Planes, TI and automobiles

Ralph Szygenda, chief information officer at General Motors, arguably holds one of the best IT jobs around. Not only does Szygenda control a $3.2 billion budget for GM - No. 1 on the Fortune 500 - but he also oversees a venture fund through which the company invests in technologies that will keep it ahead of competitors.

Yet ironically, Szygenda says he never wanted to be a CIO. "I have always been a businessperson first and a technologist second," he says. "And even though I've been in technology jobs, my work had to change the bottom line of business." Simply, the technology doesn't interest him unless it affects change to the business process.

Szygenda credits his personal need to be constantly challenged as helping him move ahead, but believes that making it in any industry means doing the best you can in your present position. "I've always told people to grow where they're planted," he says. "Do well with what you're assigned in your present job, or you're not going to move anywhere."

In Szygenda's case, an interest in aerospace engineering led him to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, where he was introduced to telecommunications, computing and engineering. After leaving the military, he decided to stay in the IT field and went to work for Texas Instruments to build the "largest computer yet." Szygenda, who had risen to the CIO position in his 21-year career at TI, planned to spend the rest of his working life there.

But, in 1993, he changed his mind. The reason? The Internet.

Bell Atlantic CEO Ray Smith had a lot to do with that. He pursued Szygenda for about seven months, eventually convincing him to leave TI to re-engineer Bell Atlantic's business processes as CIO. It was the best career decision he ever made; Szygenda realized the quickly changing network industry offered him a buffet of opportunities to feed his appetite for unique technology and business challenges.

One of those eventually included leading GM into the electronic-business era. Three years after joining Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), Szygenda found himself drawn to a company that made products everyone could relate to: cars. In 1996, Szygenda joined GM as CIO. Four years later, he is happily keeping the automaker on the edge of technology and the car-buying consumer emotionally attached to GM's product.

Whether Szygenda planned to be CIO, he knew he'd be the best at anything he undertook. His advice: Set goals, and make things happen. "Create your career; don't wait for someone else to do it for you. And if someone gets in your way, go around him," he says.

Financial finesse

A picture spoke a thousand words to Gary King, a senior vice president at State Street, a global financial servicing company with $712 billion of assets under management. Right after he left the Army in 1971, he was intrigued by a cover of Time and the story it promoted. After reading the story, which discussed the future of data processing, King was hooked.

He researched the data-processing industry's long-term potential, and decided to stake his future on it. He took a six-month course on Cobol and then worked as a programmer. King eventually took a job at Gillette, where he got involved with data center services, telecommunications and network technology.

In the early 1980s, still at Gillette, King witnessed his role as telecom manager grow in corporate stature as the network became more important. Outside of Gillette, King noticed financial services gaining technology momentum. "I knew networking and electronic data interchange would be a very significant part of banking. Because it's global, it's very network-centric," he says.

So in 1984, King pursued IT opportunities in financial services by signing on with Republic Bank to head a global network management project. Sure, moving to Dallas proved a culture shock for the Boston native, but King says getting into the financial industry was the best career move he ever made - even when "all the Texas banks crashed and burned" a few years later. King simply returned to Massachusetts and took an IT job with Bank of New England.

From there, King landed the position of vice president of global network services with State Street, in Quincy, Mass. For the last dozen years, he has headed the firm's development of global network management services for 18,000 employees worldwide. He now reports to the CIO about emerging technologies and makes decisions he believes keep State Street ahead of the financial pack.

King thinks networking is the place to be, but he also advises future IT staffers to get a broad education to back up technological inclinations. "You have to have an aptitude and interest in a technical career to be successful, but know enough to move into management when you get the chance," King says. "It all comes down to how to do business."

Start me up

Like GM's Szygenda, Jeff Tyler put in 20 years at one organization. In his case, it was the U.S. Army Signal Corp which he joined after being in the army for one year, where he parlayed his natural ability to "put things together and take them apart again" into working as a long-haul communications specialist from 1969 to 1989. During that time, Tyler became involved with the Defense Communications Agency, the ARPANet and the Defense Data Network, as well as Unix. But leaving the military was the best career move Tyler could have made.

Once a civilian, Tyler immersed himself in evolving technologies. He even thinks he may be one of the first people to have used e-mail at home. When he first "bumped into" e-mail in the early 1980s, he thought, "Wow! This is a powerful thing. This will change the way we do business."

During that time, Tyler worked for Digital Equipment Corp. (since acquired by Compaq) as a lead systems administrator. He was part of the company's Athena Engineering Group, a team working on distributed computing. Also while at Digital, Tyler provided consulting services to firms such as J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Kodak.

In 1994, Tyler decided smaller was better. He headed to Collective Technologies, a new, privately-held network and systems management company, as a systems administrator. In six years the Austin, Texas, firm has grown substantially - it currently employs more than 550 employees, 450 or which are consultants, in 22 offices around the U.S. Tyler is now CIO, managing the IT infrastructure. Collective is looking at about $70 million in projected revenue. Tyler attributes his quick climb up the corporate ladder to the management skills he learned in the military as well as technology talent.

"I still regard myself as a working engineer. That's something I let go of very reluctantly," he says. "But in the military, if you are any good at all, you are pushed into managing people."

Contact Staff Writer Denise Dubie

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