Choosing the Best Side Roads

Computerworld - Jeff Campbell was promoted to CIO at The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. (BNSF) 16 months ago, after masterminding a complete overhaul of the $9 billion transportation company's global procurement and sourcing operation.

Temple University's Tim O'Rourke spent more than a decade as the university's comptroller before his promotion to vice president for computer and information services.

As IT comes to permeate virtually every nook and cranny of large enterprises, top IT executives are moving into their leadership roles from other parts of the business, notably finance and operations. For organizations with annual revenue exceeding $1 billion, company knowledge is the most important CIO selection criterion, according to research conducted jointly in 2003 by Computer Sciences Corp. and Financial Executives International, a professional association.

Even CIOs who rose through the ranks from within IT point to an indisputable need for much deeper business and company knowledge. The reason: "There's no point in automating something you don't understand," says Kim Perdikou, CIO at Juniper Networks Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. "Before you get to any technology solution, you have to fully understand the business process."

Financial acumen and razor-sharp negotiating and contracting skills also are critical, especially as companies opt to buy more and more IT services from outside providers, says Campbell.

"I firmly believe that future IT leaders will be well-respected, well-grounded businesspeople who happen to have a second discipline called technology," he says. "We have to migrate from being doers to leaders of doers."

Acquiring Executive Expertise

So, where and how can IT professionals with executive aspirations acquire the necessary skills and knowledge from their cubicles in IT?

At Fort Worth, Texas-based BNSF, Campbell has launched a formal business-skills training program, and each one of the company's 600 IT professionals will go through it over the next two to three years.

"It includes intensive training in sourcing and sourcing policy, support and contract management, and governance practices," he explains. Negotiation training and "extensive immersion in finances, including understanding the time value of money, net present value and how and why to invest in one project versus another" are all part of the training, Campbell says.

Once trained, the IT workers will be assigned to one of the company's business units for 12 to 18 months. "We think they'll return to us much more effective technologists, and I do believe it's from here that our future IT leaders will come," he says.

Dan Sheehan, CIO at Advo Inc. in Windsor, Conn., is primarily using IT employees to staff a new 35-person "business competency center" at the $1 billion direct-mail company. People who work in the center hold the title of business technologist. "Project management types and systems analysts are the best candidates" from IT to move into the center, which also includes staff from all of the other departments, Sheehan says. The idea, he adds, is to create a single support entity that has an integrated view of the entire business and a clear understanding of how various departments and processes interact. The business technologists who work there certainly have technical knowledge, Sheehan says, "but their first allegiance has to be to the business, not to technology. You can't be a gadget or hardware fanatic."