We’re believers that there’s no better time than now to be a CIO because of the transformative power and ubiquitous nature of technology.
IT has become the ultimate multi-disciplinary function because technology is critical to every function within every company. Our careers have been grounded in IT, which enabled us to assist our internal clients and learn the company’s diverse functions from the inside out. CIOs, as IT professionals, you are at the center of the business.
USG Corp., like other global companies, confronts more sophisticated technological, regulatory, economic and environmental challenges every day. IT is at the center of integrating solutions to resolve those business issues.
Yes, to succeed in IT, you need to be a technically sound and bring excellence to the execution of every project. But you also need to hone your skills as collaborators solve the business problem at hand.
The secret every successful CIO knows is that being in IT provides the opportunity to learn your company’s business from the experts. Helping to solve your customer’s toughest problems holds the keys to the kingdom of running the business. In essence, IT is the one role where you literally get to see how everything in the company runs.
Both of us began our work at USG on a project we called LinX, a customer satisfaction initiative that involved the enterprise rollout of core business process applications that enabled USG to collect, store, manage and interpret data from its business activities. It was something much more basic from our customer’s point of view – a system that enabled customers to know whether we had the product and when they would receive it. Back in 2000, that was an almost impossible task across USG’s 70-plant network in North America.