AT&T's Thaddeus Arroyo: Tech will transform customer engagement

Thaddeus Arroyo, president of technology development at AT&T, believes IT leaders must show their organizations how technology will transform both how they do business and how they engage with customers.

AT&T

"Today's technology thought leaders," he says, "are guiding and informing business strategy, not just enabling it." That kind of thinking, along with his leadership skills and strategic vision, earned Arroyo the 2014 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award. Arroyo, who oversees about 15,000 IT employees and 10,000 contractors, shares his ideas on being a CIO.

Does your CIO position focus on internal as well as external users? My role definitely includes both internal and external components. I oversee systems supporting all the AT&T business segments, which includes servicing consumers and small, midsize and large businesses, and I'm responsible for global compute and services. And in addition to directing the internal information technology organization, I'm also responsible for external hosting data centers, and for all of AT&T's digital properties across all business segments.

Those digital properties are run by my team. For example, if you walk into the retail store, we develop the point-of-sale system and all the tools they're using. If you're using the AT&T app, our team does the development for that. My team does the digital experience design and works with the businesses to drive the customers into these digital properties.