The Transformational CIO: Leadership and Innovation Strategies for IT Executives in a Rapidly Changing World

Overturning the Status Quo

If you ask Rich Adduci to name his favorite role throughout his career, he will tell you without hesitation that it was transforming the IT organization at Boston Scientific Corporation (BSC), one of the world's largest makers of advanced medical devices.

When Rich joined Boston Scientific as its CIO in 2006, about 80 percent of the IT professionals in the company reported to executives or managers outside of IT. Here is his recollection of the situation:

The people who performed IT services were decentralized, reporting to various functions (such as finance, operations, or human resources) or to the business units. There was really no coordination of IT activities across the company, and few IT standards or policies existed. The people themselves were in small organizations with little future career growth and often not being well recognized for the level of their contribution since they were being evaluated by non-IT managers.

He quickly determined that the status quo was unsustainable.

We were operating in a highly regulated environment; I saw several decentralized IT groups building systems that solved the exact same problem and not following a standard methodology or policy set. We had just completed a major acquisition with aging systems and infrastructure in need of replacement, and there were signs on the horizon that the economy would be heading into a downturn. Our decentralized model was clearly wasteful and broken, and most importantly it ...