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September 28, 1998

What It Takes To Be A CIO

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While teaching, White was also a consultant to a textile firm, which eventually hired her full-time as a CIO. After that, she became VP of IS for a business unit at AlliedSignal, and later was a corporate officer and CIO at Baxter Healthcare, which spun off Allegiance as a separate company in October 1996.

Gordon Kerr, managing director of Security Capital Group Inc. (the Chicago financial services company reserves the CIO title for its chief investment officer), honed his communications skills as a salesman during the last four years of a 14-year tenure at IBM. Before becoming a salesman, Kerr was a programmer and held other technical positions. "During my years as a salesperson, I learned how the business worked from the other side," he says. "I learned to see a customer's business needs."

"It's kind of funny how I became an IT executive at GE. While I was working at Andersen Consulting, assigned to a systems project with GE's financial services unit, GE Capital, I walked by the door of CIO John McKinley one too many times. We started talking, developed a relationship, and eventually he offered me a job."
--Chris Perretta, CIO, GE Capital's retail and finance services unit

United Healthcare's Curd has learned that the way he communicates has to vary depending on his audience. "You have to be sensitive to people's body language and their expressions, to see if they understand you," he says. "If they don't, then you have to change your approach or your medium." Curd has found that his IT staff, which is comfortable with E-mail, responds well to the one-hour "cyber-chats" he holds every two months to address any issues they want to discuss.

Curd says that when he explains the goals of an IT project to business people, he illustrates how it will improve processes and productivity, and save money. But when he discusses the same project with his IT staff, he emphasizes how important they are to the project, and how it will affect the relationships between, say, the networking and applications departments.

Adult Education
CIOs don't need hands-on skills in every technology area, but they must understand how technology can be applied broadly to solve business problems. "There will always be someone smarter than I am with technology, but I have to be able to see how to make a business better with the technology," says Chris Perretta, CIO at GE Capital's retail and finance services unit, who has a degree in electrical engineering.

United Healthcare's Curd agrees. "It's not necessary to be a technologist to be a CIO," he says, "but it's mandatory to understand how technology can impact the business vision." Still, Curd, who is curious about technology, taught himself Java and used it to build an application for his co-workers to figure out the value of their stock options. Curd, who started his career as an electro-optical physicist, also has an MBA.

Some of the CIOs interviewed who have degrees in computer science, such as Prudential's Lucia, went back to school for MBA degrees. Others who had business or financial backgrounds returned to college to learn more about technology. For example, Nike's Harris, who started his career as an accountant, earned a master's degree in technical IS.

Dennis, Jones, Executive VP of information and logistics services and CIO, FDX Corp.

Still others found on-the-job training was the best teacher. Dennis Jones, CIO and executive VP of information and logistics services at Federal Express parent FDX Corp., is a CPA by training. He learned about technology while managing the financial planning for key FedEx projects. "I invested a tremendous amount of time talking to vendors and individuals within the company's IT organization," he says.

Ford's Mathaisel received an engineering degree at MIT, allowing him to fulfill his childhood dream: building airplanes at Douglas Aircraft. Little did he know his career would really take flight when Douglas Aircraft bought its first IBM 7090. "I invested a lot of time figuring out how to get the computer to run my work better than the calculators," Mathaisel says. "It turned out I enjoyed using the computer to solve a business problem more [than building airplanes]."