Sidebar: CIOs Emerge as Chief Process Officers

Computerworld - Studying and streamlining each and every move a company makes en route to the bottom line is becoming a bigger part of the CIO's job description.
Jeff Campbell, CIO at The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad Co., is in the midst of a major non-IT project to re-engineer how the railroad uses its 33,000 miles of track to move freight. The goal, he says, is to improve velocity, increase revenue and reduce costs. Before that, Campbell led the project to re-engineer and reduce the costs involved with BNSF's procurement process.
At Juniper Networks, CIO Kim Perdikou just kicked off a major business-process analysis project focused on the thousands of cross-functional steps involved in the customer, partner and employee life cycles.
At Baxter International, CIO John Moon led the effort to establish a standard process for integrating newly acquired companies into Baxter. The health care company typically acquires three or four companies per year.
"It used to be that each acquisition was a single and unique event," Moon says. "Now we've developed a standard process for due diligence and evaluating [potential] acquisitions." Once a target company is acquired, Baxter also has a documented and repeatable 60-day plan for integrating new employees and sites into its voice mail, e-mail and human resources systems.
"One of IT's core strengths is a real systematic, process orientation," Moon notes, adding that "companies are beginning to see how extensively that can be leveraged to gain efficiencies outside of pure technology."

Kim Perdikou, CIO at Juniper Networks Inc.