IBM CIO Lauded for Innovation and Technology Leadership

Bangalore: IBM recently announced that its vice president and CIO Jeanette Horan has been cited by a leading IT think tank for advancing innovation inside IBM and helping the company sustain technology leadership in prominent and growing market segments.

HMG Strategy, which counts CIOs at leading IT and consumer companies in its membership named Horan among the industry's "top performing CIOs who have shown unparalleled leadership to drive innovation and transformation in their businesses." The other honorees, all announced at HMG's CIO Summit of America in New York this week, include CIOs from companies of varying sizes across multiple industries.

"The honorees represent the absolute best of world-class IT leadership," said Hunter Muller, President and CEO of HMG Strategy. "This is a singular group of amazing corporate leaders who serve as role models for the IT community."

Horan oversees IBM's massive worldwide IT infrastructure that has been instrumental in supporting IBM's transformation to become a globally integrated enterprise. She is responsible for key deployments that apply IBM innovation to technology that supports everything from Big Data to cloud, mobile and social computing.

"Perhaps more than anything else, IBM has always been a culture that encourages, supports and celebrates innovation," said Horan. "Great minds inside this company are again focusing their brainpower on how technology, and the data that drives it, can solve the most perplexing challenges both in the enterprise and in society."

One of IBM's most visible internal projects is called Blue Insight -- the world's largest private cloud for analytics -- which manages more than a petabyte of data and enables some 200,000 IBMers to perform analytics on everything from skills evaluation to sales forecasting and marketing outreach. Some of the projects Blue Insight tackles might have previously taken weeks or longer to complete, but they can now be done in minutes or hours.

Horan was also instrumental in IBM's recent company-wide online brainstorming session to find new ways in which the company could benefit from being a social business. The session produced thousands of ideas from employees that are being evaluated. Her organization also runs the company's Technology Adoption Program, a virtual lab where employees experiment with and build IT innovations.