Technical Leaders as Business Leaders

by Bob Gariano

Twenty five years ago a company’s Chief Technology or Information Officer was a specialist who helped the enterprise in particular circumstances where the emerging technology of information science could be applied. It was a limited role. In contrast, information technology permeates every contemporary business process from internal communications to customer contact to supply chain management to financial reporting. The Chief Information Officer in a modern corporation has become a keystone figure in the overall business leadership team.

Two years ago the Cutter IT Journal published an article entitled "The Right Way to Recruit a Chief Information Officer." The article described a study of two dozen public companies who were replacing their CIOs. The study described the need for technology leaders who are better leaders and business people as well as technical experts. Today, cutting edge technical expertise is considered to be table stakes for senior technology executives. It is leadership skill and business acumen that differentiates successful technical executives from those who are not successful. The Cutter article goes on to describe how such skills can be evaluated in interviewing candidates for these senior roles. That selection recipe has been embraced in most high performance companies.

One of the CEOs in the study put the matter in simple terms, "Our business needs much more than technical skills in our CIO. We need a technical leader who knows how to build shareholder value from their function. We need a CIO who makes IT an integral part of our business activities. And our CIO must have the leadership skills to make the people around her more successful."

Professor Chung-Chieh Lee, who teaches at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering, recognized the growing importance of CIO leadership. He founded the Master of Information Technology Program in the mid 1990s to offer a program that combines engineering and business education. It is an intensive graduate level training program for senior technology executives who want to develop their business skills in the context of the most contemporary technological advances.

Dr. Lee, who grew up in Taiwan and now lives in Buffalo Grove, saw first hand the positive and high velocity effects of technical entrepreneurism. Immigrating to the United States in the 1977, he earned his post graduate degrees in electrical engineering at Princeton. He soon became recognized as one of the leading experts in designing digital networks for sophisticated wireless communications. He has consulted with such diverse industry leaders as Juniper Networks, GE Medical, and Raytheon.

In collaboration with Professor Abraham Haddad, also a Princeton PhD and current head of the program, Dr. Lee and his colleagues designed the Master of Science in Information Technology program. The MSIT program combines training in the latest engineering aspects of information technology with the best business classes from the Kellogg School.

Dr. Haddad says, "Technology moves at a rapid pace. There is a need not only to keep up with these technologies, but for technical leaders to better understand the business principles behind corporate decision making. Before our program, there were few programs that bridged the worlds of technology and business. Our MSIT program incorporates 70% technical courses and 30% business courses. What ties all of our graduates together is a common interest in connecting the technical needs of an organization with overall business strategies."

None of this suggests that the technical content of the MSIT program is anything less than daunting. For example, the first course of the program, still taught by Dr. Lee, is a fundamental analysis of how information systems and digital networks function. The mathematics are not for the faint of heart. When asked about the critical concepts of this first MSIT course, Dr. Lee replied succinctly, "This course teaches the relationship between bit rate, baud rate, and bandwidth. If you understand this relationship, you will pass the course."

It is a simple but exigent set of mathematical and engineering concepts. The first lecture was sprinkled with terms like Nyquist bandwidth, orthogonal subcarriers, and Fourier transforms. Still, because the economics of a wireless network are based on the cost of bandwidth, this course immediately connects the technology of channel capacity, multilevel modulation, and encryption with the most important cost associated with a network, the cost of bandwidth. It is an intimate connection between technology and business economics that carries through the entire MSIT program.

Over the last 15 years Northwestern's MSIT program has graduated more than 360 executives from a variety of functional backgrounds including information technology, finance, operations, marketing, and project management. Through time, the program has continually evolved. Recent additions include courses in virtualization and nanotechnology, information security, and intellectual property and technology law.  The foundation remains the teaching of business acumen and leadership along side a demanding technical and engineering curriculum.

An example illustrates the scale of the challenge. Today, text messaging is the single most widely used data application in world with over 3.6 billion users. Almost 80% of all cell phone users in the world use texting. Last year, more than 7 trillion text messages were sent and the revenues for interconnection services for these messages totaled more than $150 billion. It is an exploding business opportunity almost without precedent.

The technology executives who manage these systems must have more than an understanding of the engineering context of the networks connecting these users. These executives must understand the customer requirements and the competitive vulnerabilities of the market. Northwestern's MSIT program provides technical leaders with the advanced skills and training to meet these new challenges. They are skills which place them in high demand as the technical leaders of the future.

Bob Gariano is President of RGA, an executive search firm that recruits senior executives and board members for public and private companies. Bob can be reached at rgariano@robertgariano.com