How I Landed My New CIO Job: Paul Chapman recounts his job search that led to his CIO position at Box, an enterprise content management platform.

Were you actively looking for a CIO position when you heard about the opportunity at Box?

I have noticed that most of the time, good job opportunities come around when you are not looking. I had been contacted by Box six months prior to when I first interviewed. However, at that time I was helping HP focus on its future state IT architecture, and I had positioned Box in a category that was more tactical than strategic. My view of Box was rather narrow, so I did not pursue it at that time.

Then, as I was working through the future state architecture for HP, I realized more and more the power of the Box platform, and that they were the only company filling the gap with a born-in-the-cloud content management platform. So, when they contacted me a second time, I had a very different perspective and I agreed to an exploratory conversation.

What piqued your interest in the CIO opportunity at Box?

I was excited about the opportunity to join a company that was born in the cloud, had grown up digital, and did not have much in the way of technical debt. I saw that I would be able to focus more time on adding differentiating value to the organization rather than keeping the lights on and running a legacy environment. 

What about your professional background was attractive to Box?

One thing was having a track record of helping a company go through hyper-growth in a short period of time, and that is was at a software technology company, in this case VMWare.

The second piece was that in addition to a CIO, Box was also looking for someone who could be a representative for the company externally in the broader CIO community. This is an important part of the CIO role in a technology company when your customer is in the same role as yourself.  I think that my investment and participation in the CIO community was noticeable. I was part of a number of CIO advisory boards, CIO and CTO forums, and was a regular speaker at industry events on the subject of cloud computing, modernized IT architectures and accelerating change. 

How did you prepare for your interviews?

I didn’t focus too much on my background or experience. That is what it is. My preparation was more about understanding the market, where Box fits into the future IT landscape, its market opportunities, who was on the executive team, and whether this would be the right fit.

I did think quite a bit about the questions I wanted to ask. Previously at Box, IT was broken up into pockets, and this was the first time all IT activities would be centralizing under the CIO role, so I wanted to make sure there was real backing for that. I also wanted to understand IT’s responsibilities in detail and the importance of IT in the company’s operating structure.

What became the focus of discussion during interviews?

There were three things we talked about a lot. Culture, culture and culture. There is a strong culture here at Box, a new style of employee. We have a heavy millennial base of employees and a new style of workplace that is very open, social and collaborative. Understandably, there were a lot of questions about how I manage people, and around my comfort level switching from a very large enterprise with 300,000 employees to one with 1,400.

They wanted to make sure they were finding the right leader so they wouldn’t risk disrupting the existing chemistry of the organization.

The rest of the discussion was about the external facing part of the role. As noted earlier, when you are CIO of a technology company that sells technology products and services to other CIOs, you have a dual set of responsibilities. Besides running and scaling your own IT like most CIOs, there are considerable responsibilities for working with the CIO community, mastering your company’s platform and product roadmap, and being a sales and marketing enabler. You are the first and best referenceable customer. Other CIOs are interested in how you use your own product and what your born-in-the-Cloud IT landscape looks like.

How much of your time is dedicated to these external responsibilities?

This can vary. I typically manage the balance based on an evaluated priority. It could be a focus on key operational cycles, e.g. planning, budgeting, direction setting, strategy etc., and at the same time weighing the importance of meeting, listening to, and presenting to prospects and customers.

Who do you report to at Box?

The CFO and co-founder, Dylan Smith.

What do you recall about your few weeks on the job?

My initial focus was to think about how we would organize ourselves in IT. What is our purpose, our mission? And how would we structure ourselves to deliver on that mission? We didn’t have that in place because we were forming a central IT organization for the first time. So we defined our skeletal structure, then looked for the gaps. I inherited a really good team and supplemented with some additional strong hires.

Nothing was fundamentally broken. We all inherit organizations and IT environments in various states, but I hadn’t inherited an organization or IT environment that was on fire.

What else have you been working on over the past 13 months?

I have been focused on our path to becoming a $1 billion business, what the roadmaps look like to get us there, and making sure that we invest in strategic platforms and capabilities in support of transforming business processes for the path to $1 billion.

We had invested in best of breed modern cloud platforms but we weren’t leveraging them to their full extent. We were nibbling away at it, but without the benefit of a clear roadmap or a clear line of sight to the company’s most strategic imperatives.

We are raising the awareness and attention on changing the business investments not only on a functional basis, but also looking to how we scale across the whole value chain. One of the advantages we have in IT is that we get to look at entire value chains. We have an elevated, end-to-end view and we need to use this to build scalable business processes for the enterprise.

Part of our IT operating model is to engage with all the departments, like sales, finance, customer service and marketing so that we can see all of the demand that comes in across the company. The partnership model for IT is extremely important. IT is stronger and adds more value as a partner and enabler in today’s new style of IT. It is no longer about having deep technical knowledge and capabilities. It is about enabling the business to operate faster and more efficiently, often through leveraging the external ecosystem to accelerate time to value and to focus in on where you can strategically differentiate.

We also have to become more of a data driven enterprise. As our business grows and as we become more global, things become more complex, we need an Information management strategy and data-driven architecture for “real time” analytics, business insights and decisions.

I have been putting in place a program we call “Box on Box.” This is where the IT organization is bringing an enterprise POV to product teams from first-hand usage. Box is “customer zero” and the first and best referenceable customer to showcase “Box on Box.”

Lastly, I am a big believer in investing in workforce productivity. So, we have been focusing on taking the work out of work and reducing workplace friction. We have been asking questions like, “What is it like to work at Box, to use different devices in a mobile first world, to check in and out of conference rooms, to move around our HQ?” These may seem small but they have already had a big impact.

What sort of personnel changes have you made?

When I arrived, Box already had a lot of excellent, talented people, but it was a young team and many of them hadn’t had years of experience growing and scaling a business and an IT operation. The most important thing I did was bring in some people with deeper experience at scale, especially with sales operations and global finance, and blend them with the strong technical people that were already here.

What has it been like to transition from HP and 300,000 co-workers to Box and 1,400?

It has been a very refreshing transition because, at such a young company born in the digital age, there wasn’t that entrenched inertia you see in so many companies, including good ones. There were no legacy operating models, technology infrastructure, or entrenched business processes. There is a greater thirst for change at an accelerated pace.

At the same time, there are a lot of benefits to maturity. Just because you are growing up digital doesn’t necessarily mean you can jump from immature to mature. You don’t get to skip the teenage years. There is a maturity curve at every company, even the ones born in the digital age and employing a millennial workforce. I’ve had to calibrate how quickly we can mature certain aspects of our business capabilities and our IT processes.

What advice do you have for CIOs considering a new role, or launching a job search?

If you were to place your resume in a drawer today and take in out a year from now, will it have positively changed in any way? To increase your personal market cap and your ability to compete for future opportunities you need to be positively changing up your resume year-over-year. In order to do so, you need to be doing meaningful work for a meaningful company, and if either of these is not being met then it is time think about doing something else. At the same time, I would never advise anyone to run away from something. Running away is easy. You should always be running towards something – towards a better, more meaningful job or organization.

No one is going to manage your career for you. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, "Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.” You need to have patience and be ready when the gates open.

About Paul Chapman

Paul-Chapman-CIO-BoxSince July of 2015, Paul Chapman has served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Box, which helps businesses securely access and manage their critical information in the cloud. Prior to Box, Paul was the CIO of HP Software for Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), where he led the IT organization supporting a multi-billion dollar software portfolio, and was responsible for their global information management strategy, analytics platforms, master data management and enterprise data standards. Before joining HP, Paul was VMware's Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Cloud Operations, and Vice President of Enterprise Applications.

CIO-Job-Paul-Chapman-Box 

Roles We Recruit


 

Read our weekly e-newsletter packed with career advice and resources for the strategic technology leader, and information about active searches.

The Heller Report

Add a Comment

Ask These Revealing Leadership Questions When Recruiting Digital Trailblazers

Mar 27, 2024

Mark Sander of Azurity Pharmaceuticals on Leading in Times of Dynamic Growth and Change

Mar 27, 2024