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On Wings of Money

On Wings of Money

Launch a profitable product and watch your career take off

Give IT accountability for revenue. About 80 percent of VistaPrint's IT staff is in the Capabilities Development Group, which consists of software engineers, project managers, process experts and DBAs. "The group acts like a consulting organization for our business units," says Cebula. "Whenever the business needs a new process or product, the group starts early and works broadly across the whole capability. We pull together the entire solution, not just the technology."

While the product managers own the P&L, the capabilities development teams are measured on how they help the product managers meet their revenue goals. "My staff's responsibility is to meet or exceed the revenue goals for what they are developing; they make decisions based on those objectives," says Cebula. "Any one of our developers could tell you in an instant what their product's revenue projections are."

Use the two-way mirror approach. H&R Block CIO Marc West partnered with a VP of store operations to develop a major new business unit, H&R Block Commercial Markets, which launched this February. The new business provides tax preparation software as a service to companies who in turn offer tax preparation to their customers. West, who is now both CIO and group president of Commercial Markets, projects significant profits for the business in 2007.

West came up with the idea for Commercial Markets during an RFP process for some tax preparation software he was evaluating to support the business. "We used that RFP to review the major software providers to our competitors," says West. "From that software review, we learned a lot about the independent market and what our next move could be."

West calls this approach a "two-way mirror" model, where in the course of evaluating technology for your own business, you ask the right questions to gain insights about how your competitors are using that technology. "Every time you look at a technology, consider not just what it does for you, but what it does for your competitors," says West. "Then you can have a real conversation with your CEO about new market opportunities."

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