You may have been the first Fortune 500 executive given the title "chief innovation officer" when you were named to the post by Textron in April 2000. How did the role come about?I was hired here in November 1999 in a traditional CIO role. At that time, there was a ton of work going on in the e-business world. I had a lot of experience in sales and marketing prior to coming into IT.

Over the course of two board meetings, I presented what we needed to be looking at from [the viewpoint of] procurement and engineering with e-business. This is a bigger opportunity than IT; it's about business models. I made that clear to the board and the chairman. And our chairman [Lewis B. Campbell], who has been a very aggressive learner, realized that there was an opportunity for us to create something new and different.

We call it our "journey of transformation." At the time, we had 11 business units, none of which could connect or communicate with each other. So my job initially was to create this infrastructure so you could have this connectivity throughout the Textron environment. A lot of companies had already done it by then. Textron had not. It had inhibited our ability to communicate as a company.

We also consolidated over 180 data centers to two. And we standardized on a single laptop. We did a billion-dollar outsourcing deal with CSC to give us the security we needed and a common thread of IT applications like payroll, finance and insurance.

The biggest thing that came out of it was the development of a Web site to show the whereabouts of our executives and [provide] information on demand, essentially. That got us to look into other things, like online auctions for commodity materials and online maintenance procurement for our jet aircraft. This allowed us to grow into other areas as we got into far-reaching opportunities.