I'm strategically responsible for IT throughout our global holdings. We have data centers in several places around the world, and I'm responsible for directing how we follow a common path to providing a quality business systems environment. And then I'm tactically responsible for the North America data center, which supports the business entities that constitute about two-thirds of our revenue.

I took a class in FORTRAN as a freshman in college and became fascinated with how a bunch of punched holes on a piece of paper could produce a report. After college I got to talking with my best friend's dad, who was an operations manager at a large data center. They were looking to hire some people as computer operators. I thought that it might be an interesting opportunity to at least see what computers were all about. So I took that job, and 26 years later, I'm still doing it.

We have four designees in our IT group who work with people in the business side to understand where that particular horizontal slice of the business is headed from a process improvement perspective. Then they marry those ideas to the capabilities of our operating environment, and hopefully can produce results. If not, then they analyze the offerings that are in the market and ultimately lead the project to implement that new capability to satisfy their business partners.

If we need a solution that we don't currently have in place, we first look within the suite of products from Microsoft and SAP. Chances are pretty good that we are going to find what we need. If not, we typically form a cross-functional team of business people, users, and IT architects and specialists. This group would most likely start the process with a call from Gartner, who would give them some key solutions to look into. Then using the Web, they'd narrow that down to a few solutions and begin face-to-face interaction with those vendors. Gartner helps to steer us toward best of breed solutions so that we're staying with premier providers.

We've become quite adept at integrating acquisitions into our SAP system. We have a model that we follow, a dedicated team, and we can do a standard integration of a mid-sized acquisition in four months. So we're pretty proud of the fact that we've gotten good at it, and we're very consistent in our approach and accurate with our results.

We partner with the right companies, and stability and reliability are part of those contracts. The days of frequent network interruptions are so far behind us that we practically don't remember them any longer, so the bar is definitely high to maintain that environment. But I don't feel threatened by that challenge because of the partners that we choose to work with.

First, to me, is the reputation of the company. Too often I've had the experience of trying to help a startup get going and buying solutions based on price, only to be disappointed by the company not being there later on. Or they are bought by someone else, and the direction of the product strays from what we had originally intended to purchase. So we tend to prefer bigger, more stable companies that have some depth to their product offerings.

We decided several years ago that it wasn't worth the risk of working with a product that didn't have clear cut, defined lines of support. We would much rather use Microsoft® products, where we know where they came from, who to call for support, and where to go for add-ons. I think that open source is appropriate for academia, as well as power users and people that are passionate about programming. I just don't personally feel comfortable introducing it into our enterprise environment.

Fight the urge to respond to everyone's "great idea." Develop a set of core solutions that you are going to offer, whether they're home-grown or bought from the most reliable vendor that you can find. Stay within that environment and get extremely good at providing the information that the business needs with that tool set. If you stretch your resources too thin, you start providing unreliable, inaccurate, or disputable data. That will completely undermine you. Be flexible enough to work outside your tool set when you absolutely can't produce something with it, but then be repeatable about those solutions in the future.

I'm a Star Trek man. I can't help it. I remember coming home from school every afternoon and turning on the reruns. We saw each episode six or eight times, and we had the Vulcan Mind Meld down.