Nick Costides, 2014 Honoree

- Title
- Vice president, UPS Information Services
- Employer
- UPS
- Location
- Louisville, Ky.
- A recent example of your leadership style:
- I regularly conduct one-on-one meetings with top talent in the organization to facilitate managing our talent pipeline process and providing direct coaching and mentoring to potential future IT leaders.
- Skills you'll hire for this year:
- Mobile, Web development and security.
- How do you evaluate emerging technologies?
- We utilize several techniques. Our primary tool is proof-of-concept projects that allow us to quickly assess viability and fail fast, prior to making major investments.
- To what extent do you embed IT workers in business units?
- We align our IT organization directly with the business units, colocated in the same facilities. This is particularly critical for success in the use of automation technology in our operations, which requires tight planning, coordination and execution between plant engineering, facilities, operations and IT.