All security projects undertaken at Kodak in the past two years have supported very specific business needs. For example, when the business needed a streamlined process for provisioning third-party contractors, Jones' team implemented a server log monitoring application for that purpose.
"I view this relationship with the business as the most important part of the job," Jones says. "In the past, IT security was one of those organizations that sat in the corner and said no. I've challenged my organization to never go in and tell a business manager no, but help them by going in and figuring out a good solution."
Indeed, taking a proactive stance and heading the innovation efforts to achieve an overarching business vision is another defining characteristic of the 2011 class of Premier 100 IT Leaders.
At St. Louis-based bioMérieux Inc., for example, Global Senior Director of R&D Information Systems Haroon Taqi and his team were out in front in analyzing how the maker of diagnosis systems could improve its diagnostic software and its competitive positioning with customers.
"In the past, the norm was for marketing to come to us and tell us what they need. But instead, we [in IT] decided to work with marketing and our customers to determine the biggest hurdles to expanding our product and our market share," Taqi says.
"We drove the change we wanted to create," he notes. "IT did the competitive analysis, and I did some of the analysis myself."
Ultimately, the IT group conceived and developed a new software architecture and system that enables bioMérieux to automatically deliver software updates to customers without having to dispatch IT personnel to do so. BioMérieux's software is embedded in instruments used to identify new and evolving types of bacterial infections.
"What we've done is make it easy for customers to do updates themselves, much like installing patches," Taqi says. "Before, it could take as much as a year for us to have all of the delivery mechanisms in place to do installations for customers."
Quick Turnaround
Accretive Health, a provider of financial management services to the healthcare industry, also has a business goal of speeding its software products, services and updates to market. Cottey's challenge as CIO is to continually work with business managers to decide which updates and services are most critical. Last year, he and his IT team designed and implemented an agile development methodology to deliver new software capabilities that match and/or stay ahead of the flood of new and changing healthcare regulations that Accretive's clients must track.
"One of the ways we get things out quickly is we plan to get things out quickly," Cottey says, adding that all work IT undertakes is rated on a scale designed to measure its business impact.
"We're in constant touch with business owners to measure what impact a certain change might yield on our efficiency," he says. "It's not the time to invest in eye candy or gee-whiz things without a good bottom-line value. We focus on that 10% to 20% of capability that is worth delivering right now."
The Seeds of Future Growth
Many of the IT projects that delivered business value in 2010 will continue to yield big dividends going forward, especially at companies like JetBlue Inc. and Scottrade Inc., where IT leaders deployed new, foundational systems that transformed the business.
JetBlue CIO Joseph Eng says a new customer service system that his team rolled out last year enables the airline to quickly establish new partnerships with other airlines, and thereby helps it expand its global network.
"We're able to grow the number of destinations, routes, places and people who travel via JetBlue through these partnerships," Eng explains. "It's all very technologically based because you have to connect the two airlines' systems, sharing route, inventory and network information so you can also share itineraries."
Soon after the system went live in January 2010, JetBlue announced several new partnerships, giving travelers the ability to use a single system to make plans to fly from Tel Aviv through JFK Airport in New York and on to any of JetBlue's domestic locations. Eng says the airline will announce additional partnerships this year, extending its international network to London and Johannesburg, South Africa.
"We went to work on the customer service system with the knowledge that we wanted to enable these kinds of partnerships much more quickly," Eng says.
"Our leadership team has a fundamental belief that this is actually an opportune time, which is why we continue to invest in the business from a products, services and operations perspective. The idea is, let's drive through some of these tough times but also prepare ourselves so that when we do have an uptick, we can do even more to stimulate growth," he says.
At St. Louis-based Scottrade, IT completed building a brand-new secondary data center. The financial services company is initially using the facility as a fail-over data center, but it eventually plans to use it to geographically split up the systems that serve the independent investors who make up its customer base. The goal is to offer faster response times and better service by handling customers' needs in the data center located closest to them.
Also in the works is the launch of a new division of Scottrade Bank that will enable customers to move seamlessly between trading and banking transactions -- a setup that will give Scottrade an entirely new revenue stream.
"In the year ahead, we'll be focused on positioning ourselves for continued growth so that when the recession turns around and the economy begins to grow, we'll have the right applications in place," says Anne Coleman, director of trading applications.
The bottom line: Expect seamless leadership from these IT executives in 2011 and beyond, regardless of what happens with the economy, the unemployment rate or their corporate IT budgets. As long as the business vision is clear, Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders will continue to deliver innovation and value.
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