If you want to succeed as a chief information officer–really succeed – then forget the conventional wisdom about aligning the IT department with the business and facilitating that success. Instead, you’ll need to go out and create a project that impacts the company’s end customers in a major way. At least, that’s one recommendation from a multi-year research project by the Fisher CIO Leadership Program at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, designed to find exactly what makes a CIO successful.
The program identified and interviewed 14 CIOs who had been extraordinarily successful, including Dawn Lepore, former CIO of Charles Schwab, Robert Carter, CIO at FedEx and Max Hopper, former senior vice president of information technology at American Airlines. All of the CIOs had a major visible customer-focused project that was recognized as a game changer and accelerated their career progress, James Spitze, executive director of the Fisher CIO Leadership Program, told CIO Journal. “Every one of those projects was customer-facing,” he said.
Lepore, now CEO of Drugstore.com, launched Schwab.com in 1995. “It was the first customer-facing website for the company that was then a worldwide leader in electronic trading by its brokers, and it helped Schwab preserve its competitive position as a discount broker against upstart E*Trade,” according to a 2007 profile of Lepore in CIO Magazine.
At FedEx, Carter took package tracking online and saved the company a great deal of money. It once cost FedEx $2.40 to track a package for a customer by phone but that was reduced to only $.04 when customers visit its website, according to a 2003 article in the Economist. In February 2005, FedEx said customers had tracked one billion shipments online.
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Finally, Hopper’s work on the SABRE system while he was at American Airlines in the mid-70s, let the world’s travel agents quickly access up-to-date flight information for the first time, says Spitze. He was an IT manager at the time but later became a senior vice president for information technology at American Airlines.
The findings of that project were published in an article called Renaissance CIO Project: Invisible Factors of Extraordinary Success in California Management Review’s Winter 2012 edition. On Monday, the school said the project will be discussed at an event at U.C. Berkeley on September 14.