Computerworld - February 27, 2012

CIO, West Texas A&M
University, Canyon, Texas
Bart Wood
Vice president of
enterprise planning
and strategic support,
Southern Co., Atlanta
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Career
highlight:
During the
Georgia bliz-
zard in 1993,
my goal as a
power delivery manager was
to restore power quickly and
safely to Georgia Power cus-
tomers. Our team spent many
late nights working to ensure
the lights came back on,
which has given me a greater
appreciation for the advances
made in the utility industry.
An innovative sta; idea:
Southern’s intellectual prop-
erty program. To date, 10 pat-
ents have been granted.
David Webb
A BIG BET ON BIG DATA PAYS OFF
IN T WO SHORT YEARS as CIO at Equifax, David Webb has worked hard to transform the credit reporting agency. “We’re on the cusp of a revolution with data,” he says. This revolution will allow Equifax to deliver more extensive insights into consumer behavior that the firm’s clients can use to make better risk and marketing decisions, he says. Faced with integrating $1.6 billion in new data assets, in-
cluding 30 billion records on income, assets and real estate, with
Equifax’s existing credit data, Webb, 55, realized he needed a new ap-
proach to big data that would let I T crunch hundreds of terabytes in a
matter of seconds. Rather than invest $7.5 million in hardware for its
massively parallel processing environment, Webb bet that Equifax’s
engineers could build a better mousetrap in the form of a new index-
ing technology.
“We rolled the dice and built solutions internally that had the poten-
tial to derail some significant revenue streams had we got it wrong,”
he says. But Project Keystone, as it’s called, also had the potential to
generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue.
Fortunately, Webb says, the plan worked. “With Project Keystone,
we can produce products and bring them to market in a fraction of the
time of our previous model or what the competition could do,” he says.
“David gets the big picture very quickly, and his vision to move fast
is critical,” says Ravi Acharya, senior vice president of global Internet
solutions. “It helps challenge us all.” ;
Hank A.
Weigle
Senior vice president,
shared services, global
information resources,
Marriott International,
Bethesda, Md.
CIO, NYS Insurance Fund,
Albany, N. Y.
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