Ramón F Baez, VP & CIO, Kimberly-Clark
How long at current company: 6 months
Career accomplishment you're most proud of: Building an outstanding IT leadership team at Honeywell Automation & Control Solutions that helped drive good business results. This same team kicked off a five-year global SAP deployment to support a $10 billion business.
Most important career influencer: Uncle Damian Baez; James Kinnu, program manager of the B-2 program at Honeywell; and Jorge Diaz, chief engineer of the B-2 program. These three influenced my leadership style at different stages in my career and helped mold me into the leader that I am today.
Major decision you've made during your career that you wish you could do over again: I probably wouldn't have stayed on the B-2 bomber program for 15 years. I should have made my move into IT sooner.
Size of IT team: Insource team about 700; outsourced about 700
Top initiatives for current year:
- Transition to new insource/outsource model by year's end
- Deploy the new model without disrupting the business
- Complete 11 strategic enterprise IT projects
Measuring IT effectiveness: SLAs are great, but customer satisfaction and value creation are the best measures. I'm also an advocate of this question: Are we generating the business benefits we proposed with our strategic initiatives?
Key tech partners: AT&T, Avaya, Cognizant, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, TCS
The next big thing for my business will be the facilitation of the open, networked, and adaptive enterprise. This means providing an integrated set of modular capabilities that drive effective business evolution while providing a common framework for collaboration and relevant information sharing. In short, providing a foundation for predictive and trustworthy business scenario modeling, planning, and execution capabilities.
Best piece of advice for future CIOs: Have strong business acumen. Find a way to move into a business role or another function for a period then return to IT. You'll be much more valuable to your business.
View on the benefits of offshore outsourcing: There's value in outsourcing and offshoring, but you must be selective in the scope of work, as well as the partners you choose.
------------- Courtesy - Information week
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