"Collins senior management concluded the company should create a single, integrated financial system to operate across the company instead of financial and management system silos that currently thwarted a full view of the consolidated company," Charette's report says. "The effort was named Project Fusion to signify what needed to be done. A single system would allow the company more accurate and timely information, as well as reduce costs by eliminating system and process redundancy. As part of Project Fusion implementation, the company would streamline all of its business processes."

More important, Charette points out, the Project Fusion implementation would hard code a proactive risk culture into the heart of the company: its accounting and financials business process and decision-making processes were tied together.

Project manager John-Paul Besong knew failure was a clear possibility. With so much having to go right, he gave Project Fusion only a 20 percent chance of success from the start. His job, he knew, was to raise the likelihood of success. He succeeded brilliantly. Today Besong is senior vice president of e-business and lean electronics for Rockwell Collins

Value and More Value

Charette says, the CIO's job today revolves around his or her contribution to the bottom line. It is all about the value he or she can contribute to the business and the ways he or she can align IT to the business. That alignment is as much financial as it is strategic. In other words, CIOs must be innovative without costing the company money, and they have to do it quickly (see "Money (That's What I Want)", page 52). "It's an almost impossible triangle to try to solve," Charette says.

Yet, many CIOs are grappling with a loss of corporate knowledge because the jobs of some of their future brightest and best have been outsourced. CIOs expected to do more with less cannot sensibly be innovative in today's business climate, he says. If they tried, they would risk overrunning their projects or running not-very-successful projects, which would in turn seriously irritate senior management.

"So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't," he says. "If you produce value this year, then the next year you have got to produce even more value."

As for the way forward, Charette agrees that CIOs are likely to have heard much of his advice before.

CIOs should consider taking some courses in how to be better decision makers, for a start, he says. But they also have to be exceedingly sensible and proactive in identifying and managing risks and concentrate on getting value for money for all their efforts.

They also need to look for ways to create more "decision freedom" - that is, setting the environment to give them the greatest possible freedom of action.

"Part of it is also doing everything that you possibly can as well as you can. You know, these are not magic bullets, but if your IT shop isn't producing, has poor practices et cetera, then taking all the leadership courses in the world isn't going to help you. So you have to be very, very good at the basics, but at the same time, you have to expend some very conscious effort into learning how to be entrepreneurial, learning how to take some risks. But you have to do so in a way that you can explain it to the CFO, explain it to the board."

Charette routinely talks to boards and finds they are usually interested in new ideas, but that those new ideas are rarely explained to them well. That often gets down to the language the CIOs use when they talk to the boards. When CIOs talk technology to the board rather than business they are more easily ignored, he says.

However, it also means CIOs must develop the leadership skills called for to nurture their staff and encourage them to take risks. And ideally, it means they must constantly push for a place at the board table. Charette says studies have found that corporations who have CIOs on the board, who educate up at the top level, tend to get the most value from their IT.