Computerworld - February 27, 2012

Group vice president and
CIo, toyota motor Sales,
torrance, Calif.
Walter
Iwanow
CIo, u. S. department of
Justice, office of Justice
programs, washington
How are
you build-
ing an It
department
for the next
10 years?
New titles
added to
your It or-
ganization:
Chief technol-
ogy officer
and chief security officer.
A job responsibility you’d
like to delete: Cutting the bud-
get. With better planning and
projections, one wouldn’t need
to cut. This destroys the future.
the characteristic that’s
most important to you in an
It hire: Enthusiasm.
A quick-roI project: Tele-
conferencing. Our agents
travel to grant sites to review
performance and legislation
compliance.
Kevin M.
Humphries
Senior vice president of It,
Fedex Corporate Services,
Collierville, tenn.
Joshua Jewett
buSINeSS GrowtH requIreS A New Set
o F le AderSHIp Sk IllS
executive vice president
and CIo, target,
minneapolis
An innova-
tive staff
idea: Project
F1RST ad-
dressed chal-
lenges relat-
ed to support for automated
shipping solutions available
through FedEx Ship Manager
software and FedEx.com. The
project was based on feed-
back from select town halls
within the FedEx IT group.
More than 100 team members
representing seven Quality
Action teams collaborated to
implement solutions. Results
yielded internal efficiencies
and an increase in customer
satisfaction.

New titles
added to
your It
organiza-
tion:
How are you building an It
department for the next
10 years?

AS CIO at Family Dollar, Joshua Jewett has had to grow with the business — and become more busi- ness-focused along the way. As the company doubled in size to more than $8.5 bil- lion over his nine-year tenure, he says, “I’ve had to go from hands-on leadership to more strategic leadership working through my direct reports. You have to effect
outcomes through others, and that’s a different skill.” To accomplish
that, he reorganized IT around multidisciplinary customer-service
teams. “We used to be like a Ford assembly line,” he says. The new
teams are more responsive and customer-focused, says Jewett.
Under his leadership, the IT group revamped in-store IT infrastruc-
ture while keeping within a tight budget. “We need all of the capabili-
ties of a big-box store in a low-cost footprint,” he says.
Jewett, 42, also collaborated with the CEO and the executive team to
throw traditional budgeting out the window. Previously, IT would create
an annual budget at a very granular level of detail for projects that nev-
er materialized. “That was incredibly demoralizing and a huge waste of
time,” says Jewett. Now, he says, he starts with the business’ priorities,
channels funding toward those, and develops a road map. “It’s a model
designed to deal with the inevitability of change,” he says.
Jewett is all about the business, and he’s a full partner with the rest of
the executive team, says Tim Chew, vice president of technical services.
“He’s trying to guide the business versus just guiding IT,” says Chew. u