When CIOs join a company, there’s rarely a clean slate awaiting.
The remnants of previous IT strategies and legacy processes often welcome tech chiefs as they enter a new business. Smart IT leaders don’t pretend to know it all after onboarding, according to Wrench Group CIO David Fritzinger.
“You never know what you’re stepping into until you’re actually there,” Fritzinger told CIO Dive. “When people come into leadership roles, they forget that they are the newest person on the team and their job is listening and understanding to get their bearings.”
That was Fritzinger's mindset when he joined Wrench Group, which provides home repair services across 14 states, as its tech chief about a year ago.
“When I got here, Wrench was in a lot different of a place when it came to technology,” Fritzinger said. “But I have been very fortunate to come into a really good team, a wildly talented team.”
Here are Fritzinger’s three tips for IT leaders entering a new company to make an early impact:
1. Find alignment on goals
After newly minted CIOs complete their listening tours, it’s time to begin finding alignment on goals. Projects that don’t contribute to broader business goals and areas of friction can offer good starting points for the process.
For Fritzinger, a laundry list of more than 50 open projects was a natural place to begin finding alignment. With more than one project per IT pro, the roster needed to be whittled.
“Sometimes in technology, we are masters of complication, and we let things stretch out longer than they need to be,” he said. “We killed a number of projects that were out there because they just didn’t align with our mission.”
Even when projects don’t track with goals, bringing them to an end isn’t easy.
“That was hard,” Fritzinger said. “There’s cost affiliated with that, and there’s time affiliated with that, but we had to do it.”
2. Decipher project relevance
After culling the project roster down to just five critical initiatives, Fritzinger took a look at which of those needed to be prioritized.
Wrench Group’s busy season lasts from May to October, so the majority of IT transformation needs to happen in the off-season, Fritzinger found. During the summer and fall months, the entire business is focused on solving customer needs. The winter and early spring are when Fritzinger wanted to accelerate initiatives.
To accurately prioritize projects, CIOs have to understand the business and its needs.
“Once we understand it and get alignment, then we deliver with a sense of urgency,” Fritzinger said. “It doesn’t need to be complicated: Put your head down and let’s go.”
The company prioritized projects that improved customer experience, operational efficiency and consistency.
“We came into May of last year in a really good position,” Fritzinger said. “We had roughly 60 various deployments over about a four-month time period.”
3. Focus on outcome, not method
In today’s business world, everyone thinks AI is the answer, Fritzinger quipped.
“Sometimes it is AI for sure,” Fritzinger said, pointing to several internal use cases. The company is closely partnering with software company ServiceTitan to leverage AI tools that help with scenario planning and workforce management.
But AI isn’t always the best tool for the job.
“AI accelerates everything,” Fritzinger said. “Not just the good things, it accelerates the bad things, too.”
CIOs who can lead their business through the hype-filled AI haze are critical to broader success, especially as these projects become tied with growth and cost-cutting measures. But it requires a discerning eye.
“If you focus on the outcomes and not the method, the outcome will drive what method is appropriate,” Fritzinger said. “That takes a fundamentally different way of thinking.”
