Interview: Retired GM CIO Ralph Szygenda on Joining iRise

CIO — Recently I sat down for an interview with the former Global CIO of General Motors, Ralph Szygenda, who joined iRise, a provider of enterprise visualization software for business applications, as a strategic consultant and member of its advisory board earlier this month.

Szygenda is heading up the creation of a CIO advisory council for iRise, which will focus on transformation and business and IT communication issues. He is also leading content direction and speaker recruitment for iRise's events, as well as moderating some of its executive roundtable sessions.

iRise's CEO Emmet Keefe joined us during the call to elaborate on Szygenda's value to the company.

CIO: Out of your previous positions at GM, Bell and Texas Instruments (TXN) which one did you find the most challenging and rewarding?

Ralph Szygenda: Every one of them. If you look back at TI, it was building all the technology even before I became CIO. I was there for 21 years and built computing systems and software, missile systems and a number of other things.

In the telecom area, there was deregulation in the industry. Therefore you had to rebuild all your technology because you were moving into a whole new world. It was moving from the old Ma Bell telephone company to a futuristic information services company.

With GM, it was taking a very decentralized company that had thousands of information systems and make it run in one way throughout the world. I never looked just for a job, I looked for something that would be interesting to me but also something that was going to change existing environments to something that was better in the future.

Why did you join iRise and what do you hope to accomplish there?

Szygenda: I've been retired since the end of last year, and I've been looking for another discontinuity. Something that would be different, and something that would be important for the industry and customers over the next five years. I wasn't just looking for a job. I was looking for something that would really drive a change.

I see the world going back to building applications. We've been through five years of efficiency, saving costs, virtualizing, computing center consolidations, the cloud, SaaS. Most companies have gone through that and are pretty efficient. Now the pendulum will turn back around to grow these companies, which typically means people will go back and change their business processes to differentiate them from their competitors. But CEOs

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