In Depth

Leadership Lessons: CSO Compass Awards 2008

Three of the six 2008 CSO Compass Award winners - Ed Amoroso, Ron Baklarz and Renee Guttmann - share takeaways drawn from diverse backgrounds

By Mary Brandel

Renee Guttmann is vice president of information security and privacy officer at Time Warner. In her seven-plus years at Time Warner, she has worked to create the TW Enterprise Information Security and Privacy policy; define an enterprise privacy framework and strategy to support international privacy regulations and transborder data flows; and create an Enterprise Information Risk Management program.

In her nearly 20 years in information technology, she also worked at Glaxo Wellcome as a principal information security consultant, at Gartner as a senior research analyst and at Capital One Financial as an information security architect.

Gutmann holds an honors BA from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where she studied historical archaeology. The subject, she says, had a bearing on her choice of careers. In her last year of school, her professor recorded the class's artifacts on a computer punch card, in order to produce maps of where everything was found. This piqued Gutmann's interest in computers, leading her to obtain a computer programming diploma from Honeywell Institute in Toronto. She did some programming and end-user support work at Black & Decker, Honeywell and Xerox, where she also did some sales work. "That experience gives you incredible skills, because security is all about selling the mission and getting people to understand their risk or exposure, and the benefit of addressing that."

Other stories by Mary Brandel

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