January 18, 2008
Posted by Ryan Graves
Reiner Notes
Yesterday I had an opportunity to speak with Gary Reiner, CIO of General Electric and ask him anything that I wanted. It was part of my new gig in a GE leadership training program. I don’t discuss my job here on ActionsTalk but this experience and opportunity forced me to break that rule. Here are my notes from the talk with Gary:
When asked about IT’s contribution to the business, Reiner replied…IT not a contributor or service for the business, IT is the business, fully integrated. Any project that is taken on will fail if it is considered an IT project. A project should only be undertaken if it will improve the business and improve a process that the business executes. These process improvement project will succeed. Along those lines he expanded that the best measure of a process is “cycle time”.
When asked about Open Source products Reiner was very enthusiastic. He was heavily in favor and a current user of products like Skype and OpenOffice. He would even like to incorporate them into the worlds largest company if it wasn’t for issues like security, transition difficulties, and vendor support, all of which are major concerns.
There were other topics discussed that would not be appropriate for me to share on this forum. A few of these topics discussed were emerging new technologies and the companies that are developing these technologies and also many other GE specific topics.
Gary Reiner was incredibly approachable, inquisitive, broad in his knowledge of GE and the world economy and genuinely interested in what we (as low level developing managers) had to contribute. Having an opportunity to speak with Gary was an exceptional experience!
