I used to be vice president and chief information officer for engineering and construction company Washington Group International. But last August, the company told me it had decided to eliminate the CIO position and outsource IT infrastructure operations to Perot Systems. While the news did upset me at first, this decision has ultimately become a pearl in an oyster for me. You see, just prior to this event, my wife had been offered a fabulous position in Singapore, and we were in the midst of deciding how to handle that fortuitous event.

Before I tell you my story and what I learned, let me tell you how I got to be where I was. At Washington Group, I worked my way up from group director to corporate director, ultimately becoming the first CIO in the history of the company. At the time I became CIO in 2000, IT was a mess. Each business unit had its own IT, from applications to standards to people. The Hackett Group did a study of Washington Group and found 287 different financial systems in existence. Additionally, we had every make and model of e-mail, PC, network equipment, servers and so on. It was up to the corporate IT group to pull all these disparate systems and data together to create the "company view." I took on the additional challenge of changing an organization that was focused on the latest technology to one that would be focused on operational excellence and service delivery. I still remember a good business associate of mine telling me that he didn’t know whether to congratulate or console me.

It was an exciting time at the company. We had just completed a $600 million acquisition of Westinghouse Government Services, and we were starting due diligence on a $2.8 billion acquisition of Raytheon’s engineering and construction business that would more than double the size of the company. My boss, the new CFO, brought a very progressive leadership style to Washington Group. We made great progress during this time; about half the company was installed on one ERP system, and we reengineered many core financial processes. (One result: The monthly financial closing cycle was reduced from 28 days to seven.) We also installed a new enterprise data center and a single e-mail system for 13,000 users, and consolidated the independent IT organizations into operations and applications groups. In addition, we implemented a new project management program and launched a new network to connect more than 120 locations.