For the past five years, Enterpriseleadership.org has been on a mission to bring you interviews with the most influential people in information technology. These people include C-level executives at global corporations, academics from major graduate schools of business, top industry analysts, and best-selling management book authors and consultants. Two and a half years ago, we saw the viability in interviewing Howard Schmidt, who was recently appointed as the new White House Cybersecurity Czar. In this position, he will orchestrate the government’s strategy for protecting information network, and coordinate cybersecrutiy activities and policy across the federal government from the military to civilian agencies.

When Enterpriseleadership.org interviewed Schmidt, he was promoting his book, co-authored with Tom Ridge, called Patrolling Cyberspace – Lessons Learned from a Lifetime in Data Security. Schmidt got his first exposure to federal government security when he was appointed by George W. Bush as the vice chair of the president’s Critical Infrastructure Board in December 2001. The board reported to Tom Ridge, then director of the Dept. of Homeland Security.  For the past few years, Schmidt has worked as a consultant with Trident Capital, an international venture capital firm. Below is a link to Enterpriseleadership’s org interview with Schmidt:

     http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/blogs/Articles/2007/08/27/interview-howard-schmidt--former-white-house-cybersecurity-czar

Depending on the nature of the company or organization, innovation can take many forms, ranging range marketing to technology to leadership to corporate training. Some companies such as Intel and Volvo have separate IT innovation organizations. They are responsible for coming up with tools, technologies, product and services, or improve processes to help the business either improve productivity or increase revenue. At other companies such as GTECH innovative is the norm and rooted deeply in the culture. Employees at all levels are encouraged and rewarded for coming up with innovations that will help the company run better. Some companies such as AlliedBarton Security Services have had innovations in a specific area such as corporate training.  So where does innovation rank in your organization? Do you have a separate IT innovation group?  Please let us know.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini

Just in case you might have missed it, we've added a long a link to subscribe to all the latests podcast interviews in iTunes for EnterpriseLeadership.org.

Does your IT organization have what it takes to create business impact? Delivering the business impact of IT means running IT as a true business that considers value creation and makes growth opportunities happen. In a podcast with www.enterpriseleadership.org, Hank Leingang, the former global CIO with the Betchel Group, says achieving business impact means that the IT organization has evolved through five graduated stages:

• ensuring 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.

At Betchel, Leingang transformed a highly disjointed IT group into a highly coordinated service function that delivered 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 Betchel’s employees to operate as a virtual team wherever they were in the world. He says, “The business moved from a little understanding of IT’s role to a clearer understanding about all of the products and services we delivered to the organization. Senior management also knew not only the full inventory of services and cost drivers, as well as the strategic and operational impact IT provides. We moved from being a purely technology group to running IT as a business. We identified new revenue opportunities for new products and services.”

Before companies can achieve business impact of IT, CIOs, working with senior management, need to fix what’s broken – be they processes or systems, according to Jeanne M. Ross, director for MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). In her new book, IT Savvy, co-written with CISR Chairman Peter Weill, she points to two major steps companies need to take before IT can even be considered a strategic asset – undergo an IT transformation and adoption of an operating model for IT. That’s exactly the two tasks that Jack Bergstrand carried out when he was vice president of business systems at Coca Cola. (Source www.enterpriseleadership.org)

During Bergstrand’s 25-year career with The Coca Cola Company, he gained much operational and strategic experience running everything from manufacturing to marketing to IT. Bergstrand spearheaded a business transformation to overhaul the company's global IT operations, including data standards, enterprise-wide global systems initiatives, and restructuring of reporting functions. He put in place a standard operating model which included the global rollout of a single SAP solution. The rollout included the concentrate division, all manufacturing facilities, and an overall accounting backbone. He says that the project provided the needed discipline or foundation for achieving business impact. "It also established a single platform for assessing global information which dramatically improved the company's transparency.  This single source of the truth enabled people to make better, faster, and consistent decisions. Over time, the project helped the company benefit from global economies of scale, such as shared services, and better handle growth, through acquisitions or internal efforts.”  Bergstrand went on to run the entire global IT operation. He retired from Coca Cola several years ago to start his own consulting firm.

Okay, so what does the business impact of IT mean to you?  How have you achieved it? What challenges have you faced in trying to create it?