David M Williams
Thursday, 11 June 2009 04:50
Business IT -
Security
Page 1 of 2
Just months after being named Public Sector CIO of the year, RailCorp Chief Information Officer Vicki Coleman has been escorted from her office by security after allegations have been made about her to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Coleman has had a lengthy career that has never backed down from a challenge but she may now be facing her biggest challenge yet.
The Australian today reported Coleman has been
stood down following allegations of dishonest or corrupt behaviour made to the Independent Commission Against Corruption
This is a remarkable turnaround. Coleman’s early career spanned well-known organisations where she became known as a fix-it lady, having turned Westpac’s faulty network issues around in 1995 and then similarly handed QANTAS’ problem areas when the airline head-hunted her in 1997.
Coleman next moved into the public sector joining NSW state-owned corporation Sydney Water.
During her four years at Sydney Water she instituted supplier panels to streamline procurement processes, pulled the IT group from a subsidiary called Australian Water Technology back into the core business, centralised the disparate IT spending and assets to all reside under her group and ultimately reduced operational expenditure by more than $15 million.
Coleman attributes her successes to having focused on creating an enterprise architecture. This is a tool CIOs can use to give an organisation a deliberate and determined platform and objective for the technology it uses instead of an ad-hoc approach largely driven by suppliers and contractors.
In Coleman’s case, consolidating and simplifying technology through a stated architecture allowed her to reduce 80% of contractors and 5% of full-time IT staff.
Coleman relished in the challenge to fix a dysfunctional business unit and she previously stated that was the reason she accepted the job. In fact, she outlived two Sydney Water CEO’s with their own intentions to fix the business.
Yet, Coleman ultimately felt Sydney Water did not fundamentally appreciate the contribution of IT to the business. This is something many of the world’s collective CIO community can appreciate, themselves daily facing the problem of making IT relevant and be seen as a genuine strategic function and not purely an irritating cost centre that merely keeps e-mail running.
When Coleman joined RailCorp in 2004 she considered it largely similar to Sydney Water in that both organisations had large staff tenure and a heavy union presence, but she greatly appreciated RailCorp’s much different view of IT.
She said at the time, “What’s rewarding at RailCorp is that it has gone out and recruited a CIO and then trusted my ability and judgement to determine what strategic direction needs to be set.”
Coleman’s early time at RailCorp seemed to follow similar lines to her achievements with Sydney Water. She worked to pull the 200-odd IT staff back into one group from their various pockets within State Rail and the Rail Infrastructure Corporation.
Additionally, she established supplier panels just as she had previously done, saying they provide flexibility and learning capacity when a company ventures into areas and new technologies.
Just last December, Coleman was named
Public Sector CIO of the year.
How did it all go so horribly wrong?
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