Birgitta Dahlgren has recently completed an assignment as interim CIO for Tyréns, one of Scandinavia’s leading consulting firms in urban development and infrastructure. We have spoken with Birgitta and Johan Dozzi, Group CEO, about their digital transformation and today’s challenges within IT.
When the development of IT gained enormous momentum with the pandemic, Tyréns wanted to drive internal and external digital transformation in its customer offering.
When Tyréns’ CIO left, they took the opportunity to thoroughly analyse how they would organize their digitalization efforts. To calm down the recruitment process, and set the strategy, they chose to engage an interim CIO. Alongside establishing a new organization with a focus on innovation and digitalization in customer operations, Birgitta’s assignment was also to review how the internal digitalization would be developed from the group’s perspective and consolidate all IT aspects in a smart manner while planning for the next steps in IT. During the spring, a cyber security assessment was conducted, and she developed a plan for implementing new processes and ways of working.
“We were not quite sure about the needs and competencies required or how to set up our IT operating model. To create stability, we chose to bring in an interim CIO. When someone leaves the company, things often move quickly, and the role needs to be filled promptly. Permanent recruitment takes too long, and leadership suffers. To avoid losing momentum, an Interim Manager who can start within 1-2 weeks can be brought in. We are very pleased with Birgitta and the use of Interim Management; it has been a very good solution for us and the right decision.”, says Johan Dozzi.
Leadership was of great importance
Birgitta explains that as both the CIO and IT manager had left the company, it was necessary to handle the gap that had arisen. “Strong leadership was required. Despite being a large corporation, they hadn’t fully capitalized on it, and now they needed to find synergies and achieve cost-effectiveness. It is a geographically dispersed group with operations in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Within the Business Unit East, the companies run their own business but also need to be beneficial to Swedish and British operations. Technology and IT must be able to support that. Together with the IT leadership in each country, we developed an IT operating model for how collaboration within the group would function.”
One challenge, as in most large organizations, is dealing with different viewpoints and internal politics. It was necessary to stabilize the teams and work together on how the IT model and work processes should look like in the future. As a line manager, Birgitta was responsible for the daily agenda, but also for ensuring that the team could build sustainable functions with clear responsibilities.
Johan explains that basic IT, such as Work Place, Infrastructure, and Platform had been set up in each country and that they decided to drive efficiency and quality by doing more together and finding synergies. The challenge was that the countries differed in size and competence, and for that reason had different viewpoints on what was needed.
New IT operating model with synergies for the group
In order to have an IT system and models that facilitate collaboration and synergies, it was needed to develop an approach that everyone could support. It was a challenging task to implement this in a large international organization. Birgitta developed a proposal that was approved by the management, and by Christmas 2022, they had established principles and governance.
“The working culture within the IT function has improved significantly, and the ‘how’ – how we should work – is now clear. It was a complex task because the profit and loss (P&L) are separate in each individual country, making it difficult to procure a central IT system. It is important that the IT function is close to the business since we see that the services Tyréns deliver contain more and more digital solutions, but at the same time the basic IT needs to be there in the background, always delivered with high quality. We had also engaged management consultants, but their PowerPoints and guidelines did only answered ‘why and what’ but not the ‘how’, so it was important to clarify, discuss, and address the situation and how we would solve the challenges.”, says Birgitta and Johan adds that IT enables their digitalization and customer offering. They have now hired a permanent CIO who will make all of this happen.
Increasing importance of cybersecurity
Having processes and solutions to manage cyber threats is becoming increasingly important for companies. Analysing the required technical solutions, processes, and approaches is something that all companies will have to do. Tyréns had no major deficiencies, but needed to establish policies, educate the staff, and create order.
“If there is an incident, everyone in the Group must know how to act, and we have communicated our new policies and procedures extensively. Due to the major incidents that have occurred lately, the awareness has increased significantly. Now, it is easier to get resources and funding for cyber security tools.”, Birgitta says.
Life as an Interim Manager
We asked Birgitta about her career choice as an interim. She tells us that she has always been interested in working as an Interim Manager, and after many years at Volvo IT and Evry, she took her first interim assignment at Region Stockholm. The most enjoyable aspect of working as an Interim Manager is to understand what the company truly needs, setting priorities, focusing on them, stabilizing the organization, and preparing for the next phase of development and/or growth.
Despite the complex and challenging nature of interim assignments, Birgitta does not feel stressed. She emphasizes the importance of receiving “nourishment” from her network, various types of competence forums, and seminars to gain new energy and recharge: ” I often have lunch together with people in my network to learn about the latest trends in the market and to discuss issues.”
“When you turn 60, it becomes easier to have personal time, and I often visit Gothenburg where my daughter lives and I still have many friends from my time at Volvo. Since Christmas, we also have a house on the West Coast where we plan to spend a lot of time playing golf and enjoying nature. I am a person who enjoys life.” Birgitta concludes.
Since February 2023, Birgitta is the CIO at Swedavia.
About Tyréns:
Tyréns is one of Scandinavia’s leading consulting firms in urban development and infrastructure. With approximately 3,000 employees, the company operates in Sweden, England, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Bulgaria, with Sweden accounting for about 75% of its revenue.