Computerworld - February 27, 2012

Senior vice president
and health plan business
information officer, Kaiser
permanente, oakland, Calif.
Mark Dajani
Senior vice president,
business services and CIo,
Kraft Foods, Northfield, Ill.
Career
highlight:
A quick-roI project:
Career high-
light: My
first job as a
second-shift
production
supervisor
taught me the power of lead-
ership. My supervisor helped
me understand the impact
of decisions and mistakes in
such a way that I was able to
use that as empowerment
rather than fear.

Todd S.
Coombes
Senior vice president and
CIo, CNo Financial Group,
Carmel, Ind.
Michael
Del Priore
teAm-buIldING Helped tHIS It leAder
Steer A mASSIVe projeCt
Vice president and CIo,
Georgetown university,
washington (former
assistant director of It,
CIo, u. S. marshals Service)

How do you
make sure
your most
talented
workers
stay put?
If you provide a positive en-
vironment, good leadership,
open communication, career
development, the tools neces-
sary for the job, challenging
work, and appropriate com-
pensation and recognition,
there is no reason to leave.
Your relationship with a
key business leader: I have
an excellent relationship
with our operations leader.
We constantly communicate
about needs and challenges.

Skills you’ll
hire for this
year:
A quick-roI project:

MICHAEL DEL PRIORE’S TEAM spent the past 18 months developing and implementing a global ERP system and data warehouse that supports 95% of the operations at his company, Church & Dwight. It went live in Canada on Oct. 3 and in the U.S. on Jan. 3; it will go live in Mexico and Europe in the first half of this year.

“That’s certainly been our biggest, most critical project. It required
upgrading or enhancing pretty much every major system to work with
it, and we upgraded pretty much all our infrastructure as well,” says
Del Priore, 49, vice president and global CIO at the Princeton, N. J.-
based maker of household cleaning and personal care products.
Del Priore says a project that size had “exponentially increased”
levels of risk, but he was confident in how he and his team managed it,
with synchronized and coordinated project plans, war rooms or test-
ing, and team members working jointly when the systems went live.
Mike Esch, vice president of manufacturing, who partnered with
Del Priore on the SAP ERP initiative, says his colleague provided the
needed leadership: “We needed someone who had a clear vision of
systems, who knows how they could work in the 21st century, who was
calm and collected and could articulate that decision throughout the
organization from the upper echelons all the way down. But we also
needed someone who could roll up his sleeves and get work done, and
Michael could do that.” u