Linda Brigance, Asia-Pacific vice president and CIO at transportation company FedEx Express, said that she views contact with customers as great for finding out what a company needs to be doing for its customers.
Brigance has been in her current role for more than three years, although she has spent 20 years with the company in a variety of roles having originally joined as a software developer.
She now has six staff reporting directly to her, and an IT team in the Asia-Pacific region which number 246, in addition to a number of contractors. "The good thing about the job is it's not routine," Brigance said. "I think in this job versus any of the others I've had [that] this is by far the best...I get to work side by side with business units".
Brigance doesn't believe that she can get a good understanding of either customer or employee needs unless she has direct contact with these people. "It makes it a lot easier to get closer to the customer and understand exactly what we need to be doing, and why we need to be doing it," she added.
What about issues she sees CIOs and other tech leaders facing in today's environment?
Changing technologies, and the resulting need to incorporate newer technologies into legacy systems is a challenge Brigance sees all CIOs facing. Likewise, she said tech leaders also needed to get close enough to customers and business units to gain an understanding of what was needed. "A lot of times technical people think technicallyâ€"[it's] hard for them to speak business".
"I think one of the gaps we've seen in the past is understanding what [end users] need, how the business is changing and anticipate those needs and change with them, while supporting the legacy systems," she said.
ZDNet Australia asked Brigance how she thought progressing within an organisation compared with moving into a CIO job from another company. "I think I understand the environment very very well," she said. "I started out at Federal Express as a programmer developing code on mainframe systems...[and] got to move over to PCs before they were really known".
"I think I have had opportunities to learn more than just the technologyâ€"it makes me a stronger candidate to be the CIO and understand the business, than someone who came into the company and didn't have any of that experience".
Brigance added that she had some excellent mentors, whom she still relied on when she got stuck, and was also involved in several technical committees outside the company.
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