When troubled IT organizations need help, then Transition Partners can provide the perfect solution. This IT consultancy specializes in turning around ineffective IT organizations by providing them with experienced IT leaders and established business processes. The company's client base includes Aramark, Bates Advertising, Hilton Hotels, and Ingersoll Rand.
 
Transition Partners specializes in handling the one problem most CIOs don't like to talk about -- dealing with the politics of IT.  Thomas L. Pettibone, Transition Partners' founder, has waded through a lot of political muck in his 18-year IT career.  In fact, after working as a CIO for several Fortune 50 companies, he concluded that he often found himself in a no-win position and that he'd be happier being on his own as part of an interim team, parting friends with the organization at the end of the day.
 
He says, "When it comes to allocating funds and delivering services, the CIO has to be the judge and the jury. The demand always exceeds the supply. The CIO often winds either saying No to the end-user executive or trying to deliver something on a shoestring. Either way, the CIO loses politically."
 
Pettibone and his Transition Partners staff have a good track record helping some wounded IT organizations, as well as wounded companies, achieve real business value from IT. In fact, the bankrupt TransWorld Airways, now part of American Airlines, was one of Transition Partners' first clients. Pettibone says, "TWA was a mess. Most of the top IT management had left. Things ran poorly. The company was close to signing a terrible outsourcing deal." The Transition Partner's team took over the IT department, and within 12 months had created a high-performance IT organization, delivering high reliability and good end-user satisfaction. Pettibone says, "IT was one of the bright spots when American Airlines acquired TWA."
 
Several years later, Transition Partners worked with Tsumura Consumer Products. He says, "The new CIO was being held hostage by several of his IT lieutenants. They wanted hefty bonuses or else they would disrupt operations. We parachuted in, fired the offenders, and took over the IT operational responsibility with no business interruption. Within six months, we rebuilt the IT organization. The parting comment from the CIO was great. He said that we took the gun away from his head."
 
People within an IT organization usually know what's going on. Computer systems don't breakdown by themselves. The problems that arise between IT and the business often relate to management issues. After signing on with a new client, the Transition Partners' team immediately sits down with the IT organization and lays out what it plans to do as turnaround people. Pettibone says, "We tell them that we seek their support with our processes and methods to correct the situation. We emphasize that within a year or shorter, we'll leave and they'll be the recipients of the benefits we can create together. Of course, someone has to be appointed to lead IT. It's a chance for someone to move up in the organization."
 
In this podcast, Pettibone talks about how CIOs can help their organizations cope with the economic downturn; how CIOs can improve the IT governance process; what challenges interim CIOs face stepping into the former CIOs' shoes; and how membership in an organization, such as the Society of Information Management, can better prepare CIOs to do their job.

Bio

Before starting Transition Partners based in Reston, Virginia, an IT management consultancy, Thomas L. Pettibone held corporate CIO positions at the following companies: Philip Morris, New York Life, Richardson Vicks (Procter & Gamble), Emery Airfreight, and BMW. He is the past chairman of the New York Chapter of the Society of Information Management, a former director of SIM, and an active member of the Fairfield-Westchester chapter of SIM. He is a contributing editor to Chief Executive magazine, a past member of The Research Board, and The Conference Board. He has an MBA from The Wharton Business School, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University.

Resources
ResourcesCIO Insight Inteview with Tom Pettibone
Hired Guns: Temporary CIOs - InformationWeek
IT Leaders are Made, Not Borns, Says Tech Veterans - Computerworld

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

When Don Hopkins retired as chief information officer at NCR, he decided to join SunGard Availability Services, a business unit of the $5 billion SunGard  Corp. SunGard Availability Services provides the company's more than 10,000 customers in North American and in Europe with solutions that ensure uninterrupted access to mission-critical data and systems. By reporting to SunGard's CEO, Hopkins has insight into the company's strategic initiatives and, as a result, has the opportunity to understand what technologies would be good enablers to those strategic decisions.

In 1979, Hopkins joined NCR where he moved up the IT ranks from the director of general-purpose products to vice president of technology and infrastructure in NCR's IT services group, and to his last position as chief information officer. In fact, he played a leadership role in NCR's transformation and performance turnaround. In 2007, he successfully completed the very complex IT spin-off of Teradata as a separate company. Although this event happened during a very aggressive timeframe, Hopkins and the management team did it under planned budgets, both before and after the spin-off.

In this podcast, Hopkins talks about how he has translated his IT experiences at NCR and applied them as CIO at SunGard Availability Services. He also talks about NCR's strategy to cut its IT infrastructure costs and increase the company's profitability, its process for making investment decisions in technology, and its methodology for measuring the value of those investments.

Bio

Don Hopkins is vice president and chief information officer at SunGard Availability Services. Before joining this business unit of the $5 billion SunGard Corp., he was CIO at NCR Corporation and the vice president of technology and infrastructure in the company's IT services unit. He joined NCR in 1979. He holds master’s degrees in mathematics, school administration, computer science and business administration from the University of Dayton, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics/physics from Miami (Ohio) University.

Resources

Specialists Share  Transformation Models with Tech Providers, Industry Peers - Manufacturing  Business Technology

E-vaulting  Clears Hurdles to Vital Data - IDG Accelerate

CIO of  NCR Is Retiring - Dayton Business Journal

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini,  Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Doug Marcis  - Audio and Music Editing

Ace is the place, especially if you're looking for home hardware in the U.S. or in Saudi Arabia. And no one knows this better than Paul Ingevaldson. After a 25-year with Ace Hardware, Ingevaldson retired as CIO and senior vice president of international and technology for the $3 billion dollar global hardware wholesaler. Its more than 5,000 retail hardware stores do $12 billion in annual sales. Ingevaldson was responsible for Ace's IT needs for the entire corporation, including the retail stores in more than 70 countries. Of his many accomplishments, Ingevaldson is most proud of having become an officer of the company, heavily automating all aspects of the retail operation, and having the full corporation of executive management to align IT with the business. He attributes much of his success in these areas to a stint where he moved out of IT and handled distribution for Ace Hardware. He says, "The experience enabled me to see IT from the user's perspective. I realized that we had to spend more time training people how to interact with IT."

Since his retirement, Ingevaldson has written a variety of tutorial IT management articles for both CIO and Computerworld. His topics have covered everything from improving governance to delegating authority. He also has cranked out many articles about how CIOs should report to CEOs. In fact, his article, IT Cheat Sheet for CEOs, helps a CIO to explain the mechanics of IT to a new CEO.

Ingevaldson says that there are many reasons why it's important for CIOs to report directly to CEOs, than CFOs, and to be on the executive leadership team as a peer with CFOs. He says, "When it comes to corporate funds, CFOs take a risk adverse position. If you want to move the company forward through automation, then IT has to assume certain risks. If IT isn't willing to take a chance, then it will be a follower. If you work for a CFO, you have to go into much detail about every aspect of IT. Most of all, you aren't a peer with the rest of the leadership team. I'd never take a CIO position reporting to a CFO."

In this podcast, Ingevaldson talks more about why it's important for CIOs to sit at the corporate leadership table, and how they can maintain their place at this table.

Bio

In 1979, Paul Ingevaldson began his 25-year career at Ace Hardware as director of management information systems. He moved up the ranks to become Ace Hardware's chief information officer and senior vice president of international and technology. In 2004, he retired from the $3 billion corporation, but he didn't retire from IT. Ingevaldson writes IT management articles for both Computerworld and CIO magazine.

Resources

Computerworld  - IT Survival Guide

CIO  - How Do You Know You Delegate Enough?

CIO  - Five Things I Learned After I Retired

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

Since joining Scottrade as CIO in 2005, Ian Patterson has racked up a series of IT accolades for the stock brokerage firm, which manages $55.7 billion in assets. In both 2008 and 2007, Computerworld named him to its Premier 100 IT Leaders, a list of the country top IT executives. In 2007, under Patterson's leadership, Scottrade got named to the CIO magazine's CIO 100, an award that recognizes outstanding strategic IT leadership. Scottrade has also made it on the InformationWeek 500 list of the most innovative users of IT in the U.S.

What has made Patterson so successful? As a former consultant with Deloitte, Patterson realized that many companies view the IT organization as an outsider, different from other business units. He says, "This never made any sense to me. Why should IT be treated any differently from marketing or finance?" At Scottrade, Patterson created an environment to converge IT into the overall corporate strategy to promote growth and profitability. He says, "Of course, a strategy without execution is just a dream. Our leadership meets regularly to review our five-year plan and to make any adjustments to it."

Every year, Patterson makes sure that the company carries out technology initiatives to better compete in the marketplace. Because do-it-yourself traders comprise much of Scottrade's customer base, Patterson strives to be proactive about what would happen if a market crash occurred, causing a huge spike in the company's trading volume. He says, "We look at our average volumes on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis and come up with our capacity needs to be three to five times that volume." For example, before Scottrade built its recent $25 million, 34,000-square-foot data center. Patterson made sure that the data design had enough redundancy and processing power to support both transaction growth and unexpected transaction volume caused by market fluctuations. IT also upgraded the network so the 300 branches would have a more streamlined, faster, more secure and stable connection to the home office.

In this podcast, Ian Patterson, CIO of Scottrade, talks about how the governance council plans and executes on key technology initiatives, how the company measures the success of these initiatives, and what the company has done to improve the customer experience.

Bio
As CIO at Scottrade, Ian Patterson oversees all of the company's technology staff and technology operations, including the data center and the internal network for more than 300 branches. Before joining Scottrade, Patterson was the senior manager of IT strategy at Deloitte. He also previously held positions at Pivotpoint and Electronic Data Systems. Some of Patterson’s past clients include General Motors, Del Monte Foods, Graybar and W.W. Grainger. Patterson has a B.A. in Business Administration with an emphasis in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona.

Resources
St.  Louis Commerce Magazine - Takin' Care of Cyber Business
St.  Louis Commerce Magazine - New Data Centers for IT Surge
Computerworld  - JScottrade's New Data Center - Redundant Everything

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive  Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio  Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music  Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

If you ask Paul Heller, the CIO of Vanguard, to describe his IT organization, most likely he'll say one word: "Awesome!"

One might say that Vanguard, a mutual fund company that manages more than $900 billion in assets for 19 million customers, has created its own IT vanguard. The 2,600-person, in-house IT team, supplemented by 300 contractors and 500 business-unit professionals involved in IT, built 70 percent of the applications, and purchased the remainder of them from large software suppliers. The highly centralized IT organization aligns functionally and strategically, not physically, with each of the major business units.

During his 23-year career with Vanguard, Heller, who became CIO in 2006, has held many leadership positions which have included driving revenue and managing technology. But, Heller says, he loves being at the intersection of technology and business. "To lead a business, you need to understand and appreciate the value of the technology being used." And, given the mere four-percent employee turnover rate that IT enjoys, it's obvious that his organization appreciates his leadership.

Join us for a conversation with Vanguard CIO Paul Heller, about the strategies and issues at work 24/7 in a company where IT is at the core of business success.

Resources

The Vanguard Group| Paul Heller: "Simplifying the Mutual Fund Maze with Technology"

Techniques for Measuring IT's Effectiveness

Bio

Paul A. Heller is Vanguard's chief information officer, responsible for overseeing all aspects of Vanguard's use of technology to provide high-quality, cost-effective services for Vanguard shareholders. Mr. Heller joined Vanguard in October 1984 and has held leadership positions in the company's corporate, institutional, and retail divisions. Prior to becoming CIO, he was responsible for overseeing Vanguard's core retail business that provides service to approximately four million clients with over $150 billion in assets. Mr. Heller earned a bachelor's degree in engineering and economics from Tufts University and is a graduate of Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program.

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host

Is the IT infrastructure a strategic value for an organization, or these days, is it more of a basic commodity, like electricity? The May 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter," incited something like a riot among IT executives, as well as major computer vendors, and academics. Nicholas Carr, the Review's editor and the article's author, had sounded a wakeup call some people weren't ready to hear. Executives from major corporations pelted the Review with lengthy letters to the editor. Just about every business and computer trade publication took Carr to task on the subject.

Still, the bespeckled, soft-spoken Carr, now the Review's former editor, continued to fuel the controversy about the value of IT. His 2004 book, Does IT Matter? – Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press), expanded the article's initial premise.

Whether you agree with him or not, Carr ranks as one most influential thinkers about IT technology, according to Optimize magazine. For the past three years, just about every business publication, every computer trade magazine, and dozens of industry, corporate, academic, and professional venues have been examining and re-examining Carr's plea to get people to reconsider their assumptions about the role of IT. Carr says that this exercise can help CIOs distinguish between the different roles that specific IT investments play in the organization. This knowledge can help CIOs to make sure the company gets the most value from IT, Carr says.

Carr definitely has his own insights about the future of IT and for CIOs. So, what do you think about the role and value of IT, and the future of the CIO? We invite you to listen to this insightful interview with the thoughtful and thought-provoking, Nick Carr, and maybe, formulate some conclusions of your own ...

Bio

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review (HBR), Nicholas Carr is an accomplished business writer and speaker whose work centers on strategy, innovation, and technology. His HBR article, "IT Doesn't Matter," in May 2003, and his 2004 book, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business.

In addition to writing articles for HBR, Carr has also written for The New York Times, Financial Times, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Journal of Business Strategy. Articles edited by Carr have won McKinsey Awards as the best articles published in HRB. Carr writes a column on innovation for Strategy & Business, and a column about technology for BusinessWeek Online. Before joining HBR, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College, and an M.A. from Harvard University.

Resources

Nicholas Carr's Web page about his book

CIO Magazine -- "The Argument Over IT"

Harvard Business Review -- "Spend Less on IT"

Computerworld -- "The End of Corporate IT"

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer

Have you ever heard the saying, it's not what you know, but  who you know? Do you, perhaps, have some experience that supports that  old saying?

Dr. Kathleen Carley at Carnegie Mellon University has dedicated a career to figuring out networks and the flow of knowledge -- not those neatly drawn solid and dotted lines connecting names and titles on the company org chart. No, she is interested in the shadow network behind the org chart, where and how the real work gets done. Who's the person in the group who really knows how to do that job? No, not the guy listed as the division chief -- you know -- the real expert. Who's the person who can direct you to that expert? It's probably not the VP. (I doubt anyone who's worked in the modern corporation doesn't know exactly what I'm talking about.)

The reasons for understanding an enterprise's social network are more practical than esoteric. A clear view of this shadow-network can help you to understand how your organization might respond to changes such as layoffs or a merger. Carley and her team use scientific methods and technological tools to deconstruct this complex web of interaction, including metrics, data analysis, and computer simulations that study interactions via email, phone exchanges, and more.

Join us for a conversation with a pioneer who tries to predict future behavior within entities from corporations to terrorist cells by using high-tech means to map the most fundamental of human structures.

Bio

Kathleen Carley is a professor at the Institute for Software Research International in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the director of the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), a university wide interdisciplinary center that brings together network analysis, computer science and organization science (www.casos.ece.cmu.edu) and has an associated NSF funded training program for Ph.D. students. She carries out research that combines cognitive science, dynamic social networks, text processing, organizations, social and computer science in a variety of theoretical and applied venues. Her specific research areas are computational social and organization theory; dynamic social networks; multi-agent network models; group, organizational, and social adaptation, and evolution; statistical models for dynamic network analysis and evolution, computational text analysis, and the impact of telecommunication technologies on communication and information diffusion within and among groups.

Resources

Center for  Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems  (CASOS)

Disconnect the Dots;  Maybe We Can't Cut Off Terror's Head, but We Can Take Out Its  Nodes

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities  Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show  Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development  Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer