In addition to all the difficulties surrounding the transition to a new position, there are four specific challenges facing any CIO in his or her first 100 days on the job:

• Evolving role definition and shifting expectations. Not only must a new CIO be an expert technologist and strategic business partner. He or she must also quickly map the company’s political environment and influence networks to figure out what the CIO is expected to do.
• Misaligned organizational design and competencies. New CIOs often find that the IT function’s current structure and skills are ill-matched to their company’s needs. As company strategy is fluid, CIOs must not only build an IT function that can meet today’s challenges but must also develop the right competencies to help create competitive advantage in the future.
• Gaps in business strategy participation. A lack of exposure to strategy-setting processes and styles can limit a new CIO’s input to business strategy formulation and opportunity identification.
• IT portfolio risks. Given the level of complexity and risk in most companies’ project portfolios, it’s important for new CIOs to quickly introduce steps to increase project success rates while lowering overall delivery costs.

The challenges facing a new CIO have taken their toll on CIO retention: annual turnover averages 34%, compared with 17% for CFOs and 12% for CEOs. This is due in large part to an incredibly steep learning curve, with CIOs given only a couple of months to come up to speed.

Though the study is primarily focused at CIOs just entering the profession, there are implications outside onboarding the top IT executive. CIOs may consider the other applications, such as:

• Onboarding new direct reports. How do you speed up the learning curve for your direct reports? How do you handle internal promotions differently from external hires?
• Assessing your own job performance gaps. Which of the four challenges facing a new CIO also challenge you? How would you “do things differently” if you could do everything over?
• Helping other peer executives transition smoothly. What different challenges do other executives face, and how can you help them ramp up faster to overcome them?

CIO Executive Board members can access related CIO Executive Board materials at the CIO Executive Board website.

The CIO Executive Board is a membership of senior executives with a shared commitment to steward enterprise-wide IT initiatives. The membership offers a set of unique services and practical tools designed to assist IT leaders with their most pressing managerial, communications, and decision-making challenges, and serves more than 1,000 CIOs and Heads of IT worldwide.