When Ash Brooks first joined Arrow Electronics as vice president of end user computing in late 1999, then-CIO David Westmoreland asked him to deal with his biggest headache—the help desk. Three major metrics told the terrible tale of the poor help desk service at the $10.6 billion company. Calls took two minutes to be answered, half of the users who called gave up, and first-level call resolution—whereby problems were solved rather than escalating to the next level—was a dismal 40 percent.

"I quickly assessed the situation and immediately told the CIO how I could change it," recalls Brooks, now Arrow’s vice president of IT infrastructure and operations. "In less than a month,

I gave him a 20-point plan to fix the problems and a 12-month time line to get it done." True to his word, Brooks did turn the help desk around. He centralized two locations, put in a scheduling program and a host of tools to monitor workloads, and instituted more robust customer service training. Within a year, those help desk numbers started looking much better. It now takes less than 30 seconds to get a call answered; the abandon rate has plummeted to 9 percent; and first-level call resolution has jumped to 80 percent.

Brooks’ bosses were wowed; eventually, current Arrow CIO Mark Settle asked Brooks to take over the entire IT infrastructure organization and the vendor management office. He saw in Brooks what the judges of our Ones to Watch awards recognized—true IT leadership potential. Identifying and developing such senior staff members—those destined to become the CIOs of the future—is critical. "It’s important from a succession planning standpoint to always be looking for people to move into new roles, including your own," says Steven Agnoli, awards judge and CIO of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham. "The other reason it’s important is that these people are doing very important things in key roles now, and you want only the best people in those roles." (For more on developing future leaders, see "How Stars Are Made.")

At the level they’re at, these almost CIOs have been deputized, and much of the credibility of the CIO actually rests on their shoulders. They manage the majority of major vendor relationships. They are responsible for the success or failure of multimillion-dollar, enterprisewide initiatives. They hire and manage your most critical employees. They act as your surrogate when you’re out of the office. And the best thing is, they do it all very, very well.