Interviewee: Jack Cooper, CIO

Company: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (www.bms.com)

Main location: New York; information technology is dispersed across 85 locations worldwide, including several research-and-development sites in Princeton, N.J.

Number of IT employees: 2,000 worldwide; about 50 at headquarters

Number of employees (end users): 55,000 worldwide

Tenure: Since 1994

Major IT initiatives: "Early this year, we completed a large SAP implementation aimed at increasing our overall productivity and consolidating services across the company, and that has saved us well over $1 billion a year. Those productivity gains and savings have enabled us to invest in our research systems, and we've done extensive work on directly supporting the discovery, development and clinical trials associated with new pharmaceutical products.

"[We're setting up] collaborative computing so that researchers can go into a database of compounds and research them and share information on their performance. . . . Using IT, we can go up in multiples of orders of magnitude in increasing the compounds researchers can observe and . . . speed up the delivery of drugs."

What's unique about working in IT in the pharmaceuticals industry? "We're primarily a research organization, and the mind-set associated with research is to make change. And IT professionals like to see new ideas come forth. So it's a very fertile environment for an IT professional to work in."

In-house training options: Training in specific technical areas; soft skills training, such as for presentation skills and management skills, and leadership-development training.

Career-path options: "Predominantly, we offer an IT management trail, and more and more, we are offering a technical trail with multiple steps."

Bonus programs: Presidential awards, and financial and recognition rewards decided by an executive committee are given across the company; no IT-specific bonus programs.

Dress code: "It's very flexible. We feel very strongly that we want our employees to be highly motivated and comfortable. In the corporate offices, we have a tighter dress code than anywhere else. Here, it's more business dress, although few have to wear a coat and tie."

Workday: "IT hours are attuned to the user departments' hours. If you work in finance, for example, it's normal business hours. The overall average is an eight-hour day. We also have flextime, and in the summer, we have Friday afternoons off."

Must people carry beepers? Cell phones? Yes, "if they're on-call. For example, we have to report results on a monthly basis, so those supporting finance are on-call during that period, and they rotate the schedule month to month. But we find today that the wireless devices are consumed and used by nearly everyone -- we encourage that."

Percentage of staff that telecommutes: "It's very low. It's not very popular. You have to be aligned with your users and your team."

On-site child care? In Plainsboro and Princeton, N.J.; summer camps for employees' children in Evansville, Ind., and New Brunswick, N.J.; backup child-care referral services in New York and Stamford, Conn.

Little perks: Each IT unit has a quarterly event to "highlight successes across the grouup and raise ideas for collaboration."

Last department/companywide perk: An annual trip for the corporate IT staff to the Culinary Institute of America for a one-day team-building exercise. Morning classes are followed by an afternoon cooking contest.

"It's all about learning to work together -- the division of labor and how to cooperate and support each other. Last year, I won the contest with pork chops in mango sauce. Everyone said it's because I'm the CIO, but I think I'm just a quick study."

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