It"s a dream situation that most CIOs never get to experience -- the chance to build an IT organization from the ground up. That"s essentially what Sam Coursen is doing. Coursen, who had been the CIO at NCR Corp. for the past seven years, was hired in August by Freescale Semiconductor in Austin to help the firm develop a set of world-class IT processes following its spin-off from Motorola Inc. late last year.

Computerworld caught up with Coursen before he spoke Tuesday in Las Vegas at the IT Financial Management & Asset Management Summit, presented by the International Quality & Productivity Center based in New York.

Why did you join Freescale? At NCR, I went through the entire transformation of IT and it got to be where I was going to be presiding over the end state, which was OK, but I felt that I did pretty much what I"d hoped to accomplish. So I was willing to listen to offers and I received a call about this opportunity and thought it would be a good challenge. And it"s a fairly new company, so it has a bit of a start-up feel to it. It was spun off from Motorola at the end of 2004 [following an initial public offering in July 2004].

Why do you look upon this as a "good" challenge? The CEO wanted to bring someone in to bring us to a world-class level.

That must"ve been a pretty heady time to be at NCR, given the dramatic changes the company went through. Over the seven years I was at NCR, I had seven different bosses. I worked for Mark Hurd [former NCR CEO, now Hewlett-Packard CEO] the last couple of years. At the end of that time, there wasn"t a single senior executive who was there when I started.