Global CIO: How Do You Match Up Against 50 Of The World's Top CIOs?: Page 2 of 3

In the past year, Alcoa Brazil's head of IT, Tania Nossa, focused intently on extending and upgrading the company's connectivity. For Nossa, that required optimizing connectivity miles under the surface of the earth in bauxite mines in the Amazon rain forest with satellites and IP networks. Along the way, Nossa and Alcoa looped into their network a number of schools and hospitals in the region. QUESTION: As you're undertaking complex technology projects, are you considering reasonable ways those projects can offer significant social benefits without diluting your effort?

Alan Matula is CIO of Royal Dutch Shell and in the past year has signed $4 billion in outsourcing contracts, led one of the largest unified communications projects in the world, and pushed ahead with a range of social-networking efforts. QUESTION: In spite of the lousy global economy, are you being aggressive enough as CIO to bring about the transformations your company needs?

State Street CIO Chris Perretta has extensive resources at his disposal for delivering business value: 5,300 IT professionals and 20% to 25% of the company's operating-expense budget. But perhaps his most-important asset is his breakthrough commitment to aligning State Street's IT efforts not with the old-fashioned and internally driven model of "the business" but rather with its customers. On the company's Web site, Perretta pledges, "We are focused more than ever on ensuring that State Street's IT vision and business strategy are aligned with our clients' demands and needs." QUESTION: Are you building your IT vision and strategy to reflect internal operations or customer-driven opportunities?

Fiat Group CIO Gilberto Ceresa has embedded virtual engineering deep into the carmaker's production process to squeeze time and cost out of the old, slow, and expensive process of modeling everything with physical prototypes. That slashed the design-to-production cycle from 26 to 18 months, which is essential in today's consumer-driven and often fad-inspired world. QUESTION: If someone asks your CEO what level of contribution you're making to your company's efforts to create new products and services more rapidly and with greater chances of market success, would the answer be (a) "my CIO has been a magnificent accelerator of our processes"; (b) "my CIO has consistently supported the innovative methods proposed by others"; or (c) "my CIO and his old-fashioned ways of thinking have become a drag on our ability to compete and we're about to make a big change"?

In the turbulent world of global marketing and advertising, JWT senior VP Sunil Mehta has a track record of getting out in front of some of the massive business model and technology shifts that have rocked the advertising business. From conceiving a comprehensive application for media operations to developing an ASP model for media buying, Mehta, who functions as CIO but whose title is central Asia systems director, has helped JWT (formerly J. Walter Thompson) avoid the wrenching adaptations many ad agencies have been forced to cobble together in an attempt to catch up and stay relevant in the high-change global-advertising market. QUESTION: How do your company's business model IT capabilities stack up against those of existing and, more important, emerging competitors? And if your business models are behind, is that because or in spite of IT?