InformationWeek

September 28, 1998

What It Takes To Be A CIO

How did today's CIOs achieve their positions? Let us count the ways . . .

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

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eorge Conklin was a psychologist. Marian Lucia was a programmer. Bud Mathaisel designed airplanes. Kathy Brittain White taught business to college students. What do they have in common today? They're all CIOs at major companies. Ask them--and the 10 other CIOs interviewed for this story--how they achieved their top positions, and you'll get a dozen or so different answers. But even though their backgrounds are diverse--other IT executives interviewed started out as CPAs, salespeople, and consultants--they all have a combination of leadership, management, problem-solving, business, and technology skills that helped them land their current jobs. In addition, most weathered a lot of long hours and a few bumpy roads. And in some cases, a little luck went a long way.

"I started my career as an electro-optical physicist at Bremson Data Systems, designing photographic printing products. While working there, I'd talk to the president of the company about how to better compete and other business issues, not design. I soon realized I was more interested in how technology could be applied to business, rather than the actual design of technology."
--Steve Curd, CIO of strategic business systems, United Healthcare Corp.

Many of the CIOs say they honed their skills by spearheading projects in earlier jobs. "I've always been attracted to projects that have little hope or are in bad shape," says Steve Curd, CIO of strategic business systems at United Healthcare Corp. in Minneapolis. "Some of those projects will be doomed to fail, yet others will be turned around. There is always something to learn, whether they ultimately succeed or fail."

In several cases, the CIOs say they volunteered for jobs to get more experience and responsibility--and to get noticed. "As you get higher, there will be eight or nine people going after a job. Maybe two or three will be qualified candidates," says Greg Levinsky, CIO of General Electric Appliances in Louisville, Ky. "The question you have to ask yourself is, 'How do I get beyond just qualified?' Get yourself known. Volunteer for special assignments that go beyond the scope of your job and can help build up your skills, like budgeting and finance. You'll lift yourself up from the pack."

But volunteering for a project, especially a high-profile one, can be a gamble. What if the project fails? CIOs who have had their share of failures say it's OK as long as you learn from the mistakes and avoid making them again. "In my career, there have been application projects and computer centers that didn't work, and technologies that were dead ends," says Bernard "Bud" Mathaisel, executive director and CIO of Ford Motor Co. "I have a long history of learning experiences that were non-fatal."

While Curd agrees it's important to learn from failures, he points out that the lessons aren't always focused on not repeating the same mistake. "Just because something failed the first time doesn't mean it should never be revisited," he says.

In 1986, Curd joined American Airlines as VP of application development for Sabre, where he managed the development of the Easy Sabre airline reservation system for consumers. It was here that he learned a memorable lesson about project failures. His group was working on a project in which Unix servers were to be used instead of conventional mainframes. But after much work, the group reluctantly had to admit that Unix wasn't able to handle the heavy volumes of reservation transactions.

The Unix project was canned. "It was very disappointing," says Curd. But a year later, the group found another use for Unix in the reservation system. "Unix rose like a phoenix out of the ashes," he says. "It proved to me that technologies and solutions are worth taking a second look at, even after they've failed." That's because technologies mature to better meet business application needs, he says.

"When it comes to IT, it's still a man's world. But there's such a dire need for companies to find people with solid technology skills that the opportunities for anyone to advance, regardless of gender, have probably never been better. If you have the initiative and talent, you have a good shot of succeeding today, whether you're a man or a woman."
--Marian Lucia, CIO, Prudential Investments

Marian Lucia, CIO at Prudential Investments in Newark, N.J., says IT managers can rebound from the pain of failures if they have an important trait: trustworthiness. "If you do make a mistake, the business people need to trust you enough to try something else," says Lucia. To earn their trust, she tries to take the "black magic" out of IT by illustrating how a technology solution will improve business operations.

Often business managers are reluctant to adopt a technology they don't quite understand, especially if it requires the reengineering of familiar processes. To gain their trust so they're willing to try the solution, the CIO must be able to communicate how the technology will help. Lucia says the road to the CIO office isn't so much "who you know" as "who trusts you."