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Computerworld - The IT department at Philip Morris USA Inc. is a poster child for aligning IT with a company's business divisions. Just ask Henry P. Long Jr.
Long, vice president of leaf purchasing at the tobacco giant, raves about how IT leaders work side by side with the heads of various departments to develop an IT strategy to support their respective business plans.
Over the past four years, the IT group has also put into place a more disciplined project management methodology that's helping it deliver projects on schedule, on budget and within scope 85% to 87% of the time, according to a benchmarking study conducted by The Hackett Group in September. That's up from a 50% to 60% delivery rate in 2000.
But what impresses Long the most is the fact that IT leaders get together with him and other business executives every quarter to find out how well the IT department is meeting project requirements, delivering on strategic objectives and supporting day-to-day operations. "They're very much aligned with each business function," says Long. "There's a real effort to focus on the client and move the business forward."
Such praise from a 26-year Philip Morris veteran is a testament to CIO Joe Amado and his masterful recrafting of the 560-person IT organization he inherited in 2000. (A combination of attrition and outsourcing has since decreased the staff to 480.)
Prior to Amado's promotion, Richmond, Va.-based Philip Morris' IT department was historically viewed as technically adept but lacking in organizational leadership competence, says Howard Guttman, president of Guttman Development Strategies Inc. in Ledgewood, N.J., who has been working with Amado and his team to drive organizational improvement since 2000.

Philip Morris USA CIO Joe Amado (front), pictured here with members of his IT team. Image Credit: Douglas Woods

"The people who had been at the top had IT competence, but they needed to ratchet up their leadership competence," says Guttman.
Enter Amado, who by 2000 had risen to the top IT post, 13 years after joining the company as a programmer. He found that the section on customer satisfaction with IT in that year's biannual corporate employee survey revealed that improvements were needed in managing projects and aligning IT with the business.
"We had a mantra: 'We're good today, but we want to be great,'" says Amado. That helped set the tone for a multipronged strategy aimed at developing a world-class IT organization, he says.
Leadership
Amado's first goal was to broaden the leadership capabilities of Philip Morris' IT managers. In 2001, Amado