Honorio Padron

It took guts.

Hired by Dallas-based CompUSA Inc. to salvage a floundering $50 million information technology project, Honorio Padron worked on it for 90 days, then sold his rescue plan to top management.

Trouble was, he came in the very next day and told management he had changed his mind. “I told the executive team, ‘What I just sold you we can’t implement. The right solution is to throw away the project and do a new one,’ ” Padron says.

Padron says a mark of IT leadership is having the courage and vision to set aside short-term advantage for long-term gain – something that’s especially hard to do in a field that’s changing as fast as IT.

The point-of-sale (POS) system being developed in-house was too complicated and badly designed to serve the computer retailer well over the years, he says. Better to bite a painful budget bullet and buy an off-the-shelf system, he decided.

Remarkably, the executive team accepted Padron’s painful assessment with little objection. That’s a tribute to Padron’s extraordinary ability to win the trust and respect of senior business managers, says Paul Daversa, CEO of Resource Systems Group Inc., an executive recruitment firm in Stamford, Conn.

Says Daversa: “No matter where he’s gone, Honorio has always quickly emerged as a key player on the business operating committee. He’s one of the foremost thought leaders in the country in terms of marrying business and technology.”

Padron was born in Cuba in 1952 and earned a degree in electrical engineering and biomedicine. He says his educational background serves him well to this day.

“You have to think of the enterprise as an organism,” Padron explains. “I see myself as the architect of the digital nervous system. The human body has an infrastructure that allows you to play basketball or play baseball or to sleep. We need to put an IT infrastructure into companies that has that kind of flexibility.”

Padron says the new POS system, followed by a $100 million rollout of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a major network upgrade – all sponsored by Padron – form that infrastructure at CompUSA.

Last year, ERP vendor SAP America Inc. gave Padron its “Best Run Project Award” for the Americas. The project was ahead of schedule and 15% under budget, Padron says.

The key was getting the authority from the CEO to “keep it vanilla” – to reject requests from users for “weird customizations,” he says. “Ninety percent of the time, users don’t really need those things, and they won’t get you a return on investment,” Padron says.

The other success factor was finding a strong, disciplined project manager and then giving him the authority to exercise that discipline, Padron adds.