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In this podcast, Hank Leingang, the former global CIO for the Bechtel Group and the former CIO for Viacom, talks about the leadership qualities global CIOs need in order to be effective across the enterprise.

Within the last five years, the qualities needed by global CIOs of Fortune 2500 companies have changed radically. The CIO role has become more pervasive, touching just about aspect of the enterprise, as well as every constituency the organization has. As a result, CIOs have to be more than  technologists. Of course, they need to understand how different technologies relate to one another to drive business processes. More important, CIOs need to be business leaders who can do the following:

• sit at the executive management table and collaborate with other team members;
• exhibit some depth around their opinions;
• understand how things get done in the organization;
• influence others;
• listen and learn;
• collaborate with business unit leaders;
• and communicate effectively with all constituencies from the start.

Hank Leinging understands the role of the global CIO for a major company. He spent five years as the global CIO of Bechtel Group, Inc. and seven years as the global CIO of Viacom. Today, he is a senior consultant at Korn/Ferry International, one of the world's largest executive search firms. He works with clients to identify their enterprise IT needs and to fill those positions with qualified executives, such as CIOs and CTOs, and people who report to them.

Leingang says that the assessment for CIOs, for example, goes far beyond the functional competencies an organization needs. He says, "We look at a candidate's leadership characteristics and reputation in the industry. A CIO's longevity in this environment requires the ability to develop and to execute a communications plan. CIOs need to understand their constituencies and proactively to communicate with them, rather than reacting to them. Because the CIO role now touches just about every part of the organization, you might provide products and services that meet customers' needs, you might drive new strategic opportunities for the business, or you might transform how the business operates."

So what is driving a CIO's increase need for this high degree of interaction? Leingang says it has to do with what he calls the commercial architecture.  While the technology architecture looks at all of the diverse technologies in the portfolio, the commercial architecture looks at all of the diverse, global relationships between the entities that supply these technologies. These suppliers could include in-house sources, third-party sources, or a combination of the two. Leingang says, "The commercial architecture manages all of the relationships with those suppliers across the global enterprise.  To this end, CIOs have to structure all of these relationships, and integrate them into the technology portfolio both locally and globally so there is no disruption. CIOs have to accomplish these things while driving innovation."

In this podcast, Leingang goes into more detail about what qualities global companies want in CIOs, how the CIO role has changed, why some CIOs have trouble achieving business impact of IT, and how the next generation of CIOs differs from current CIOs.

Bio
Hank (Henry) Leingang is a senior consultant and key member of Korn/Ferry International's Information Technology Officers Center of Expertise. Based in San Francisco, Leingang helps drive the firm's executive search capabilities around the CIO function. Before joining Korn/Ferry, Leingang was president, CEO, and a board member of ITM Software, before BMC Software acquired it. He previously was president and CEO of ThinkLift, a business and IT strategic 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, Interspace, 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
Enterpriseleadershp.org Podcast – Hank Leingang, Former Betchel CIO:Get Ready to Maximize Business Impact of IT
http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/blogs/podcasts/2009/03/05/hank-leingang-former-betchel-cio-get-ready-to-maximize-business-impact-of-it

CIO 2.0: The Chief Impact Officer, CIO Update
http://www.cioupdate.com/insights/article.php/3739126/CIO-20-The-Chief-Impact-Officer.htm

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast Shields talks about how this roadmap closed the gap between a project's initial budget and its real cost. Now let's join Gerald Shield, senior vice president and CIO of Alfac.

Who would think that TV commercial featuring the antics of a wisecracking duck could improve a company's brand recognition by 90 percent? That's what a few quacks did for Aflac, a Fortune 500 disability insurance company. Now, Aflac associates have no trouble getting accepted into new business accounts. The payoff has meant a double digit annual growth rate since 2003, and there's no end in sight. For 2008, Aflac had revenue of about $16.5 billion and more than 8,000 employees. The company insured more than40 million people in North American and Japan.

Of course, Aflac isn't resting on Nielsen ratings from the TV commercials to stay competitive. Accelerating growth continue to drive IT to find ways key departments can provide better value and services to external customers. In fact, in 2008, Gerald Shields, Aflac's senior vice president and CIO, received an InfoWorld CTO 25 for adding a future IT projects roadmap into the company's existing IT governance process. Shields says that this roadmap has helped to close the gap between a project's initial budget and its real cost.” During Shield's tenure, both Computerworld and InformationWeek 500 have consistently named Aflac as one of the Best Places to Work in IT. Meanwhile, he was also selected as one of Computerworld's 100 Premier CIOs for 2006.

In this podcast, Shields talks about the following:

• How the future IT projects roadmap has helped to improve IT's relationship with the CIO,
• What payoffs the company has received from doing this type of roadmap,
• How the future IT projects roadmap has changed the governance process,
• What other CIOs can learn from the Aflac experience,
• How Shield's measures and communicates the business impact of IT to Aflac's constituents.

Bio

Gerald Shields joined Aflac Inc. in 2002 as vice president, IT enterprise services. He was promoted to senior vice president, CIO in 2004. Before joining Aflac, Shields served as CTO, and director of information services for LifeWay Christian Resources and held senior IT positions at Electronic Data Systems (EDS). He holds bachelors degrees from Baylor University in accounting and computer science. He also holds a Fellow Life Management Institute certification from the Life Office Management Association.

Resources

2008 InfoWorld CTO 25: Gerald Shields, Aflac, Infoworld

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/2008-infoworld-cto-25-gerald-shields-aflac-838

Symantec Podcast with Gerald Shields, Aflac

http://www.symantec.com/podcasts/detail.jsp?podid=ent_aflac

Balancing Act - How Aflac keeps the lights on while finding time—and funding—for IT innovation, Smart Enterprise

http://www.smartenterprisemag.com/articles/2007spring/casestudy.jhtml

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

After becoming CIO of Walmart.com in 2005, Rangan had the challenge of making sure that the online store stayed up and running around the clock. He said, “It had experienced a number of unexpected outages. My challenge also included carrying out the value proposition of the Wal-Mart store brand – Always Low prices, Always, and Save More, Live Better. When you shop at Wal-Mart, either in the stores or online, we guarantee that your purchases will cost less than if you bought the same goods from another source.”

Once Rangan’s team got through taking the necessary remedial steps, the online store just wasn’t opened all of the time, but it could also scale significantly to handle peak periods. In fact, on the day after Thanksgiving in 2005, Walmart.com surpassed amazon.com as the site with the highest traffic in the e-commerce space. Rangan says, “We had more than 3.5 percent of the nation’s population shopping the store on that day. It was a proud day for all of us.”

The following year, the Arkansas team asked Rangan and his team to create a global dot.com format. The transformative nature of the project would position Wal-Mart has having both a bricks and mortar and online presence in 12 different countries, including Canada, Mexico, the five countries in Central America, Brazil, Japan, the UK, Germany and Korea. He says, “The key question was how to institutionalize the largest brand in the brand world by turning the initial dot.com format into a global format. We had the challenge of ensuring a single format with multi-language, multi-fluencies, and multi-distribution capabilities. We also had to spearhead the global format from incubation to inception to proof of concept.”

In 2007, Rangan’s team proved that the online global format would work.  He said, “We blueprinted the entire concept so that it would be carried out over the next couple of years. Like Walmart.com, our global online store was another transformative initiative for this major brand.”

Although Rangan officially retired from being a CIO in 2008, he is still creating business impact of IT, as well as communicating how other CIOs can achieve it. He is currently the chief information technology officer for MarketShare Partners, an industry leading analytics firm that makes marketing more measurable and accountable than never before. He says, “We are enabling some of the largest brands in the world to determine how best to make their investment decisions, and how to measure these investments. In addition to his role at MarketShare Partners, Rangan has also written a book, called Tomorrow’s CIO: Strategic Executive Conversations. Rob Carter, the global CIO for Fedex, says that Rangan puts forth “much sound advice around how to navigate this complex and continuously changing space [of IT].”

In this podcast, Rangan explains the following:

• How to communicate business impact of IT to constituents,
• How to successfully measure the impact of IT,
• How to deal with the politics of being a CIOs,
• Why it might not be necessary for a CIO to be a regular board member, and
• How to develop IT professionals to speak the language of business.
• What business transformations he has lead

Bio

Ashwin Rangan is the chief information technology officer for MarketShare Partners (MSP), a private-equity backed company. Before MarketShare Partners, he assisted Bank of America’s Consumer Banking Sector in defining and developing new Web strategies that leveraged Web 2.0.  Rangan served as CIO for Walmart.com global. He previously was senior vice president and CIO of Conexant Systems Inc. He was a member of the founding team that spun-out Rockwell Semiconductor Systems and created Conexant.  Before Rockwell, he served in various senior management positions at AST Computer. He is a member of the governing body of both the NorCal and the SoCal CIO Executive Summit.  He frequently addresses the CIO institutes at the Haas and Anderson Schools. He has a Masters in Industrial Engineering and Management with an emphasis on IT and Operations Management from NITIE , Bombay, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Bangalore University, India.

Resources

SIPAcon 2008 – Interview with Ashwin Rangan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR2Q-1cY7dU

Interop – Podcast with Ashwin Rangan

http://interop.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=307719

Tomorrow’s CIO

Supply Chain Matters

http://www.theferrarigroup.com/blog1/?p=855

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast, Bruce Ash talks about Dollar General's leveraging of technology to fly under Wal-Mart's radar screen, the political challenges he faced as CIO for a rapidly growing retailer, and his takeaways CIOs can use to create business impact.

If you're a CIO for a rapidly growing retail chain, you had better make sure you can deliver the business impact of IT to the organization. Bruce Ash has done just that repeatedly. He spent about 20 years developing IT infrastructures to support two major retailers --Talbots and Dollar General. During Ash's 10-year stint as CIO with Talbots, the company grew from 175 stores to 900 stores in four countries. On the other hand, Dollar General's explosive growth was like nothing Ash had ever experienced before at Talbots. Ash's nine-year tenure as CIO coincided with the company's expansion from 4,000 stores to 8,000 stores in 35 states. He said, "One year we opened 700 stores and three distribution centers to support the additional stores. Some retailers don't even have 700 stores."

Some retail analysts say that Sam Walton's original vision for Wal-Mart resembled that of today's Dollar General. This modern version of the neighborhood general store sells everything from apparel to toys from electronics to household goods, all at prices most people can afford to pay. Each Dollar General stores carries more than 5,400 core products from America's most trust brands and manufacturers.

As CIO of Dollar General, Ash became the linchpin between the business community, the corporate leadership team, the company's strategy, and the deployment of IT. He says, "The business impact of IT came from building the infrastructure to support the company's fast-paced growth strategy. It included bringing in a point of sale system that improved both our customer experience and our supply chain. We could process a variety of alternative payment methods. As a result, customers could get through the checkout line faster. The merchandise information this system captured enabled us to have perpetual inventory in the stores, including automatic stock replenishment."

Bio
Before becoming CIO for Dollar General, Bruce Ash spent 10 with Talbots as senior vice president and CIO. He also was vice president of information systems at Filenes in Boston. He also has held senior IT at Foley's in Houston, Texas, and Federated (Macy's) Department Stores' corporate offices. He is currently doing retail IT consulting for 1010data, an emerging company that provides an analytics software as a service for business intelligence.

Resources
Discount Doesn't Skimp on Supply-Chain Investments - Supply Chain Brain

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