For many incoming CIOs, their first 90 days with a company are often spent meeting with IT staff, business leaders, the senior leadership team and the board to understand what their needs and pain points are and then using this information to develop a strategic technology vision.

When Peter Hogan joined Compana Pet Brands as Senior Vice President of IT in July 2023, he applied some of these techniques as well as others that worked well for him when he was VP of IT at the prior company where he led IT, trying to right size options.

The following is a condensed version of Peter’s story which he recently shared with HMG Strategy’s New York CIO Summit of America Advisory Board members:

Compana Pet Brands is a privately held consumer products company. The products range from feed-based animal product lines to dog and cat supplements, innovative nutrition options, as well a toy/treat subscription boxes and other supplies.

In my first 45 days with the company, I interviewed more than 75 people and most weren’t in IT. These interviews were with most of my business partners across all business functions at multiple tiers. I did this because I really wanted to understand what their biggest concerns were and seek ways to connect the dots for the most impactful projects we could lead in IT. I also met with the executive team to better understand what their concerns were. This enabled the ability to pull together a draft view of a tactical model and a strategic plan to share with them within 45 days so that within 60 days we could finalize the approaches.

The tactical model talked about all the little things we found that could be knocked out very quickly – anything from 2-hour to 40-hour projects. We built out a list of these projects and prioritized them and then shared this with each of the stakeholders so that they knew what we were taking on.

We took the bigger efforts and put them on a strategic roadmap and then we shared these with both my executive partners and with the board.

What I did differently at Compana than in past lead roles was to meet with all of the stakeholders, listened to what they had to say, and then shared the strategic roadmap with them afterwards. People want to be heard; they want to know that you’re listening. Giving them the opportunity to speak before I put anything  down on paper gained a lot of credibility and buy-in.

Input from the IT Team

I also worked with people cross-functionally. When I first met with the people on the IT team, one of the questions I asked them was, ‘If you weren’t working in IT, what would you like to be doing?’ Some people who weren’t in analytics said they had a passion for this. Another person told me of a desire to work part-time in finance and another in security.

So, I tried to bake in alternative parts to their jobs so that they could become bimodal where possible. We’ve since provided more cross-functional support in IT without adding a lot of resources. The team felt like they were being heard and they got to do something new in their day jobs. It was probably the biggest surprise to me in terms of becoming a huge morale win at a level that I wasn’t expecting.

I also did an assessment of enterprise data capabilities and our enterprise footprint. I thought it was important to share ‘Here’s where we are today and here’s where we want to go.’

It’s just been under a year, and it has really helped us to quantify the impact that we’ve had for our business partners to show the starting line and the gains we have made (and what is still to come).

I also wanted to identify where we could leapfrog technology so that we could get rid of technology debt and provide capabilities that we didn’t already have.

When I got to Compana, I spent the first 45 days determining what our needs were. We had four traditional ERP systems and two consumer focused platforms for DTC sales. But we didn’t have data integration on any of these. So, we needed to integrate the platforms, but until we can do that, we needed to integrate the data for analytical insights. So, a unified Data Lake became one of our strategic deliverables in the first 6 months based on the top two use cases that would provide the highest value for the data insights.

We also had not executed an external penetration test in depth prior, so that level of security insight became a parallel priority. To address it, we implemented testing within the first 90 days and remediated over 95% of the findings in the next 90 days. We also leveraged the findings to implement several parallel platform and product enhancements across the environment.

Peter Hogan is a chairperson and a featured speaker for HMG Strategy’s 10^th Annual St. Louis C-Level Technology Leadership Summit on August 27, 2024.

To learn more about the St. Louis summit and to register for the event, click here.