Global CIO: How Do You Match Up Against 50 Of The World's Top CIOs?

From around the globe, the Global CIO 50 -- some of the world's most innovative and dynamic business technology leaders -- are pursuing a range of initiatives that differ greatly from company to company and industry to industry. But for all of their differences, the members of our Global CIO 50 have found common ground in making IT an externally directed force focused on growth, customers, on market-facing leadership.

Out of that list of 50 brilliant CIOs, I've listed 10 and offered a related question with each one against which you can benchmark yourself. How do your priorities match up with these members of the Global CIO 50?

Jai Menon is group CIO for India's Bharti Enterprises, a conglomerate whose business units are in such fields as wireless communications, retail, insurance, and agriculture. For the wireless unit, called Bharti Airtel, Menon also serves as head of customer service, giving him a very direct link to the customer world of revenue, loyalty, complaints, preferences, and emerging trends. QUESTION: Are you engaged deeply enough in the non-IT parts of your business?

At Shenzhen Airlines in China, CIO Liu Zhixuan is leading an effort he calls "service-chain integration," which offers an end-to-end view of not just processes but also customer segmentation and resets the outcomes of some of those processes based on a customer's status. QUESTION: During the past year of endless cost cutting, have you been able to make progress in offering strategic end-to-end visibility for your enterprise?

Kim Tae Keuk is CIO of LG Electronics and is implementing a global single-instance Oracle ERP system for the $48 billion-a-year South Korean company. The cornerstone of that effort was an 18-month effort to map, integrate, and optimize 440 business processes across the company's 83 subsidiaries within the new system, reflecting Kim's belief that IT teams must be masters of all business processes across the enterprise. QUESTION: Do you and your team qualify as business process masters across your enterprise? If not, should you?

In the past year, Alcoa Brazil's head of IT, Tania Nossa, focused intently on extending and upgrading the company's connectivity. For Nossa, that required optimizing connectivity miles under the surface of the earth in bauxite mines in the Amazon rain forest with satellites and IP networks. Along the way, Nossa and Alcoa looped into their network a number of schools and hospitals in the region. QUESTION: As you're undertaking complex technology projects, are you considering reasonable ways those projects can offer significant social benefits without diluting your effort?

Alan Matula is CIO of Royal Dutch Shell and in the past year has signed $4 billion in outsourcing contracts, led one of the largest unified communications projects in the world, and pushed ahead with a range of social-networking efforts. QUESTION: In spite of the lousy global economy, are you being aggressive enough as CIO to bring about the transformations your company needs?

State Street CIO Chris Perretta has extensive resources at his disposal for delivering business value: 5,300 IT professionals and 20% to 25% of the company's operating-expense budget. But perhaps his most-important asset is his breakthrough commitment to aligning State Street's IT efforts not with the old-fashioned and internally driven model of "the business" but rather with its customers. On the company's Web site, Perretta pledges, "We are focused more than ever on ensuring that State Street's IT vision and business strategy are aligned with our clients' demands and needs." QUESTION: Are you building your IT vision and strategy to reflect internal operations or customer-driven opportunities?

Fiat Group CIO Gilberto Ceresa has embedded virtual engineering deep into the carmaker's production process to squeeze time and cost out of the old, slow, and expensive process of modeling everything with physical prototypes. That slashed the design-to-production cycle from 26 to 18 months, which is essential in today's consumer-driven and often fad-inspired world. QUESTION: If someone asks your CEO what level of contribution you're making to your company's efforts to create new products and services more rapidly and with greater chances of market success, would the answer be (a) "my CIO has been a magnificent accelerator of our processes"; (b) "my CIO has consistently supported the innovative methods proposed by others"; or (c) "my CIO and his old-fashioned ways of thinking have become a drag on our ability to compete and we're about to make a big change"?

In the turbulent world of global marketing and advertising, JWT senior VP Sunil Mehta has a track record of getting out in front of some of the massive business model and technology shifts that have rocked the advertising business. From conceiving a comprehensive application for media operations to developing an ASP model for media buying, Mehta, who functions as CIO but whose title is central Asia systems director, has helped JWT (formerly J. Walter Thompson) avoid the wrenching adaptations many ad agencies have been forced to cobble together in an attempt to catch up and stay relevant in the high-change global-advertising market. QUESTION: How do your company's business model IT capabilities stack up against those of existing and, more important, emerging competitors? And if your business models are behind, is that because or in spite of IT?

Rolls-Royce chalked up revenue growth of 22% last year as it continued to diversify from being primarily a maker of premium luxury cars to being a designer and builder of power sources -- including engines, turbines, and propulsion systems -- for aerospace, marine, and energy markets. Jonathan Mitchell, CIO and director of business process improvement, realized several years ago that what he called the company's "software fiefdoms" -- 24 separate instances of SAP around the globe -- would be a barrier to not only efficiency but also growth. Today, Mitchell has converted those 24 versions of the truth into one single global instance. QUESTION: Was Mitchell able to achieve that because of his dual title of CIO and director of business process improvement? Or is it something all CIOs should be leading?

In Brazil, Banco Bradesco VP of IT Larcio Albino Cezar has 2,238 IT employees, with about 4% of those dedicated to R&D to help create competitive advantage through tech-enabled innovation. Banco Bradesco is looking to enhance customer security and confidence with biometric authentication, which it's testing at 1,700 ATMs in Brazil. QUESTION: In spite of the brutal economy and the multiple budget cuts you've had to make over the past year, have you managed to preserve forward-looking R&D efforts? If not, how will you and your team play catch-up when the business climate improves?

Take a look at your answers to these 10 questions based on comparisons with priorities and achievements of some of our Global CIO 50. How do you feel you measure up? In which areas are you holding your own, and in which do you feel exposed? Would you be comfortable showing your CEO a side-by-side comparison? Can you use these examples of worldwide excellence to buttress your arguments for how your priorities should be set, or for why you should be excused from an imminent round of budget cuts?

As we've emphasized in this column, the global economic downturn is accelerating the evolution of the CIO position and will require CIOs to be more business-driven, more customer-focused, more able to articulate clearly the business value of IT expenses, and more accountable for growth. I hope the 10 examples above from the Global CIO 50, plus the related self-assessment questions, will help you take stock of whether you're ahead of -- or behind -- that evolutionary curve.

For more on how Global CIOs are handling today's challenges, read the InformationWeek cover story The Global CIO 50: IT Leaders Changing the Business World