LEE CONGDON CIO, Red Hat

How long at current company? 10 months

Career in IT: 25 years

Career accomplishment I'm most proud of: Capital One, my previous employer, is a leader in agile development. We set a goal to drive down the time to deliver projects. In two years, we went from one-year delivery to four months.

Most important career influencer: Gregor Bailar, the recently retired CIO at Capital One, has continuously given me career advice and been a sounding board for ideas. He broadened my perspective and sharpened my thinking.

Decision I wish I could do over: Given the chance, I would do everything over. I understand more about my previous roles and how I could improve, based on my current perspective.

What surprised me about Red Hat: The exceptional degree to which individuals in this firm are passionate about our open source mission, about open source as a driver of business technology in this century.

Best advice for future CIOs: Focus on the business and ensure, first and foremost, that you provide solutions that are driving business value and supplying innovation for your business partners.

How I measure IT effectiveness: Have an annual set of objectives that you map out with business partners. Review them every month. I am a technologist by background, but I'm business-centric as well. Balance what can be done technically with what needs to be done for business requirements.

Size of IT team: 200

Top three initiatives:

• We launched an ITIL implementation a couple months ago. We're in the process of deploying it right now. We're working on IT incident management, IT problem management, and IT change management. We will follow them up with configuration management.
• We participate in the Fedora [freely downloaded, rapidly changed version of Red Hat] development process, and we need to make sure we drive new ideas into the product.
• Improve Red Hat growth capabilities and enable the business to deliver on its financial goals. We need to focus on improving the Red Hat customer experience--our online environment, and the issue-tracking process and resolution.

Colleges/degrees: Purdue University, BS in computer science; Northwestern, MBA

Leisure activity: Hiking and travel

Best book read recently: American Prometheus: The Triumph And Tragedy Of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

If I weren't a CIO, I'd be ... a nature photographer