Please review and comment on this DRAFT of a CIO persona

Mary Beth Raven  February 28 2010 02:03:06 PM

Customers and business partners:
Please review and comment on my DRAFT of a CIO persona, below. Ideally, feel free to share it with YOUR CIO and see if it fits him or her-- and if not where I can revise it.  For example, I am wondering if I am taking a broad enough view of what a CIO worries about -- I do not have much about different operating system worries, or  hardware upgrades or organizational issues like whether all the "telephone PBX people" should get retrained as network engineers and report to the CIO.

How we plan to use a CIO persona: We do not plan to use this CIO persona much in the DESIGN of the UI of our products-- the CIO is generally too technical, too much of a power user. Rather, this persona is being created at the request of Alistair Rennie, our general manager, who wants to have a person that the sales and technical sales people can keep in mind as they are crafting  presentations, proposals and oher materials and conversations.

So, feel free to provide any kind of feedback that you think would be helpful for a persona that sales and technical sales can use. I look forward to your comments by Friday March 5. Thanks in advance,
Mary Beth

Madison "Gus" Armand - CIO of Renovations

"The closer we get to products and the customer, the more value we add for them" "The balance between new projects and cost control is the dichotomy of my life" Madison manages a staff of 16 in the IT Communications organization. Her organization is responsible for things from an External-facing Web Architecture, Web Content, Messaging and collaboration, to application development. Renovations is a chain of home improvement stores. For more information about Renovations, see here: https://camdb07.lotus.com/u_dir/UXAssetLib.nsf/Companies/Renovations

Summary
Madison "Gus" came on board as the CIO of Renovations 3 years ago and quickly rolled out a BES server and Blackberries to all the execs. This prompted VP of Marketing Ted Amado to call her a "Gust of fresh air".  Thus, the "Gus" nickname was born-- along with the expectation that she was going to achieve a lot, and quickly.

Gus sees her job as mainly balancing cost cutting in IT with adding value through technology.  She thinks it important to balance a few other things, for example, being pragmatic while also being a visionary.  She is also struggling to balance being an inspiring IT manager (which she loves to do and is excellent at) and being a collaborative business leader for Renovations as a whole (this is a challenge for her).

Work Goals
Gus's broader work goals are to:

• Achieve a higher return on IT investments
  • Cut costs
  • She's actively looking at which capabilities to move to "cloud"/SaaS", what the security issues might be and how to integrate them into what Renovations already has on premises.   (Her friend, the CIO of  a local university just moved to a Google suite, and Gus is following that closely)
  • She's investigating how many employees she can convert to "Web-only" users. She hopes having fewer installed clients mean less support work for her dwindling staff)
• Investigating whether to suggest a move to IBM Lotus  Symphony -- initial cost savings are great, but needs to quantify learning costs, etc.
• Is trying to justify getting rid of all pagers; she feels they are obsolete
• Find new ways to meet customers needs
  • Her team has "duelling pilots" of Lotus Connections and Jive to see which offers better "social networking" integration into their current infrastructure. The infrastructure includes not only Notes/Domino but increasing amounts of Sharepoint.  These tools have GOT to install and integrate quickly and easily with what Renovations already has. (This project worries her more than any other-- the whole "Social networking" thing is the rage now, bit it's difficult to get solid data on ROI for this.)
• Give employees new technologies that will make them more productive
  • Her team in researching Unified telephony and unified communications (including video) across several vendors.
  • Her team is setting up an "Alloy" pilot - Notes and SAP to see what kind of a productivity boost it might cause
• Plan for future IT needs and have the data necessary to support her plans.
• She is constantly evaluating whether to build custom apps or buy, and from which vendors?
• Assimilate recent acquisitions (sometimes small, sometimes large) and standardize their IT processes and tools to be in line with the corporate ones
• Be able to proactively advise the business and do things differently to realize greater returns

Her narrower goals are to make sure:

• Her staff keeps the website securely up and running with a good response time (Portal), and the web content up to date and accurate.
• Her staff keeps the servers (Sharepoint, Domino, BES, Sametime, SAP, other app servers) securely up and running
• Her application developers are assigned to the right projects and build apps that have real return for Renovations (using the right technology.  Xpages?  .net? )
• Be a good manager, and provide career opportunities for her staff

Work Life
Gus took this job because she saw that Renovations already had a strong centralized IT organization, but had not yet really leveraged the centralization to standardize or automate processes. She also felt strongly that she could provide better business intelligence so that the organization as a whole could  take marketing analysis to a higher level and improve buying behavior, and increase advertising ROI.  Gus usually works a 60-hour work week, coming to the office all 5 days of the week, and often putting on late and/or early hours based on which remote subsidiaries she needs to meet with. She spends about 20% of that time generating  buy-in for her plans.  The Blackberry  roll-out was a clear and easy "ROI" thing; now she needs to plan the future for their custom app -- should she "web/Blackberry" enable her Notes apps?  Redo them in Xpages? Move them entirely to Sharepoint? She focuses a little over a day a week on cutting costs.

Work Tools
Gus has several machines-- a T61p laptop running Windows 7, a Macbook ( to understand the needs of the marketing dept), and a desktop running Redhat Linux - right now, mainly as a proof of concept.
To do her job she uses the following additional things:
Tools

Software VPN connections Lotus Notes: mail, calendar, contacts, to dos, databases Microsoft Project Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 Sametime Instant Messaging Sametime Meetings Audio Conferencing Video Conferencing   Web Browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, although Renovations standardized on IE

Hardware Desktop computer Laptop computer Wireless connections Telephone: land line, mobile, and pilot VOIP device Blackberry (email, calendar and Sametime IM) Multi-function device (for scanning in expense reports) She also has her own personal iPhone

Personal Information
Gus is a divorced Mother of two boys. Her oldest son is in graduate school at the University of Chicago and lives on his own.  Her younger son still lives with her in their house in Glenview, Ill, and has a short commute to Northwestern university.  She has a macaw named "Picard" , whom she taught to say "Make it so" and "Tea, Earl gray, hot."  He taught himself how to say "Turn off the crackberry." She recently took up golf (to enhance her career opportunities and just for fun).
Picture of Picard hanging out on her son's hand:

• Comments [35]