LAINO: On the infrastructure or overhead side, the IT group is the change agent for the company. They are the ones that know how to manage change through a process by introducing technology and push the process along.

AUTHELET: When someone comes in and asks us to do something, you turn around and say, okay, you go and talk to a business process person for us. They look different than an IT person. They work on the business process, and then you come to us and you talk to us about the refinement of that process. That's versus IT folks coming in and applying the solutions.

BROGAN: I think part of the challenge is to balance that technology with the new technology that's out there, or what we have established and balance it with the process. How does it integrate with the business and how we do things? It's a critical part of my role, I know, to try to mitigate those two almost disparate ideas. If I go in from a technology point of view and say, this is the way we should be doing things: 3- D modeling, use this tool, it is not going to work. It cannot be driven by me only. Bringing in the whole other side --.the architects, users, managers and such -- and integrating them is really what our role is.

SCHRIENER: Does that mean that there are a lot of hallway conversations? Do you see your job as selling?

BROGAN: Hallway conversations and lots of walking around. A long time ago, I would sit downstairs with the IT folks and kind of just do my thing, and it's absolutely the wrong thing to do. Now, I'm out there involved with all the projects with the folks that are working and really understanding their pain as well as how we can push things further.

RAMLETH: We found a common ground in how you actually get some of these change
agents to really respond, and that was by the corporate acceptance that Six Sigma should be the way we operate. So you don't drive it from the technology side.

STOCKLEY: Change agents, who are really IT representatives, live in the business units. What that has done for us is similar to what Keith said. It doesn't give the feeling or appearance that change is being driven by IT. We try to support the goals of the organization. We try never to have initiatives, ever.

PUGLISI: You really put your finger on something, Chris. You have to be able to pick up the phone and talk to these senior management. And equally important, if not more important, they have to feel comfortable picking up the phone and calling you. You don't want to spew a bunch of three letter acronyms or technobabble at them. You have to be able to speak in clear and concise English terms, or construction terms, whatever the case may be.

RAMLETH: That's the beauty of being in construction, because you can throw the same vocabulary back to them. Building software systems is like building a building. You go through the same methodology on the same macro level and analysis.You design this, you go down to the detail design, you test it, build it.

WOLGEMUTH: Judy, you asked if we sell and I would tell you that I think that's part
of what has created a bad reputation for us. We ought to be listening and not selling, and to the extent that we have sold without understanding problems, then we've earned a reputation that says we don't connect.

RAMLETH: I don't think we sell; I think we market. And by doing proper marketing,
you do a lot of listening.

KERSHAW: I don't have an IT department because I didn't want technology to drive what we were doing. I wanted it to be the other two legs of the stool, and that's people and process.

GULAS: We are so decentralized. Every office seems to have their own IT specialist in it, and they all seem to develop things that will tap into the infrastructure. There are skunk works everywhere. Just this past year we set up an investment management process where anything over X amount of dollars, we have a representative from every major business unit sitting at a table and one IT person, which is me, theoretically. We make decisions regarding the organization. Invariably it's the cost. The costs are going up, but the business end realized that they are making the costs go up, in many cases.

SCHRIENER: Geir and I had a conversation a few days ago and one of the things that he mentioned was that a lot of their requests and ideas come from the bottom up. Are you finding that in your companies, especially if you are very decentralized?

ANDERSON: I walk around and ask a lot of questions. I find out an awful lot of scuttlebutt. Every so often from the president or from the board I will get a request, but most often it comes right from walking around and talking to people, sort of gluing them and getting them to talk.

RUBIN: Do you see yourselves the glue in the sense that brings together the business units? Is there a lot of that going on in companies or not enough of that?

STOCKLEY: The CIO role is a very unique role in that everyone in the organization knows and looks at us, whether it be an issue that we caused or our technology caused. Visibility in the role is unlike probably the CEO. You almost can't walk in a building and not have people know who you are and what you do. We (in the Office of the CIO) have done a pretty good job of building relationships and really building a transparency in our group.

RAMLETH: Our job is like being a soccer keeper. Nobody knows about you until you let one in. When you screw up, then they all scream. When it all works, you never hear anything. I'll never hear, "You know, the e-mail system is working really well."

THOMPSON: Well, I'm on the M & A front, and that's all I've been doing for the past two years for the Shaw Group. We literally had to get to a single platform in about nine months, with about 17,000 employees. We had five different ERP systems. Our IT spending was cut in half because of it, so we had to get there for that reason. We didn't have a choice or the luxury of getting more of the business line involved. Now that we have turned that corner and finished that project, we have been a little nicer about approaching the business lines to get involved in some of the other technology initiatives.

RUBIN: When you are doing an integration as part of a merger, this is the first line where you are having an impact on the culture. What impact does that have? Does it change it drastically?

PUGLISI: We did two major acquisitions and have doubled in size in the last four years. It's an absolutely remarkable, dramatic difference in the attitude of the management of the firms that were acquired, because to them the EMCOR net was just what EMCOR did when they were purchased. You talk about the cultural impact. This was becoming a part of EMCORI. t was a tangible change and it had made them feel a part of it.