One CIO’s Path to Becoming a Business Leader and Utility Player

Patty Crawford, CIO at UL Solutions and Governing Body Member of the Chicago CIO Community, describes herself as an “accidental CIO.” She did not “grow up in IT,” as she says, but built her career in consulting. “I loved learning and wanted a career where I could focus on it. I started working in consulting because it was about solving business problems,” she explains.

As a consultant, every industry, every project, every problem that you are doing is different, so it was an opportunity to become what I consider to be a utility player.

Instead of growing her career through IT infrastructure or application development, she worked in program management and knowledge management. “I looked for opportunities to apply what I knew, learn something new, and build out that utility player approach to know anything and everything there is about IT,” Crawford says.

After nine and a half years in consulting, she went to work for a client, BP, leading their architecture design group for ERP systems. After that, she led organizational design for IT. Crawford shares that her approach is “going in, and knowing X, and then they give you an opportunity to do Y, and you do that.” 

Becoming a Utility Player – and a Business Leader

Crawford credits good mentors for helping her focus on “business-adjacent IT,” as she describes it. Roles blending IT and the business – like process redesign and operating models – gave her experience in transforming business operations. “Each of those experiences, like any broad experience, connected me to the business and allowed me to grow as a business leader,” she says. 

“That's how I've worked my way into the CIO role – because I have a broad background. I can dive into areas that I need to, but I can also pull up to a high level. And I've had opportunities that allow me to blend business and technology,” she explains. 

Crawford is relatively new to her role – under two years in the seat – and credits her mentors for giving her the “playbook” for a new-to-role IT executive. Earlier in her career, she worked for a new CIO, and for his first six months, he spent time learning the business and ensuring his leadership team learned the business. “We would travel to different locations, sit with leaders in that office, learn what they do and how technology helps them,” she explains. “And we would work in their environment.” 

Once they had completed this exercise, they created the IT strategy and were able to present it in a way that was relevant to their business stakeholders. Crawford realized early on the importance of this process. “That CIO had a playbook, and I watched and mimicked it,” she says. “Go in, spend your first 90 or 120 days, and learn the business. Don't transform IT because you really don't know how yet.” 

Don't transform IT until you know what the business needs.

Advice for New-to-Role CIOs

Crawford believes this new-to-role approach is relevant for other CIOs, and these are her top three pieces of advice:

• “Spend time learning the business. I cannot stress that enough.” Crawford emphasizes that understanding business needs is a critical place to start. She advises: “Spend your first three to four months meeting with business leaders, touring operations, and meeting with customers, so you can understand how they operate and what their priorities and objectives are.” She adds that you can also learn what is working or not working in relationships with the IT organization. 
• “After that, develop your strategy.” After gaining a thorough understanding of stakeholder needs around the business, Crawford recommends developing a strategy to align what IT needs to do to meet those objectives. And importantly, she says, “Tie that story together” by connecting the dots between what you have learned and the resulting strategy. “You are developing a strategy that aligns to their objectives, and you are replaying their words,” she notes. 
• “Don’t be afraid to take some quick actions.” Crawford believes that if you find common themes or issues across the organization, you can take immediate action. She shares that she heard a common concern regarding the use of an intermediary to outline work, rather than connecting directly with the project staff. She says, “I listened for 90 days. Within 120 days, I took quick action, and I changed the structure.” Crawford continues, “It showed the business that I was ready to take quick action and that I heard them. It could be anything – it could just be digging into a project that's behind and getting it back on track.”

There is a process: first you start with strategy, then you go to structure, then you go to talent. And you don't do it in the reverse order. You have to align to what the strategy needs are.

Aligning IT with the Business

Crawford’s approach to being new in the role – learning the business, then developing an IT strategy – also helps to ensure that IT is aligned with business objectives. Crawford explains, “I always ask my team, ‘Are you a business leader who happens to know technology, or are you a technology leader who happens to know the business?’”

Crawford led a session at the recent Chicago CIO Community Executive Summit called From Technologist to Trusted Business Leader. She thinks this is particularly relevant right now as “every C-suite wants to understand value.” If IT leaders are strictly technology leaders and don’t understand the business, it can be hard to translate the value. “Every CIO wants a seat at the table,” she continues. “To do so, you need to position technology with business language.” 

As an example, she shares that an IT objective could be “delivering projects on time.” Instead, she recommends finding out the impact of not delivering projects on time and changing your language accordingly. “Instead of saying my number one priority is to deliver projects on time, say ‘my number one priority is to deliver customer value and colleague productivity.’ It's a slight play on words, but the value isn't delivering the project on time – it’s the impact if you don’t,” she explains.

If you think about the CIO of the future, they are going to have to be true business leaders who know how to transform the business using technology.

In terms of where she sees the role of the CIO in the future, it’s no surprise that she thinks the CIO will be even more of a business leader. “It’s not leading with technology – it's figuring out the problem or the opportunity and how technology can solve it. That's why it will be even more critical for CIOs to be trusted business leaders.”

To join a conversation with other CIOs like Patty Crawford of UL Solutions, apply to join your local Gartner CIO Community. If you are already a community member, sign into the app to find and register for upcoming events.
 

Special thanks to Patty Crawford and UL Solutions.