Bally Total Fitness CIO Gail Holmberg oversees a staff of 140 and reports to the CEO. In part 2 of this interview, she discusses what important qualities she looks for when hiring IT staff and how she's planning to stay competitive in her industry. Read part 1 of this CIO Conversation.
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What were your financial priorities when you got to Bally a year and a half ago?
The first thing I did was create a tech steering committed and learn about where requests were
coming from. My second area was to analyze skill sets internal to the organization and identify
skill gaps that needed to be addressed. I've added more project management, business analysis, QA
staff, [as well as] more DBAs and more people with business relationship management skills.
What are the most important qualities of those people that you added?
The most important is an interest in the business and an eagerness to learn about the business.
Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap ... and others don't author Jim
Collins described Level 5
employees as workers at any level who make decisions for the company's benefit as opposed to their
own. What do you do to keep these people in your organization?
A true Level 5 executive can be challenged and energized by an opportunity to make a difference.
The key is to make them feel connected to the business and that they're making a positive
contribution. I've never found it difficult to keep those kinds of people satisfied.
I don't think they truly feel valued unless they value the contribution they're making to the business. Good people want opportunities to do a good job and to be seen to do a good job. For IT people, the worst thing is to be bored. Some prefer a business challenge, some a technical challenge, but they want something new to work on.
How can IT investment help benefit your company as a whole?
IT investments are looked at on an individual ROI basis. We need to get a clear list of business
initiatives that we need to support, and then we'll work from that.
What are your top technology initiatives?
We rolled out a new contact management system to enable us to automate our lead tracking. That will
be a huge help to sales management. We're rolling out the Kronos timekeeping product for
productivity improvement over paper time cards and manual intervention.
What's special about the relationship between you and Bally's CEO, Paul Toback?
When Paul came on just over a year and a half ago, I was the first new hire under his new position.
I definitely feel a part of his team. He brought me on with a challenge to make IT a more direct
contributor to the business. There's no question that he understands that Bally needs technology
and technological improvements to be competitive. The challenge is to make the right choices.
How did you carve your niche as the CIO?
The key thing I had to do was to build relationships with the business. IT had always been
physically removed from the executives. I concentrated on learning about their parts of the
business and where they needed help, while at the same time understanding the IT organization and
how it fit.
I didn't need to physically move IT, but I needed to add some skills, some in Chicago [Bally's headquarters]. But I believe IT needs to be run as a virtual organization. You don't have to be next to the business, but you have to have a communication flow. I brought in people with those skills, whose job it was to facilitate that kind of communication.
Is the IT culture different in a company with financial issues than an established one like
Sears, where you were before Bally?
The biggest difference is just in size. At Sears, IT was 1800 people. At Bally, it's 140.
Individuals have to wear multiple hats and fill various roles. You have to structure your
organization differently.
The challenge isn't resources -- no one has unlimited resources. The challenge is: What's the best way to use the resources that are available? How do we deliver on the business value?