Forbes The CIO’s First 100 Days Series: Kim Stevenson

Intel CIO Shakes Up IT’s Culture In First 100 Days

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

09-30-2013

Kim Stevenson has one of the biggest jobs in information technology. As CIO of Intel, she leads a diverse team of technologists within a company that is historically known to be a paragon of technology innovation. When she took her current post nearly two years ago, she had been part of the IT leadership team already. Yet, as a new CIO she needed to develop a new relationship with her peers among the division heads and the broader leadership team. She found that leaders outside of IT were quite happy with IT, but she came to a surprising conclusion: they were not expecting enough of the IT department. As Stevenson notes herein, she realized that if Intel was going to succeed in increasing the pace of innovation, IT needed to be more of a contributor to that innovation. Her first 100 days in her job were critical in setting a new tone and culture within IT; it is a path that is not for the faint of heart, but the accomplishments of her team are evidence enough that it is a path worth emulating.

(To listen to an extended podcast interview with Kim Stevenson, please visit this link. To read the other five articles in the CIO’s First 100 Days series, including interviews with the CIOs of Time Warner, Caterpillar, and Global Partners, please visit this link. To read future contributions in this series with the CIOs of companies like J.Crew, Johnson & Johnson, SpaceX, AmerisourceBergen, and Viacom, please click the “Follow” button above.)

Peter High: Kim, you were promoted to CIO of Intel in January of 2012, having spent two and one half years at the organization previously.  Unlike other CIOs who are hired into the role from outside of their companies, you had some ideas about what was going well, and where there was room for improvement.  How did this impact the development of your plans in the first 100 days at the helm of IT?

Kim Stevenson: Thankfully, it meant that I had a built-in network within the company. I reached out to our business unit leaders to ensure we were aligned with them, to the IT employees to hear first-hand their views of the good, bad, and ugly and to a number of external peers / mentors to calibrate my plans.  All of this up-front input and advice was very helpful in shaping the direction.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• What interesting conclusions did you come up with after those conversations?
• What initiatives did you pursue in light of these insights that you generated?
• How engaged in your plans were your colleagues outside of IT as you continued to make progress against them?
• What metrics did you use to gauge success?
• If you had it to do over, what would you do differently?
• Is there any other advice you would offer to new CIOs who are looking to kick off their tenure successfully, and set themselves for sustainable performance excellence?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

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 To listen to a previous Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Kim, click here.