GIRISH VARMA CIO, Qwest Communications

Career accomplishment I'm most proud of: I'm especially proud of the low-cost, high-value structure we have in my IT group. Qwest's global IT operations utilize strong talent in both the United States and India to provide services at about one-third of the industry norm.

Most important career influencer: At Bell Labs, my boss taught me the value of coupling strong business acumen with IT. He taught me not to get enamored with technology for its own sake but for what it can do for people.

Vision

Advice for future CIOs: Stay focused on business results by keeping collaboration, efficiency, and transformation top of mind.

The next big thing for my business: My challenge as CIO is to integrate Qwest's partners and services into competitive offerings. IT fosters the creation of innovative solutions, improves time to market, and helps drive costs out of the business. The variety of rapidly developing technologies will push us to ask, "How do we uniquely make these services work better for our customers?"

Best way for CIOs to cope with the economic downturn: To deliver a quality customer experience, critical in tough economic times, get in touch with your best customers to understand their business challenges. Then you show stakeholders how to leverage IT for growth.

The federal government's top technology priority should be ... cybersecurity. As hacking attacks and other threats rapidly evolve, security countermeasures must stay ahead of that constant change. By collaborating with industry, federal agencies can take advantage of our research, development, and innovation to protect the nation's critical infrastructure.

On The Job

Top initiatives:

How I measure IT effectiveness: The mission is simple--enable the delivery of a quality customer experience and deliver new customer capabilities. Every efficiency IT introduces means a gain in our ability to do more of just that. For example, through programs like data center consolidation, maintenance cost reduction programs, and server virtualization and consolidation, IT has reduced business costs significantly. This frees up resources that Qwest feeds back into delivering innovative solutions to our customers.

Personal

Leisure activities: Tennis gives me plenty of exercise and motivates me to improve myself in other ways

Tech vendor I respect most: Apple's Steve Jobs has an amazing ability to be creative and constantly delight us

Biggest business-related pet peeve: Sitting through meetings that aren't well thought through with respect to their agendas and desired outcomes

If I weren't a CIO, I'd go into ... a research and a laboratory setting; I'm excited by innovation that pushes the edge of technology frontiers