This article is part of the February 2013, Vol. 19 issue of Business Analytics: The Power of Personalized Data

It's not uncommon for the CIO to be in charge of centralizing IT processes and the underlying IT systems that support them. What's not as common is the CIO taking on the role of managing the processes that support line-of-business services. But that's shifting in some organizations, as demonstrated at the recent Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., where several attendees had the dual role of CIO and business process optimization guru. Michael Saitow That's a role that Michael Saitow, CIO at Somerville, Mass.-based wine and liquor distributor M.S. Walker Inc., readily embraced five years ago, when he was invited to also manage line-of-business services. As with centralizing IT services, the key to managing business services is standardization, according to Saitow. "Standardization has helped everything: service delivery, our pricing and accuracy," he said. Prior to standardizing line-of-business processes, "all types of issues" could gum up the works, Saitow said. This included having to hold up certain processes until individual employees ... Access >>>