InformationWeek

September 1, 1997

Transferable Tech Skills

Insurer 's CIO makes smooth transition from oil industry

rincipal Financial Group recently ended its long search for a CIO by selecting Carl Williams, an industry veteran who was previously VP of IT at Amoco Corp., and who has held technology positions at other top companies, including Xerox Corp.

Williams, who assumed his new duties in August, maintains that the transition to insurance after almost four years in the oil industry is simply a matter of matching the right technologies to the goals of the business. "I've learned I can transfer learning from industry to industry as long as I understand the business process and leverage technology," he says. "I look at the specific part of the business, what are the issues, where management is trying to move the organization, and [determine] h ow to support it."

At Principal, Williams has inherited an IS staff of 1,700 people that serves 17,000 users-on an annual IS budget of $256 million. Williams says he expects to hire about 120 more IS employees this year as Principal proceeds with its global expansion plans.

Williams began his IS career at Xerox in Rochester, N.Y., in 1968, as a programmer and analyst. He moved to American Can Co. in Greenwich, Conn., in 1977, and in 1982 joinedad agency DDB Needham Worldwide in New York, where he was senior VP and director of MIS.

Williams served as VP of IS and technology at Macmillan Publishing Co. in New York from 1991 to 1993, overseeing a warehouse automation project that used scanning technology to help the company place returned books back on the market within days; the previous system required as many as 10 weeks to get books back in stock. He also equipped Macmillan's regional marketing managers with notebook computers so they could access LANs that stored sales, inventory, and marketing information. In 1993, Williams joined Amoco in Chicago, where he was charged with centralizing the company's IS operation.

Williams says working in different industries has afforded him a variety of business perspectives-experience he says has been valuable, given the abbreviated life span of most technologies. "The most important thing," he says, "is to focus on the business and business process. You can't focus on technology because it's constantly changing."

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