Hi folks,I’m thinking about sending this open letter to the CIO and or CFO. Please share you thoughts with me here about how it can be improved.
Dear CIO,
Your recent reorganization announcement identifies many things TIS desperately needs: clearer accountabilities, better collaboration, stronger business enablement, and more efficient delivery.
Those are the right priorities. But for many of us, the announcement was deeply frustrating.
We've been waiting years for these improvements.
The previous transformation initiative was supposed to address longstanding problems with governance, decision rights, processes, and collaboration. It delivered little meaningful change because the executive leadership team couldn't align on what needed to be done.
Then we gave you another year to learn the organization and establish your direction.
You've been with the company for approximately 15 years. You're an SVP with significant authority, a substantial budget, and the ability to bring in whatever expertise was needed. You didn't need to wait for a reorganization to start fixing these problems. That work should have been happening in parallel.
You inherited the dysfunction. But after a year in the role, you own the lack of progress in fixing it.
We've reorganized. What have we fixed?
Your announcement changes reporting lines and leadership responsibilities while acknowledging that significant work remains to determine how the organization will function.
That's difficult to accept.
The same executive team that has struggled for years to resolve cross-functional problems now has substantial new portfolios, teams to integrate, and businesses to support.
Expecting those same leaders to somehow find the time, alignment, and motivation to transform TIS is not a credible plan.
Running TIS and fixing how TIS works are both essential. But the latter cannot remain a side responsibility for the people who have repeatedly failed to deliver it.
Put trusted leaders in charge of transformation
Establish a TIS Transformation Council comprising a small group of directors and managers selected for their credibility with TIS employees, delivery performance, and the trust they've earned across the organization.
You don't need to guess who those people are.
Employee engagement survey results provide evidence of which leaders have built strong teams, earned employees' confidence, and created environments where people feel respected and supported. Combine those results with delivery performance and cross-functional credibility.
Let the council choose its chair. Give it dedicated capacity, a budget for external expertise, direct access to you, and the authority to challenge existing practices.
Task it with fixing the processes, governance, decision rights, and accountabilities that connect TIS. Require practical recommendations, implementation plans, measurable outcomes, and deadlines.
The executive leadership team must remain accountable for implementing the changes, but it cannot be allowed to stall them through competing priorities or an inability to reach consensus.
And listen to the people doing the work. Many have been identifying these problems for years.
Change is about human behaviour. If you want employees to embrace it, put leaders they already trust in charge of making it happen.
Reconsider who you're trusting and rewarding
One of the biggest criticisms of the previous CIO was the perception that loyalty mattered more than independent judgement and that challenging leadership carried personal risk.
Your appointment was supposed to change that.
Yet employees have seen a highly respected, trusted, and effective director leave after demonstrating the courage to challenge senior leadership and stand up for what they believed was right for the company. Not only did you fail to stop it, you've told us you enabled it.
Whatever the circumstances of that departure, its effect was chilling.
Meanwhile, leaders facing longstanding concerns about their performance, people leadership, and ability to deliver meaningful improvements remain in senior positions. Some have even been promoted.
The message employees take from this is troubling: challenging leadership may cost you your career, while failing to deliver results carries little consequence if you retain the confidence of those above you.
Whether or not that's the message you intend, it's the one your leadership decisions risk reinforcing.
Are you rewarding the people who make TIS better, or those who are best at managing their relationship with you?
When employees believe speaking up carries greater risk than underperforming, they stop telling leadership what it needs to hear.
You need to challenge your executives, confront poor leadership, and reward integrity, competence, and results rather than loyalty or personal relationships.
Accountability requires capability
There's another lesson from the previous leadership regime that appears to have been missed.
The former CTO wasn't necessarily the underlying problem. The bigger failure was assigning that position an unrealistic breadth of authority without adequate checks and balances or consideration of the capabilities required.
That was a leadership decision.
And we risk repeating it.
The new structure assigns executives responsibility for broad and sometimes very different technology disciplines. But have we adequately assessed whether they possess the experience and judgement to lead them?
We wouldn't assume a civil engineer was qualified to lead pipeline integrity simply because they held an engineering degree. We'd expect relevant expertise.
Why should technology be different?
Cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, software development, enterprise architecture, operations, AI, and technology strategy are distinct disciplines. Experience in one doesn't automatically qualify someone to lead another.
Technology expertise deserves the same respect for specialization that we give engineering.
Executives don't need to be experts in everything they oversee. But they must recognize their limitations, understand the expertise required, and empower capable people to exercise genuine authority.
Otherwise, we're setting leaders up to fail and then expecting to hold them accountable for responsibilities they may never have been equipped to fulfill.
As CIO, you're accountable not just for your executives' performance, but for whether you've put the right people in the right roles with the support and authority to succeed.
Stop leaving employees to reconcile contradictory expectations
Your direction appears to give the business greater authority over technology decisions while TIS retains responsibility for architecture, cybersecurity, standards, and risk.
That ambiguity is unfair to employees and dangerous for the company.
People are expected to follow established governance requirements while being criticized for slowing down the business when they do exactly that.
If the policies are wrong, change them. If accountability belongs elsewhere, move it. But don't expect employees to read your mind.
If you want to change the rules, change them in writing. Communicate the new expectations, align authority with accountability, and stop treating employees who follow existing policies as obstacles to business enablement.
The longstanding ambiguity between the BSS/DSS teams and TIS is another example.
You knew about these problems from your years in the business. Yet after a year as CIO, the boundaries, decision rights, and accountabilities remain unclear. Have we moved the needle even a little? It doesn't seem so.
These aren't technical problems requiring years of study. They're leadership decisions that should have been addressed long ago.
Lead the organization. Leave the technology to the experts.
You weren't appointed CIO because you had the deepest technology expertise.
Your value proposition was your business knowledge, relationships, leadership experience, and ability to improve collaboration and organizational culture.
Those are valuable strengths. But we need to see them put to work.
We already have talented professionals who have spent their careers mastering technology, delivery, governance, and risk management.
What we lack is consistent executive leadership that trusts their expertise, removes organizational barriers, resolves conflicts, and supports sound professional judgement.
We don't need you to become the smartest technologist in the room. We need you to create an organization where the smartest technologists can do their best work.
The previous CIO brought technical discipline but struggled with culture and collaboration. Your opportunity was to retain that discipline while fixing the leadership problems that held us back.
Instead, we risk weakening governance without materially improving trust, accountability, or organizational effectiveness.
That's not the change people were expecting.
It's time to raise the standard
Nobody expects you to resolve years of dysfunction overnight. But after a year in the role, we should have a credible plan, dedicated leadership, clear accountabilities, and evidence of progress.
Instead, we have another reorganization that appears to reward the EMT, and another promise that the real work is about to begin.
We need you to establish the Transformation Council or something similar, empower trusted leaders, resolve longstanding accountability problems, and hold your executive leadership team responsible for supporting meaningful change.
We need you to reconsider whose advice you rely on, whose performance you reward, and whether employees can challenge leadership without fearing the consequences.
And we need you to hold yourself and your executive team to the same standards of competence, integrity, accountability, and professional judgement that you expect from everyone else.
There are exceptional people throughout TIS who know how to deliver. They've spent years working around organizational barriers that leadership has failed to remove.
They don't need another announcement about change. They need leadership that finally delivers it.
You have the experience, authority, resources, and relationships to be that leader. But it requires focusing on the problems that only you can resolve.
Stop trying to prove you can lead the technology conversation. Start proving you can lead the technology organization.
We've been ready for change for years.
Now it's time for you to deliver it.
We in TIS deserve better. Enbridge needs better.