AS a new CIO, you have two choices for learning about your organisation. You can “hit the road” and meet with most or all of the leaders, stakeholders and a sampling of others, to get a broad picture, or along with the meeting and greeting, you can focus your efforts on key functions and relationships to ferret out the problems. A broad approach will uncover issues but won’t allow you enough time to dig in before moving on to your next meeting. Furthermore, if your assessment is not done in the first three months or so, the honeymoon is over and the problems are yours, whether you know them or not. So, you have to get it done fast.

At Diamond Consultants, one of the common questions we get is how to assess the health or maturity of an IT organisation. We have developed extremely comprehensive models, and tools to develop these assessments. But for a new CIO, you don’t have the time for such a detailed and comprehensive assessment in your first 100 days. To address this, I’ve distilled our best thinking into five questions that can serve as a proxy for a more detailed assessment.

With these five questions, you can develop a good view of what’s going on and where the hot spots are. The questions are:

Do Business and IT Leaders Regularly Interact?
By regular, I don’t mean “Hey, nice to see you” in the coffee line regular.  And, I don’t mean executive status meeting regular. I mean, is there a regularly scheduled time during which real issues are discussed and concrete planning is discussed – not in large groups, but one on one. I worked with an insurance CTO who had a weekly meeting with the head of strategy – now, we’re talking. Here are some of the regular meetings you should look for:

• CTO/chief architect – head of strategy
• CTO/chief architect – head of new product/service development
• Head of Apps – business unit/functional leaders
• Head of Ops/Infrastructure – head of customer service
• IT person responsible for people – head of HR/recruiting
• IT Controller – corporate controller

The other thing to explore is what kind of regular meetings your predecessor had with  key leaders – CFO, Controller, Head of HR, business unit leads, etc.

Has Scope Been Cut for Any of the Top five Projects?
“On-time, On-Budget” has got to be one of the most over used and largely useless measures of project success. The reason is that many times this magic is done by cutting scope. In Diamond’s 2010 Digital IQ survey, 60% of business and IT leaders said  that their projects don’t regularly deliver their planned scope. So, just bypass the scope-budget metrics and go straight to the scope. Its the business capabilities that a project’s sponsor wants anyway. Cutting scope cuts business value and customer satisfaction.

Does the IT Leadership Group Operate as a Team?
As follow-on to the first question, how regularly does the IT leadership team meet and interact? Are the meetings just the CIO’s staff meeting that follows a meaningless agenda or are they real issues-based interactions? The second part of this question is how well the team’s skills complement each other and how well each leader’s traits and skills align with their assigned jobs. Is the leader assigned to manage and track the IT portfolio really a better innovator and planner?

Are Any of the Top IT Support Issues Recurring?
MIT’s CISR’s research shows that firms who don’t have a stable service platform can’t do much else well. So, have a look at the top 10 or 20 high priority service tickets over the last few month and see if there are any patterns in who is logging the issues, what kinds of issues they are, how long they take to resolve, etc. You will also learn a lot about the organization’s attitude toward service, process maturity, staff, etc.

Can Business Sponsors Simply Describe Business Cases?
Every company has a different approach to business cases. One grocery company I worked with was satisfied with a “we know it’s a good project” to justify an investment (not advocating that, BTW).  Instead of getting into the specifics, just ask the business sponsors to explain what they are getting out of the projects. See how simply they state the objectives, if there are any business metrics attached and make sure you can actually measure them.

With these five questions, you will learn about alignment, processes, projects, people, service and support and most importantly, business value. Let me know what you think and other ways you have seen CIOs get up to speed quickly.

CHRIS CURRAN is Diamond Management & Technology Consultants’ chief technology officer and managing partner of the firm’s technology practice. He writes the CIO Dashboard blog at www.ciodashboard.com