"Attracting and retaining the best talent is the difference between success and failure."

RON UTTERBECK
Corporate CIO
GE

In his role as Chief Information Officer (CIO) – GE Corporate and AMSTC, Ron Utterbeck is responsible for delivering enterprise applications and services, IT centers of excellence, driving IT innovation for the company and developing a world-class technology center. Utterbeck joined the Company in 1992, and has held a variety of leadership  roles, beginning with global manufacturing production, messaging and integration services at GE Lighting. He served as an IT Leader for three Americas-based businesses in GE Plastics and was responsible for driving process improvements across GE Plastics’ global operations. In 2010, he was appointed to his current role of CIO – GE Corporate and AMSTC.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.

In the dynamic global world that we live and do business in, speed is a huge differentiator for our customers. Speed of analysis, speed of decision, speed of solution, and speed to benefits are just a few examples of how we set ourselves apart from our competition. In IT, we need to be able to grab onto technological advancements and trends like mobile, big data, and social networks, quickly figure out how they can bring real business value and then quickly enable our businesses to exploit the capabilities to make us faster.

Leveraging agile and non-blocking methodologies, as well as focusing our projects on getting to the benefits faster vs. focusing on delivering an IT solution that on day 1 meets 100% of the criteria, is also key.

SAAS models allow us to bring solutions faster to the business, but they also bring challenges like security and integration within the existing IT eco-system.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier.

Providing solutions would be so much easier if people followed industry standards. Take for example the HTML standard. All browser manufactures pick and choose what they implement and when. Having an application that works across all major browsers via one standard code continues to be challenging.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

Big data, mobile, social networks in the enterprise and gesture based computing are just a few. Gesture based computing has huge potential to bring computing power to new audiences. With gestures and pictures, one does not need to know the language to be able to work within an application. I believe this will continue to transform and expand the workplace. It also makes it easier to take a single IT solution across the world.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

Today, more than ever, the CIO role requires one to wear many hats and fly at multiple attitudes many times at the same time. CIOs need to understand business strategy, detailed business process as well as be a technically strong across existing and emerging technologies.

Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you

IT is a people game. You want the smartest technical brains that have experience with your business processes. You want people who can influence their IT and functional peers. You want people who can lead complex projects and drive significant change throughout the business. Attracting and retaining the best talent is the difference between success and failure. I spend a huge amount of my time focusing on people.

In IT we like to have things be 100 percent. Instead we need to focus on how to launch, tweak, and launch again; this enables us to deliver benefits to the business quicker.