Complete CIO 100 Coverage

100 Innovative Projects

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How Goodwin Procter Uses SharePoint

Vanguard's Multimedia Tools

Marriott's Underground Disaster Recovery Facility

Virtualization at Schwan Food

CPS Energy's Smartphones

How We Chose the CIO 100

"We had a much larger workforce than a business our size maybe should have," Barron says.

Barron, who had recently been named CPS's first CIO, looked at other companies with large mobile workforces like its own, companies like UPS and FedEx, and saw a huge disparity in the way his business was operating. For instance, specific CPS workers had little or no access to IT systems and resources while away from the office or warehouse. They were often required to visit work sites or customer locations to diagnose issues or suggest fixes before reporting back to the appropriate departments or parties, which would then initiate the next step of the resolution process. That could mean dispatching additional workers, and the whole ordeal could take days.

Christopher Barron, CIO, CPS Energy Photo
Photo by Robert Baumgardner

"If we kept with the amount of manual labor that it took for us to accomplish that work, we would not be in the position to be competitive in the future," Barron says.

From this realization, the company's Magellan Program was born. The Magellan Program was envisioned by Barron and his colleagues—the CIO was and continues to be the program's lead sponsor—as a way to better mobilize and connect its traditionally siloed workforce to the people and systems they needed to do their jobs. The goals of the programs: extend CPS's networking infrastructure; build its own secure Wi-Fi networks in offices and warehouse; and deploy smartphones and custom mobile applications to all CPS staffers who didn't currently have a laptop or other mobile device.

The Magellan Program is currently about halfway deployed: CPS expects it to be fully implemented in 2011.