Meridith Levinson

William Scales wouldn't be where he is today

For two years, Joe Gagliardi had been pondering where to go next in his professional life. But it wasn't until this past May when he vacationed in Jamaica with his wife and a group of acquaintances that his next step (and a plan of action for getting there) came into focus.

Shortly after Dick LeFave arrived at Nextel Communications Inc. in February 1999 as the company's new senior vice-president and CIO, he concluded that Nextel could vastly improve its IT operations and its sagging bottom line (it had posted a US$1.8 billion loss in 1998) if it outsourced a good portion of its IT.

To hear Tom Trainer discuss the rigors he experienced as a global CIO, you'd think it was a stress factory.

David Butler, 59, was thinking of heading for the fairways of retirement in 1998. At the time, he was wrapping up a 31-year tenure with Dow Chemical Co. But when he was offered a job as corporate vice-president and CIO of Whirlpool, his R&R reveries quickly turned into visions of his company's products in more than 80 million homes. Thus, he postponed his retirement plans for another five years.

Soon after he joined Whirlpool as corporate vice-president and CIO, David Butler says he began thinking about succession planning.

When it comes to Web site look, feel and functionality, many companies have let technology, development tools and hunches do the driving rather than data about customers' needs. But with e-commerce maturing, some B2C (and B2B) sites have become overloaded with information leading to confused navigation, grandfathered dead ends and, ultimately, frustrated end users.

Real employees who received poor performance reviews from Cheryl Smith, senior vice-president and chief information officer (CIO) of US$57-billion McKesson Corp.