When John E. McDermott joined Xerox as chief strategy officer, the $18-billion copier and printing giant was in recovery mode.  He worked alongside Anne Mulcahy, Xerox's CEO, to crystallize the business strategy and the turnaround strategy. In 2007, with the business in good shape, Mulcahy decided that the company needed to do a faster job of carrying out certain aspects of the business strategy. McDermott says, "To do that, we had to build new business processes, which are dependent on critical relationships between the business and IT." To bridge the gap between the IT organization and the business, McDermott moved into the CIO role when Patricia Cusick, the former CIO, retired.

McDermott spent his first few months on the job asking customers' CIOs how much they spend per seat to do printing and copying activities. He says, "Most CIOs can't come up with an answer. They can tell you down to the very nickel how much they spend per seat to provision workplace-computing services.  The print and copier world has been treated as a second-class citizen by the IT organization."

Xerox's biggest challenge today is to fulfill the needs of its large customers that want services around their Xerox copier and printing devices.  McDermott says, "If you start to manage these devices as an infrastructure, then you have the tremendous capacity to use their scanning capabilities as an on-ramp to a company's digital workflow." To this end, Xerox has begun to build significant value-added services on top of the infrastructure management business that helps customers deal with document-intensive business processes.

In this podcast McDermott describes the elements of Xerox's service strategy that will leverage existing hardware resources by moving documents seamlessly between physical and virtual worlds. He is the first to acknowledge that building a services business as a companion to a hardware business is a great idea, but it's hard to carry out. He says, "The services business has a different basis than the hardware business. We're focusing most of our aligning of the IT strategy with the business strategy in the area of how to seamlessly enable our services business, and how to make sure we're bringing the kinds of modern IT solutions and modern business processes to the delivery of these services to our customers."

Interview Questions (Note: There is generally some variance)

1. How is being a CIO different from the other positions you have held at Xerox?
2. How has your background in business development and strategy helped you as a new CIO?
3. Can you describe how Xerox has converged its IT strategy and its business strategy into one corporate strategy?
   
4. Can you briefly describe your IT organization?
   
5. What process do you go through to make capital investment decisions in technology?
   
6. What tools or methodologies do you use to measure these capital technology investments?
   
7. Xerox has reduced a significant amount of debt across the company. How are you continuing to control spending on technology?
   
8. How does IT participate in Xerox's formal innovation program?

Bio

Before becoming CIO of Xerox Corporation in 2007, John E. McDermott was vice president, corporate strategy, alliances and business development. He was involved in Xerox's corporation development activities, including Xerox's recent acquisitions of Global Imaging, Amici and XMPie. Prior to joining Xerox, McDermott was a partner at Marakon Associates, a management consulting firm, where he provided Fortune 500 clients with support on business strategy, operations improvement and organizational design, primarily in the technology and telecommunications industries. In addition to his consulting responsibilities, McDermott was also CIO at Marakon. McDermott earned his MBA at Yale University School of Management and his BA degree from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

Resources

Xerox Extends Information Technology Services Contract With EDS - EDS Press Release

'InformationWeek' Magazine Ranks Xerox among Top 10 Information Technology Innovators - BNET-InformationWeek

Breathing New Life into Xerox - CNET News

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Doug Marcis - Audio Editing

During her climb up the corporate ladder at SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, Suzanne Gordon, SAS's vice president of information technology and CIO, developed an air-tight strategy for how IT could work in lockstep with internal SAS customers to reinforce the company's success. A roadblock stood in the way of selling her idea to management. Meanwhile, she decided to move out of IT and into the sales consulting side of SAS. It was here that she saw IT from the customers' perspective.

In 2003 when the CIO position came opened at SAS, a company that provides 44,000 customers with analytics software, Gordon got the job. She now could turn her vision into a reality with her IT staff of more than 300 employees. In fact, that same year, Computerworld recognized Gordon's leadership talents by including her in the list of Premier 100 IT Executives for that year.

In this, her second interview with EnterpriseLeadership, Gordon talks about how the collaborative governance process makes IT project decisions, how the value of IT gets measured, how innovation gets carried out at SAS, and what it takes to develop a culture of trust between IT and its internal customers.

Bio
In 2003, Suzanne Gordon got promoted from vice president of SAS Information Systems Division (ISD) to chief information officer. She also served as the director of National Technical Consulting and acting vice president within SAS Professional Services Division. Before joining the professional services organization, Gordon headed the management information services department in ISD for about 20 years. She joined SAS in 1980. She received a bachelor's degree in math and computer science and a master's degree in statistics from North Carolina State University, where she a member of the board of trustees.

Resources
SearchCIO - SAS CIO Sets Example for the Whole Company
LocalTechWire - SAS Exec Suzanne Gordon Builds Success Around Persistence and 'Short Memory for Negative Things'
LocalTechWire - Head of IT at SAS Sees Risks, Opportunities

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Doug Marcis - Audio Editing