The Grill: Microsoft CIO Stuart Scott on the Hot Seat

Microsoft's CIO talks about playing a revolutionary role, being his company's best customer and purging alien technology.

By Eric Lai

September 24, 2007 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Why would a successful CIO leave one company to become co-CIO of another with only one-third the revenue and employees? Answer: The new company is Microsoft. Stuart Scott moved there in mid-2005 from General Electric Co., the $160 billion, 319,000-employee behemoth where he had worked for 17 years, most recently as CIO of GE Industrial Systems. Then, about a year ago, co-CIO Ron Markezich was tapped to run Microsofts budding managed services business. Scott has been Microsofts sole CIO since then.

How is managing IT at Microsoft similar to or different from managing IT at GE? GE grew a lot through acquiring and integrating different businesses. IT had to be at the forefront of that, to be able to connect people and to make the combinations of businesses be successful by enabling people to work together and leverage the talent that crossed from the acquired company to the host company. Thats very similar to what were doing at Microsoft.

As an example, how are you integrating the recently acquired advertising firm aQuantive? Does the company use a lot of Adobe or open-source technology? Will that be dumped in favor of Microsoft technology? Were going to look at what they have and continue to leverage the technology thats in place. But yeah, were certainly going to move them to Microsoft technology. We run our entire business today on Microsoft technology on the infrastructure side, and were going to continue to do that.

Dossier

Name: Stuart Scott

Title: CIO

Organization: Microsoft Corp.

Outside of work ... "My family is my biggest priority. My wife, Melanie, and I have seven children. I also enjoy playing golf and volunteering with my church and youth groups."

Read any good books lately? "I keep up on the latest business titles by reading executive summaries at www.summary.com."

First PC?: "The original Compaq 'luggable' with a 7-in. CRT screen."

Smart phone? HTC Dash with Windows Mobile 6

Is there an actual prohibition on non-Microsoft technology, or do you allow exceptions at the departmental level or for esoteric back-end applications? If we have a problem that we need to get technology for, we look at the marketplace. If Microsoft has the best technology, then we certainly choose it. And if they dont, then we take that information back to our product group and we work with them to identify our needs as a customer. In some cases, we decide its just not a large enough market for Microsoft, so Ill go out and buy third-party products.

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