Computerworld - February 27, 2012

Chief operating officer,
Information technology &
Services, HCA, Nashville
Doug Porter
Senior vice president
of operations and CIo,
BlueCross BlueShield
Association, Chicago
A new title
added to
your It or-
ganization:
Skills you’ll hire for this
year:

Your relationship with a
key business leader:
A quick-roI
project: The
Vertica busi-
ness intelli-
gence instal-
lation runs
many concurrent informatics
activities, including research,
studies, all ad hoc queries and
benchmarks, while creating
a robust informatics service
bus. This infrastructure offers
us an infinitely scalable infor-
mation service bus for fulfill-
ing our analytic interests.

James
Robertson
Dnyanesh
Patkar
Vice president, corporate
development, eA, pmo,
Schneider National,
Green Bay, wis.
tHIS It Vp StAYS AHeAd of tHe CurVe BY SpottING treNdS
CIo, State of texas,
and executive director of
the texas department of
Information resources,
Austin
New titles
added to
your It or-
ganization:
Enterprise
architect,
solution architect, director in
the program management of-
fice, IT portfolio manager and
enterprise program manager.

New titles
added to
your It
organiza-
tion:
Your relationship with a
key business leader:

IN TODAY’S 24/7 NEWS C YCLE, reporters at media outlets use all kinds of wireless gadgets to gather and report news and communicate with the newsroom. Turner Broadcasting System’s James Robertson, 39, vice president of technology in- frastructure and broadcast transmissions, recognized the bring- your-own-device trend six years ago and has worked to keep the company ahead of the technology curve by allowing employees
to use their own devices to do their jobs. Personal devices like iPhones
were incorporated into the IT infrastructure as early as 2008.
TBS adopted what it calls an “IT Anywhere” strategy and set up an
ITIL infrastructure that allows employees to log on to the corporate
wireless infrastructure using any device from any where in the world.
“At first, we were thinking this could really complicate things,” such
as the help desk, says CIO Dan Darling. “But James has been instru-
mental in [developing] employee self-service portals where people
can self-authenticate. Our employees are very happy.”
The biggest challenge, Robertson says, is staying ahead of the tech
curve. “We have to be ahead of that demand,” he explains. “In the ab-
sence of a [corporate] solution, people are clever enough to build their
own solutions.”
“The company has realized the true importance of having IT as a
component in the whole analysis life cycle,” Robertson says. “It’s no
longer just a business life cycle, but what is it going to take for us to be
successful from a technology standpoint? That’s a big change.” u