by Peter High, published on Forbes
2-8-2016
Chris Perretta has been an IT executive at State Street Bank since 2007, with most of his tenure spent as chief information officer. A few months ago, he advanced beyond that role to become the Global Head of Enterprise Data and Technology at the company. The role was created as an acknowledgement of the sanctity of data, and digital advances that State Street hopes to lead. Perretta has led a significant transformation of the information technology function in order to help realize this vision. First, he standardized and simplified IT. Next, he implemented what he refers to as “industrial agile.” He also re-organized the IT team significantly, and created a greater emphasis on customer experience and innovation. Perretta describes all of the above and more in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 27th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read through past interview with executives from companies like Waste Management, Biogen, Allstate, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and BMO Financial Group, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your responsibilities. Could you talk about the purview of that role?
Chris Perretta: I have a new job titled Global Head of Enterprise Data and Technology. It is an extension of the realization of the importance of the digital world and the creation of digital businesses and enterprises that State Street has recognized. I am excited by that, I think it is the next level of integration of the operational side of things and the technology side of things.
High: I would love to hear more about that – the sanctity of data – and the fact that it is actually called out in the title. I am sure that is meaningful. Can you talk a bit about your growing set of responsibilities?
Perretta: From the data side, it is an important part of what we do. When you look across industries as well, even manufacturing, and you look at what those companies are doing from a data perspective, is it driving revenue. The data component of what we do is so important in providing insights, analytics, and risk management to our enterprise and our customers. There is a need, frankly, to have an enterprise view of yourself as an enterprise, in a more sophisticated way than in the past. Our clients view of what they do with us, and augmenting their data with other data that they could care to look at, and providing that service is a need. The concept of so many more of our products, services, and obligations are data-intensive. There is a recognition that the business has to address the data question, not only in terms of pure technology, but also as a management and governance responsibility. It has to be integrated across what has traditionally been different functional and operational areas. I see my task as putting structure around that task, and to be able to provide visibility, analytics, and insights that has not been the purview, in its entirety, of traditional IT organizations. We are excited about that.
On the technology side, there is so much technology that could be emerging or disruptive that could change the landscape of what financial services do, despite their virtual nature. The designation of technology is a confirmation of the importance to the financial services business, as well as the traditional IT world that I grew up in.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
2-3-2016
Workday, an $800 million leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources has hired Diana McKenzie as the company’s chief information officer (CIO). Diana will have global responsibility for Workday’s information services organization.
“In my experience, nothing is more rewarding than accelerating business growth by evolving the ways an organization can take advantage of new technologies to unlock the potential in people and data,” said Diana McKenzie, chief information officer, Workday. “I’m delighted to join a company that believes technology is the foundation for business growth. Workday continually proves this with best-in-class finance and HR applications that work the way people want to work and deliver the knowledge they need to move the business forward.”
McKenzie will report to Mark Peek, co-president, Workday, who commented, “With the addition of a CIO of Diana’s caliber to the leadership team, we will continue to build on this success. Her passion for developing teams and driving companies forward with technology will help us move through our next phase of growth.”
Prior to joining Workday, Diana was senior vice president and CIO at Amgen, where she spent 12 years applying leading-edge analytics and information technology (IT) to continually drive competitive advantage for the company. Preceding Amgen, Diana served in a variety of IT leadership roles at Eli Lilly and Company.
During her nearly three decades of experience, Diana has been an active leader in various trade, technology, and governmental organizations and in 2015, was recognized as one of the “Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology” by the National Diversity Council. Diana holds a bachelor’s degree in computer information systems from Purdue University.
2-1-2016
Jim Swanson has been the Chief Information Officer of $15 billion Monsanto for nearly two and half years after spending almost all of his career to date at healthcare companies at companies like Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and SmithKline Beecham. A scientist by training, Swanson joined the St. Louis-based provider of agricultural products for farmers because it allowed him to continue to pursue opportunities at the intersection between science, technology, and intellectual property innovation. As such, he has thought about the role of CIO much more strategically than most.
Swanson has led a sweeping digital transformation over the organization focused around five pillars that define the digital opportunity: operational excellence, business productivity, customer centricity, revenue enablement, and disruptive innovation, each of which he describes in great depth in this interview. As such, Swanson’s team is playing a significant role in revolutionizing a company in perhaps the oldest industry of all: agriculture.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read more articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Monsanto. Please take a moment to describe your role.
Jim Swanson: I have responsibility for all the IT systems and data that spans Monsanto. We are in about 67 countries worldwide, and I have responsibility to deliver on the IT capabilities across that global footprint. Monsanto is comprised of two segments with a third one that is emerging. One is our crop protection business – our chemistry that helps growers with herbicides, pesticides, etc. Our second is our seed trade business – corn, canola, soy, vegetables, etc. Our third emerging area is economic services. We provide information to help growers better improve their yield, improve their outputs, reduce their inputs, and do it more sustainably. As the CIO, I have the responsibility to enable those three segments with data, tools, and capabilities for our business.
High: You operate in the world’s largest and oldest industry – agriculture. To the uneducated outsider, it may seem ironic in some ways that there is a real digital revolution that is happening within agriculture. You have just begun to describe some of that, and how it applies across the three segments of the business. Please talk about the move from analog to digital that is happening within Monsanto and the industry, more generally speaking.
Swanson: We are taking an industry that has probably done it the same way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Over the last half decade or so, we are digitizing the farm and digitizing agriculture, which is pretty exciting. You think about the seven and a half billion people on the planet, growing to nine billion in a relatively short period, and growing the amount of food we need, and doing it sustainably is an important mission that Monsanto has. We are going to need every tool that we have to enable that. We need information, science, and technology. What is happening on the farm is a leveraging of data and information insights to provide much better ways to do agriculture than has been done in the past.
We connect combines in the field, so we can collect real-time information on how they are performing on the farm. We use analytics and data to get better insights into the performance of our products, as well as sustainable agricultural practices. We internalize and digitize our internal processes, so we connect more effectively across the “ag” ecosystem. It is rapidly evolving with sensor technology, with data, and with insights that have transformed the way that farming is done. It is having a tremendous impact on yield impact, reduced input, and more sustainable agriculture.
High: How tech-savvy are growers? Do you find that adoption is happening readily? Is it readily apparent as to how important and how valuable the new tools that are now available can be?
Peter High
12-18-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Group Health Cooperative offers care system, care delivery and insurance coverage in order to achieve one goal: affordable, quality health care for all. Founded in 1947, the company now consists of 25 medical centers within Washington and northern Idaho. The company’s focus is on preventive care, combined with medical education, a charitable foundation and a nationally recognized research institute.
Don Lewis is the vice president and CTO at Group Health, and as he discusses with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, technology plays a significant role in ensuring that the company serves its customers while maintaining efficiencies.
CIO Insight: You have focused on turning IT from a cost center to a profit center at Group Health. How have you done so?
Don Lewis: We are working to improve the visibility that other business units have into what is going on within the entire IT environment. The goal is that IT serves as the caretaker for IT systems and applications, and as an advisor and expert collaborator on how technology can help grow the overall business.
While it’s true there are expenses associated with IT, there’s also value. However, that value does not always accrue within IT, which means there isn’t a true revenue side within IT. The value instead is what accrues across the entire business. So we work closely with the other business units to put in place strong business cases that clearly call out where that value accrues. If it’s in the health plan part of our business, the cost may all be within IT, but the value accrues with the health plan, that’s fine because from an overall organization standpoint, that’s what we’re looking for.
We focus on having those conversations with the business leaders and demonstrating the value technology delivers to the entire organization. We know technologies we implement generally have significant business value, but we haven’t always been good at capturing that. Now we have a more formalized process to do just that.
CIO Insight: You have also focused on more tightly aligning IT strategy to business strategy. What methods have you employed to do so?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
1-25-2016
When Jim Fowler was promoted to become the Chief Information Officer of GE, it was a move that he was aware of well in advance. A hallmark of GE’s legendary talent management program is to have leaders identify people who could take their places in advance of the need for that transition. Jamie Miller, who had been CIO for two and a half years prior had identified Fowler – then CIO of GE Capital – as her possible successor. As Miller ascended to the role of President & CEO of GE Transportation, Fowler had been preparing for this move. In turn, in his first six months in his current role, he will be planning who might succeed him, even though he has no plans to leave the role any time soon.
In this interview, Fowler describes how he has organized himself in the early stages of his role. He already has developed audacious goals of driving $1 billion in productivity gains by 2020 while also generating $15 billion in revenue growth from software and technology. At the heart of this is Predix, an analytics platform to help assets run more effectively. GE is using it internally, and has already garnered $5.5 billion in revenue gains by making it available to GE’s customers. All the while, Fowler has developed a well thought out plan to keep GE’s information secure. He talks about all of the above and more in the following interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 32nd article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past interviews with the CIOs of P&G, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab, among many others, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: In our last conversation, a number of months back, you were the Chief Information Officer of GE Capital, a unit that has since been sold off, and you have taken over the role of global CIO for all of General Electric. I wonder if you could reflect on the transition, how you found out about the new role, how you began to prepare to the ascension to the role, and how the news of the role came to you.
Jim Fowler: The role came about as a series of leadership succession movements were planned in the company. Those successions, based on a few retirements, led to the previous group’s CIO, Jamie Miller, taking on the CEO role of our Transportation business. That planning started to happen over the summer as some of the retirements came to be known. I think I found out about it around mid-July. The plan was to have me step in as the group CIO later in the year. I had thirty days’ notice before the formal announcements went out to start to think through what I had to do to prepare for the role and to lay out a plan.
I used that thirty days to spend some time with Jamie, understanding what her thoughts were as I transitioned into the role, what things she felt needed to be continued or changed, and get her feedback on what it had taken her to be successful in the role. I also used the opportunity for myself to reflect on my experiences in the company and where I thought the company was headed relative to digital products, what we were doing related to growing the company in new areas, and how that was going to relate to the priorities for the IT function. So, that let me lay out a ninety day plan. I am coming to the end of that ninety days having worked through a lot of the steps in the plan.
High: Can you describe your purview as CIO of GE?
1-20-2016
Dan Fallon’s journey from CIO to board member to president and COO has been an interesting one. Fallon, who now serves as the president and COO of GFMI Metalcrafters, credits his strong tech background for understanding how many moving parts work together (and very often, don’t). GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) was founded in 1979. An Argentinian father and his sons brought to the U.S. their passion for crafting custom cars. The Metalcrafters division helps engineer and those who create custom vehicles for the auto, aero and rail industries primarily. These can be prototypes to full functioning vehicles, including driverless. The Aerospace division creates glass, carbon fiber and other composite parts for the aerospace, auto and rail industries. Additionally, the Camera Ready Parts division prepares cars for photo shoots and commercials, including logistics management.
After 22 years at Accenture, the CTO role at Navistar and CIO role at Rewards Network, among other IT leadership roles, Dan Fallon was looking for a change that would offer more operational experience. He was convinced to join GFMI Metalcrafters as president and COO in September of 2014. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he highlights the reason for this move.
CIO Insight: How did you become affiliated with it as President and COO?
Dan Fallon: I have known GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) for more than 20 years. My father-in-law, Mike Alexander, had worked with the Gaffoglio family for many years. Mike and his brother, Larry, were the Alexander Brothers; ground-breaking, Detroit custom car guys from the late 1950s and Mike, later in his career, worked with GFMI on select projects. Mike’s son, Mike Jr., wound up working at GFMI. In 2014, Mike asked if I’d consider joining the company to help significantly grow revenue. To run a company while growing it was where I wanted to be next. After 22 years at Accenture, and five years in IT leadership positions at a couple Fortune500 companies, I wanted to get completely immersed in business operations. Running a smaller company seemed to be the ideal—yet humbling—way for me to do so. Wow, have I learned a lot and enjoyed it. And I’m very grateful for my IT background.
CIO Insight: In recent years, you had been CTO at Navistar and CIO at Rewards Network. What did your time as a technology executive do for you in preparing for your current role as COO?
Fallon: Like Finance and HR, IT gets to “see” a very broad swath of the business, yet I believe at an even deeper level. Successful IT leaders have to understand business execution (processes, schedules and results) and where information and automation can change and accelerate execution. OK, we’ve heard that before—and it’s really hard, especially given ever-increasing competitive demands, legacy systems hangovers and the crazy challenges of changing tires on moving cars. So, as an IT guy—both ex-Accenture consultant and Fortune 500 executive—I got to see how all these moving parts work together—and very often, not. It’s like a mosaic in which some elements of the picture are clear and others are really mottled. As a result, I have this deep, innate appreciation for integration. It’s just a sense I have developed—where are the disconnects in data sharing, process performance and automated systems. So now, on yet another side of the table, COO, I can sense these disconnects; yet even more acutely because I am now directly responsible for getting it done. My time in IT helped me hone and deepen that sense which I think as a COO enables me to quickly zero in on those mottled mosaic pieces and more quickly figure out how to unblur them.
1-18-2016
Perhaps nothing signaled the arrival of artificial intelligence quite like January 14, 2011, when IBM Watson defeated two legendary Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. At last, the computers were smarter than us. Since then, Watson has developed into a growth engine for IBM.
For just over two years, Michael Rhodin has led IBM Watson, having come to that role after a four year stint as the head of the Software Solutions Group at the company. IBM has already found applications for Watson across seventeen industries in over thirty five countries, but as Rhodin notes in this interview, the company is just getting started.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the third article in a series on leaders in artificial intelligence. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Many people will remember that Watson was developed initially to compete on Jeopardy! versus two of the biggest Jeopardy!champions of all time, and it won a million-dollar prize in the process. Then a bit more than a year ago, IBM made the decision to create a business called the IBM Watson Group, which you now lead. The company invested a billion dollars (quite a bit more than the winnings from Jeopardy!) to get the business off the ground. Was there always a desire to turn Watson into a business line?
Mike Rhodin: If you look at what we were trying to do, this was an IBM Research Grand Challenge going after– from a technology viewpoint– something in the AI world that was known as the “open domain deep Q&A problem”. It was a problem that was originally postulated based on a comment by [John] von Neumann in the late 1940′s. At that point in time, after his architecture became the basis for modern computing (the binary system that all computers today are built on), he made a comment in the late ‘40s that said someday computers will be able to answer any question. For the next sixty years, computer scientists were trying to figure out how to do what he said, which is how to build a system that could answer questions on a broad base of domain knowledge. That was the real impetus for the Watson system coming out of IBM Research.
Along the way, we decided that it was going to be necessary to have a proof point that you could answer questions in an open domain. The Jeopardy!quiz show ended up being a great example of something that had a broad topic base, lots of different types of questions, tricks, use of natural language in interesting ways, and it became a great demonstration of the technology and the breakthroughs that the IBM Research team made. So that was what led up to Jeopardy! in the first place.
After the Jeopardy! match, we were thrilled with the outcome. It was not a foregone conclusion. With any of the probabilistic systems, there is a level of chance in everything, but we knew we had a system that we thought would show well in the game show. We were pleased to be able to come out with a win against two incredibly smart leading champions of the game.
We started a period of what I would consider in-market experimentation for the two years after the Jeopardy! match. We started working with a handful of companies that had approached us that wanted to start to experiment with the technology–not to play Jeopardy!, but to use the underlying technology to start to solve problems. The preponderance of them were in the healthcare field. Industry luminaries like Memorial Sloan-Kettering or MD Anderson in cancer, or in general medicine, the Cleveland Clinic. They all started partnering with us to explore how we could take what was inside the Jeopardy! system and morph it into things that could be used in the healthcare profession. We did that for a couple years, and that gave us the confidence that led to the announcement in 2014 of the commercialization project and Watson Group.
When you think about what a doctor does every day, they gather evidence about a patient, they use that evidence to build a level of confidence in a set of hypotheses that could lead to a diagnosis, and then they make a treatment based on that. They were looking for systems that could start to help them with a particular problem that has occurred in the healthcare industry, that is, the amount of information being produced: the amount of new research and publications has outstripped the ability of doctors to keep up. In 2015 alone, we will produce something around seven hundred thousand new reference documents in medicine. I am pretty sure most doctors do not have time to read all of them. They are focused on how we could start to use what we demonstrated in the Jeopardy! match in the pursuit of helping them understand all of the information that is being published in their profession, and how to do it in a way that could help them create better outcomes for their patients. That was one of the first clues that the AI world was ready to be woken up– we have been a little bit dormant for decades — and that the systems were ready to start to move into prime time.
That was how we got to the launch last year. It became a pretty big point for us because we had decided that not only could this technology be used in health care, which we still believe is a huge opportunity, but we also recognize that it had applicability across pretty much any industry we could see. The way we thought of it was that any profession within any industry where the amount of information being produced has surpassed the ability of the humans in those professions to consume it. That is a lot of professions these days with the amount of information being produced. That part became pretty clear to us.
The second thing that was a key decision about the launch of the commercial project was the creation of an open ecosystem: we would open up the APIs on platforms so that startups could get access to the technology and start to build out businesses on top of it. When we launched the Watson Group we had our early adopter customers that we had been working with, but we also had a small number of startups that we had exposed to the technology in advance of the launch so that they could be ready to stand up with us and talk about we were doing. Since then, the ecosystem project has taken off. We have hundreds of companies building on the platform, over one hundred now in-market with commercial solutions. Another four hundred or so are under development behind that, and they will be coming out over the next year or so. That part is taking off as well.
1-11-2016
Having had the pleasure of interviewing a vast number of technology executives over the years, there are some who have risen above the rest. These include the likes of John Hinshaw, the Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Andi Karaboutis, the Executive Vice President of Technology and Business Solutions at Biogen, Linda Clement-Holmes, the board-level CIO of P&G, Ben Fried, the CIO of Google, Stephanie von Friedeburg, the board-level CIO of the World Bank Group, Roger Gurnani, the Chief Information and Technology Architect of Verizon, among many others. See each of these executives speak on stage at the second annual Forbes CIO Summit at the Ritz Carlton at Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. Request an invitation through this link.
Like last year, I have invited my chief information officer contacts, and Forbes has brought members of the various categories that they know so well: billionaires, CEOs, like Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Midas List venture capitalists like Lars Dalgaard, founder and CEO of SuccessFactors and now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, 30-under-30 award winners, and the like. The conversation is to business-first technology executives who are looking for an edge.
This year, we will not only showcase the best executives, but we will also award the first ever CIO Growth Champion Award (in partnership with Metis Strategy). It will be bestowed upon CIOs who are leading innovative efforts that have led to demonstrable top-line growth. If you are the CIO of a company that is in excess of $1 billion in revenue per year, you qualify. Submit an application on the CIO Summit website here. Winners will be recognized at the CIO Summit, join in an onstage conversation with me, and have the opportunity to be featured in my Technovation column on Forbes.com.
Those who attended the first annual Forbes CIO Summit saw the likes of Fred Smith and Rob Carter (Founder/CEO and CIO of FedEx respectively), Jim Goodnight (CEO of the SAS Institute), Frank Blake and Matt Carey (Then CEO and CIO of Home Depot), among many others. Attendees said, “Fantastic meeting so many amazing and talented people.” “Time well spent… High impact discussions sun up to sun down.” ”Great topics, attendees, and conversation!” “… a great meaty event.” We hope to see you at Half Moon Bay.
Seven months ago, Trevor Schulze joined $16 billion Micron Technology, a global provider of semiconductor devices, as the company’s first ever chief information officer. After spending time as a technology leader at other technology-centric companies like Broadcom, AMD, and Cisco, Schulze found an opportunity that it seemed he had been preparing for throughout his career. He had been an IT executive who had worked well in companies where even members of the Finance or HR teams had technology backgrounds, and was able to make the case for the value that IT could create on behalf of the enterprise.
Prior to starting his job, he delved deeply into all strategic collateral he could, and got to know more about the company and its culture. Once on the job, he spent time with his new colleagues across the enterprise. Since then, he has changed the organization structure such that IT is closer to the other business functions, and has developed a dedicated business intelligence and data team, as he believe these are areas of substantial opportunity for IT and for Micron Technology more generally. He also notes security as an area of increased investment, as he hopes to develop true thought leadership on his team in this critical area.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 31st interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past articles with the CIOs of Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergn, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Please begin with a description of Micron Technology’s business.
Trevor Schulze: Micron has been around for more than 35 years. It is a global leader in advanced semi-conductor systems. As a company, we design and manufacture an incredibly broad portfolio of high-performance memory technologies. These include DRAM, Flash Memory, SSDs (Solid State Drives), and emerging technologies like 3D Xpoint, which we announced recently. In a short period of time, I have been exposed to this internal innovation as a company. I am blown away by how strategic it is. In the world’s innovation engines – compute, storage, networking, mobile, and embedded – if it has a computer in it, it most likely has Micron memory associated to it.
High: I was also curious to find that you are the first CIO of the organization, despite its long history. Why did the organization feel the time was right, and why did it wait so long, in your estimation?
Schulze: We went through the interview process we were discussing what the first CIO would be responsible for. The company is evolving from an operations perspective. If you step back and look across all industries, there is a core infrastructure renaissance underway. The demand for innovations in memory solutions is unprecedented. Micron’s business model is pivoting. It has done from a demand fulfillment model, where we would make parts, put them on the market, and people would buy them by the pound.
We are evolving to this “demand-creation” model. What this means is that we have an expanded set of customers that we have never had before. There are more diversified end-markets, and new operational scale and speed demands. The industry has a voracious appetite for memory solutions. As the first CIO, they recognized that there needed to be somebody with industry experience to support this business transformation that we have underway. They needed someone to sit at the metaphorical table and help drive the new and changing processes. There are new demands for data and insights. There is a new speed of delivery required. Information technology inside of Micron is poised to grow significantly in importance and opportunity. That is where they felt the opportunity was to bring in a CIO and drive this opportunity forward.
1-5-2016
Eric Sigurdson co-leads the Information Officers practice at Russell Reynolds Associates. In his nearly 20 years as a recruiter, he has diagnosed what sets successful IT leaders apart from those who do not succeed. in this interview, he notes that IT leaders must first understand the culture of the organization before attempting to transform the IT function. He also speaks about the rising trend of CIOs coming from other functional areas, the increased appreciation of IT from the rest of the company and the board, among several other topics.
(This is the 30th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past interviews with CIOs from Intel, J. Crew, Johnson & Johnson, Ecolab, and Microsoft, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Eric Sigurdson, let us begin with what separates successful CIOs from unsuccessful ones, especially in the first 100 days. What are some of the characteristics that set apart the stars from the also-rans?
Eric Sigurdson: I think human nature says that they want to invest time in listening, asking questions, evaluating the team, not jumping to any quick conclusions, but be viewed as someone who is open to ideas and trying to learn the culture of the organization. Of the CIOs I know, two years in as they reflect back on the first 100 days, almost unanimously they wish they had moved faster. So there must be a balance between those two reflecting motivations: taking your time, get behind them, do not feel like you have to move too quickly, and, by same token, do not let the grass grow under your feet. You have to move fast enough because you were brought in typically as a change agent. Frankly, if a CIO is placed by an executive search firm, there is a mandate for change almost always.
High: Out of curiosity, maybe these percentages are not readily available, off the top of your head, how often when they have gone to search is it succeeding a successful CIO—say someone who is retiring or has been promoted – versus a scenario where a transformation of one sort or another is necessary?
Sigurdson: I would say of the work that we do, 75 or 80 percent of the time it is the latter. The 20 to 25 percent where it is continuation is that stage where someone is stepping into a broader role trying to bring in an individual to take over responsibility for IT. Even if it is a successful, retiring CIO, without exception, the client will always say, “They were successful in the period we needed them. We now need somebody different.” Rarely have I heard a client say, “We want someone just like them.” Even when they were happy with person vacating the CIO role, they always want someone different.
High: As somebody who thinks a lot about CIOs and CTOs, but also delves a degree beneath to the reports, I am wondering what kinds of roles are you seeing as increasing in frequency of demand at the degree under the CIO? A CIO comes in what tend to be the kinds of positions that are growing or increasing in need as you do some of the searches that are a degree removed from the CIO?
