Ross Philo

Position: Chief information officer, U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Service has 37,000 retail locations and an annual revenue of $75 billion.

Career Highlights: Director, global energy solutions, Cisco Systems; president and chief executive, Visean; senior vice president and chief information officer, Halliburton Energy Services. Before that, Philo spent 28 years in leadership roles at Schlumberger, including as IT director, vice president of market development and director of IT operations.

Age: 56

Education: BS, engineering, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London.

Personal: Lives in the District. His wife, Gillian, and twin boys, James and Alex, 17, will move from Texas. Their daughter, Alisa, 19, is a sophomore at Yale University.

How did you get to where you are?

I grew up in the United Kingdom, where my parents were teachers. My father in particular gave me the really strong love of math and science. Before going to Imperial, I decided I would flush out my practical side of being an engineer and did an apprenticeship with an engineering company called Vickers Engineering, famous for building submarines and big printing machinery. I won a full scholarship from Vickers to Imperial, and I returned to the company after I graduated.

I then spent 28 years with Schlumberger, the oil field service company, with operations in 90 to 100 countries. I fulfilled my love of adventure, working in 30 countries, then landing in the United States in 1986 for what I expected would be an 18-month assignment. Twenty-two years and three children later, I'm still here.

The great thing about my career with Schlumberger is that I gained a broad experience from field operations, marketing, communications and product development, including engineering and manufacturing.

In 2003, I joined Halliburton as the senior vice president and chief information officer of the energy services group. I spent three great years with Halliburton, where I was able to drive change and transformation, merging a number of different IT organizations.

After Halliburton, I was president and chief executive of Visean, a very small but global oil field services company that was headquartered in Sydney but with operations in Malaysia, the Middle East and North America. I was working to expand the Visean presence in Houston.

It might appear as if there is little similarity between the U.S. Postal Service and oil field services, but I think there are parallels. Both sectors involve huge amounts of data. Operations take place in all weathers and around the clock. Employees have a tremendous sense of purpose and service. Each sector requires a fascinating combination of dedicated people, complex technology and well-managed processes.

You can see that I have traded in the global complexity of oil and gas exploration for a leadership role in a company that has perhaps the largest scope and scale of any U.S. organization.

It's an amazingly complex organization; and from an IT perspective, it has to be one of the biggest challenges out there. At the time, it was a path I may not have realized I was on, but all roads lead to the Postal Service, which I consider to be the highpoint of my career.

-- Judith Mbuya