My First 100 Days as CIO Business Strategy and Information Technology: What I Learned During My First 100 Days. When I assumed the job as CIO, my first priority was to understand the critical issues facing our organization, so I traveled to a number of different Sun locations, gathering ideas, thoughts, and issues from hundreds of IT employees as well as Sun executives across the company. I also wanted to understand how our IT organization compared to other organizations so I spent quite a bit of time speaking to customers and participating in industry events.

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What my first 100 days on the job says about the changing role of the CIO and how everyone in an organization can help reinvent IT

Welcome back, Sun Inner Circle readers. As regular recipients of this newsletter already know, I’m Bob Worrall, and I publish a letter in this forum to share topical industry issues and my insights as the CIO of Sun Microsystems.

Last month I invited Bob Brewin, Sun distinguished engineer and the CTO of Sun Software, to guest write a letter in this venue on the meaning of Sun’s decision to open source Java. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, it’s worth a read if only because Bob is intimately involved in all software decisions here at Sun and because Sun is now far and away the largest contributor to both the open source software and free software communities.

As I write this letter, the new year is freshly upon us, and I think I will turn introspective and discuss some of the lessons I learned during my first 100 days on the job as CIO. I recently had the opportunity to address a large group from our services organization during an all-hands meeting and share some of the personal discoveries at my 100-day milestone. I’d like to take this opportunity to expand on some of those revelations, as well as draw out some implications vis-à-vis the changing role of the CIO industry-wide and the consequences for employees of an IT organization.