Challenges and Rewards Wait at the Top for IT Executives

IT executives moving onto the top rungs of the corporate ladder do well to focus on two important assets: people and information.

That maxim is reflected in the experience of Lisa McFarlin, vice president of delivery operations for Sterling Commerce, and Vince Campitelli, senior vice president for Wachovia. These executives demonstrate how an IT background can be a springboard for advancement in today’s challenging corporate environment. And that it’s also possible to have some fun along the way.

Vince Campitelli, senior vice president for Wachovia

McFarlin, who studied both music and marketing in college, started her career in sales, then progressed into systems engineering and project management before landing back in IT, although at a higher level. Working in a division that is central to the operation of Sterling Commerce, a leader in electronic data integration for businesses, she particularly enjoys her continuing contact with tech-savvy employees. Their creativity and intelligence shine, she says.

McFarlin believes that developing good people skills can be just as important for top-level corporate managers as acquiring technological and business knowledge.

"Leadership and the ability to select for talent are things that are critical to any environment, especially IT," she says.

Keeping current with IT
Campitelli, who monitors emerging risks for Wachovia, stresses the importance of information management to top-level executives.

"My view would be that there’s no business today that can survive very long in the marketplace without mastering the use of information technology," Campitelli says.

"You just really need people who make it very easy to understand, in non-technical terms, how and where and what’s involved in making sure technology is effectively deployed and used to support the business."

Campitelli is a CPA with an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA. He served as a managing partner at Coopers & Lybrand accounting, auditing and taxation services before leading the global information technology audit organizations at Salomon Smith Barney and Goldman Sachs Inc. He has also served as the chief technology officer for an Internet start-up and as vice president of strategic alliances at an information security consulting firm.

Now Campitelli’s work at Wachovia focuses on ways to identify potential external events that could impact the business, and strategies to address that risk. Considering the speed of change in today’s business and economic climate, historical modeling isn’t effective in many cases, and it can be a challenge to identify and acquire the information needed to predict the future and prepare for it, he adds.

Bringing it all together
"I think a real challenge today is for the businesses to fully understand the information they need and then have the ability to access it, analyze it and effectively use it," Campitelli says. "And interestingly enough, with some of the recent tools that have been developed for the marketplace, combined with Web technologies, business staff are now seeing where they can go out and access these tools in a relatively easy-to-use [manner], as long as you can tie it into the infrastructure."

For those at the helm of high-growth corporations, the integration of information systems can be even more of an issue, especially when that growth involves acquisitions of existing companies.

"The challenge for any major organization that has grown by acquisition is the rationalization of redundant systems and the creation of an overall corporate data model. When a company has acquired over the last 10 to 20 years, 10, 20, or even 50 other companies, you create quite a collection of legacy systems, applications and supporting infrastructure," he says. "Each one adds to your customer base, your revenue stream, your related expense streams and accounting systems. It’s the additive aspects of both business process and technology that challenges technology management. It makes an awareness of exactly where is all your data, how is it being used, what are all the systems that are creating, using and /or manipulating the data the major challenge in utilizing the concepts of business intelligence. Without achieving the former, business intelligence becomes another technology oxymoron."

Hence, it is important for the vendors, such as SAS, who are developing these new era tool sets, to fully understand and support their customers in the functions and business processes necessary to fully utilize the BI tools.

Another key is leadership
On par with technology and communication skills, McFarlin cites good leadership as a primary element in running successful organizations. In fact, she experienced the impact herself after joining Sterling. Reorganization and personnel changes had created a situation where "lots of things fell through the cracks," McFarlin says. "People were not communicating very well." Duplication of effort and inefficiency in the internal infrastructure resulted.

"But since that time, we have built up our leadership," she adds. "We’ve started building relationships across organizations and within the IT organization. Things are actually working pretty well. You have to get rid of all the inefficiencies and then you can actually start to look at ways to improve the infrastructure with virtualization and more modern methods."

Virtualization has led to the elimination of 400 to 500 servers from Sterling’s operation, which has helped to unify the system and give control back to the company’s management team, she says.

Further progress will be made as Sterling moves toward more mature business intelligence applications, McFarlin predicts. For example, a company using SAS’ BI software can integrate data that allows a variety of self-service reporting and analysis options.

"It just takes a lot of selling, a lot of homework and modeling to show what you can do with the information and the value it adds,” McFarlin says. “I think it’s absolutely necessary."

Lisa McFarlin

vice president of delivery operations for Sterling Commerce