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

The “Outsider”

If you ask Tony Scott, the CIO at Microsoft, to describe what he likes best about the growing partnership between IT and the business, he'll tell you it's the closer collaboration with the company's product groups.

Traditionally, the IT organization here would test products as they were going through various phases of the development cycle. But now we're involved in the product design. We're involved with our product groups way up front and we're influencing the features that get into the products supporting large enterprises.

We help the product groups make sure that our new products have the features that big companies really want, such as manageability, upgradeability, and low cost of support. That's where we're making the biggest contribution.

Any time you can influence your company's products in a positive way—not just testing them, but having a direct influence on the quality and the direction and the capabilities of the products—that's the ultimate value you can provide.

When you listen to Tony talking about the collaboration between IT and the product groups, you can hear the excitement in his voice. From Tony's perspective, the difference between testing and designing is like the difference between riding a scooter and riding a motorcycle!

The tighter relationship between IT and the business didn't blossom overnight. It helped that Tony was considered an outsider, since he had not worked previously for Microsoft. It also helped that in his previous roles ...