This year’s top 25 CTOs

VISIONARY LEADERS KNOW that there are lessons to be learned at every moment in history, even the most difficult of times. It’s fair to say that 2002 has been a bleak year for IT, but the 25 Most Influential CTOs InfoWorld honors here have seized opportunities in this downturn. They have created more integrated systems and efficiencies in their organizations, driving not only cost savings but also innovative ways of doing business that will serve their employers well when the economy turns around. While helping their own companies and organizations, these executives have continued to keep an eye on trends and developments that will shape the future of technology. Some are taking leading roles in standards debates, while others are fostering community relationships with fellow IT executives, building a strong peer network, and strengthening the knowledge base of the enterprise.

What differentiates our influential CTOs and top IT executives from others is that far from seeing only the limits in this difficult period in IT history, they know the last year has really been about creating opportunities to align technology even more closely with core business strategies. Some of them work for companies that have taken a beating in the current economic climate, but they have continued to strive for improvement.

InfoWorld’s 25 Most Influential CTOs are pragmatists and strategists at the same time. They play a leading role in enabling their organizations to engage in something that Hal Varian, dean of the school of information management and systems at University of California, Berkeley, refers to as “recombinant growth,” which has helped drive technology innovation in the past and will continue to drive it in the future. “The component parts [are] … things like HTTP and XML,” Varian says (see ” The economics of innovation .” “All of these protocols and pieces of software and standards have been combined and recombined to create all sorts of new innovations.”

Past boom/bust technology cycles in history — say, for example, the era of railroads — offer perspective on today’s economy. When the railroad era went bust, it left miles of excess tracks that were useless when the next wave of transportation technology, the automobile, came along. Varian says today’s technology is much more fungible. “You can put it to lots of different uses, even after the capacity has been put in place.”

History has many lessons to teach leading technologists, but perhaps one of the most difficult to practice is the notion that persistence and the daily struggle for excellence pays off. For our 25 Most Influential CTOs, profiled here by writers Eve Epstein, Jack McCarthy, Loretta W. Prencipe, Stephanie Sanborn, and Scott Tyler Shafer, continuous improvement is a career credo. We have never needed these CTOs’ skills more than we do now.

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