CIO — Bob Whyte did the dotcom dance?not once, but twice. In 1999, he left his solid CIO job at DirectTV for the chief technology officer spot at PayMyBills.com, an online bill-paying service for consumers, whose business model caught his imagination. He jumped just eight months later to land as chief operating officer for TimeBuy.com, a service for media advertising buyers. Then came a disagreement with the chairman on company direction. Whyte resigned. (The company eventually went belly-up.)
It was November 2000. And after a tumultuous year-plus as a dotcom executive, Whyte wasn’t looking for more startup scintillation. "The end of that [period] was like a death. All of the stages, from denial through anger to acceptance, applied," says Whyte, now 42. "I knew after what I’d been through personally and what it put my wife through, I didn’t want to go that direction again for a while."
That direction, as returnees from the Internet startup front have seen, wasn’t always fun and certainly wasn’t a clear path to glory. But it also wasn’t a bust. Whyte, along with four other prodigal CIOs profiled here, brought back business insights and management strategies that they learned during their dotcom days to the terra firma of corporate America and state government.
For Whyte, the homecoming meant three months of job hunting before signing on as CIO and senior vice president of operations at SAP Portals, a subsidiary of ERP vendor SAP AG. He brought his recent past with him; he demanded to report to his division’s CEO and to be included in strategy discussions. To accelerate action-taking, he says he empowers his staff to make decisions so that his IT managers, for example, don’t have to get his sign-offs for purchases.
Whyte and other CIOs returning to traditional businesses found that the ground had shifted. "When I left, I assumed startups were the only ventures that could adopt new, cutting-edge ideas," Whyte says. "But in the time I was out, the Global 1000 realized that they would need to change. Projects get going faster and move much more quickly than they did three years ago."
Here’s what four other CIOs found on their journeys back from dotcom adventures.
There’s Plenty of E-Business to Do in the Old Establishment
For Phillip Windley, the transition from the Internet world to government appointee was counterintuitive. Compared with serving as CIO for the state of Utah, he says his last two jobs were buttoned-down portraits of stability, albeit fast-paced. It is state government that he finds full of possibilities.
