Cios at Work

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Contents About the Author .............................................................................................................vii Acknowledgments............................................................................................................viii Introduction........................................................................................................................... x Chapter 1: Benjamin Fried, CIO, Google, Inc. ............................................................ 1 Chapter 2: Tony Scott, CIO, Microsoft .......................................................................33 Chapter 3: Monte Ford, Senior Vice President and CIO, American Airlines, Inc./ AMR Corporation...............................................................................................47 Chapter 4: Mittu Sridhara, CIO, Ladbrokes plc ........................................................71 Chapter 5: Steve Rubinow, Executive Vice President and CIO, NYSE Euronext........87 Chapter 6: Lewis Temares, CIO Emeritus, University of Miami..............................113 Chapter 7: Mark Mooney, Senior Vice President and CIO, McGraw-Hill Education..133 Chapter 8: Dan Wakeman, Vice President and CIO, Educational Testing Services ..151 Chapter 9: Lynne Ellyn, Senior Vice President and CIO, DTE Energy ........................173 Chapter 10: Becky Blalock, Senior Vice President and CIO, Southern Company, Atlanta.............................................................................................................191 Chapter 11: Ken Bohlen, Vice President and CIO, Arizona Public Service Company (APS)................................................................................................211 Chapter 12: Roger Gurnani, Executive Vice President and CIO, Verizon ...................231 Chapter 13: Ashish Gupta, Managing Director of Service Design, British Telecom (BT) ........................................................................................253 Chapter 14: Joan Miller, Director of ICT, the UK Parliament.......................................277 Chapter 15: Vivek Kundra, First CIO of the United States of America ......................299 Chapter 16: Paul Strassmann, Former CIO for Kraft Foods Inc., Xerox Corp., U.S. Department of Defense, and NASA..........................................................309 Index ........................................................................................................................343 v Introduction For the past two generations of human civilization, we have been told that we live in an “Information Age.” And for at least one generation, we have been told that our business organizations, our government agencies, and our day-to-day social lives depend more and more critically on computer technology. We no longer express any surprise about how rapidly technology is changing and evolving because it’s something we all experience: every one of us has his or her own “war story” about how primitive things were—even a short five years ago. Nowhere is this more evident than in the office of the Chief Informa- tion Officer of today’s organizations. Ironically, that title did not even exist when I finished college and entered the workforce back in the Paleolithic Age of the 1960s. But those were the days when companies thought they were in the “widget” business—whether the widgets were automobiles or toasters or some other tangible product. Today, even the most Luddite executives realize that information technology (IT) is what connects their organizations and its products/services to the marketplace and the customers and their assortment of laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Equally important, IT is the “electricity” (or, as U.S. federal government CIO Vivek Kundra puts it, the “digital oil”) that keeps their “factory” running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Consequently, CIOs are becoming an increasingly critical executive in both private-sector and public-sector organizations. As I confirmed in the interviews presented in this book, they almost all have a title of “Vice Presi- dent” or better; many of them report directly to the CEO or COO of the organization; and some are members of the board of directors of their organization. At the same time, they are often difficult to identify and sometimes extremely difficult to track down and contact. Of course, it’s not so easy to pick up the phone and make a direct call to the CEO of a large organization, either; but I was surprised to see how many companies had no public information about the identity, or even the existence, of their Chief Information Officer. x Indeed, I was surprised by how many CIOs were uninterested in talking to me about their opinions of how IT was being used to make their organizations more productive, more competitive, more efficient. After all, “information” is the middle initial of their abbreviated title; and, as one CIO put it, a more appropriate title might even be “Chief Communication Officer.” After several such unsuccessful efforts to contact CIOs within various Wall Street banks and financial services organizations, it finally dawned on me: in some of these organizations, strategic use of IT really is considered a competitive advantage. If these firms really do believe that to be the case, why on earth would they want to share that competitive advantage with any- one else? Why would they want to discuss it? Why would they even want to acknowledge its existence? It would almost be like the CIA or the National Security Agency opening all their secret files for public review and discussion. At the same time, the secretive “closed” approach towards IT that these organizations exhibit reminds me of “closed” countries now experi- encing turmoil on the world scene where attempts to shut down the Inter- net essentially shut down the country’s economy. Wall Street firms are not the CIA, and in the long run, I believe their attempts to seal themselves off from the increasingly interconnected, Internet-enabled world will prove to be a failed strategy. Meanwhile, some organizations are clearly proud of what they’ve done, and what they plan to do in the future, with information technology. They’re not going to share their “secret sauce” proprietary algorithms (for example, Google didn’t offer to share its page-ranking algorithm with me any more than Coca-Cola would have shared the detailed recipe for its soft drink) and they’re not going to deposit all of their software in an open-source code repository. But they realize that their employees—who often number in the tens of thousands, sometimes even the hundreds of thousands—represent a society of their own, and that it’s a positive thing to encourage their employees to interact with customers, suppliers, vendors, and business partners in the outside world. Equally important, most of the companies I spoke with have finally ac- cepted the wisdom of The Clue Train Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual [Perseus Publishing, 2001], which comprises 95 theses describing what the authors (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Wein- berger) felt was the new “reality” of the networked marketplace. A decade ago it sounded quite radical to suggest that “Markets do not want to talk to xi flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall,” (thesis number 62), or that “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing at them,” (thesis number 2). But today, more and more companies realize that the best way to confront these theses (which have turned out to be realities, not abstract theories) is to be honest and open, and to be pervasively and intimately involved in the activities of their markets and their customers. As Messrs. Levine et al prophesied, this cannot be done by having “flacks and hucksters” talk at the marketplace, but by having everyone, from the clerk to the executive, talk with the marketplace—via Twitter, Facebook, smartphone, blogs, wikis, and whatever new forms of interaction may come along in the next few years. Clearly, all of this involves the IT department within an organization, and thus requires the vision, strategy, and leadership of the CIO and his or her team. But it doesn’t tell us what the CIO does on a day-to-day basis. As I learned from my interviews, those duties usually break down into three ma- jor categories, the first of which can be described metaphorically as “keep- ing the lights on.” I must confess that I didn’t give this area much thought when I began the CIOs at Work project because I started my own IT career in the 1960s, when most organizations operated fairly straightforward mainframe computers in locked, air-conditioned, heavily secured data centers. As we moved into the 1980s and 1990s, of course, companies began acquiring thousands of desktop and laptop computers, and their solitary mainframe centers evolved into increasingly scaled-down, distributed, interconnected computers in every country, every manufacturing center, every sales office, and every nook and cranny of the organization. But my understanding was more intellectual than visceral. It didn’t really make an impact on me. Today, it’s common to see CIOs overseeing an IT infrastructure that in- cludes tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of computers and servers and

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