InformationWeek Chiefs Of The Year: Where Are They Now?
The execs who have earned InformationWeek's Chief of the Year title are a diverse bunch. Here's a look at what 10 top CIOs are doing today.
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When we interviewed Bank of America's Cathy Bessant, this year's InformationWeek Chief of the Year, she briefly turned the tables and asked us a question: What stands out over the years among the CIOs chosen for this recognition? After thinking the question over a bit, InformationWeek editor in chief Rob Preston responded: "For one thing, they do things their own way."
[ Read the related feature story, IT Chief Of The Year: Bank Of America's Cathy Bessant. ]
Look at our honorees over the past 20 years and you'll find no cookie-cutter pattern. There's not a dominant IT strategy -- some Chiefs of the Year were adamantly against IT outsourcing, for example, while some made outsourcing core to their innovation plans. There's also no standard resume. Some Chiefs moved up the IT ranks, some through various business units (even -- gasp! -- marketing).
That same career diversity holds true of Chiefs after they were honored. Some moved on to broader executive roles. Former Schwab CIO Dawn Lepore became a CEO, former Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillett became a COO. Others who remained CIOs, such as GM's Randy Mott and FedEx's Rob Carter, redefined their charters or branched into other roles along the way. Some, such as Gillett and Eli Lilly's Roy Dunbar, went on to work for tech vendors; others, such as former Chase CIO Denis O'Leary, stepped out of daily business operations and became board members and investors.
Lepore, Mott, Carter, Wal-Mart's Linda Dillman, and Procter & Gamble's Filippo Passerini were honored after spending 15 years or more at a single company, showing the value of understanding a company's culture and an industry's dynamics. While an outside change agent, like Gillett was at Starbucks, can sometimes provide the right ingredient, that's the exception.
We asked this year's Chief of the Year -- Bessant, who led a number of Bank Of America business units before getting tapped to head IT and operations -- whether she aspires to become CEO of BoA. No, she replied, saying the 24/7, all-consuming demands of that position aren't for her, even though she's a hard-charger herself.
What follows is a "where-are-they-now?" look at the career paths of past InformationWeek Chiefs of the Year. We've selected Chiefs of the Year since 1986, sometimes with multiple selections in a single year, as we did in 2001 and 2013. Here are just 10 of those leaders.
Denis O'Leary, our 1996 Chief of the Year, stepped out of the corporate fast lane in 2003 at the age of 46, having served in various executive IT, lab incubator, and banking roles during a rich 25-year career at J.P. Morgan Chase and various predecessor companies. After leaving JPMC, O'Leary went into private investing for four years, focusing on early-stage tech companies, and later became a senior adviser at Boston Consulting Group. Today, he's managing partner of Encore Financial Partners, a firm he co-founded in 2009 to acquire and manage US-based banking organizations. O'Leary also serves on the boards of Fiserv (financial industry processing and payments); Crowdstrike (endpoint security, intelligence, and consulting); and Hamilton State Bancorp (a community banking rollup). "I continue to feel we are in the earliest stages of societal transformation via technology," he says, "and the role of CIO is still the second-best job in most companies."
O'Leary also finds time to pursue his love of car racing. He races his Radical SR8 RX (which he calls a "poor man's LMP2") in multiple club and North American Racing Association events each year. All in all, he has competed in 75 races and earned 34 podium finishes to date.
Randy Mott moved on to high-profile CIO jobs at Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and now General Motors since we named him our Chief Of The Year in 1997 for the application development, data mining, supply chain management, and merchandising system work he led at Wal-Mart. Much of Mott's current work at GM is out of the playbook he used at Wal-Mart and elsewhere: centralized IT decision-making and data warehousing; fewer IT projects delivered in less time, each subject to a thorough cost-benefit analysis before it's approved; streamlined and automated IT operations to free up more time and money for innovative work. All of it with a keen focus on delivering business value.
Mott's signature move at GM has been to flip its IT outsourcing model upside down -- from 90% outsourcing to only 10% -- a transition that has the automaker hiring thousands of IT pros in four new development centers nationwide. Mott's rationale? In-house people know the business better than outsiders do and have more skin in the game, and they can help GM move an idea to execution much faster.
Dave Bent's career of more than 30 years, 18 of them as a CIO or senior technology VP, has taken him from automotive to telecom to distribution -- in the UK, Germany, and the US -- with responsibilities that have ranged from supply chain management to digital marketing to software sales. InformationWeek named Bent our Chief of the Year in 1999 for his work as CIO of Visteon, the $19 billion auto parts unit of Ford, where he led a team of 800 business and IT professionals and managed a budget of $400 million. Bent moved on to become CIO of test equipment company Acterna from 1999 to 2003, and then joined United Stationers, the country's largest business products distributor, where he served as CIO from 2003 to 2013 (and in a P&L capacity later on as senior VP of e-business services).
Bent, 54, left the big chill of Chicago for the dry heat of Phoenix a little over a year ago to join Avnet Electronics Marketing, a global operating group of electronics distributor Avnet, where he serves as senior VP of IT.
We recognized Dawn Lepore as our Chief of the Year in 2000, along with co-CEO David Pottruck, as we highlighted the vital CIO-CEO partnership. This selection came at the height of dot-com madness, when executives were under pressure to prove they were hauling in the Web's promised riches. A year later Lepore expanded her role at Schwab, as vice chairman of technology and administration, overseeing the CIO and functions such as HR, legal, payroll, facilities, and corporate communications.
Lepore went on to a CEO role herself, leading Drugstore.com for eight years. Turns out, she was training for higher executive leadership roles all along. In this 2011 interview, she said she would use her position as Schwab's CIO to pump the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Scott McNeely for insights into how they ran their companies. "Because they were trying to sell me," Lapore said, "they had to answer my questions."
Drugstore.com never hit the jackpot; Walgreens acquired it in 2011 for about $409 million. Lepore now is an investor and serves on the boards of TJ Maxx parent TJX, Real Networks, and AOL.
Roy Dunbar was never the classic CIO. When Eli Lilly named him to that position in 1999, he had no formal IT training or experience -- just a pharmacy degree, an MBA, and nine years of standout research, marketing, operations, and product line experience at the company. Born in Jamaica and raised in the UK, he studied comparative religion, meditated daily, and had met the Dalai Lama twice. And he also got things done. One of Dunbar's goals as Eli Lilly CIO was to get the company's business and IT leaders on the same page, one of a number of accomplishments that earned him our Chief of the Year honors in 2003.
After leaving Eli Lilly, Dunbar stayed in tech, joining MasterCard International in 2004 as president of global technology and operations and then Network Solutions in 2008 as chairman and CEO. He now serves on various boards, including Lexmark International, Igate, and Humana.
Linda Dillman has been CIO of multimedia retailer QVC, best known for its home shopping TV channels, since January 2012.
At Wal-Mart, Dillman was RFID's greatest champion, seeing it as a key supply chain innovation. In 2003, Dillman told the company's 100 largest suppliers that they had until January 2005 to have radio-frequency ID systems in place for tracking pallets of goods through Wal-Mart's sprawling retail supply chain. Wal-Mart had been experimenting with RFID, but Dillman's deadline sent the message that the company was serious about applying this emerging technology for everyday use. RFID today is used across many industries for specific tracking tasks, but it hasn't revolutionized the retail supply chain as many -- including InformationWeek commentators -- speculated that it might.
After more than 20 years with Wal-Mart, Dillman left in 2009 for Hewlett-Packard's IT organization, where she worked for her former boss at Wal-Mart, Randy Mott. In addition to her QVC work, Dillman currently is on the board of Cerner, among the largest providers of electronic health records software.
Not all InformationWeek Chiefs of the Year move on to other pastures. Our 2005 honoree, FedEx CIO Rob Carter, is still calling the technology shots at the global package delivery and logistics company he has served for more than 30 years. Carter, 54, is the poster executive for the modern CIO: customer-engaged (he once ran customer service at FedEx), business-savvy (he has run several FedEx units, is on the company's five-person executive committee, and sits on the boards of Saks and First Horizon National), but still highly technical (as evidenced by the massive private cloud migration he recently led at the company).
Carter also holds the distinction of being InformationWeek's only two-time Chief of the Year. In 2001, he was among a group of eight technology executives we honored for the roles they played in leading their companies and staffs through the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11.
When we named Vivek Kundra our Chief of the Year in 2009, it was more for the federal IT vision he had laid out as the nation's first federal CIO than the concrete results he had delivered just nine months into the federal job. Kundra left that position after two and a half years, but much of his initial vision remains alive today. His vision focused on modernizing IT architecture, including a push toward cloud computing that has the feds ahead of many private-sector companies. It included measures to increase the transparency (and accountability) for IT projects and spending. And most of all, it included opening up more of the government's data stores to the public, via websites that let developers use that data in their own mash-up applications.
Kundra, who was Washington D.C.'s CTO before moving to the federal level, left Washington in 2011 for a six-month fellowship at Harvard University. He has spent the past three years at Salesforce.com, as an executive VP helping promote cloud software, particularly among potential customers in emerging market and government sectors.
Procter & Gamble CIO Filippo Passerini is due to retire in June after three decades with the company, as P&G reshuffles its management amid the selloff of as many as 100 of its slower-growing brands. An internal memo described the moves as putting the "right structure in place for the new P&G."
Passerini was a force in reshaping the old P&G. He drove a major outsourcing effort, shifting large swathes of ongoing IT operations to Hewlett-Packard. He was the first to take on the combined roles of CIO and leader of Global Business Services, which includes functions such as HR and facilities management. Most notable was Passerini's drive in recent years to improve collaboration among employees and partners and their broader use of data analytics. His team drove the use of data "cockpits" of easy-to-read charts and other data visualizations, so that teams would spend less time debating "what" is happening and more time figuring out what to do next. Passerini also increased P&G's use of videoconferencing, the pinnacle of which was an executive briefing room that combined data visualizations and videoconferencing on 8-foot-tall screens.
In the new P&G, Passerini's dual role will be split again: Julio Nemeth, senior VP of product supply and global operations, will become president of Global Business Services on Jan. 1, while Linda Clement-Holmes, global information & decision solutions officer, will become CIO.
Stephen Gillett spent the past two years as chief operating officer of Symantec, but the company eliminated the COO position this month as it prepares to split itself into two companies, one focused on information security and one on information management. Gillett remains in a "non-executive capacity for a transitional period," the company says.
It's the second short-term tour for Gillett in two years. He left Starbucks for Best Buy in 2012 to lead e-commerce and digital business, a gig that lasted just nine months as the consumer electronics retailer struggled against all-digital competitors.
Well before the chief digital officer craze, Gillett was pushing a digital agenda at Starbucks. He was just 32 years old when CEO Howard Schultz tapped him as CIO in 2008 as part of Schultz's effort to revitalize growth at the company. Soon after, Gillett pitched the idea of creating a Digital Ventures group, which he also led. The group, pairing IT and marketing experts, spurred innovations such as Starbucks' mobile payment app and free content (such as The Wall Street Journal and an iTunes download-of-the-day) on the company's in-store Wi-Fi networks.
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