When Gary Cantrell became chief information officer at Textron in early 2006, the company was almost three-quarters of the way through a six-year transformation of the information technology organization. Over the years, Textron had become an $11 billion global, multi-industry organization by acquiring aircraft companies and industrial firms. Some of the Textron brand companies include Cessna Aircraft, Lycoming Engines, and Bell Helicopter.

By leveraging formal best practices and governance, Cantrell and his team have continued to streamline the IT infrastructure across all of the Textron companies. He says, "We're doing things faster, better, cheaper."

Recently, enterpriseleadership.org spoke with Cantrell about how the IT organization is structured, what initiatives were key to the transformation, and what were some of the lessons learned from this process. Here's what he had to say:

EL: You've taken a kind of matrix approach to your IT organization. Can you describe it? 

GC: We have a federated model with nine divisional CIOs. They focus on delivering application services and support, but are also accountable for the infrastructure. Our shared services model for IT comprises six Centers of Expertise (COEs) including infrastructure, security, enterprise initiatives and strategic planning, collaboration, SAP, and PeopleSoft. Each COE has a leader. For example, the CTO who reports to me oversees the infrastructure COE. The collaboration COE is working on how we handle virtual teaming across all 400 Textron locations.

EL: How does your governance structure work?

GC: We have two ways to manage the governance process. Our information management council comprises the nine CIOs, all of the COE leaders, and me. This group provides our strategic direction, the corporate business unit alignment, and then our integrated planning activities. Below this group, we have started to organize tactical review boards staffed by people who report to the COE leaders. For example, we have an architecture review board.

The Textron executive management committee has five members, including the CEO. Below that, there is the Textron Transformation Leadership Team, which consists of all the business unit presidents. All IT capital issues, such as deploying SAP, would go through the TLT. If something affects the business, I might go to the executive management committee. I don't have to go to either committee for everything that happens in IT. Neither one of these committees works on IT issues independent of my involvement.

EL: Textron has undergone a six-year transformation in process improvements. Can you talk about some of the key IT process improvements?

GC: We call our transformation process "systems modernization." Like a lot of companies, we've acquired several companies over the years, nine in our case. SAP has been a big part of our IT modernization.

We're trying to clean up the portfolio of acquisitions. Six Sigma has helped us to reduce the variation in our environment, and Lean has helped us to move a little faster. That's where Lean fits in. You still have to deliver high quality and value, but you have to find innovative ways to do it.

EL: Can you describe the specific areas of IT modernization where these best practices have helped you improve processes?

GC: Using Lean processes and with the help of an outsourcer, CSC, we restructured nine different infrastructures and architectures where we took out dozens of data centers. We also restructured our email service from 150 servers in 70 locations to 40 servers in six locations. Now we have the redundancy and backup capabilities we need on the network backbone.

We also put in a new manufacturing system across the enterprise. However, some of our business units use specific applications that complement the manufacturing system. We leverage these applications across the enterprise also.

EL: Do you use the IT Infrastructure Library, CobIT, or the Balanced Scorecard?

GC: We've tied use of the Balanced Scorecards in with our Six Sigma gold deployment that we used in the beginning of the IT modernization. We're now working on integrating CobIT into some of our process maturity initiatives with Six Sigma. We've pretty much standardized on a plan for using CobIT for the next few years. We have a little bit more work to do on our tactical action plan.

Some of the business units have become very advanced CobIT users. We used the Lean manufacturing philosophy of Shigeo Shingo for one assessment we went through. In some cases, we've gone from silver to gold; in other areas, we're at the basic level moving to bronze. We're working aggressively on having a standard implementation methodology and assessment methodology for driving our maturity. Over the next 24 months, we will get the horses all lined up and get the enterprise on the same level footing.

EL: What kind of certification levels do you have in place?

GC: Right now we have two Six Sigma black belts for every 100 people on our IT staff and on the CSC staff. The ratio of Six Sigma black belts is higher on the corporate side. This year, we're pushing to have 60 percent of the first two levels of IT professionals green-belt certified in Six Sigma. The goal for 2008 is to have 100 percent of these folks green-belt certified.

EL: You have been quoted in the trade press saying that Textron's IT strategy resembles General Electric's IT strategy. How are they similar?

GC: When I was CIO of Honeywell, I had some first-hand exposure to GE. That company has a core corporate IT function similar to our COEs. GE's IT organization also has a fairly strong presence in their business units similar to us.

On the other hand, GE is larger than us and its business units have more scale that ours. We have a more standardized, rigid infrastructure, which provides us speed and efficiency and a lot of leverage. Also, our architecture review process is more rigorous that GE's. We try to do as much enterprise standardization as we can.

EL: Do you think IT can be run as a business?

GC: We had these conversations at both Honeywell and Bank of America. As far as I'm concerned, IT is a support function, enabling the business units to generate revenue and generate support for their customer. If you're an IT provider such as CSC or IBM, then you can argue about running IT as a business. Internally, IT is a cost center. It might not be a core competency in each business unit, but it's critical to support the work of each business unit. To this end, my charter is very simple -- help give each business unit a competitive edge and to achieve customer satisfaction.

EL: What do you get out of venues such as the CIO Executive Summit?

GC: Venues such as the by-invitation-only CIO Executive Summit give me tremendous network opportunities. That's the most important thing that comes out of it. Second, I get to discuss common challenges or technologies or industry threats. The most common discussion among peers deals with the latest virus threat on the horizon. These venues also expose you to lot of new IT talent or new suppliers. If you select your venues wisely, you can spend several days looking at a lot of new technologies. This process eliminates the need to have vendors parade through your office.

EL: You spoke at the Hackett Group's 17th Annual Best Practices Conference. What did you have to tell attendees?

GC: We've used the Hackett Group to benchmark some of the processes we are doing, as well as to assess how well we are doing with some of our best practices. This year I spoke about Textron's IT transformation and the best practices we deployed. The group of 100 really wanted to know what best practices worked and what best practices didn't work in our environment and why.

EL: So what things didn't work?

GC: We had a strong business case for many of the things we planned to do. Communication seems to be fairly robust. On the other hand, we grossly underestimated employees'

resistance to change. We had to do a lot of front-end work on change management. If I had to do things over again, I would've put more emphasis on this.

EL: What best practices did you find to be ineffective?

GC: Our change management process, which is based on Six Sigma, worked very well. This seven-phase-gate approach requires you to define everything from business case to stakeholder involvement. It worked well for the high-risk, high-changes areas. When it came to routine activities, it didn't hold up for us. That's where we could've done a better job of selecting a better methodology.

EL: One of your IT teams is looking at virtual teaming. What are your thoughts about 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life?

GC: I'm not sure what to do with it. It's not based on reality in the first place. If someone can help me understand the applications for Second Life, I'd be glad to listen.

EL: You were one of the nominees for the Information Security Executive Award from this year’s Northeast division of the ISE. What initiative did you get nominated for?

GC: We've had a comprehensive push on consolidating perimeter security, along with improving other areas of security. The nine acquisitions Textron made presented IT with the challenge of how to handle disparate approaches to security. We also focused on how to extend secure wireless connectivity to all of our Textron locations. Here, we sewed up all of the areas for possible data loss. Next, we overwhelmed our disaster recovery and business continuity programs to focus on our consolidated data centers. We also carried out a program to educate employees about security.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.