InformationWeek

December 22, 1997

Chief Of The Year Honorable Mentions

Java In His Veins: Charles Nettles, McKesson Corp.

hen Charles Nettles wrote his master's thesis on urban planning nearly 20 years ago, he never dreamed it would lead him to distributed objects.

Today, as VP of technology for McKesson Corp., an $18 billion drug distributor in San Francisco, Nettles is a driving force behind the company's deployment of distributed Java apps, and he reports directly to the CIO. He took a circuitous route to IT, starting as an urban planner in Denver. But the title of his master's thesis hinted at the future: "Analysis Software Systems Planning."

In 1977, Nettles took a temporary job as a telephone-service dispatcher at IBM. He ended up staying for 14 years, climbing the corporate ladder and innovating all the way. In 1984, as program administrator for IBM's national service division, Nettles devised a customer service progr am based on concepts first fleshed out in his college thesis. "Today we'd call it a continuous quality improvement program," he says.

His program saved IBM $18 million in its first year and established an IT model that frames Nettles' vision to this day: Seek out, master, and deploy technologies that reduce costs, improve services, and above all firmly embrace customer needs.

More recently, Nettles' approach led McKesson to one of the most advanced all-Java networks in the industry. It links 1,200 remote sales reps to product, customer, and commission data. The extranet app, InfoLink, uses server-side Java to centralize access to McKesson's Oracle7 data stores. The app communicates with remote clients and the company's System/390, Unix, and Windows NT servers, through a distributed object architecture.

InfoLink earns praise within McKesson. "I can visit a customer and provide a service level that sets us far, far apart from the competition," says Marc Weiss, a sales manager in McKesson's South Florida territory.

InfoLink's success led McKesson's directors to allocate a mid-eight-figure budget in October, charging Nettles' team with extending the architecture to company subsidiaries, customers, and vendors worldwide.

But there's a downside-namely, making users more demanding, stressing recruitment and training efforts, and causing competitors to beef-up their service levels through better application of IT. "My job is going to get harder," Nettles says, "even as the systems we build get easier to use and manage."

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