Published reports suggest that half of all CIOs leave their jobs in less than three years1. Having been in the business far longer, I'm often asked what is my most critical piece of advice for success in our profession. It boils down to one question — do you know what Q x A = E means?

Most everybody in industry by now understands the power of Six Sigma methodologies to design robust processes, root out defects, and ultimately assure the highest possible quality in delivering solutions. The impact of "less-than-superlative" quality is easily demonstrable: an IT system running at a 4 Sigma quality level will likely suffer 54 hours of computer system downtime per year, while at 6 Sigma, unplanned downtime is only 2 minutes per year.2

At Sun Microsystems, we recognized early on that the explosive growth of network computing poses an unprecedented quality challenge, because the number and complexity of connected devices is such that any single defect whether it's in a hardware or software product or in a business process is greatly magnified through what we call the "Net Effect".

Ever since the Spring of 2000, Sun has applied Six Sigma (under the name of Sun Sigma) to develop a common customer-focused methodology to deliver high quality in everything we do, and I led its use within Sun IT as CIO.