Computerworld - February 27, 2012

“IT has to keep pace with the clock speed of business,” says Joe
Touey, senior vice president of IT for North America Pharmaceu-
ticals at GlaxoSmithKline. “You can’t say it will take two years to
get there if the CEO wants to transform in six months.”
Making big changes is always risky, but doing it at breakneck
speed is especially perilous. Yet, that’s precisely how so many of
this year’s Premier 100 IT Leaders are making their mark — by
quickly and successfully executing on bold decisions that are yield-
ing big business benefits, thanks to rigorous attention to detail,
expert risk management and unparalleled leadership skills.
“The big game-
changer events have
the highest risks,” says
Mary Gendron, CIO at
Toronto-based Celestica,
an electronics manufac-
turing services company
whose customers include
Cisco, HP and IBM.
Among Gendron’s high-
risk/high-reward moves in
the past 18 months was the
decision to opt out of using
a commercial software
system as the company’s
manufacturing execution
system (MES) — the life-
blood of Celestica’s world-
wide operations. Instead,
Yet, as Gendron saw it, “in the area of shop floor, we are the
experts. Our ability to build and develop an application that is agile,
flexible, nimble and accommodating to over 80 customers’ shop-
floor requirements is our di;erentiating capability,” she says. In her
view, it was the right moment “to double down on custom software.”

Continued on page 20

Game-changing projects are
risky, says Celestica CIO Mary
Gendron.
PEOPLE
PARTNERS
The 2012 honorees’ top five
vendor partners or suppliers:
SOURCE: INFORMATION IN THIS PACKAGE REFLEC TS
QUESTIONNAIRE DATA COLLEC TED IN JULY AND AUGUST 2011
Premier 100 Snapshots
Average size of IT sta;:
1,449
Average number of I T
employees for which each
honoree is responsible:
709
Average number of
contract I T workers used to
supplement the I T sta;:
500
1
2
3
4
5

Microsoft
IBM
Oracle
Cisco Systems
Hewlett-Packard

It’s Déjà Vu as
IT Centralizes

CHANGING BUSINESS PRIORITIES, a need for new skill
sets and a desire to more tightly integrate IT and the
business are key factors driving a significant number
of IT leaders to shake up their IT departments.

Complete organizational overhauls are not uncommon.

“We did a complete redesign,” notes Todd Coombes, CIO
at CNO Financial Group. “Once we had our strategy figured
out and it was aligned and integrated with the business, it
became clear that our IT organization needed to change to
fit the new strategies. More than half of the entire IT sta;
ended up having a di;erent VP to report to, and more than
one-third of the sta; have a di;erent direct manager.”
Centralization and standardization are the major themes
behind the moves, Coombes says. Before, for example,
testing teams were a;liated with the applications they
supported. Under the new design, all testing teams have
gathered into a single group.

“We wanted to enhance our ability to do testing one way
instead of having a lot of di;erent approaches to the same
thing,” Coombes explains.
At Target, CIO Beth Jacob reorganized I T so that sta;ers
are now centralized into functional groups rather than
scattered among di;erent teams supporting various parts
of the business, such as merchandising and marketing.

“Instead of having what were many organizations, we
pulled people together,” Jacob says. “Now, all of our archi-
tects work together, which allows us to take current plans
and knit them together into multiyear road maps. This
way, we can identify the best places to leverage technolo-
gies and take out redundancies,” she says.

— JULIA KING
PROJECTS
The Premier 100 I T Leaders are making
these projects their top five priorities in 2012:
1
2
3
4
5

Application development, including ERP
and CRM projects
Data management/business analytics
Security, including virus protection, identity
management, single sign-on, firewalls and VPNs
Cloud computing, including public, private
and hybrid cloud setups
Virtualization (desktop and server)

C4
Cover
C2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
C3

share

fullscreen

Open Article

article text for page

< previous story | next story >

add comment | read comments

Share this page with a friend
Save to “My Stuff”
Subscribe to this magazine
Search
Help