Vic Bhagat, Chief Information Officer Global Growth & Operations of General Electric

Episode Overview

Among other topics, Vic discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:

• Vic’s unique IT role explicitly focused on enabling growth in the global markets
• IT’s significant role in leading innovation, whether that is through managing information to accelerate decision making, improving predictive capabilities, or enhancing other various business processes
• The importance of employee loyalty and pride, as well as the need to proactively mold a culture of innovation in order to foster and encourage creative thinking
• Vic’s charter to translate best practices from the various pockets of excellence in GE’s businesses throughout the company, with the focus on still making decisions localized and relevant for each market
• The challenging balance between being innovative and still focusing on security, risk management, and proper governance practices
• GE’s move to bring many IT jobs, and therefore critical domain knowledge, back onshore to its Michigan Tech Center that now houses the largest concentration of GE IT professionals in the world
• The future of the IT leader, and how historical IT responsibilities will be table stakes, and true leaders will need to drive and enable growth
• GE’s approach to ensuring that IT metrics are effective in driving the desire behavior, with a focus on enabling business processes more than simply server outages
• Eye on the trends: Omnipresent information and the capability of sending IT solutions to anywhere at any time, hyper-intelligence and how analytics can bring the decision support system to a whole new level, and the need to give ample attention to the entire user experience in order to ensure stickiness

Vic Bhagat’s Biography

Vic is Chief Information Officer (CIO) for GE’s Global Growth and Operations organization, where he is responsible for leading IT in delivering process excellence, simplification, collaboration, security and compliance in all non-U.S. markets, with particular emphasis on high-growth markets such as China, India, the Middle East and Brazil. Vic is currently based in Hong Kong.

Prior to his current role, Vic served as CIO for GE Corporate and GE’s Advanced Manufacturing and Software Technology Center.  Vic has also served as CIO for GE in India and Southeast Asia, where he was responsible for driving the company’s regional strategy in sourcing, IT and the global development centers. He has also held a series of leadership roles in the areas of information management, e-business and corporate security across several GE businesses including GE Aviation, GE Consumer & Industrial and GE Plastics. Prior to joining GE, Vic held IT positions with Keane Inc., Humana Inc., and Colgate Palmolive.

Vic earned his bachelor’s degree in information management and marketing from the University of Louisville and a degree in physics and mathematics from St. John’s University in India. He serves on several Advisory Boards including AT&T Utilities & Field Services, Fairfield University – School of Software Engineering, and works closely with University of Connecticut’s School of Business.

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