InformationWeek

December 22, 1997

Chief Of The Year Honorable Mentions

Man of Mettle: Bill Howard, Inland Steel

ith an annual salary of $433,000, Bill Howard is one of Inland Steel Co.'s highest-paid executives. But so far, the 63-year-old CIO has earned every penny.

In 1990, Howard left construction-management company Bechtel Inc. to join Inland in Chicago. His mission: to replace Inland's complex net- work of applications with an integrated system that could connect all areas of the business. It took Inland a long time to answer customer inquiries, and the company couldn't track products from the time they were manufactured to when they reached the customer. The systems were "world-class in the 1970s," Howard says, "but they hadn't been upgraded in over a decade."

So Howard spent the first few years in his new job just trying to assess the state of the systems and identify the needs of the business. In 1993 he was ready, and Inland started planning its Order Fulfillment System, a massive development project with 7 million lines of code, 27 applications, and a budget of $37 million. "The real goal was to achieve a breakthrough in customer service," Howard says.

That's a company goal he has met. By linking separate business units on a single integrated system, Inland has slashed its order-entry cycle time from 50 hours to a matter of minutes. Inland also reduced the number of items in the manufacturing cycle by improving its view of the status of orders. "The old systems operated in silos, so we had to have many manual handoffs between departments," Howard explains. "Now everything is online. We have a workflow engine so everyone knows when to pull up an order from the system."

Howard says he still needs to do year 2000 conversion work on the legacy systems that were not replaced; they represent about 30% of all systems that were in place when he started. Also, Inland plans to use the Internet to share information and do a better job of collaborating with customers and suppliers.

Howard credits his success to first identifying the business issues within Inland, then building the technology that meets those requirements. He explains: "Unless technology people are working on things that are important to the business, they're making a big mistake."

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