Being a CIO is a tough job. No one knows that better than Hank Leingang, the former global CIO for the Bechtel Group, Inc., and the former CIO for Viacom. As CEO of ITM Software, which BMC Software recently acquired, Leingang worked with both CIOs and their executive teams to maximize the business impact of IT. His IT consulting firm, ThinkLift, also helped CIOs and their IT teams to achieve business impact. Leingang continues to pursue hs passion for building and developing high-impact executive teams as a senior member of Korn/Ferry's IT Officers Center of Expertise.

So what's the business impact of IT? It's really about running IT as a true business that makes growth opportunities happen. Leingang says that achieving business impact means that the IT organization has evolved through five stages beginning with a stable applications portfolio, developing automated support for processes and functions, carrying out an ERP implementation, enabling a business transformation, and delivering business products and services developed by IT or that containing IT components. He says, "Customers benefit from the results of these IT activities."

Where can you see visible proof of the business impact of IT across the organization and how do you measure the outcome? Leingang lists four areas where you can see it: enabling of individual productivity, enhancing group productivity, enabling a function or a process, and delivering products and services to customers of the enterprise. He says that you can measure it by profit and loss cost reductions, improvements in revenues, and an increase in shareholder value. He says, "At the end of the day, whatever business case that is developed from the associated IT activities has to contribute to all of these."

In this podcast, Leingang talks about what his teams did in order to maximize the business impact of IT, what hurdles CIOs face in achieving business impact of IT, and how they can overcome them.  For example, Leingang's first task as the global CIO at Bechtel was to turn a highly disjointed group into a highly coordinated service function, which could deliver products and services to 13 business lines around the world. His team stabilized the infrastructure and the core applications that enabled the company's delivery capabilities. His team also enabled Bechtel employees to operate as a virtual team wherever they were in the world. He says, "The longer it took for Bechtel to turn the keys to a project over to its owner, the more risk of liquidated manages we could incur. Because our virtual teams could quickly pull in expertise from other parts of the company, we could lower our risk and speed up the delivery time."

Leingang says that the real business impact of IT came from the company's move from a little understanding of what IT did to a clear understanding of all the Bechtel product and services delivered from the IT organization.  He says, "They also knew, not only the full inventory of services and the costs drivers, but also the strategic and operational impact of IT. We moved from being a purely technology group to running IT as a business. We actually identified new growth opportunities from IT products and services."

Bio

Hank (Henry) Leingang  is a senior consultant with Korn/Ferry International, a premier global provider of talent management solutions. He is based in San Francisco and is the firm's IT Officers Practice leader in the West. He is a senior member of Korn/Ferry's IT Officers Center of Expertise. Leingang was president, CEO, and a board member of ITM Software, before BMC Software acquired it. Before ITM Software, Leingang was president and CEO of ThinkLift, a business and IT strategy consulting firm. He spent five years as the global CIO of Bechtel Group, Inc. and seven years as the global CIO of Viacom. He also had held IT leadership positions at Triangle Industries, Interpace, and Touche Ross. Leingang has a B.S. from the University of Illinois and an MBA from Southern Illinois University. He serves on the board of directors of New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Resources
CIO 2.0: The Chief Impact Officer - CIO Update

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