside some minor business sector differences, is to understand the role of technology in the business and how it interacts with the business, she says.

But the role is also very much “about the person and how they interact with others, if they engage as a peer with the business”.

The combination of emotional intelligence and business skills is essential to CIO success – a blend many women feel comfortable with, she notes. “There’s a huge people skill; you need to be influencing, you need to be listening.”

And then there’s the always valuable skill of multitasking, a great strength for a CIO. “Women are very good at multitasking, and keeping a lot of balls in the air at one time.”

Because the role is also an invisible one – ask people what a CIO does, and you’ll likely find that many don’t really know – “you need people who don’t need to be stroked. The job takes a huge amount of effort but it’s kind of a given” that there won’t be a lot of public kudos, she says.

Overall, the role is “about managing a large budget, about leadership, teamwork and managing people, managing a complex environment and technical skills, but not hands-on skills. It’s about the interpretation of technology, the ability to talk to suppliers and manage outcomes”.

She welcomes the fact that more and more companies are focusing on bringing women into IT and offering a support structure to steer them into the pipeline for management roles such as that of CIO. She talks to management regularly about the need to more actively identify capable women for promotion because, often, women won’t go for a job.

“Typically, when a job comes up, unless a woman ticks every box, they won’t apply. Whereas if men tick 70 per cent, they’ll apply,” she says, referring to a study. “Most women get what they apply for,” she adds.

Interestingly, she says there are also issues around what wording a company puts on a job. More women will apply for a job if its described as a “support analyst” than as a “technology analyst”.

She’s passionate about the need to bring more women into IT and onto boards, and, she argues, every company should be too.

“There’s huge evidence that those companies that have more women, and more balanced teams, do better.”

Chief Information Officer: A grooming role for CEO

The chief information officer (CIO) role is one of the most common senior executive positions in business for women.

Indeed, almost one in four Fortune 100 companies – many of them in the field of technology – have a woman in the role, compared to just 7 per cent with women as chief executive officers (CEO).

As the CIO role is often a grooming position for a future CEO, some believe greater numbers of women eventually will fill the top seats at companies.

WOMEN LEADERS OF THE FORTUNE 500 CIO PACK

Walmart: Karenann Terrell

General Electric:Charlene Begley

IBM: Jeanette Horan

Boeing: Kim Hammonds

Dell: Adriana Karaboutis

Intel: Kimberley Stevenson

Cisco: Rebecca Jacoby

Lockheed Martin: Linda Gooden

Walt Disney: Susan O'Day

Sysco: Twila Day

IRISH WOMEN CIOs

RSA: Aisling Hayes

Allianz: Karen Forte

Bord Gáis: Ashling Cunningham

Stanford Research Institute (SRI):Jennifer Kenny

Aviva: Sheila OSullivan

UCD: Mary Crowe

Eirgrid: Ann Scully

AWAS: Fiona Taaffe

(source: Boardroominsiders.com)