Larry Biagini, CTO of General Electric, is responsible for driving the technology direction of the Fairfield, Conn.-based corporate giant, which operates businesses spanning appliances and medical systems to media. Biagini controls the company’s technology stack, which drives the products and services used within GE. He has introduced collaboration tools, giving GE a variety of ways to communicate with its employees, customers, and suppliers. He works with CTOs at individual GE business units to cut costs across the enterprise, driving VPN implementations to replace costly private lines and using mainframe Linux to consolidate servers and applications. “The opportunities new technology will offer business [are] going to continue to grow in ways that we can’t even imagine,” Biagini says. “The key … is to know when to adopt a technology and how to get the most benefit out of it as early as possible.” “These are tough economic conditions, and I think that we are learning a valuable lesson about technology,” Biagini says. “During the dot-com bubble, companies bought anything that smelled like the latest and greatest, only to find out that all they were buying was technology, not solutions to business problems. After the bubble, I see strict emphasis on the business value that a given technology will produce.” — E.E. Return to InfoWorld’s 25 Most Influential CTOs 2002 Software Development