Former Nortel CIO Steve Bandrowczak--now VP of Global Sales for Avaya--gives his outlook on CIO leadership, training and IT staffing.


It’s not every day that a CIO shifts to the role of salesman. But that’s exactly what Steve Bandrowczak did earlier this year, when Avaya bought pieces of Nortel, where he had been global CIO.

Bandrowczak now works with Avaya clients and sales professionals to identify and understand CIO priorities today.

On top of that list, he says, are managing costs and driving value. Traditional cost pressures are not going to change, he suggests, so CIOs should look at options like cloud computing and virtualization to limit operating costs. Bandrowczak says IT leaders need to keep asking, how do I get more efficiency? And how do I get more out of the assets I already have?

Then comes the constant challenge of delivering value to the business. “We’ve talked about this for years,” he says. “But this is the first time I’ve really seen CIOs get under the covers and own business processes, and then tie technology and systems to the processes.”

But he’s also seeing a positive sign: More CIOs having formal responsibility for more than just IT. “If you look at some of the bigger transformations in companies today, more and more CIOs are owning them. When I left Nortel, I had all shared services under me. All of those were big transformation projects. When you think about companies looking at onshoring/offshoring, etc., and the lowest-cost option per transaction, it’s what CIOs have been doing their entire career.”

But while he’s seen big changes to the CIO’s job description, he hasn’t seen, big, wholesale changes to the CIO job title. “The CIO title is still relevant—it just happens that they own more transformation responsibilities and processes.”

At Avaya, Bandrowczak has a front-row seat for the enormous changes occurring in mobility. And he sees enormous opportunities for younger generations of IT pros to contribute.

“The next generation coming out of school will teach IT organizations in a big way the future of how business will be done,” he says. “You still have the security and infrastructure put in place, but the way that you’re going do business and handle transactions is going to change dramatically in the future.”

The big question, in his eyes, is: How do you take disruptive trends in mobility and other areas and tie them to business value? Bandrowczak believes younger IT pros—despite “absolutely” getting a bad rap—can bring a tremendous amount to the table today.

Training and development are essential for that. But CIOs need to constantly revamp how they’re conducting their mentoring programs, he says.

Bandrowczak thought back to an internship program he oversaw about 15 years ago, while he was CIO of Avnet. According to Bandrowczak, the 10-week program included participation in “meaningful” projects for the company, coupled with mentoring and real-world business scenarios.

But in the end, during the exit-interview process, one of the brightest interns equated the program to “being in a rock quarry.” The interns did what they were assigned, but there wasn’t much room for creativity, the intern remarked.

Bandrowczak said he and his team took that comment to heart. The next year, they modified the program dramatically to give the young workers the chance to flex their creative muscles.

“It’s not that we didn’t have success in the first group, but not allowing them to work the way they wanted to—letting them collaborate—you were destroying half the value they brought,” he says.

And that concept has strong relevance today, he adds: “Any CIO who is trying to solve this world of mobility and bring value to customers, you need this generation to do that.”

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