The CIO: Driving Competitive Advantage One Byte at a Time
by Ryan McKelley, Austin McNamee and Elota Patton

Have you ever heard of the Marketing Age? What about the Accounting Age? The 21st century is called the Information Age for a reason: information drives everything. Managing complex information is a growing business challenge. How do you become a strategic leader capable of navigating an organization toward success in the Information Age? With a healthy blend of creativity, management talent and technology leadership—in other words, become a CIO.

Ask the average McCombs student what a chief information officer does and he or she will probably say, “I don’t know—something with computers?” One of the biggest misconceptions about the role of information managers is that they are über-techies. But the reality is that today’s information manager is part savvy strategist, part skillful communicator, part systems thinker and part business expert. All this, and they get to play with the cool toys.

The CIO job title is younger than members of Generation X; it first appeared in the early 1980s. As a result, many in the current generation of CIOs do not have a formal management information systems (MIS) education. For example, Robert Jackson, CIO at EZCorp, a market leader in the specialty consumer finance industry, began his career on the financial side. And Michael Clifford, CIO of Whole Foods, the world’s leading retailer of natural and organic foods, got his bachelor’s degree in history. Clifford took the fork in the road that led to CIO when he took a class in the computer programming language Fortran to meet a math requirement.

But these days, information technology (IT) has evolved to become an integral part of every facet of business. Managing the constant changes requires the skills of a new generation of CIOs who have emerged from places like the McCombs School of Business Information, Risk, and Operations Management degree program.

Lessons from the Digital Trenches

Thanks to the work of IT pioneers, the job of CIO has come of age and shares the driver’s seat of executive-level leadership. Professors Leonard Jessup and Joseph Valacich of Washington State University note in their 2005 book “Information Systems Today” that the CIO position came about so organizations could integrate new technologies into their business plans. As corporate IT investments inside and outside the company exploded in the 1990s, the CIO role became increasingly strategic. A river of information flooded through new links between employees, customers and suppliers. New complexities required new ways of evaluating business problems, and CIOs moved from managing technology in the basement to analyzing core business challenges. What happens when you cross IT with ROI? That’s right—CIO.

Stephen Rohleder, BBA ’79, studied finance in school, but he took every MIS course offered and graduated just before the degree was formalized. Prior to becoming Accenture’s chief operating officer in 2004, he was group chief executive of Accenture’s $1.6 billion global government operating group. Under his leadership, the government group—which provides services in 23 countries—achieved outstanding growth in revenue and profitability, including increasing sales by 56 percent from fiscal year 2002 to 2003 through innovative deal structures and offerings.

But it was Rohleder’s IT track record that helped Accenture land a $10 billion contract with the U.S. government to tighten border security. Accenture will, according to Rohleder, “provide innovative solutions to current entry/exit problems, modernize or replace existing computer systems, introduce new border-management processes and implement a long-term strategy to help position the Department of Homeland Security to address future challenges.” Sound like tech support to you? Hardly.

Before the dotcom era, CIO functions were viewed as complementary to the business; now, CIO decisions are seen as crucial to success. But CIOs must choose and implement IT solutions carefully. Cary Peele, BBA ’83 and vice president of development for PointServe, believes CIOs deliver strategic value through “applications that are not all necessarily technology-driven.”

“At some point, technology becomes irrelevant,” Peele says.

But if your competitor has the same technology as you, how long can your IT remain strategic? Enter the new generation of CIOs—corporate chiefs who must cultivate the right blend of technology expertise, business capability and entrepreneurial spirit. Although technology comes and goes, one aspect of business remains constant—customer satisfaction increases profits.

Elizabeth Davis, BBA ’83, has driven her own career path in IT. As founder and CEO of QuickArrow, a leading provider of on-demand professional services automation (PSA) solutions such as tracking project status and managing time and billing, she sees the role of IT as integral not only to business functions but also to support product delivery. “The role of IT is expanding to include not only support for the internal organization, but also expanding to directly support the delivery of the primary revenue stream.”

QuickArrow delivers its PSA software as a service. Under this model, QuickArrow hosts the application, which the client accesses through a standard web browser. The IT function is now responsible for maintaining and supporting the 24/7 delivery of the application and is even classified as a cost of goods sold. While IT has always been important, it is now a critical component to the company’s ability to meet its revenue goals.

So what does an IT leader do? He or she identifies and addresses complex business concerns—rather than improving the business one piece at a time, an IT leader enhances the entire process and encourages revolutionary and evolutionary thinking. An IT leader ushers in the future by using tomorrow’s solutions to solve today’s problems.

Ingredients of IT Leadership

Stephen Rohleder believes that successful IT leaders set a vision, manage urgent and long-term goals and prioritize people and projects. He encourages managers to lead their employees without pushing them. He espouses the “teachable point of view” that a leader must, “[1] know the way, [2] show the way, and [3] go the way” to make things happen.

Deverus Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Todd Salmi, BBA ’96, emphasizes the need for skilled employees and managers who reinforce teamwork and deliver an outstanding product. In his opinion, “the general should be able to do the same job as the soldiers.” Deverus managers take time to work side-by-side with programmers and are expected to retain their technology expertise as they develop their leadership skills. Establishing this feedback loop and rapport among coworkers is key to Deverus’ success in selling sophisticated software for background checks.

Anthony Y. Tsai, MIS manager/vice president of Procter & Gamble Household Care, says P&G is different from many other companies because it selects executive-level employees almost exclusively from within the company as part of its “promote from within” policy. Having a broad perspective of the company and its core competencies should be priorities for anyone aspiring to CIO and senior levels of IT leadership. Frequently switching jobs within P&G helped him to learn about other business operations and step outside his comfort zone, particularly in marketing and customer business development roles. Tsai decided that he could best help P&G by gaining experience in the company’s broad scope of operations.

These veteran IT leaders share the belief that developing great relationships with team members in all areas of the organization is crucial. Effective leaders find strength in numbers by lending their skills to others and encouraging feedback. Open communication inside and outside the firm helps forge robust business ties that drive future success. Networking is even more important for startups and entrepreneurs engaged in the critical search for investors.

Erik McMillan, BBA ’03 and founder of Silent Technology, a company that provides testing products to students taking the LSAT, MCAT, SAT and ACT exams, relied on networking to turn his dream into reality. “Networking served a key role in our start-up process,” he says. McMillan traveled the lonely entrepreneurial road and broke through the barriers of self-doubt, criticism from skeptics and the process of finding investors. “I used my network for advice on our business plan, corporate financing, retail pricing and distribution, as well as investor funding.”

Now his SILENT TIMER™ is picking up momentum and selling faster than it can be produced. Even when naysayers told him his invention would never sell, McMillan believed in his idea and sold it by convincing others. Add “skilled salesperson” to the list of valuable CIO qualities.

Today’s world of information complexity demands a new breed of CIO—multi-skilled, multifaceted and able to envision the big picture of business transformation and the small steps it will take to get there.