Hitting the ground running as a new CIO: An interview with Barclaycard’s Ian Buchanan

In a career as CIO or COO spanning more than 20 years and five diverse financial institutions, Ian Buchanan has developed an approach for the first 100 days that has served him well regardless of the corporate environment.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing. After rising through the ranks at Nomura to become the investment bank’s CIO, Ian Buchanan confesses that he didn’t realize he was stepping into a very different role “that was all about relationships and credibility,” where execution wasn’t all that counted. Buchanan eventually progressed to take a seat at Nomura’s executive table and won a reputation as a transformational leader. However, wizened by the experience, he took a more proactive tack when he later walked through the door at Alliance & Leicester, Santander, Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking, and, in October 2011, Barclaycard, where he is now COO. In a recent interview, Buchanan revealed his key insights. Among them: start before you start; listen, listen, listen; and get to the heart of the issues quickly.

Read the rest on the McKinsey website (December 2012) -- with Paul Willmott

The first 100 days of a new CIO: Nine steps for wiring in success

It’s critical to get a good start when stepping into the CIO role. Consider several measures when you shape your course.

The early months of a CIO’s tenure are an extremely important time to learn about a company’s culture and critical issues, shape an agenda for change, build relations with peers and senior leaders, and make decisions—on people, funding, and other matters—that will provide a solid foundation for the future.

By working over the years with many senior executives stepping into this role, we’ve learned about elements to cover, priorities to make, and mistakes to avoid. We have attempted to distill the most important topics to address during these critical first months. Of course, the particulars of each situation will have an impact on the priorities of each CIO. But we believe every new CIO will benefit from reviewing these elements and using them as a starting point to shape his or her own course of action.

Read the rest on the McKinsey website (December 2012) or in the Financial Times -- with Paul Willmott

Elevating technology on the boardroom agenda

Businesses are becoming increasingly digital and it’s not just a matter of process automation or resource-planning systems. Technology trends such as big data, cloud computing, mobility, and social media are giving rise to new marketing and operational capabilities. Indeed, technology has become too embedded in the fabric of the business—and too critical for competitive performance—to be left to the IT function alone.

As a result, many senior-executive teams have been called upon to get involved in technology issues. Boards are also beginning to take a strategic view of how technology trends are shaping their companies’ future. More boards than ever before are asking questions that ensure executives focus on the right issues. Deeper board involvement is also serving as a mechanism to cut through company politics and achieve endorsement of larger, integrated technology investments.

Read more on the McKinsey website (October 2012) or a summary in the Financial Times (September 2012) -- with Brad Brown and Johnson Sikes

Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value

Large IT efforts often cost much more than planned; some can put the whole organization in jeopardy. The companies that defy these odds are the ones that master key dimensions that align IT and business value.

As IT systems become an important competitive element in many industries, technology projects are getting larger, touching more parts of the organization, and posing a risk to the company if something goes wrong. Unfortunately, things often do go wrong. Our research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Oxford, suggests that half of all large IT projects—defined as those with initial price tags exceeding $15 million—massively blow their budgets. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. Software projects run the highest risk of cost and schedule overruns.

These findings—consistent across industries—emerged from research recently conducted on more than 5,400 IT projects by McKinsey and the BT Centre for Major Programme Management at the University of Oxford. After comparing budgets, schedules, and predicted performance benefits with the actual costs and results, we found that these IT projects, in total, had a cost overrun of $66 billion, more than the GDP of Luxembourg. We also found that the longer a project is scheduled to last, the more likely it is that it will run over time and budget, with every additional year spent on the project increasing cost overruns by 15 percent.

Read the rest on the McKinsey website (October 2012) or a summary in the Financial Times (August 2012) -- with Sven Blumberg and Juergen Laartz

Israel: an innovation gem, in Europe’s backyard

Israel is a first-tier innovation hub, second in the world only to Silicon Valley in its concentration of start-up companies.

However, it seems as though European companies have yet to get that message. US companies and investment funds currently make the vast majority of all investments in the Israeli market. In an effort to help all firms, especially European and Asian companies, tap into Israel’s innovation leadership, we collaborated with Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, to research pockets of opportunity for multinational companies looking to boost their innovation metabolism.

We identified four sectors that we believe are rich with promise. This article will briefly discuss Israel’s performance in innovation to date, highlight the results of our research, and suggest some ways companies might try to tap into the opportunity.

Read the rest in the Financial Times (September 2012) -- with Dana Maor and Jonathan Kolodny