He is expected to have a view on the company’s strategy, products and services – not just on IT or supply chain – when he sits in the C-suite.
Ansley has learned to keep it simple when he is explaining technology to the board. “Bill Kelty told me something that was fantastic for me. He said to me: ‘John, when you present to me, I only want to know four things. Tell me how it is going to win us new business, how it will retain existing business, how it is going to make the lives of the men and women in our company easier and better, and how it is going to drive down costs.’ When you look at it from that point of view, all of sudden it doesn’t matter if it is Android or IOS, SAP or Microsoft. You say there is this business project we can do that might use some technology that gives these outcomes.”
Ansley’s anecdote is a snapshot of the major requirement of today’s CIO – translator. “I have been in these roles for 12 years, and I have seen it change substantially,”Ansley explains. He was CIO at the pharmaceutical company, Roche, and the miner, Rio Tinto prior to Linfox.
“In the early days, I don’t think it was really a C-level role; it was really just ‘head geek’. The main thing I have seen change is the need for the CIO to be a two-way translator: to translate the business requirement across to the people in IT who are less business-outcome aware, and then conversely to take the technology language and translate it back to the businesspeople to make it make sense.”
What works for technology staff can fall flat with business leaders. “I created a beautiful diagram one day for the board that showed a funnel and all the systems that we have flowing into the top of the funnel. The funnel was the process we go through to reduce all the complexity to standardised platforms that were easy to roll out and manage.
“Bill didn’t like that diagram at all. He said it meant nothing to him.”
Ansley says two-way translating is not a difficult task, but it is a skill that takes practise. To polish up on his business language, Ansley has done an MBA – or nearly; he is up to his last assignment.
A recent report found that many boards do not listen to the views of CIOs, suggesting that Ansley’s role is unusual. However, it also found that those CIOs who do get listened to tend to have MBAs, supporting his decision to study. He says many of his peers have got MBAs or are completing them.
“I recognised that I knew a lot of the things, but I didn’t know the frameworks or the terminology, like net present value and discounted cash flows. I sort of knew but I decided to go and make sure. And it was an opportunity to look at an MBA from a slightly different angle, not just from a traditional finance base or business base. I am looking at entrepreneurship; how do you take a traditional business model and give it a shake-up.”
As a black belt martial arts expert, Ansley is used to giving things a shake-up. He is disciplined, focused and willing to try new ideas. He started studying geology, dropped out when he saw a mate doing well in IT, sat an IT aptitude test, was trained by his employer and worked up from there.
