CIO Jeff Connery created a services organization that supplies IT to two credit unions. Here he shares his rules of the road.

Jeff Connery, CIO of inUnison Technology Services, spends half his time working out of a spartan office in the bowels of the First Calgary Savings & Credit Union headquarters in Alberta, Canada. Connery and CEO Tim Wasilieff share an office -- actually a trailer that's been backed up to a nondescript building where a wall was knocked out to create a doorway. The rest of the IT department is also crammed cheek by jowl outside the door. "We have no room here," Connery says.

Connery spends the rest of his time working at Envision Financial, on the other side of the Rockies, in Langley, outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. For a while, Connery was CIO of both credit unions -- though there had been no business merger. Instead, there was the vision of two CEOs of creating a network of credit unions across the country, providing services for traveling members, enabled by a shared technology platform and ultimately other shared services as well.