When Sandra La Bella arrived at Alexander Forbes just over a year ago, she found a ‘broken’ IT department.
She’d been called in as a caretaker CIO for the country’s largest pension funds administrator, initially for three months. It was only when she asked to see its architectural plan, role profiles and strategy, which couldn’t be produced, that she realised the extent of the problem. The firm was also in a state of flux: it had fired its CEO Andrew Darfoor in September 2018 after the board lost confidence in him. Seven other executives left shortly after him.
But matters appear to be improving, and new CEO Dawie de Villiers said in a results announcement in December that it has ‘turned the corner’. And La Bella was part of that turnaround.
Now, one year on, La Bella has founded a proper IT organisation, and one that is bringing real change to the business itself. It’s this achievement, among others, that persuaded the Institute of Information Technology Professionals of South Africa (IITPSA) to award her the Visionary CIO title of 2019. She’s been in IT for 34 years, 12 of which were spent at Absa. She left the bank in September, but a week later, got an offer for the three-month stint at Alexander Forbes, or Alex, as she calls it.
Listening in
What was the IT department like?
“It was broken. This isn’t an exaggeration, but I think 80% of the (120) people had post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
There were IT managers, but all were in ‘acting’ roles.
The first thing she did was meet every single person in the department, at ‘coffee sessions’, down in the company’s garden area. This was clearly a time to be listening, and she asked them, in groups of 10 at a time, what they were feeling, and what they thought should, or shouldn’t, be happening at the company.
This revealed the department’s ‘weak spots’, such as no one being allowed to go on training, as well as a ‘huge sense of fear’ among the staff.
“People were too scared to say anything.
A lot of people had been put into roles they couldn’t do, and they’d been forced into them. They were also too scared to say if anything was broken because they’d get blasted. They were aimless. They didn’t know what they were doing, and didn’t know where they were going.”
She remembers standing outside her office not long after joining and ‘there was a deathly hush’.
“You could hear a pin drop.”
She then gathered all the ‘acting’ managers into a room for a day-long strategy conversation.
They looked at all the parts of the business: operations, cyber, data, audit, risk.
They also dug into the company’s networks and infrastructure, and what was being supplied by vendors. Crucially, they also looked at the business’ strategy, and how this was aligned to that of the IT department.
She says that most of the budget was being spent on operations, and almost nothing on innovation. She was still in an acting position herself, but after what she remembers as a ‘long chat’ with De Villiers, she agreed to also be interviewed for the still vacant CIO position. It was just before the December break when De Villiers told her ‘you’re not going’.
She spent the December holidays preparing a strategy and presented it to the board early in January. This was not the kind of report board members were used to receiving, and they told her they’d never had such an honest assessment.
She’d broken the strategy into 116 programmes ‘to fix what was broken’, and told the board she’d have it done by the end of 2019, a promise on which she’s made good.
There was plenty to do. There was unsupported hardware and software, and no configuration management database, and no service management department. No assets had been tagged. Staff role profiles had also been written by the staff. There was no risk profile, and none of the applications had any proper managers. Of the 162 applications in the firm, only four had disaster recovery plans that had been documented.
And there had only ever been 12 disaster recovery tests. Its platform was also down more often than it was up. Other that what she calls ‘natural attrition’, she’s not had to get rid of anyone, and in the year has hired 70 people, bringing the complement to 201. The new hires include a number of cyber personnel, a disaster recovery manager and a data officer.
Another crucial hire was that of a change manager.
Asked what her staff would have to say report about her management style, she says they’d say they’re given absolute autonomy, and can ask her for advice at any time.
“My office is like a railway station. I’ve created a collaborative place where they’re comfortable enough to come to me, or one of their peers, and ask for help. They now don’t have any fear doing that.”
‘They call me the eagle’
Is she good at delegating?
“Extremely. I’m fortunate. People call me an eagle. I’m able to do the strategic (work), but at any time I know what each of my staff members is working on and what they’re struggling with. I don’t know how I do it. If anything is going wrong, I’m able to come down, sit with them and fix it, and then go back up again.”
La Bella says before her tenure, the business had been reluctant to approach the IT department, as they were met with responses like, ‘I can’t do it’, or ‘I don’t know how’, or ‘I’ll help you tomorrow’.
Now, the business is asked what’s needed, and the message to the IT department is that it’s there to serve the business.
“I don’t want to see people slouching in their chairs looking at Facebook. We need to win the business’ trust.”
Before she took the job, La Bella also made sure she had a seat on the exco.
“I’m not having people present my packs on my behalf. You’re going to hear it straight from me,” she remembers telling De Villiers.
Is she tough?
“I am tough, but gentle. If a staff member asks me what to do, I’ll ask them, ‘What do you think you should do?’ and then we’ll talk through what they think and what I think, and then we’ll come up with something. If you’re just telling someone what to do, how are they going to learn?”
Asked if cleaning house resulted in conflict, she says once a staff member has worked for her, ‘they don’t want to work for anyone else’.
“I’m not a conflict person at all. I never lose my temper. I’m a very calm person, even in the toughest of situations.”
IITPSA’s visionary CIO Award runners-up
- Avsharn Bachoo, PPS
- Helen Constantinides, AVBOB
- Louise van der Bank, Afrisam
- Derek Wilcocks, Discovery
This article was originally published in the February 2020 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za
Share
