Microsoft's new CIO has a very big job

It's not so easy being #1, especially if all eyes are on you as Microsoft's new CIO. Tony Scott, 56, Microsoft's new CIO, will direct the company's global IT organization. He will oversee worldwide sales, marketing and business applications as he navigates the way for the giant tech vendor. Phil Murphy, an analyst with the CIO group at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., describes it this way: "It's a dragon's den of sorts." Gordon Haff, principle IT advisor at research firm Illuminata in Nashua, N.H., says any CIO at a big IT vendor needs to do the job and simultaneously showcase the company's own products. "CIOs at any of the software or hardware companies very much have to look at their own operations and say, "Wow, I can do that with my products, whether it is Microsoft's or IBM's or HP's, and say this is really cool." Haff said.

Not only that, Microsoft's CIO produces software for customers and makes sure that products work properly across platforms. "It is a very different world when you are in commercial software as opposed to when you are 'simply' trying to satisfy some internal users. The other big thing here is that Microsoft internal users are likely to be far more savvy, right?" Murphy said. "It's no small job, certainly." So we are certainly waiting for the new guy in town to shake things up, do it differently and take a very big job by the horns. Stay tuned.

For more on the challenges for Microsoft's new CIO:
- Check out this SearchCIO article