The Professional CIO: Paul Burfitt, ex-CIO AstraZeneca

The professional CIO is the company insider closest to the traditional image of the top IT executive and someone who has worked their way up through the ranks over the years on performance and merit.

They are deeply loyal to the company, according to Brinley Platts, author of the Leading Edge Forum's Building Effective IT Executive Teams research, and chairman of CIODevelopment.com.

Platts says: "If you have a professional CIO who has been in the place for a while the chances are it is because they have been doing a good job."

Paul Burfitt, who has just retired this summer after seven years as global CIO at pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca, is one such CIO who fits the 'professional' profile.

Burfitt graduated from university in 1969 in mathematics and got his first job in research engineering at ICI's plastics divisions in Welwyn Garden City. There he specialised in process control and was drawn into manufacturing and then distribution as a manager within a European business of ICI.

But it was only about halfway through his career, after a spell on the business executive team of ICI's chemical products business, that Burfitt was drawn into information systems (IS) when ICI was looking for project managers for a major European accounting system

Burfitt told silicon.com: "Then I had a series of different IS leadership roles for different businesses of ICI - ranging from the strategic use of IS to a business that was very cost-focused and needed to get costs down."

In the early 1990s Burfitt became head of IS for ICI pharmaceuticals. The company then de-merged to become Zeneca before it moved back in the other direction, merging to become AstraZeneca where he became global CIO in 1999 until his retirement recently.

Burfitt says he never had a specific career goal that he was driving for: "It was step by step and avoiding taking huge risks with my career."

The key strengths required for any IT professional with the ambition to reach executive level are solid general management experience, leadership and influencing skills, strategic thinking, determination to deliver and the ability to balance priorities, according to Burfitt.

He says: "You have got to be able to get above the day to day, to think how IS makes a difference to the business and how it contributes to the delivery of company strategy. The bottom line for me is that IS leadership has to be very well integrated with the business and culture, and must focus its IS performance as directly as possible onto contributions to business performance and value."

Although 59-year-old Burfitt has officially retired from AstraZeneca he jokes he's not about to "sit in my chair and read books" and has set up his own independent consultancy as a strategic IS advisor to top company executives and IS leaders, along with voluntary work for the British Computer Society around IT professionalism.

Read more about the different types of CIO in our special feature 'What kind of CIO are you?' and an interview with 'paratrooper CIO' David Lister of Reuters.