The Ultimate CIO

As InformationWeek's 20th Chief of the Year, the innovation-inclined and customer-obsessed Tim Stanley follows in the footsteps of 19 other dynamic and influential business technology executives. Taken together, their powers could combine to create a veritable Voltron of IT leadership: the Ultimate CIO. What follows are some of the extraordinary attributes a handful of recent winners bring to the table. Financial wizard and bridge-builder Our 1996 winner, Chase Manhattan Bank CIO Denis O'Leary (now an investor and consultant), helped oversee what was then the largest bank merger in U.S. history. O'Leary, a car aficionado, once sold a 1966 MGB for more than three times the purchase price. He also was and is a tech visionary, having thrust Chase Manhattan into data mining and onto the Web ahead of its main rivals. Bottom-line business exec Our 1997 honoree, Wal-Mart CIO Randy Mott, is a first-class technologist who built a world-class IT organization at the giant retailer before leaving for Dell and then Hewlett-Packard. But Mott was always a businessman--the consummate retailer--first and foremost. He embraced a range of early-stage supply chain, data management, point-of-sale, and other technologies to replenish inventory, speed transactions, and improve customer service--all while keeping costs to a Wal-Mart-renowned minimum. Demanding boss, hard-bargaining partner General Motors CIO Ralph Szygenda, our 2002 Chief of the Year, knows how to get the best out of employees and vendors alike. Szygenda's rigorous reviews of IT projects, the incredibly high bars he sets for vendors and outsourcing partners, and the absolute accountability he demands of his deputies make for an intense working environment--but ultimately one that cut an IT budget by $100 million in two years and forced competing outsourcers to work together. Adaptive newcomer Our 2003 honoree, Roy Dunbar, then CIO of Eli Lilly, is a different sort of business technology leader. The former pharmacist and comparative religion student is studious and humble, characteristics that made him incredibly adaptive as CIO. Dunbar came into the role short on tech experience, but he was a quick study, taking classes at Harvard and absorbing what he could from employees. One major accomplishment was bringing disparate research groups together under a new knowledge management platform. Risk taker Another former Wal-Mart CIO, Linda Dillman, our 2004 Chief of the Year, is a force of innovation. As CIO, Dillman led the retailer's charge into RFID long before other companies began to grasp how the technology could transform supply chains. That initiative has experienced some technical and cooperative setbacks, but Dillman's bet may yet make a company already legendary for its efficiency even more so. Big thinker, master planner FedEx CIO Rob Carter, our 2005 winner, pulled off business technology's version of the Marshall Plan with the 6x6 Transformation, a multiyear program that, among other things, set global IT infrastructure standards and processes, aligned the IT organization more closely with business units, and focused tech spending on areas that would improve customer satisfaction. Carter also showed grace under fire, setting up private radio networks and stopping shipments to undeliverable locations during Hurricane Katrina and rerouting packages to ground transport after 9/11. Change agent Last year's Chief of the Year, Dan Drawbaugh, CIO of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, is a true believer in the power of IT to transform business and help people, having worked in health care since 1983 and having wanted to be involved in health care technology since he was a child. Drawbaugh and team showed the laggard health care industry how to go digital, deploying e-medical records, computerized physician order-entry systems, clinical support tools, and other multimedia systems for UPMC, among the world's largest hospital systems and health care service providers.