Change — Your Career Ally

Want to be successful? Embrace change. It is your ally.

Whether you work at an insurance company or a clothing manufacturer, have a reduced budget or more money than you can get around to spending, you have to crave change if you want to make it as a successful CIO.

That was a consistent message recently at a high-powered gathering of CIOs at a San Francisco meeting of the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology group.

”We have to be change agents and look outside the IT hole,” said David Bergen, Levi Strauss & Co.’s CIO. ”If you don’t like change, you won’t survive in the CIO’s role.”

Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. of Novato, Calif., takes that notion of CIOs and change so seriously, it’s given CIO Fred Matteson the additional title of chief transformation officer. ”I think it’s the same job,” Matteson commented.

Marty Chuck, CIO at Agilent Technologies put it this way: ”I’m a change junkie.”

It all means that 2005 should be a good year, as CIOs are expecting plenty of change — in challenges, priorities, methods and budgets. Some CIOs said they’ll focus on security issues while others are backing emerging technologies such as RFID and IP telephony.

”A big hairy goal (I have) this year is to give 10 million hours of productivity back to the business,” said Agilent’s Chuck. One way he’ll be doing that is by introducing Six Sigma, an efficiency-boosting and waste-reduction system most frequently used in the manufacturing industry, into the IT department.

This article was first published on CIOupdate.com. To read the full article, click here.