At Advanced Micro Devices, Frederick Mapp deals with planning and oversight.

Over more than thirty years in information technology, Frederick Mapp has worked with just about every innovation that brought IT to its stellar role in business today. Now he deals mainly with the planning and oversight of technology.

Mapp is CIO and VP of IT at Advanced Micro Devices (Sunnyvale, CA). He reports directly to president and CEO Hector Ruiz.

The position, a new one for AMD, shows the company’s recognition of the importance of IT to business success. “We no longer do coding or just provide email, LAN and WAN support. We work with the corporate executives to simplify their business processes with out-of-the-box solutions,” he says.

Mapp is enjoying the hands-off role, although “It was a tough transition to stop touching and modifying the applications,” he admits with a smile.

ICs for computers and communications
AMD is a global supplier of integrated circuits (ICs) for personal and networked computers and communications. The company produces microprocessors, flash memory devices and support circuitry. Its revenues topped $2.7 billion last year and it employs more than 12,000 people worldwide.

Mapp has split his time between AMD’s Sunnyvale, CA and Austin, TX locations since he joined up three years ago. Since he arrived he has made significant changes in the IT organization and developed an overall strategy to integrate or eliminate legacy systems.

He refined the number of IT processes performed, increased the efficiency of performance and significantly reduced costs. A new SAP system for finance and procurement was implemented in just nine months, he reports proudly.

In his years in business, Mapp has developed a group of initiatives – the framework that guides his efforts. They include aligning with the business to understand its requirements; putting good processes in place; building the application roadmap to support them; gathering the right people to implement the work; managing the costs of IT; and measuring results.

Long way from New Haven
It’s been quite a roller coaster ride for a kid who started his technical career tinkering with a crystal radio, and getting in trouble by riding a homemade go-cart down the street without a license. “That was my start, competing with RCA and General Motors,” he says with a chuckle.

Mapp’s parents came to the U.S. from Nevis and Barbados in the West Indies as children. His father learned the dry cleaning business from the ground up, his mother studied accounting, and together they opened a dry cleaner’s, one of the first minority-owned businesses in New Haven, CT.

Growing up, Mapp worked in the family business. He graduated at the top of his high school class and won a scholarship to the University of New Haven. He left college early and joined IBM (Armonk, NY) in 1965.

He spent the next thirty years with IBM, starting as a customer engineer and ending up as director of services and support of what is now part of IBM Global Services, a $36-billion division.

Starting out at IBM
As a brand-new customer engineer, young Mapp worked on some of the early computer/accounting machines. He attracted the attention of Jack Howell, a senior VP in IBM’s service organization.

“He discovered me and mentored me,” Mapp says. “That’s how I got started.”

In the 1960s, ambitious young African Americans feared being brought in by companies as token black employees – “We called it window dressing,” he says. “I had a joke with myself back then that the only black person I saw in the corporate world was me in the mirror.”

To avoid any chance of pigeonholing, Mapp took care to learn all aspects of the business. He spent time at IBM’s schools in Endicott, NY and Rochester, MN and, later on, did an IBM-sponsored semester at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY).

By 1971 Mapp had been promoted into management. “Now I had to manage people that I used to hang with,” he says. Most of them were white, but, “We made it work.”

In those days the position of program admin at HQ was IBM’s traditional first step to groom young talent. Mapp got that job, and when a technical area manager was sidelined by illness, Howell put Mapp in his spot for the interim. When the manager returned Mapp became Howell’s administrative assistant.

In 1976 he was promoted to branch manager for the IBM service organization in New Jersey. In ’78 he moved back to the corporate offices as a consultant – another of those grooming posts.

From consultant to manager
As a corporate consultant, Mapp worked on strategies and planning for the service organizations. Next he headed the new systems center in the field engineering division. That involved selecting new products and getting customers to accept them. “We’d check out the service plan, training plan, the maintenance plan, everything to test the support for the new system,” he says.

By 1984 Mapp was regional manager for services in the Midwest. He had sixteen branch managers, with more than 3.000 employees, reporting to him.

Supporting Global Services
Nine months later he was managing the new national services organization, a merger of three divisions. He moved south to Kansas City, MO, where one of the critical accounts was Federal Express. With ninety planes landing and exchanging packages every night, the IBM systems had to be super-reliable.

That year Mapp also found time for a quick course at the Tuck School of Business of Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH). “It was like a mini-MBA,” he says. And he began another new enterprise when he got married that same year.

In 1987 he was back at HQ as director of services and support for the national services group. Now it was called Global Services, and it was a vital component of IBM’s transition from a product company to a service company.

In the early 1990s Howell and several other executives left the company. In 1992 Mapp decided to make a change, too, and took early retirement from IBM.

Second career and more
After thirty years of calling one company home, Mapp began a rapid-fire series of new experiences. Within the year he came out of retirement as VP of tech ops at InfoSpan, Inc (Minneapolis, MN). His specialty was building infrastructures for startup companies.

In 1994 Mapp formed his own consulting company, Quality Service Solutions. American Express (New York, NY), one of his clients, soon asked him to hire on to oversee and improve applications and processes for the corporate card in Phoenix, AZ. The idea of that sunny climate attracted the Mapps and he took the job.

In Phoenix he connected with another African American executive. “We call it an ethnic sighting,” he says with a smile. His new friend was VP of HR at Honeywell’s Industrial Automation Controls Division (Phoenix, AZ), and in 1996 Mapp joined the division as VP and CIO of IT.

In 2000 he moved to AMD and a new home in Austin, TX.

After hours
Mapp still loves cars, but there are no more go-carts in his life. He owns six prestige cars now, including an H2 Hummer. He and his wife have lived with several dogs over the years; right now it’s Lily, a French bulldog.

He also enjoys helping others develop their careers. He mentors people at AMD and at the University of Texas-Austin. “I’ll talk to anyone who will listen,” he says. Recently, that has included sessions with the Austin Technology Council, MBA and IT classes at UT and a minority-serving college in Houston.

He’s also working on a book, which, he hopes, will distill some of what he’s learned over the years about technology, business and management.

It’s been a long and varied trip for Frederick Mapp, and there’s no retirement in sight anytime soon.

D/C

– Kate Colborn & Christine Willard