Monte Ford
Senior Vice President and CIO, American Airlines, Inc./AMR Corporation

Monte Ford is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at American Airlines and its parent company, AMR Corp. He oversees all aspects of the company’s information technology strategy and operations. Widely regarded as a leader in the field of information technology, Ford joined American Airlines at a time when the airline needed to regain its technological prowess. Ford’s leadership has been critical in restoring American to the forefront of technological innovation—one key element to the long-term success of one of the world’s largest airlines.

Prior to joining American Airlines, Ford held senior management positions at The Associates First Capital Corporation and the Bank of Boston. Mr. Ford has served on the boards of two public corporations and is currently on the board of directors at Oncor, one of the United States’ leading energy transmission and distribution companies. He is also a member of The Research Board, an international think tank restricted to CIOs of the world’s largest corporations, and the CIO Strategy Exchange (CIOSE), a selective multi-sponsor program for chief information officers from “forward-looking” companies. He is active in community programs, church leadership, the Baylor-Grapevine Board of Trustees, and the Dallas Children’s Medical Center Development Board. Ford has a long history of community involvement in both Dallas and Boston.

Ed Yourdon: One of the questions that I’ve asked everybody at the very beginning, particularly because I know there are lots of young IT professionals who dream and hope that someday they’re going to end up in your position, … is basically [about] how you got to where you are now. Is this your first CIO position? Or have you kind of come up through the ranks of technology to end up where you are now?

Monte Ford: I started on the vendor side or the supplier side of the business, working for supplier companies, like Digital Equipment and IBM.

Yourdon: Oh? That’s unique amongst the people I’ve spoken to so far. I started with DEC¹ also, by the way.

Ford: I thought that was a fantastic company, but I ended up being hired by my customer in Boston at DEC, and took an executive position with the customer organization. I was about to take a different job at Digital, a more senior job at Digital, and I went to tell my customer, and he asked me to come work for them.

Yourdon: Oh.

Ford: Which I did. I went to work for them and became a customer of Digital Equipment and IBM and other companies at the time and then continued on along the technology track from there. So I came into this side of the industry reporting to a COO that also was a CIO and moved from there to take a job in Texas …with the intent of being the CIO at that company, which I did [become]. And then I moved from there to being CIO at American. By the way, I did have marketing and technical jobs when I was at DEC as well.

Yourdon: Ahh, okay. By contrast, I was always in the techie department. I worked at the old [Maynard, Massachusetts] mill, originally on the PDP-5² and then on the PDP-6³, in the early days. But it was quite a place to work. [laughter] That’s for sure.

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Ford: Sure was.

Yourdon: Anyway, the question that I was about to ask was whether you had any important mentors or role models along the way.

Ford: I have had mentors and role models along the way. In both sales and marketing and in technology, I have had mentors and role models and people—I continue to have mentors and role models and people that provide me the opportunity to grow and develop in what is always a mutual relationship. At least I try to make sure that every relationship I have is mutually beneficial, but I have had them along the way, inside the professional range and out.

And I know this book is about technology, but as an African-American in this industry, this business, I’ve had the opportunity to have role models that counsel me on how to function within the technology world, as well as people that counsel me on what to do about technology. Technology is really the culmination of a set of common-sense functionality, if you will, to me, that is applied to solving business problems and business needs based on circumstance. The technology business, though, is as much about people as it is about technology, maybe more about people than it is about technology. So my focus, and the role models that I’ve had, and my focus over the years has always been on the people, and a lot less so on the technology.

I think if you get the people part of it right, the technology part will come. Technologies come and go. They change—I’ve been through several technologies that are supposed to save the planet.

Yourdon: [laughter]

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Ford: And make programming incredible and make the world incredibly easy, which I know that you have both lived through and written about over the years. And you know, every so often, you hear another technology’s going to change everything, and often technologies do change things, but there’s always another one coming. The thing that allows you to make it through all those changes and iterations and capability and lack thereof around technology has to be the people you work with and grow and cultivate and manage and develop. So my focus around technology is really on people.

Yourdon: Yeah. You know, that’s something they certainly don’t teach you in college, at least not when I was in college. I didn’t have a chance to learn it for several years after college either. But I think that’s a comment I’ve heard fairly consistently from everybody in terms of their mentors and role models. And one of the reasons, by the way, I had to put that question on the list is that I knew, for example, I was going to be interviewing the CIO of Microsoft, and I had to ask him whether Bill Gates was a major role model for him and so on, and I’ve gotten a variety of interesting answers.

One last question in this “getting started” area: once you started moving along this career path, did you find the need for any additional education? Did you go back to get an MBA or anything of that sort?

Ford: You know, I’ve had several opportunities to get an MBA and including sponsorship to get a full MBA and multiple opportunities for executive MBA. And I did not. I chose not to.

I think the most important role model for me … from a technology standpoint—and I think this will stand the test of time—is a guy named Jim Cash.

Yourdon: Now where have I heard that name before?

Ford: Well, he was dean of the business school at Harvard. He ran the Harvard Business Review. He was a professor at Harvard in the business school. He ran their executive MBA program. He’s a technologist, he’s written books, he’s on the board—well, I think he just got off the board of Microsoft, he’s on the board at GE, Walmart, he’s been on the board of Knight Ridder, he’s on the board of Chubb, he’s on the board of Tandy, which is originally Radio Shack. He’s done a number of very strong, highly qualified things. Early indicator of what outsourcing would be to India.

Yourdon: Ahh.

Ford: Early indicator of real-time and just-in-time inventory management and did consulting around those things. Early indicator of just a number of things—social networking. Early indicator of a lot of things that technology would evolve to. He’s just an incredibly bright, well organized, very well socialized person.

Yourdon: Very interesting. Really, it’s the heart of your day-to-day life in a sense—and that is, how you see technology and IT contributing to the success of an organization like American? I think everybody knows the story from the early days of just what an enormous impact [American Airline’s reservation system] Sabre has had business-wise and technology-wise, but what’s the story today, in 2011?

Ford: I think that the business that we’re in is a technology business. We’re in the information business, I should say. We do transport things on airplanes. We make the world smaller, certainly. We transport things on airplanes, but the thing that people need most, whether it’s transporting cargo or themselves or somebody else or something else, they want information. You know, our routine day is transporting 33,000 people someplace on an airplane that they weren’t at earlier in the day before getting on our plane. And it happens on time the vast majority of the time, around … 84 to 87 percent of the time, which is a pretty incredible number actually across the industry. … And that’s great. If you look at all the things logistical and otherwise that need to go in to get a plane off the ground, it’s a minor miracle. Never mind luggage and all the rest of those things.

Yourdon: [laughter]

Ford: So we transport 110 million bags or so a year, and we lose, literally lose, less than a couple thousand out of 110 million. And the tiny minority of those bags, less than three tenths of 1 percent, arrive late, and 80 percent of those come in on the next flight.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: So when you think about that, 110 million times—now, if it’s your bag, it’s late. That’s another issue. It feels different. But less than three tenths of 1 percent is a big number. So on a routine day when everything is fine, at the airport and routine flight, everything is fine, everything is great. We’re measured by what happens when things are not routine. When there’s a dust storm that shuts down Dallas, like it did a couple of weeks ago.

Yourdon: That’s right.

Ford: When there’s the most incredible weather in recent recordable history in the Northeast and in Chicago. What happens when you’ve got thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of people who are impacted? And when it happens over a two- or three-day period? How do you recover? People want information about their flight. They want to know what’s going to happen, what do I do, what are my options? All of these are built around and driven by technology. Technology is at the center of everything we do, and information technology, information specifically, is at the heart of that sensor. It’s the core of that sensor. So we play a pretty significant role, and probably even more so than we did back in the Sabre days, because even with Sabre, a lot was still manual and otherwise, and with today’s volume and today’s technology, you just cannot do that.

Yourdon: You know, I heard a variation on this in a speech by Theresa Wise, the CIO of Delta, who said one of the things they now try to do is stay in touch with their customers almost 24 hours a day, along the lines of what you were saying. And what I see as a traveler, I’m getting things on my iPhone saying, “You can now check in on this flight,” or “Your flight’s been delayed”—I got that on the way to the airport a couple of weeks ago—“and here are your options.” So I certainly agree with you that generically, maybe one of the things that has changed over the last 30 or 40 years is the opportunity that you have with technology to provide this information everywhere and anywhere, anytime to a degree that just wasn’t possible back then.

Ford: You know, Ed, our philosophy, our goal, is not only for customers and employees, but we want to meet the customers and employees where they want to be met, which we don’t get to dictate. And—do you have American’s iPhone app?

Yourdon: I do, yeah.

Ford: So what we’re trying to do, with all of the things we’re doing with iPhone and Android and other platforms that we’re working on, we want to be able to meet people wherever they want to be met. And you’ll see some other examples of this coming up. And we don’t get to dictate that. I mean, in a world of social networking, in a world of social media, social technology—we don’t get to control everything. The world has gone from being very vertical to very horizontal.

Yourdon: That certainly is true. Absolutely.

Ford: And in a horizontal world, you don’t want the hierarchy. In your business, I used to sit around every morning and wait for the newspaper kid to come, and I would hope that he wouldn’t throw it—when I was living in Boston—hope he wouldn’t throw it in the snow.

Yourdon: [laughter]

Ford: And hope that he doesn’t break a window or bang the front door with it, and I would sit there and wait patiently for the newspaper to tell me what my world was and what was going on in it. Now I get the newspaper on Sunday, the New York Times, just because I like laying down on the couch and opening up the newspaper and having paper everywhere and reading it. But the world has been voting to get information instantaneously. My kids won’t read a newspaper.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: They read it online. But they won’t physically read—you know, it’s kind of sad to me actually, because I’m a newspaper guy. But they want the information when they want it and where they want it, and they’re not going to wait for the paper guy, paper boy or the paper girl. And the information flows horizontally at a rate that we can’t control and manage. So, three years ago or so, I don’t remember the time, a plane set down in the Hudson, and the way the news media found out about it was on Twitter.

Yourdon: Yeah, it was on Twitter. It was about a mile away from where I’m sitting right now. Out on the Hudson River, that US [Airways] flight. That was an amazing thing to watch—on Twitter.

Ford: On Twitter! You know, and the first pictures came from some guy with a smartphone. So nobody knows their names. Who was tweeting about it first. I mean, none of that is really important. It wasn’t breaking news from CNN. It was breaking news from Twitter reported on CNN. And so, in a horizontal world, people go to each other really very quickly to get information. So the hierarchy of waiting for the newspaper or the hierarchy of waiting for American to tell me what’s going on in my world isn’t going to happen. So we supply all kinds of information through the Internet. Our customers aggregate that data faster, as fast as we can supply it, so they know and can understand what’s going on.

Before we had the capability that we have now, we started sending information out over the Internet about flights and this and that to other service providers and other information providers and the like. And before we started doing this ourselves, I was standing at a gate and the flight was delayed. And I knew what was going on with the flight because I called the Operations Center to find out. I was at the airport walking around, seeing what was going on. The Operations Center told me, “Okay, we’re just making a decision. Hold on a second. Okay, we’re going to change gates. We got a new plane coming in. That one’s broken. So we’re going to move down three gates or two gates, or wherever the new one is. And we’ll be getting that information out shortly.” Well, as soon as they put that information out, it’s broadcast across the Internet.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: So I’m sitting there. I see a bunch of people looking at smartphones and handheld devices. All of a sudden, about 20 percent of them, 25 percent, pick up their bag and walk down two gates, just as the gate agent is announcing, “We’ll have more information for you shortly. Just hold on.” Those people already had the information. The irony was we sent it. And at that moment, I said, “You know, I know we have all these things coming, but I am not going to put our employees in this position.” And we emphasized getting real-time information out to people as quickly as physically possible, at least at the same time that we get it out to customers.

Yourdon: Interesting.

Ford: And now, we’re the best aggregator of data of anybody. We see the smartphone implementations and other things. And the responses to it—in our app, we’ve embedded technology and information into the functional features of the device. So it’s not a website experience. It is a functional experience that takes advantage of the device. And you’ll see this continue through GPS, the concept of presence, the phone. So at DFW [airport] here in Dallas, one of the most difficult things for people is parking someplace and coming into another terminal [thinking] “Where did I park my car?”

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: Now you can take a picture of the place where you parked, of the location number where you parked, and it’s embedded into the app. And you pull up your flight and the information comes up on the phone with a picture of where you parked. It’s embedded in the app, taking advantage of the features of the phone.

Yourdon: That’s fantastic.

Ford: It pushes—for an Android, for instance, it pushes flight-status notification. And you can imagine that it’s not too far-fetched to think that, well, since we know where you are—I mean, customers are willing to share information. They know nobody has any privacy anymore—about when they’re on, what their location is, and what their GPS position is—so if I know that you left Dallas a couple of days ago, and the application knows that you’re coming back, and the application then realizes you’re in Dallas, it ought to just pop up the picture of your car and say, “Remember. You parked at B23” or whatever it is.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Ford: And those are things that the public is just not going to stand to wait for. And those are the type of things where I think we have the right mindset. I’m biased, but I’m willing to test this. We have a superior mindset than most companies like ours about what the function of technology is and the capability is and how to embed that into the thinking of the people that implement it. And not just customers, right, but the people that implement it, so customers and employees. So we have—CRM.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: And CRM is customer-relationship management, as you know. Well, we have something called ERM, which is employee-relationship management, which focuses on the same concepts, right?

Yourdon: Aha.

Ford: Employee-relationship management—our employees live the same way our customers do. So our employees work the same way—our employees work the same way our customers do. And it’s unrealistic to think that our employees, who live in a very horizontal world themselves when they’re outside of work, will get to work one day and all of a sudden have to be vertical. Have to be in this hierarchical structure, with this technology that doesn’t allow them to work horizontally the way they work everywhere else. It doesn’t make sense. So we have to be as focused on the employee, à la my airport day experience I just told you about, as we do for the customer, or we’ve only got half the equation. And most people don’t think of things that way. We focus on the information our employees get, and the social networking aspects, social media, social technology aspects of what they do. They will by definition be of more use to the customer.

And if it makes it sound like I’m doing a little bit of bragging, I guess that I am, but that’s not the point. The point is, technology in our environment is the leading-edge indicator of what the capabilities of the environment and the workplace are. People will almost let them pay us to do the work. So here’s the deal. You can fly on a flight that costs $10, and you go to the airport, stand in line, get your ticket, whatever. You can fly on the [same] flight, it will cost you $12, but you do the work yourself and go through a self-service machine. You’ll pay the $12.

Yourdon: Just because you feel you’re in more control.

Ford: More control. You’ve got all the information. You’ve got all the things you need yourself. In a horizontal world, nobody’s going to stand around and wait for the hierarchy to wait their turn in line. Tell them, “Here, okay, I’m going to give you information.” “No, I want it all. I can do it myself.” Nobody’s going to wait for the newspaper boy.

Yourdon: Very interesting. Now, a lot of this involves giving customers and employees the opportunity to do things that they basically could not do before. Is IT in your organization expected to be the originator or creator or the source of new ideas? Or does it come from all over the place?

Ford: Yes, we call it the “art of the possible.” But it’s a three-pronged approach. Part of what we do at American is we take some of the best businesspeople … throughout the organization—they’re in revenue management, they’re in capacity planning, the person that is the president of the Advantage program, our frequent-flier program… You take the best employees in the company—some of them, anyway—and we run them through the IT organization when we can, as part of sort of corporate property, if you will. I take them here, give them a total frontal lobotomy, and then retrain them from scratch about everything from how to start a project, how to manage a project, how to run a project, the IT aspect—because their job is information.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: They’re only as good as their ability to implement the next-best technology solution within their business unit. And so we take them here, we don’t park them. We take them here, they go through regular jobs in the IT organization like a career IT person, and then we push them back out into the business.

That philosophy works beautifully if you really believe that the world revolves around IT. Because your people can be great managers, great thinkers and this and that, but if they walk into the room and say, “Okay, we’re going to talk about everything about the business and every aspect in the business, except that IT stuff—I’m going to throw that over the wall to the programmers. I don’t understand that IT stuff.” It’s perfectly acceptable in some places to walk into a room and say that, but unacceptable to say, “Uhh, numbers, financials, budget—I don’t understand that budget stuff. I’ll leave that up to the financial guys.” Nobody’s accepting of that. But in some places it is still acceptable for somebody not to have a thorough background and training and understanding of technology.

Yourdon: How much of that is a function of the generation? You know, you still see older managers who won’t read their own e-mail, but it’s much less common, isn’t it, with the younger generation?

Ford: It is with the younger generation. That makes it more challenging though. It doesn’t solve it, because IT is still evolving. The younger generation is pushing IT in a very horizontal way. It’s pushing IT to places it’s never been pushed before. So social networking, social media, horizontal stuff, is part of the continuum, not the end state. So, the, the people driving—I’m talking about young people—are driving things to another place, to another level. So, for instance—what’s the best way to articulate this? The places where we have to be are ahead of where we are today. So when we bring people into the organization, bring young people into the organization, they expect instant messaging and social media and socialized technology and this horizontal world. That drives a set of requirements and a set of things that set the future of the next generation of things that we have to provide that is head and shoulders above where we are today.

And so our job is to figure out how things like mobility, what things like mobility and the concept of mobility mean. So we can’t develop applications anymore that are “stateful” applications. Even mainframe-like applications or client-server-type applications, certainly not cloud-based applications, you certainly can’t develop them in a way that doesn’t contemplate mobility. You can’t develop them in a way that isn’t agile in nature, or an agile development methodology, because they’re not going to sit still for six months of requirements that they’ll see a year and a half later when the project’s done.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: It’s not how they work. So while they are driving some of the things we do on an implementation basis today that we live with, what’s not happening is, they’re not contemplating and thinking about, “Okay, what is the future going to be? What kind of cellular or wireless network am I going to have to have when everything is on, when everything, everything is an Internet-based function, an Internet-based protocol?”

Yourdon: Interesting. Now you’ve actually touched on a couple of things in the next area that I wanted to discuss, in terms of the new trends in … IT that are likely to influence … your organization over the next few years. You mentioned cloud and mobile are the two obvious ones. Are there any other new paradigms or new trends that you see coming along in the next few years?

Ford: The real implementation is agile computing. Not just the talk of it and not just—but the real implementation of agile computing.

Yourdon: Interesting. Okay. I have not heard other CIOs emphasize that quite that much.

Ford: I’d be interested in any comments you might want to add here, such as: what kind of development projects are you now doing in an “agile” fashion, and how much of what you use is older legacy apps? How are you dealing with the legacy apps—are you refactoring any of it? What issues have come up, and how do you deal with them?

Yourdon: Okay, well, that’s a good one to add to the list. Let me turn it around 180 degrees then and ask about the dark force. You know, what are the problems that keep you up at night and the things that you really worry about in terms of IT over the next few years?

Ford: This is part of what I was saying is challenging IT. And I don’t think I articulated it well, but the days, the hierarchical days, of big American Airlines or even some of the technology providers deciding what the future of technology is—that’s gone. Consumer-based technology, in a horizontal world, consumer-based technologies will dictate what big corporations do and how they provide it and what they provide and when and to whom. It will dictate what your employers demand. It will dictate what your customers demand. I don’t care what project we have going on, if it’s not based on what consumer-based technologies are driving people to have the capabilities to do—and when I say “consumer-based,” individual technologies that people can have and use—then it’s useless.

So one of the challenges we have is we don’t get to determine all the rules anymore. We don’t get to go to the mainframe gods and tell everybody what they can network to and what they can do and what they can’t do. I mean, DEC made a living off of helping to open this up.

Yourdon: Yes. It’s true.

Ford: So we don’t get to do that anymore. We have to look at and be predictors of the trends and technology and media and stay much more ahead of where things are and … where we think things might be going in order to provide the capability for people to do that. So to do what they demand to do, because if you can’t connect to people on their BlackBerry, they’re just not going to talk to you, irrespective of how good you think your application is. So you better build it in a way—in an agile way, I think—you better build it in a way that works mobilely and you better be able to make sure it works up and down quickly, in the cloud, and you better be able to do it nimbly, agile.

Those three things go together, significantly go together in my opinion, and are a troika, like a three-legged stool that cannot be broken apart functionally, for the future. The difficulty in all this is how do I predict what my budget is? How do I predict what the next things are? I can’t do five- and ten-year programs very often anyway, at least not the way that I used to. They’ve got to be smaller component-part things. I’ve got to be able to turn left and turn right quickly. I’ve got to be able to do a lot of things that I didn’t have to necessarily do before, and I have to be a pretty good predictor of where we spend money. And then how do you, how do you budget an agile-developed project? You have standup meetings every day, you have the scrums every day, ten-minute standup meetings in the mornings. You’re having these agile work sessions where what you started with, where every two weeks you’re coming back, or three weeks or four weeks you’re coming back with a prototype, and what you started with six months ago is not where you are now.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: But it’s a better place, but you thought your scope was gonna be XYZ. Now scope is ABC and XYZ, or you thought it was going to be XYZ, now it’s just Z. So how do you manage technology in a predictable way in that environment? And we’re cutting our teeth on that, and I don’t think the whole world has figured that out, but I absolutely believe that’s where it’s going and that’s what we’re doing. I don’t think that most CIOs … that are not technology providers—I can’t speak for them—but I don’t think that most CIOs in businesses are thinking about things that way. And that’s absolutely how we have to think about things.

Yourdon: So you see that as one of the big challenges. Well, I certainly would agree with you. I think everything you’ve said makes eminently good sense, but it’s interesting that you focused on that as the first and foremost item as opposed to what I’ve been hearing from almost every other CIO, whose first and topmost concern that gives them nightmares every night, is security. Not that I’m suggesting you’re ignoring it at all, but that wasn’t the first thing that you mentioned.

Ford: But that’s a given. You can’t stop the train unless it’s just egregious, but you can’t stop the train because the horizontal world provides different security concerns. Of course, it does. I mean, in the news business, authentication of stories is much more difficult, and there have been a bunch of people saying, “Stop this horizontal stuff, because you can’t trust the stories.” Well, that’s not stopping. Security has to catch up with—it has to be not the tail wagging the dog, but the other way around. Security has to function in a way that we need it to function to be effective. And people like me have to think about security differently. When we first started this cloud computing thing, we had 150 reasons why we couldn’t do it, ’cause it didn’t look and feel like the mainframe, it didn’t look and feel like the client server, it didn’t look and feel like the data center. It’s not going to look and feel like that, so what things can we do and how can we change the security paradigms, and we can by the way, to adapt to what the needs of the people are, because, remember, the consumers are dictating this stuff, not us. And people are always going to provide things that they can sell, and that’s what people are buying, this horizontal technology, not the vertical stuff. And security better figure out how to catch up … security to me is a given.

And by the way, when I talk about this three-legged stool, you know, this … agile development methodology, mobile computing, and cloud technology, we’re dragging the vendors along with us, we’re dragging the suppliers along with us and demanding that they do things in the way that we need them to do. So it’s not just us following technology trends. It’s suppliers to companies like mine. And … CIOs don’t have this nailed, they don’t have this licked, they don’t have this figured out as well, and we’re having to do this together, at the same time.

Yourdon: Interesting. And I think that’s kind of different from the popular story that you see in the press, where the impression is that the vendors are leading the way, and you’re saying it’s really not that way at all.

Ford: Not that way at all. No, you may hear that from the supplier guys, but, of course, they’re supplier guys, so they think they’ve got all the technology. It’s not that way at all.

Yourdon: Hmm, okay. Well, that is interesting. So you’re saying security is just a given. One of the things that I’ve been interested in, though, is the level of concern that I’ve heard from some CIOs.

Ford: Oh. I don’t want to, Ed, I don’t want by any means to minimize the importance of security. We are all over security. We’re all embedded with the government, TSA. You know, we’re 20 percent of the air commerce in the United States. If something were to happen and our systems were to shut down, that’s pretty significant. I mean, we have a lot of personal information.

Yourdon: There’s all the privacy stuff, too, yeah.

Ford: I mean, we’ve got to PCI-a-go-go everything we do. So we are security-, security-, security-focused. Absolutely. Incredibly so. My only point was, you have to just be that way. It has to be part of your existence. Not to focus on the future of technology is shutting things down. Or the focus on the future of technology is security. If you can focus on security, you can focus on shutting down things that happen as opposed to what you can allow to happen in a secure manner. It’s a different mentality.

Yourdon: Okay. That does make an awful lot of sense.

Ford: And things that we can’t do securely, by the way, we just don’t do. But so far, there have been very few things that we’ve not been able to do. That’s one of the places where we’re dragging the vendors along kicking and screaming.

Yourdon: Aha. Interesting. Two more areas that I want to ask you about before we run out of time. We’ve already touched on this whole topic of the younger generation or the digital natives or whatever else you might want to call them. And, of course, they’re not only coming into your IT department; they’re coming through everywhere, in all business organizations. Do you have any concerns about the younger generation in terms of how they use technology or what their expectations are?

Ford: No. My only concern is if we can get enough meaningful information from them. If we can sit them down long enough to get enough meaningful information from them to be able to chart the course of our future. They’re a tremendous resource all over the company, and if we have our way, we’re not trying to limit the technology or the people who understand the technology in the organization.

If I have a company full of technologists that work in business and do the job in business every day, I’m happy. That’s why we transplant people from the business unit into the technology organization and then send them back out. Even if they’re technology-savvy, it’s a requirement to work here, to have technology background, if you’re coming into the management training program or whatever. I don’t view that as a limitation or an issue or—I’m not afraid of it at all. One of my first jobs, when I got hired by my customer, the first thing they said [was], “The first thing you’ve got to do is this e-mail stuff, [it] is getting out of hand.”

Yourdon: [laughter]

Ford: “Now we’ve got to shut this down. People are using it during the day, you know, they’re hacking off. People could be using it—my God, they could be sending e-mails out all day instead of doing their jobs! You’ve got to shut this e-mail thing down and figure out how to get it under control. And the other thing is, these PCs are out of control. Personal computers are just causing people to do their own work and, you know, just people have them at home now. They’re starting to be in their homes. This is crazy. Shut it down.”

So the first thing I did was look into this. And I thought, “You know, these guys are crazy. We’re not going to shut this down.” So I came back with this report that said, “The way you really get control over it is you let people do what they want to do.” And they said, “No, no, no.” And I convinced people that we should do that. And we opened it up, with some measures and some security and some control and all that, and the response was incredible. I mean, we got more value and understanding about what we need to do as a company by doing that than by everyone else running around and trying to shut things down.

I think the same thing is true with people coming in. Unless you think they’re all stupid, you really ought to take advantage of them. They’re the ones that made this stuff really popular and really work and caused the companies that are supplying the technologies to them to focus on what their needs are and what they want to do and how they want to do it. The best ideas from YouTube come from … people using it and saying what ought to be the next thing. Not, you know, the genius of some big corporation.

Yourdon: That certainly is true. Absolutely.

Ford: If you really believe that the world is horizontal and becoming more so, you have to embrace it in how you live your life every day, including the people you employ and how you manage them. And by the way, it’s not just technology. How do you manage these guys? How do you manage these people? They’re not going to sit around and listen to you dictate all of the—you know, we’ve got to be sensitive here, because we’re in airlines, so we need structure, right?

We need a bunch of things because safety is first and foremost in everything we do, so you’ve got to have structure. But how do you manage a bunch of horizontal employees coming in to a historically vertical organization? You’d better manage them differently, or you won’t get as much out of them, or they’ll leave. So it’s a set of problems that are, that are interesting and different—but a tremendous opportunity.

Yourdon: That reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you about, because it came up in an earlier interview this morning. Have you seen many instances of younger people being hired into your organization as a team and insisting on remaining together as a team?

Ford: No.

Yourdon: As opposed to just individually?

Ford: No, and I don’t know how tolerant we are of that in our work environment.

Yourdon: Well, as I’m sure you know, it’s always been common in the IT industry that if a project team works together and bonds, they want to stay together on the next project, which runs afoul of a lot of HR policies. But this idea of being hired right out of college as a team. I heard this about a month ago from the CIO of Marriott, and I got it confirmed this morning by the CIO of Arizona Public Services, and I had not heard it before a month ago, so I was just curious.

Ford: That they hire people as a team right out of college?

Yourdon: Well, the kids insisted on being hired. They said, “You either take all four of us or none of us.”

Ford: I would take a pass, and I’m not sure how long those kids would be around anyway. And I would take a pass because, we view people as individuals, and if you think about it—though, if you’re doing agile development, you have to focus on teams more, you have to pay people differently, you have to have a better, greater emphasis on teams and the value of teams, because that’s how you get the work done. But I don’t subscribe to that philosophy at all, and when teams of people come in and start to dictate to you what you can and can’t do and what they will—’cause the next thing they’re going to say is what they will and won’t work on. I’ll take a pass. I have a very different philosophy. We break up teams routinely—high-performing teams.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Ford: And it’s the best way to get more high-performing teams. Once a team hits a stride, and they’re cruising and they’re just loving life, “and this is great, and we’re really high-balance, high-performance,” you know, invariably there are other places that are not working as well.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: So you take the leaders from that team and either create new teams or put them where they will be more effective in taking those traits and characteristics and learnings and things from the team that they were on, and propagate that across the organization, proliferate that across and throughout the organization, and invariably you get better people and better teams, with better people that are cross-pollinated, number one, and that culturally and functionally put the kinds of attitudes and culture and philosophy out there, spread out throughout the organization, that you would not have had as much of had you not done that.

The other thing that it does is … it proliferates the concept of team, because what happens with really high-performing teams that demand to stay together and that kind of thing, after a while, it’s not necessarily them as a team, but it’s the overall team. How much of a team do you have if you have people that pride themselves on how well they do versus other people at the expense of everybody else as opposed to how they make the entire organization better?

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.

Ford: How do they make the entire world better? ’Cause what you have then is “us against the world,” or haves and have-nots, or thems and those, and, you develop these little cocky—especially if they’re working on new stuff, right? You develop these cocky, internally focused, “my way or the highway,” “just us,” “I’m only focused on me,” “I do good work, but, you know, the rest of the organization—never mind them.” When you routinely break those up, you get a team effect that’s greater than the sum of the parts. You get a synergy that exists that otherwise you wouldn’t by sending them across the organization.

Yourdon: Okay. Very interesting. Okay, I’m going to ask just one last question, and I think it’s kind of an appropriate question, and that is: where do you see yourself going from here? Do you expect to be a CIO for the rest of your life, or is this just one of many opportunities along the way?

Ford: I was thinking about starting a career writing technology books. What do you think?

Yourdon: [laughter] It doesn’t pay very well these days!

Ford: But as ex-DEC guys, maybe you and I can team up and go to some publisher and demand that we stay together as a team.

Yourdon: There you go. [laughter]

Ford: But I really don’t know. I’ve never really managed my career. There will always be a need for technology people. So I’m on the board now for—I’ve been on two public boards and one board that’s sort of a utility—and boards are going to continue to need good, strong, qualified technology people that have experiences like I have in a significant way. And I can only do one board at a time while I’m here. So I would do more than that, but for the time being, the world needs leadership that is open-minded and open-thinking and not shutting things down. The world needs to understand how to implement horizontal technology in, in a large enterprise environment. And that’s something that I think I am extraordinarily good at and may be narcissistic or conceited about it, but I think that part I get.

And so I’m not really focused on it, but I know that if things keep going the way that they are, that there will be people like me that need to help get it there. And I’m not the only one, obviously. There are a whole bunch of people that understand this stuff. But I’m just one person. But I think I can help get people to where they need to be.

Yourdon: It’s a future path that I’ve not heard other CIOs mention. And as it turns out, I’ve been on a couple of public boards also, so I completely agree with you that obviously in places like Silicon Valley, maybe everybody on the board is a technology person. But not in the typical Fortune 500 companies. You’ve got strong marketing people and financial people and so on, but, you know, having a real strong voice for technology—what a great career.

Ford: And I’m a very strong believer in all kinds of diversity, and I think some of those Silicon Valley companies would be a lot better off if they didn’t have just technologists on the board.

Yourdon: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Ford: Think about it. Not a lot of them have CIOs on the board.

Yourdon: You know, I’ve been surprised how infrequently the CIO has been on the board of all the companies I’ve been trying to track down. You’re right, absolutely.

Ford: You know, they absolutely should. People understand the organizations and the structure and the things they’re trying to do, they’re trying to sell to. No matter the size of the company, they want to sell to a big company. It legitimates them, it will standardize them, it will get them big contracts, all of that. And as much as even the companies that say, “We are so anti-big company,” the first thing they want to do is sell a contract to a big company.

Yourdon: [laughter] Right.

Ford: And it makes sense. It makes sense to have that same expertise. I also am a firm believer that just as right now, because of not only security, but also all these other things that we talked about, because today on public boards, as you know, you have to have a financial expert.

Yourdon: Right.

Ford: It makes all the sense in the world to me for any significant board to have a technology expert. I don’t, I don’t know if it will be a sort of requirement, Sarbanes-Oxley, like that you’re got to have one certified and all that, but if you’re a forward-thinking CEO and you don’t have a technology person on your board—I don’t care what business you’re in—how real forward-thinking are you? You absolutely have to have technologists on your board, or at least one, if you’re going to live in the free world today, irrespective of the product or service.

Yourdon: Well, I completely agree with you, and I think that is a wonderful general suggestion as a career path for CIOs at some stage, maybe later on in their career. Wonderful. Okay, well, I’m going to wrap this up so that I don’t interfere with the rest of your day of meetings.

Ford: Thank you.