September 18, 2000

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Reiner's Importance Rises With The IT Tide At GE

With the Internet's importance escalating at General Electric Co., so has senior VP and CIO Gary Reiner's clout within the company. As recently as two years ago, "IT was not a discussion topic at high levels. Now it's the predominate discussion topic for management," says Reiner, CIO since 1996. IT--and specifically the Internet--"cuts across every management discussion we have today: about productivity, the way you can change a culture, ways we can change our cost structure," he says. "There's been an amazing transformation in a short amount of time." The 47-year-old Harvard graduate joined GE in 1991 as VP of corporate business development, responsible for new business ideas, acquisitions, and strategic planning.

Though he's worked closely with CEO and chairman Jack Welch "on all sorts of initiatives over the past years," the work today "is unlike any other," Reiner says. Four years ago, the biggest IT-related concern was that the company's core applications--mostly on mainframe computers--were always functioning. "Now everything is mission-critical--E-mail, Web access, server access," says Reiner, who is constantly reminded of that urgency thanks to a siren in his office. "That siren goes off whenever any server is down that would impinge upon somebody's ability to conduct business," he says. "That kind of thing would never have been needed two or three years ago."

In 1998, Reiner led another of Welch's pet projects--the Six Sigma Quality initiative--driving process and program execution across all GE systems. Reiner has also earned the respect of his subordinates. "You can talk with Gary for five or 10 minutes and he'll figure out if an E-business pilot is working, how to scale it, and how you're doing personally," says Camille Farhat, a business manager who reports to Reiner.

But life under Reiner is tough, too. Customers must be able to access information within four seconds or changes are made. GE unit CIOs are measured weekly on the performance of their business. Network performance is measured every 15 minutes and is automatically uploaded to a database so everyone in the company can see how any server or network is performing.

Return to the main story, "Wake-Up Call."

Photo of Reiner by Chriss Wade

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