Driving Change

The 'Geeky Kid' Strikes Back

As a girl, Gail Farnsley liked math. Farnsley, CIO of Cummins Inc., the $8.4 billion-a-year maker of the diesel engines found in pickup trucks and school buses, largely credits a high-school math teacher--David Brewer of Medina High School in Medina, Ohio--for her career in IT. "He taught a computer course for the geeky kids who liked math," she says, recalling the punch cards she programmed with No. 2 pencils.

IT certainly has changed since Farnsley programmed those punch cards in the late 1970s. It has even changed quite a bit since she took over as CIO at Cummins in 2002. "Several years ago, an IT person would generally either buy an application or build an application on their own," she says. "Today, you have to follow company standards, work with the outsourcers and suppliers and internal business units, and bring it all together. Today, IT is about communication and collaboration."

These always have been Farnsley's strengths. Before becoming CIO, she worked in Cummins' corporate IT group in sales, marketing, and distribution. One of her first big projects was to help the group's international distributors solve their year 2000 problems.

Last year and, so far, this year have been good for Cummins. But the company has had its share of lean times. One of Farnsley's biggest projects as CIO, an effort called PowerSweep, was intended to get IT costs under control. To make it easier and cheaper to support the 20,000 PCs its employees used, Cummins decided two years ago to replace every PC at the same time. PowerSweep was completed in 2003, and Farnsley estimates it will save the company $9 million over three years in service and support, application development, and application deployment costs. "It's much easier to develop applications when you know exactly what the baseline is for the installed PCs," she says. Cummins is preparing for its next PC PowerSweep next year.

While cutting the cost of doing business is an important role for IT, Farnsley says, it shouldn't be the focus. "Today, IT should sit at the table as a business partner. In that function, IT can add value to a business." At Cummins, IT professionals are business analysts, she says. "They understand technology and how to apply it to business problems."

Farnsley used the opportunity of cutting costs to introduce change. Toward the end of the first PC PowerSweep, the company started adding wireless-access cards to notebooks. That's been a big productivity boost. "We've installed wireless in all of our facilities. It's changed the way we do business," Farnsley says. People can be productive wherever they are, she says.

One of Farnsley's passions is encouraging girls to consider tech careers. Last month, she accompanied her 11-year-old daughter to a gathering of 400 middle-school girls at the joint campus of Indiana University and Purdue University in Indianapolis, where professional women showed them the opportunities available. "There are tons of opportunities in technology for women," she says. "Not only the technical aspects, but the real burgeoning areas are in using communication skills to help technology solve real business problems."