As a CIO at Royal Dutch Shell, Jay Crotts knows something about recruiting IT talent on a global scale. The US$26.3 billion company employs 8,000 IT professionals in 145 countries, including remote areas such as Iceland, Togo and Mauritius, a small country off the East African coast.
Xerox takes information security pretty seriously. It regularly conducts network vulnerability scans, as well as corporate audits of its risk mitigation efforts. A compliance program buoys employee awareness of its security processes -- as well as its disaster recovery, information privacy and Sarbanes-Oxley Act policies -- and an executive board champions adherence to them all. Meanwhile, the security budget at the U.S.-based company is holding steady compared with last year, even as its other IT spending is down.
In 15 years at Case Western Reserve University in the U.S., systems engineer Jim Nauer has been involved in six major beta tests. In each case, Nauer was motivated by the failure of existing technology to meet Case's technology or business needs. For example, in the mid-1990s, the university beta-tested a native version of Novell NetWare that ran on Apple's PowerPC platform. Nauer was excited about the product's potential.
Willy Anderson remembers the day he realized the human impact of the work he does at Allstate Insurance. When he started as an intern at the insurance giant at the age of 19, Anderson was responsible for maintaining the company's claims loss reporting system. As part of that job, he listened in on a call that the claim center received from a woman who had just been in a car accident.
If you asked Kevin Smith three years ago what it's like to have your outsourcer acquired by another company, he might have said, "No problem." Today, however, he's got a different tale to tell. That's because Smith, information systems director at U.S.-based Spyder Active Sports, has had the experience not once, but twice. And while the first transition couldn't have gone more smoothly, the second ended in disarray.
For IT professionals interested in career advancement, a scan through the help wanted ads could pique their interest in the booming business intelligence arena. It's no wonder there are so many new BI positions: With increasing competitive pressures, companies have to make smarter decisions, which BI systems can support. And with the growth in Web-enabled systems, BI is no longer cost-prohibitive.
Randy Carter, CIO at Cabot in Boston, has a daughter and two sons, one of whom was a freshman in college during the dot-com boom, when many parents didn't think twice about urging their school-age kids to get into IT. Carter's son graduated as a computer engineer into the gloomy hiring climate of 2003, made even gloomier by the increasing practice of offshoring, which was taking hold at the time.
Being a project manager today is a lot different from playing that role a few years ago. Just ask Brenda Dunn, a project manager/business analyst at Long & Foster Real Estate in Fairfax, Va. She recently headed up a project to build a critical relocation system for the privately owned realty firm.
Great ideas don't just happen, they need space, context and nurturing.
Anyone who has ever worked on a global IT team has a culture-clash story to tell. For Rick Davidson, CIO at Manpower, it was the time he and a male co-worker were waiting for an elevator in Japan, along with two Japanese female colleagues. When the elevator arrived, the men looked at the women as if to signal for them to enter, while the women -- following their own culturally embedded rules of hierarchy that defer to men, especially male guests -- simply looked back at the men. "The doors opened and closed, and no one got in the elevator," Davidson says. "When we realized what happened, we agreed to a compromise -- they would enter first on the way up, and we would enter first on the way down."
William McQuiston retired last month as CIO at Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, after 41 years in IT. But he still vividly recalls the boss who made his life miserable in the mid-1980s. That difficult period followed his acceptance of a position at a county medical center.
A few years ago, Lincoln Financial Group completed a project that was originally given the green light based on its ability to reduce head count within a particular department. The project, which resulted in customer service improvements and other benefits, was deemed a success -- that is, until Jason Glazier, chief technology officer at the firm, made an important discovery: No one had ever executed the layoffs.
When he first joined The AES, a power company based in Arlington, US, George Coulter traveled the world for four months straight, meeting with business and IT leaders in 15 countries.
For CIOs, setting the agenda on business process outsourcing is vital.
Ten tips to help you get the best performance from your IT vendors. Mary Brandel reports