IT Management Slideshow:
The 50 Most Influential People in Business IT

• The people portrayed here represent a diverse group selected by Baseline readers and editors for their contributions to the world of information technology.
• David Barnes started as a part-time package loader in1977, and is now senior vice president and CIO for UPS Worldwide overseeing one of the world’s most powerful and highly visible business process management/customer support integrations.
• Since 2006, Rollin L. Ford has been executive vice president/CIO for Wal-Mart, overseeing the global information systems division and guiding all Wal-Mart’s IT and applications strategy and execution.
• Robert Carter is responsible for setting technology direction, managing the corporation's key applications and technology infrastructure, advanced networks and data centers that provide around-the-clock and around-the-globe support.
• As group vice president and CIO of General Motors, Ralph Szygenda is responsible for global information technology strategy and plays a leadership role in GM's business process transformation. He joined GM in 1996.
• Diane Offereins has been CTO and executive vice president at Discover since 1998, overseeing systems supporting the 50-million-cardholder Discover Card Services and the Discover Network serving more than 4100 merchants.
• Tim Stanley is CIO and senior vice president of Innovation, Gaming and Technology for Harrah's Entertainment, the world's largest provider of branded casino entertainment. Managing Harrah's global IT operation is just the cornerstone of Stanley's job.
• In November 2007, Gareth Lewis was appointed group CIO at integrated energy company Centrica, ending Lewis's six years as the highly visible CIO of Virgin Group.
• Serving in Congress since 1976, Edward Markey (D-Mass) is currently chair of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, and he serves on several other committees and subcommittees pertaining to technology, security and the environment, as well as being a proponent of net neutrality-- the principle whereby service providers must offer the same quality of Internet service to all users.
• As Congressman and Senator (Tennessee) in the late '70s and early '80s, Albert Gore chaired the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology and became known as one of the Atari Democrats, championing the use of high-speed networking for education and economic advancement.
• As vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight is responsible for a worldwide organization that plans and provides global net-centric solutions for the president and the military. Prior to assuming her current post in 2007, she was principal director of operations and deputy commander for the Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations.
• Howard Schmidt headed the computer crime exploitation team at the FBI, and later became director of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations Computer Forensic Lab and Computer Crime and Information Warfare Division. He then served as Microsoft’s chief security officer (CSO). In 2001, President Bush appointed Schmidt special advisor for Cyberspace Security for the White House.
• In 2003, Takai was appointed director of information technology for the state of Michigan. There, Takai led the governmentwide IT consolidation, which merged the state's information technology into one centralized department, saving $100 million in the process.
• In the early 1970s, as a grad student at UCLA, Vinton G. Cerf made contributions to packet-switching protocols used in ARPAnet, the Internet’s predecessor. At Stanford, his research culminated in his co-invention--with ARPA research colleague Robert Kahn--of the TCP/IP protocol stack and the basic architecture of the Internet. He’s now the chief technology evangelist at Google.
• Tim Berners-Lee is an Oxford-educated computer scientist and physicist who, as a fellow at CERN (the European nuclear research agency) in 1990, invented the World Wide Web by pairing a simple server/daemon architecture (httpd) across a high-level protocol (http) with a browser client, capable of rendering and navigating hypertext documents written in a simplified derivative of SGML.
• In September 1991, Linus Torvalds created and uploaded the first version of Linux source code, sparking off what swiftly became--and remains--one of history’s most successful examples of open source software creation, and launching a product now in use worldwide, from embedded systems and desktops to the Internet core.
• Nick Negroponte built the MIT Media Lab into an international blue-sky research powerhouse, whose output strongly influenced the evolution of unified, location-aware multimedia digital communications, robotics, computer graphics, simulation, augmented reality and other industries
• Welshman Michael Moritz, a former technology journalist, publisher, event producer and entrepreneur, joined Sequoia Capital in 1986.
• Blake Aaron Ross is a software developer best known for having started, with Dave Hyatt, the Mozilla Firefox project, an open source web browsing alternative.
• John Pescatore is a vice president and research fellow in Gartner Research.
• Charlene Li, an independent thought-leader on social technologies, was vice president and principal analyst on the Devices, Media and Markets team at Forrester, focusing on how new technology influences how companies do business and engage with customers.
• Charles Weaver writes and speaks on the managed services industry. Prior to starting the MSP Alliance, Weaver was an editor for an Internet news organization.
• At various positions with IBM, Irving Wladawsky-Berger was responsible for leading IBM onto the Internet. More recently, Dr. Berger made contributions to IBM’s strategy for emerging technologies, including the ”On-Demand Business” initiative and IBM’s high-profile work in virtual worlds.
• The duo met in the PhD program at Stanford, where Page had been advised by Prof. Terry Winograd to pursue his interest in graphing the Web’s link structure. To pursue this work, he built the BackRub Web crawler; then to convert BackRub data into influence measurements, Page and Brin wrote the PageRank algorithm, which remains at the core of Google’s technology.
• Eric Schmidt began his career as an engineer at Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox PARC. At Sun Microsystems, beginning in 1983, he headed the initiative that created Java, eventually becoming CTO.
• Marc Benioff founded Salesforce.com in 1999, with a vision of providing salesforce-management applications on demand to businesses at any scale.
• Tom Anderson founded MySpace with Chris DeWolfe, and now serves as president after the acquisition of MySpace by News Corp.
• Marc Andreessen was a co-author of the original Mosaic browser and the founder of Netscape. Following Netscape’s acquisition by AOL in 1999, Andreessen became AOL’s CTO, but soon left to found Loudcloud, a high-availability hosting service.
• J. Michael Arrington, entrepreneur, blogger and Internet influencer, founded his first company, Achex, in the late 1990s.
• Jeff Bezos founded online-bookseller Amazon.com in 1994.
• John Chambers is chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems. He joined Cisco in 1991 as senior vice president, after stints with Wang and IBM.
• Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977, under the name Software Development Laboratories. It was renamed Relational Software, and became with the release of the Oracle 2 Relational Database in 1980.
• Reid Hoffman was the founder of SocialNet, one of the first social networks. He was CEO for four years before moving to his current position as chairman and president.
• Michael Howard is the senior security program manager at Microsoft.
• Mark Hurd is chairman, CEO and president of Hewlett-Packard.
• Jonathan Paul Ive is senior vice president, Industrial Design, at Apple.
• Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, also founded NeXT Computer. When Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, Jobs returned to lead the company he founded.
• Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, is now chief software architect at Microsoft.
• Sam Palmisano is chairman, president and CEO of IBM, which he joined in the late 1970s. He held positions of ascending importance and became CEO in 2002.
• Jonathan Schwartz began his career as a business analyst at McKinsey, but changed direction in 1987 when he founded marketing consultancy Lighthouse Design. Sun purchased Lighthouse in 1996, and Schwartz became director of product marketing for JavaSoft.
• Jimmy Wales co-founded the Wikipedia open-content encyclopedia in 2001, and shepherded its subsequent growth into one of the world’s most-consulted sources of information.
• While at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg launched the social networking Web site Facebook with fellow students Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
• Since 2000, Peter Weill has been director of the Center for Information Systems Research and senior research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He urges CIOs “to spend more time working with external customers, selling and delivering the firm’s products and services, while helping to increase their firm’s business process effectiveness.”
• Nicholas Carr, formerly an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, is best known for his 2003 article for that journal titled, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” in which he argued that the strategic importance of IT in business is vanishing. His 2004 book Does IT Matter? elaborates on his ideas.
• A columnist for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman is best known for several seminal books on topics relating to globalization and the implications of borderless economy.
• While at World Online, Adrian Holovaty collaborated with colleagues Simon Willison, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Wilson Miner to create the Django Web framework, a tool used for efficient Web site building. In 2005, he created chicagocrime.org, a free database of crime information.
• Walter Lewin is a proponent of technology in science education. For many years, he offered courses in physics on MIT cable television.
• Andrew McAffee, associate professor at Harvard Business School, is both a critic and a proponent of the business use of social networks, prediction markets and other contemporary Web tools.
• F. Warren McFarlan is T.J. Dermot Dunphy Baker Foundation professor of business administration and Albert H. Gordon professor of business administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School.
• Walt Mossberg is the principal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal.