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          Jim Barton is very energetic, outspoken head of Loan Operations department. He is one of the very dynamic executives, a key player and a likely CEO someday—of a different company, if not IVK.  Board of directors of IVK working with new CEO Carl Williams to get things on track and back to steeper growth trajectory. Board asked CEO to reconstruct the leadership team, to clear away the ‘rot’ that might remain from the way some things were done in the past. To recommend the composition of a team that could rise to the challenges company will be facing in the coming months, they want Barton to be on that team as new chief information officer. Though Barton is non-technical manager, CEO believes Barton is a Fixer and he can figure it out.

Though this was the news that had knocked the air out of Jim Barton, he managed to buy sometime to make the decision. When he starts exploring what is needed for IT Management, he comes across the statement: “more than any other group within a company, IT is positioned to understand the business end-to-end, across departmental boundaries”. Which is true. IT supports almost all business functions within the organization and positioned to see all corners of business.

          Meanwhile, Barton get to meet Bill Davies, who was previous CIO and let go recently. During their conversation, Davies says, Barton may not stay longer, and he will be gone soon too. Davies thinks, IVK is madhouse and nobody could succeed running IT in that place.

          After giving enough thought, Barton decides to take up the roll as CIO. He gets IT department organization chart from his assistant and setup a meeting with his direct reports. In the meeting Barton floated his idea of an off-site management meeting to set direction for the department. But he received strong objections from all his direct reports. They suggested Barton to invite few of their technical experts, because upper level management could not keep up with fast moving technology.

              Barton didn’t like the fact that his direct reports need their technical experts to explain details. He decides to read books and gain some technical skills. He goes to bookstore and buy lot of technical books such as TCP/IP, router protocols, firewall design, Java programming etc. He spends all night, while he gained some knowledge, he started realizing most of them had nothing to do with delivering direct functionality to system users. He had no idea so much complexity resided “below the floorboards” of IT systems. No dots had even begun to connect. He thinks, he might need to rethink his ideas about how management works!