When Patricia Morrison became the executive vice president and global CIO for the $42 billion Motorola company in 2005, she had this message for her team of 2,200 professionals and a variety of outsourcing partners: "We need to make sure we deliver what we commit to." Her 25-years of experience as a CIO –- including impressive stints at Office Depot and Quaker Oats -- has been based on doing just that. During Morrison's first year at Motorola, she spearheaded an effort to build a global IT organization that could deliver world-class IT value to all of the business units. Her efforts helped to take Motorola from #46 to #12 on InformationWeek's Top 500 IT innovators in 2006, and #1 in the manufacturing industry segment.
Morrison gladly accepted the challenge of integrating Motorola's many acquisitions, such as the $4 billion Symbol Corp. And, business process improvements, based on best practices such as Six Sigma, the IT Infrastructure Library, and CMMI, have enabled Morrison's team to overhaul the global supply chain and improve the manufacturing process. Motorola is an internal test bed for its own products, so the IT staff has the luxury of working with the most innovative technology. But, Morrison's organization makes sure that working "on the bleeding edge" doesn’t mean compromising on the reliability and availability of application or network uptime.
In this podcast Morrison talks about everything from corporate governance to business process improvements to IT career development through rotational programs.
Bio
Patricia B. Morrison is executive vice president and global CIO for Motorola, a $42 billion technology company. She oversees all strategic, operational, and financial aspects of the company's information technology architecture, systems, tools, processes and infrastructure. Before joining Motorola, Morrison was executive vice president and CIO of Office Depot, Inc., and she also has held corporate CIO positions at The Quaker Oats Company in Chicago and GE Industrial Systems.
Resources
The Grill: Motorola CIO on Finding and Keeping Talented People
Motorola CIO Gives IT a Reality Check
How to Turn Your Employees into Leaders
Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
