Scott Griffin enjoyed every minute of his 28-year career at The Boeing Company, the world's leading aerospace company with capabilities in both commercial jetliners and military aircraft. From 1999 until he retired in June 2007, Griffin was the global CIO and vice president of Boeing IT.  His responsibilities included overseeing a staff of more than 5,000 people, and spearheading all of the IT strategy, systems, infrastructure, and architecture, The collaboration between his team and Boeing engineers around the world played an integral part in the design and the manufacture of the first Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.  In fact, a chapter in Evan Rosen's book, the Culture of Collaboration, chronicles Griffin's real-time interactions with other Boeing executives.

While Griffin retired from Boeing, he has no desire to retire from IT. In fact, he is pursuing a master's degree program in not-for-profit leadership at Seattle University.  He plans to start a not-for-profit company to do pro bono IT strategy consulting for other not-for-profit organizations.  He has served on the board of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Recently, enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Scott Griffin to discuss his IT career at Boeing and his plans for the future. Here's what he had to say.

EL. When you talk to MBA students about IT, what leadership  qualities to your emphasize to them?

SG. I have a regular presentation about preparing MBA students to run organizations and to understand the power of IT to transform a business model. You can use a cookie cutter to stamp out CIOs who understand technology. They need to know how IT works and how to talk to business leaders about things that are important to the business.  That's number one. It made me successful at Boeing.

EL. How do  you acquire the skills that made you successful in your long career at  Boeing?

SG. I had three careers at Boeing. When I worked in customer service, we moved from paper to electronic media. Today Boeing delivers digital content to airlines around the world every day, as well as to the U.S. military. My second career was in avionics where I worked on classified software. When I joined the IT department, my third career, I understood the business process, the IT systems, and the data. I had the great fortune to be a business leader before I became an IT leader. I talked to people in the airlines, in the military and inside of Boeing.  I talked to each audience in language they understood. If the CIO doesn't have this, he or she is just a technical leader.

EL. Why did you decide to spend your retirement  years pursuing IT in the not-for-profit sector?

SG. Before I went to work for Boeing, my wife and I, both fresh out of Fresno State, moved to Seattle to work as house parents for a home for troubled teenage girls. This was my first experience dealing with a not-for-profit.  It was a truly rewarding one. The hill the home was on run down to the Boeing 747 plant. In fact, the home benefited from a Boeing fund.

I picked up Peter Drucker's book, Managing the Not-for-Profit Organization.  In it, Drucker talks about how not-for-profits have become the distinguished feature of American society. The book talks about how to get the most performance out an organization. The book ends with this profound question: What do you want to be remembered for?  That drew me back to my experience working at the not-for-profit.

EL.  How did you IT team react to your decision to retire and to go in this  direction?

SG. My staff wasn't surprised by my decision, just the timing of it. Recruiting a new CIO takes time.  We started the process five months before we announced my replacement, John Hinshaw. I still get a lot of questions about the initiatives my team started while I was CIO.  I left a well-run organization that had great people.

EL. What, if any,  reporting changes did you make to your IT organization?

SG. Before 2005, IT had a shared services model for the infrastructure group. The rest of the IT folks resided in various business across the company. In 2005, we brought everyone in IT together under one organization.  We even pulled the functional analysts in, engineers who sat on the boundary between being a design engineer and being an IT person. We needed those people because we build IT solutions for our customers. This move gave us a fresh start to figure out what was important to us. It was one of the strategies for Boeing IT.

EL. What challenges did you place driving innovation in  IT?

SG. When we looked at innovation, we always benchmarked against the top companies in the world, especially Toyota.  Concurrent design has a lot of complexity. You had people working on the same assembly, regardless if they are in Moscow or in Everett, Washington. We had these great pockets of innovation. Our money didn't match our strategy of innovation. Two- thirds of IT budget went to support the things already in place and one-third went to innovation. We created a strategy to fill this gap. We looked at how to have two-thirds go to the future and, one-third go to support the business. We were just embarking on that when I retired. .

We looked at how IT could help transform the business and innovate there, not where we thought IT was going.  This posed an interesting challenge. You need to have people thinking about how to do the business process differently. If you don't, they will become adverse to change. Unfortunately, even the best IT leaders over time can find themselves spending most of resources on improving the things already in place, not trying to create a breakthrough change the company. Collaboration became that breakthrough at Boeing.

We looked at the places where we had innovation. For example, we worked with our global suppliers as if they were part of the same company.  Cisco did this before Boeing.

We set out to work on those  areas we had ignored. I really don't want to elaborate on them. 

EL. Can you discuss the your philosophy behind your mantra to  innovate and to inspire?

SG. Inspire deals with who are the people looking for the change.  Is it the IT team?  No CIO is smart enough to know which inflection points are real, which are flash in the pan, and which IT company has the next great thing. You have to energize your entire team to work on these issues. When you inspire, you begin to remove the obstacles for the experts to do innovation. My leadership team spent a lot of time thinking about what people can really inspire other. We looked for a certain leadership style, which focuses on breaking down walls for your team so they can be most effective rather than leading the charge.

EL. What did you do to inspire  future IT leaders?

SG. This's one of the top roles of the CIO. It's the reason I was able to retire and to shift in providing IT to the nonprofit sector. You can judge the effectiveness of the former CIO by looking at the future leaders that CIO groomed. I can tell you the list of potential CIOs and why I selected them.
We had some great programs.  Every week the entire IT team, people located in about 60 countries, attended a virtual IT staff meeting. Our executive skills team met every week. We asked staff managers to ponder these questions: Who are our future leaders? What does the pipeline look like?  How diverse is it?

EL. How did you select candidates  for Boeing IT University?

SG. To look for candidates to attend the Boeing IT University, we would comb the pipeline for managers who had the potential to be executives, and staff people who had the potential to technical leaders. The program doesn't use university professors, but IT leaders teaching potential leaders. The curriculum consists of spending eight, 24-hour days discussing what  challenges face Boeing, how do these challenges translate to Boeing IT, and how these future leaders can contribute to the strategies of innovate and inspire. We give the participants a graduate-level case study, which we created. It presents the what if scenario about Boeing acquiring a company.  The participants must work through migrating the company into the existing IT structure. Using actual data and strategies from Boeing, participants, at the end of the week, have to give a present their findings to a board of directors comprised of the IT leader instructors. This experience has changed the way we relate the people in that pipeline. We get to know these future leaders. In turn, they have a safe place where they can present their ideas. They also write a business case. to do an ERP implementation.

EL. Do you use the center for excellence concept to fuel new  ideas?

SG. It's not a strategy for us. Most of my colleagues with centers of excellence didn't have a consolidated IT organization. We had the center for excellence strategy when IT was decentralized throughout the company. At that time, we said let's create and fund centrally a center of excellence for manufacturing engineering. Once we got all of the IT folks together, we still called them centers of excellence. I don't want to say that concept isn't a good strategy. Now the people who do manufacturing engineering systems now work on the same team as Boeing IT. Together, we begin to create the future process, systems, and data for those functions.

EL. Can  you describe how the Investment Board came about at Boeing?

SG. After the merger with McDonnell Douglas, we started to think about how we could move Boeing to common processes and where it makes sense for common systems. We couldn't do that if every cubicle had its own IT leader.  We had a shared services model where all of the transactional activities existed. The systems resided in the business unit.  If we wanted to move to common processes, we didn't have the right governance model. We didn't have our hands on the people that were learning today's systems and planning for tomorrow.

Our first move was to pull the IT people together. That was a lot of work. It presented all sorts of cultural challenges. We had shadow organizations all over the place. We had to change people's budgets so they couldn't create shadow organizations.

The 2B model was the IT investment portfolio. I made the decision that I shouldn't chair that. The CTO for Boeing assumed this responsibility We invited all of those businesses who owned their own IT, such as a design engineer on the 787 program on the 787 project had his/her own IT department. We pulled those people away. We offered to make the leader sit on the Investment Board.  Once we got the IT people and the functional leaders together, we could decide what investments we would make with Boeing's IT dollars. We were in the third year of it when I retired.

EL. What  changes did you make to the governance model because of the Investment Board.

SG. The governance model was slow to change. The functional leaders would come together on the front end and say, 'My program is totally unique from everyone's.' We weren't interested in having a discussion about building one ERP system. We rejected more than a $100 million dollars worth of good projects not aimed at the entire Boeing Company. When I left, that model had completely changed. We were still having an Investment Board meeting once a quarter. When people came to us, they knew that their project wouldn't be approved unless they had taken into account the entire Boeing Company.

Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer  from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.