“If this doesn’t come through, I’m going to be gone.”
That’s what Union Pacific CIO Lynden Tennison told me a few years ago, describing a massive undertaking he was leading to overhaul the iconic railroad company’s transportation-management system. Based on initial estimates, the project, dubbed NetControl, would cost at least $200 million over the course of a decade or so.
Union Pacific’s transportation-management system had been written several decades before, on about 12 million lines of Assembler code. As I wrote in my book, “Confessions of a Successful CIO,” this nearly 150-year-old company, with a storied history of innovation, was running an enterprise resource planning system that was almost older than its CIO. Something had to give.
My co-author Dan Roberts and I recounted the story in a chapter of our book which you can read here . It oozes with some of the most challenging issues for CIOs: replacing legacy systems; building influence in the C-suite; developing and motivating talent; and, perhaps above all, how IT organizations can transform or redefine the way business gets done.
Clearly, those are critical areas that we need to discuss, and the CIO community needs to work together more to share best practices, risks and guidance from their experiences in each topic area. But for me, Lynden’s story resonates because of his ability to demonstrate true leadership. That’s something we don’t talk about enough in the CIO community—and that needs to change.
I have had the great pleasure of speaking at MES West 2015 and MES East 2016. At the latter, I interviewed Anthem CIO Tom Miller, who has quickly become one of my favorite IT leaders, not only for his intriguing background http://www.cio.com/article/3101439/cio-role/how-one-cio-navigated-the-path-from-sales-to-it-leader.html but also because of the compelling initiatives he is leading at the healthcare giant.
At the upcoming MES Conference in Austin, I will share the stage with Lynden Tennison. During that conversation, attendees will hear more about the ambitious NetControl program, but more importantly, you’ll hear Tennison’s strong perspectives on executive leadership, IT strategy, and people management.
Now, I understand that many midmarket IT leaders might be thinking, “What can the CIO of a $22 billion company tell me about the midsize market?” Well, the interesting thing about Tennison is he helped to create and run smaller technology companies that were spun out of his own organization. Tennison’s IT team has long been a forerunner in the railroad industry—to the point where they have productized their internal offerings and actually sell them to competitors. He will tell you that the revenue those subsidiaries earn is a “rounding error” for Union Pacific, but he’s being humble (another of his outstanding attributes). How many big-company IT organizations have you heard of that have that sell their technology products?
And here’s some more perspective on how Tennison pairs his business smarts with the entrepreneurial spirit he spearheads within Union Pacific’s IT shop. He insists that his subsidiaries plow a minimum of 15 percent of annual revenue back into R&D. As he told us in “Confessions of a Successful CIO,” if you don’t stay current, you’re dead. You have to continually re-plow R&D in all aspects of your business. It made it obvious to me that you can’t run a really good technology idea for very long as an annuity.
http://siliconprairienews.com/2014/05/the-startup-that-grew-from-inside-...}> to see one example of these subsidiaries.)
The advisory board for the Midsize Enterprise Summit was kind enough to offer some suggestions on what we will discuss during our session in Austin, and we will do our best to cover a broad range of topics, including:
• Best practices for getting executive management engaged in the IT roadmap;
• How to inspire innovative thinking inside the IT organization;
• Recruiting, retaining and developing top talent in IT;
• Balancing innovation investments with bottom-line concerns; and
• Key technology trends affecting the midmarket
As a side note, for those of you interested in data analytics and the Internet of Things, check out this piece I wrote https://www.hpematter.com/issue-no-2-semptember-2014/union-pacifics-c about the opportunities Lynden sees in those spaces.)
