Rent-a-CIO

Three for-hire ICT professionals tell us the skills needed for this career path.

A number of people have decided, or been compelled, to move from the security of a CIO position to the less secure, but more flexible life of a freelance consultant or part-time CIO-for-hire.

Peter Jameson was CIO at Redeal, the back-office support organisation for electronics distributor Rexel, until May last year, when the role was disestablished. "I had been thinking about a move of this kind before the economic climate forced it on me," he says, "and I knew the reorganisation was coming." So he was to some extent forewarned. He saw the change as offering a more flexible lifestyle, with better work-life balance.

Networking skills

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A number of people have decided, or been compelled, to move from the security of a CIO position to the less secure, but more flexible life of a freelance consultant or part-time CIO-for-hire.

Peter Jameson was CIO at Redeal, the back-office support organisation for electronics distributor Rexel, until May last year, when the role was disestablished. "I had been thinking about a move of this kind before the economic climate forced it on me," he says, "and I knew the reorganisation was coming." So he was to some extent forewarned. He saw the change as offering a more flexible lifestyle, with better work-life balance.

Networking skills

The life of a CIO, with its management of several concurrent projects, can be frustrating, though it is also stimulating and rewarding, he says. "I also looked for the mental stimulation of working for different organisations and doing different types of work."

A successful consultant has to sell him/herself on the open market, "you have to become a different kind of person, a self-marketer who gives a lot of time to networking -- a communicator," says Jameson.

Attention should be paid to marketing materials; such as a set of documents that will quickly give a potential client an idea of the consultant's strengths. "You need to have something you can show clients." Preparation of such materials is, naturally, unpaid work, part of the "cost of sale".

However, a CIO is hardly a stranger to communication, networking and selling one's ideas and usefulness; it's just selling to a different audience, Jameson says. "The key positive skill-set I bring from my CIO experience is to look at the problems of the business, rather than technology." Some who have built a career in the consultancy market might be comparatively technical in their approach and this gives him a possible advantage in bidding for work.

Contracting and CIO work may, of course, overlap. With New Zealand's large proportion of small organisations, unable to justify the budget for a full-timer to look after ICT, there is an opportunity in the market for a part-time CIO. A person who can work with a business long enough to translate their ideas into a fully defined ICT project and oversee its implementation, says Jameson.

Asked what "fields" he is involved in now, he jokes, "mostly green ones". He is spending a lot of time on his small farming property, as fulfilment of that more flexible lifestyle he was seeking. In the ICT-related field, he is currently involved in a project to help companies implement the requirements of the Financial Advisors Act, passed in 2008 to improve disclosure and assurance of integrity in the financial advice industry. "That's less a technical job and more about business process," he says.

Before starting business as a consultant, it makes sense to talk to those already in the field about their experiences and their ways of working, Jameson says. There are elements of both co-operation and competition in the consultancy community, he says. "People are quite free with advice, but I do find that in recent economic conditions, they hold their key contacts close."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.