The six accomplished IT executives we induct into the 2009 CIO Hall of Fame share more than an impressive history of business and technology achievements. What especially stands out among them is a sense of mission and imagination, coupled with a passion to understand and apply IT wherever it can shrink the distance between people and companies, speed commerce, advance health, improve product safety or create new ways to learn and work and live.
Across the C-suite, there is no position that demands as much invention as that of CIO, says Tony Scott, CIO of Microsoft and one of our honorees. Scott is also the former CIO of The Walt Disney Co. and former CTO of General Motors.
See the complete list of Finalists and Judges here. Check out the 2008 and 2007 honorees.
"We put all the business sensors in place, connecting all the parts. We can see where the friction in a company is. With that," he says, "is the responsibility to be part of the solution."
This year's CIO Hall of Fame inductees join 44 past recipients honored for work that has shaped the business technology landscape, demonstrating both creative vision and practical IT leadership. This year, a panel of 15 former CIO Hall of Fame honorees helped us judge our nominees, naming 13 finalists as well.
While we recognize this year's inductees for their many outstanding career successes, it is also instructive to consider the collection of experiences--good and bad, happy and not--that got them here. During their careers, our honorees have capitalized on or created the room to build stronger companies. Looking back, they recognize as milestones some events that at the time seemed modest or even took them by surprise. They have developed notions about how to do IT that survive up-and-down economic cycles, management fads and the latest product hype. And now, with a sobering decline in the number of college graduates entering enterprise IT, this year's Hall of Fame inductees are keen to share ideas for enticing the next generation to take the CIO journey.
CIOs have "broad entry into the entire organization," says Pat Skarulis, CIO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a $1.6 billion healthcare powerhouse in New York City. "You have the opportunity to be innovative and work with the most innovative thinkers in your organization--the ones who want to do something differently. You're always excited by new technologies and new processes. That sense of opportunity is always there."
Skarulis, 63, doesn't see what's so hard about rousing youth to walk to the CIO path. For her, it's about having a mission. She has served in IT leadership positions at Rush University, Duke University, Rutgers and Princeton University, to name a few. With a 40-year career leading IT in academia and hospitals, she admits that in such settings, "mission" may be a bit easier to identify: educating people, helping patients.
But she believes corporations, too, can generate a sense of mission. "If you're being measured by Wall Street and your stock is getting creamed, that's difficult. But if you have a clear goal and set it for your staff, they can go home and celebrate how they're helping achieve it."
Career Turning Points
In work as in life (as if the two were truly separate), you make the best possible decisions with the information and skills you have at the time. You spend your career adding to that information as you go: degrees earned, projects managed or mismanaged, uptimes celebrated, downturns weathered. Those experiences all inform your next decision, though sometimes the path isn't quite so linear.
Bill Deam, CIO of Quintiles Transnational, recounts how disappointments and taking what may seem to be counterintuitive action moved his career forward. Deam, 56, joined the $2.7 billion medical research company in 2005, after holding the CIO post and other IT executive positions at The Nielsen Co., Safeway (in the United Kingdom) and Mars, among others. "I went from very
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