Gerald Peterson
Gerald H. (Jerry) Peterson Senior Consultant
Jerry Peterson is a Senior Consultant Cutter Consortium’s Business Technology Strategies practice. He focuses on risk management for large-scale IT programs, the strategic application of IT, and the evolving role of the Chief Information Officer. He has written Cutter Executive Reports and Updates, and he writes a regular column for CIO Digest, a magazine of strategy and analysis for senior IT executives published by Symantec Corporation.
Jerry teaches at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, where he is a lecturer in business information technology. His courses, in both the graduate MBA program and the undergraduate BBA program, focus on how companies use IT to gain a competitive advantage and on the implementation pitfalls of large-scale, IT-enabled, change programs. Professor Peterson has been a member of the faculty since 1998, and he has been a leader in the development of new syllabi to ensure that course offerings remain up-to-date and relevant to the continually evolving world of business information technology.
Until recently, Jerry was Director of the Information Systems Executive Forum, an outreach activity of the Ross School of Business that keeps industry leaders abreast of new developments in information technology management and promotes joint industry/academic collaboration.
Jerry is retired from the Ford Motor Company, following a career of 30 years in information technology. At his retirement, Jerry was the Director of Information Technology Services with global responsibility for Ford's data processing centers, telecommunications networks, end-user computing programs, application development services, application maintenance and support services, and application implementation services. This organization of more than 3,000 IT professionals was created under Jerry's leadership as a single, corporate, shared services organization replacing dozens of disparate activities around the world and adopting common processes based on best industry practices. Notably, this included one of the earliest and at that time the largest, deployments of "agile" development methods, to speed up the system development process and dramatically improve its productivity.
Earlier at Ford, Jerry was the Director of Marketing, Sales, and Service Systems, a position in which he was responsible for all of the customer-facing and dealer-facing systems used by Ford companies around the world. Prior to this, at various times, he had responsibility for Ford's accounting, financial, personnel, payroll, purchasing, and manufacturing plant-floor systems.
Jerry also spent four years at Ford of Europe headquarters in Essex, England, where he worked on integrating the previously independent European subsidiaries into a single pan-European organization. Throughout his career, Jerry continued to work closely with Ford's overseas affiliates having, at various times, responsibility to coordinate, integrate, and commonize information systems in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific region, and for new ventures in non-traditional Ford markets, such as India and China.
Before joining Ford, Jerry served as an officer in the United States Air Force. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and of Stanford University. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.
Up Close with Jerry Peterson"The key to risk management in ERP programs is to focus on what we don't know. As the philosopher Confucius said 2,500 years ago, 'Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.'"
— Gerald Peterson,Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium
"It is the operational issues that, more often than not, defeat the CIO. You need a defensive game plan that focuses on running the "back room" well -- on delivering IT services reliably and economically."
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