I guess I'm a bit of an odd CIO: I started in the field as a service technician working on equipment. One of my proudest moments was making the transition from a raw technician in the field to an office person who created a long-lasting service network.

We are an infrastructure and technical service provider. We have numerous commercial and government clients—museums, factories, airports, you name it—that outsource their operations and maintenance work to us. As Chief Information Officer, I take a pragmatic approach that's rooted heavily in my background as a field technician—understanding the core business needs and then applying straightforward tools to approach those needs.

All of our servers are centralized in one data center (with the exception of domain controllers, which are held at about 75 LAN sites). Our clients log in using the Active Directory® service, hit our Windows® servers, and then run their applications. If you looked at a picture of the Microsoft® stack, with the exception of the e-commerce components, we use it. We are 98 percent Microsoft through and through.

The challenge for our company is to create value, bringing change to this traditional industry. We do that in large part through technology, with our focus on interconnectivity among our remote sites.

We are an out-of-the-box company. Lots of CIOs want to modify everything. I don't know why. Ten years ago, they had to. In the year 2008, with Web services and highly integrated toolsets and service-oriented architecture, it just is ridiculous to customize anything. SharePoint® and other Microsoft tools can expose any business logic you want. So we made a rule that we don't customize anything. As a result, when it comes to us upgrading, for example, Microsoft Dynamics™ AX, it takes us a day and a half. Some companies, who have a highly customized model—it may take them a month. When you don't operate outside the box, you don't have to worry about the risks of customization, and I think that's contributed to our consistently high performance.

Innovation and customization are not mutually exclusive. We're very innovative. We can do very innovative things just using SharePoint tools, Windows workflow, and the Microsoft BizTalk® workflow engine to do all sorts of neat things without ever having to customize anything.

We have one Linux box to run our contingency e-mail server. We also have an outdated financial-management system that runs on a UNIX back-end, which we are currently in the process of replacing with Microsoft Dynamics AX. Those are the only two boxes in our whole environment that are not Microsoft SQL Server® and Windows Server®.

You know, it runs great if you're a company of a certain size. But when you get to the size that we are—3,600 employees—you're talking about a highly integrated environment. We can't afford to be tweaking and adjusting everything to get components to talk to one another just right. We're a huge believer in safety, reliability, and interoperability with other applications. When we deploy a Windows server in a Windows environment, the thing just works. It's automatic. It sees Microsoft System Center and starts talking to it. You start messing in open source, and it just doesn't work.

When we deploy a Microsoft product, we follow the Microsoft standards to a "T." We follow the Microsoft best practices without any shortcuts. We also follow best practices when it comes to clustering and load balancing. And I have to add here that people with open source software are kidding themselves if they think that they can build that reliability into their systems. With Microsoft, you can scale out horizontally as well as vertically. It's a much more sound model.

You know what's different about my group—the Information Management Group (one-fourth of which is IT)? We're not a cost center with a purely tactical mission and a management philosophy to beat the heck out of the employees in order to keep driving down costs. We're a strategic group, as important as other business units in leading the company. We lead the corporation's change.

Yes, because everything goes back to our quality management foundation. We make mistakes just like any other company. We are a labor business, so we are 80 percent disconnected field workers. I made mistakes all of the time when I was in the field. But the difference between us and our competitors—and the driver behind our financial growth patterns—is that when we see a problem, our systems are agile enough to expose the data, get a corrective action working, and prevent it from happening again.

If you have connected systems—infrastructures that are talking to one another, scorecards that are exposing data and creating visibility, and Windows workflow agents that are running out and telling you when something is going sideways long before the customer or anybody else knows about it—you can continually evolve and continually increase customer value in your productivity statement. If we've made a mistake, we have faith that our quality management will catch it and fix it the next time. Our customers have that same faith in us. That's what explains those growth patterns.

I like podcasts, such as the ones on CNET and the technology podcasts from the Wall Street Journal. I also watch videos on Channel 9, the Microsoft blog.

Realize that IT is just an enabler. It's just a simple tool. Most importantly, you need to really understand the business. Ten years ago, I would have given the advice: understand your programming languages and how they interact with one another. But today, it's more important for a good IT person to be able to translate what business users need into reality in the systems.