Chrysler CIO talks about major IT transformation involving key partners
As gas prices slowly crept up to the $4.00 mark this year, sales of new trucks and SUVs hit a record low sending some automobile makers on a hunt for ways to keep the bottom line from taking a nose drive. Three years ago, the $64 billion Chrysler LLC took take steps to deal with an impending downturn in the market by launching a recovery and transformation plan. In early 2007, the company began the corporate journey toward financial health and operational well-being. The plan includes changes throughout the entire enterprise and throughout all of the organizations with IT being one of them.
Jan Bertsch, Chrysler's senior vice president, and global CIO, says, "Our IT goal is operate more efficiently and more effectively. The business case specifically for IT was very clear. Because the competition continues to get stronger, IT really needed to focus on several things, one of them being the need to leverage global resources to support our growth initiatives."
Enterpriseleadership.org recently sat down with Bertsch, who is a also Chrysler's treasurer, to talk about the strategic changes and partnerships that will make IT more responsive to the global needs of all its constituents. Here is what she had to say:
EL. What can briefly describe your key responsibilities as CIO at Chrysler?
JB. I'm responsible for the direction of our global systems' hardware strategy and planning. This comprises all of the company's systems application development, our data center operations, telecommunications, and network operations on a global basis. IT has the dual role of keeping our global operations running, but also being a key partner with our business. We try to use IT to help the enterprise respond to changing customer and business partner needs, as well as to help fuel our international growth. Our structure today combines centralized services as well as shared services.
EL. Can you describe how the current structure of IT supports all of global business operations?
JB. Our applications group aligns with the main businesses of Chrysler, which includes our sales and our marketing systems, our after sales systems, our product development, our procurement and quality systems, as well as manufacturing and supply systems, and human resources, finance, tax, and legal. Our shared services group provides these standardized services and support to all of our applications across the organization. These applications include our applications architecture, and our IT compliance of our processes, such as Sarbanes Oxley. Databases and business intelligence belong to our shared services organization.
Our infrastructure group provides the foundation for all of the work, the hardware, the software, the data center, and the networks across the company. We operate and support all of our partners across the business, in all of the plants across the countries with all of our data centers. We interface with all of our suppliers and parts depots as well and our dealerships. That's our organization today.
EL. How is the structure of your IT organization going to change because of the IT transformation?
JB. Going forward, we want to focus on continuing to support the design, and the manufacturer, and the sales and the service of our vehicles. At the same time, we want to improve the business intelligence and operational excellence that goes along with that. We'll continue to focus on critical company initiatives. For example, we'll support the strategies of our business partners by carrying out the following strategic initiatives: determining the prioritization and the source of funding to speed delivery, and to enhance the quality of our services across the company; and also helping the company to improve its efficiencies, and to achieve its revenue goals through more innovative and more efficient use of technology.
EL. What's your enterprise architecture and does it align with the overall business model?
JB. Our technology architecture goal is to provide the capability for the interoperability between our diverse platforms we have. We achieve this with a number of efforts, including a common development in infrastructure platform, a product strategy that includes simplification and a drive towards common IT services. Our applications architecture focuses on a consistent consistency of design.
We want to enable common processes and common business services, which span all of the areas, with a service oriented architecture approach to the development. We'll focus on service enabling many of our legacy systems, which have coding for a significant amount of business processes. We have the goal to improve upon the simplification of that and work with some of external service providers that we recently announced. These external partners will help us to combine those solutions in divergent areas to become agile solutions. There's a big focus on that aspect.
EL. What were some of the signs that prompted the IT transformation?
JB. Because of the rapidly changing industry, changing marketing demand, and changing customer demand, we thought the need for IT capability could flex better with business demand if we had an alternative solution to how we work today. Of course, we all need the ever-increasing demand for innovation and technology improvement. Our IT transformation was one part of the corporate plan, but I see it as the next step in our continuous efforts to operate more efficiently and effectively. An IT transformation gave us the tools and the flexibility to drive business growth, not just to react to the situation.
EL. Who are the IT partners and what do they bring to the table?
JB. We decided to look at those areas within IT that had the biggest opportunity for improvement. We took time to assess where we felt we were market leaders and where we weren't. For example, we've operated our mainframe and server support areas efficiently with third-party resources. However, we manufacture automobiles, not provide IT services to major corporations. We knew that other technology companies in the industry could probably service us better in those areas because of their scale of business.
We first identified some areas where we felt we could drive improvement in the organization. We went out and market tested those areas. We also market tested some global players that had the capability to handle a company Chrysler's size, and that we felt would be good business partners with us. Based on our market test, we found that where we thought we had opportunities, we did have opportunities. At that point in time, we did due diligence and settled on suppliers. We awarded business on the applications side of our services to Tata Consultancy Services, and also to Covancys, a part of Computer Sciences Corp. We awarded our infrastructure business to Computer Sciences Corp. We're now in the process of transferring our internal business processes to our new business partners.
EL. What is involved in the handoff of business processes from IT to the partners?
JB. For example, Tata will handle some of the applications maintenance work. We identified what work will go to them, and then we'll work with them on transferring business processes and the know-how. Because we're in the middle of this, I don't want to go into too much detail. On the applications side, some of the work will take place in other locations and might not require as many people. Tata might provide offers to some people to work locally. On the infrastructure side, Computer Sciences Corp. has provided interviews to our on-roll people and has made offers to some of those people to work either on the Chrysler account and perhaps later on to work on another account. We also have contract houses who've elected to work with our business partners.
EL. How will the transformation change your governance process?
JB. There will be a reasonably large change in that area when we transfer the business. This transformation allows us to better focus on identifying internally the strategic business processes we could benefit from, and we could improve some of our innovative solutions. We'll be less involved with the day-to-day operations, and we'll be more involved in the strategic processes going forward. We'll further collaborate with our business partners. We'll gain a better understanding of their pain points, their desires, and the way the business moves. As a result, we'll be able to better leverage our global service providers' wealth of experiences in these new technologies, and to identify quickly projects that will have the greatest payback and the surest ROI. We'll have more time and more ability to improve our governance process, to improve the prioritization of our projects, and to improve the quality of the innovative solutions we can bring to our business partners.
EL. Do you have any strategic business processes where IT can make big improvements?
JB. Sales and marketing is an area where there is some capability to improve our volume planning operations. This is area also works very closely with our logistics and purchasing operations to improve our forecasting techniques for what we should be building and, therefore, what we should be buying. We always seem to have many good ideas. However, we're somewhat precluded from being able to participate all of them because of capital requirements. Because we're going to be working with partners that have the capacity to invest in those new technologies, our revised governance structure will enable us to better prioritize these business processes.
EL. Does your financial background enable you to see things differently than a CIO who has grown up in IT?
JB. Having a finance background helps me to dive into the business case to analyze each of the improvements or projects we're looking at. I've always professed that changing IT or anything for the sake of changing it doesn't make any sense. You need to have a sound business case to justify it or else we shouldn't be doing it.
I don't imagine that being in finance really differs from the experiences of most CIOs today. I see more CIOs with a strategic background, usually in finance or in business management. To be successful in a CIO role, you have to know the entire business, and you can't be a successful CIO just being a good technology person. You have to understand the strategy. You have to have a good financial sense about you. I see more people with those some skills taking on this role in many industries.
EL. What process improvements you are making to become more responsive to customers' needs?
JB. We're in the process redefining our IT landscape for the new delivery model we're talking about in the future. Both IT facing and the customer facing processes will focus more on becoming customer friendly. At Chrysler, we know that the perception of the customer is everything. We spend a lot of time with our dealers, with our systems, and with our processes to try to enhance the customer's experience with the dealership -- either online or in person. I think one of the key changes will be in the level of participation that we to target in the alignment of our IT strategy with the business strategy. We don't like reacting to business requests. Instead, we like to be an integral part of the solution to our issues and our goals. We'll measure our contribution in the future, not only in terms of our IT delivery metrics, but also as an innovative and cross-functional partner of our business.
EL. Have done any previous outsourcing?
JB. In the past, we told the partner what we wanted them to do. Now we're saying: 'Listen, we have something to deliver. Let's work with you to figure out the best way to deliver it. We're open to suggestions.' We're doing this a much larger scale now. We're also looking at doing that with certain functions within our organization. However, we're still maintaining relationships with the suppliers, and maintaining the governance, the compliance, and much of product planning up front in house. I know that many people who outsourced in the past might've outsourced too much and now they're bringing a portion of it inside. We tried to be cautious about that as we go to our next steps -- making sure that we transfer those parts of the business that our partner is best at and maintaining those parts we know we are the best at managing.
EL. What is your timeline for the IT transformation?
JB. Last year we started in earnest right after the separation of Daimler and Chrysler. We determined what we were going to do to by year end. We selected our partners early in 2008. We should be completely done with this portion of the transformation by late summer. It's a quick timeline, but we felt it was important both for the respect of the people and to maintain our business knowledge transfer as much as possible. Our new business partners agreed with that.
It's not going to stop there. We're relying on our relationship with our new business partners to continue to identify opportunities. Already in the process, our partners are now coming to us, identifying some things that we had either not thought of, or hoped would happen shortly after the transformation. Some of those are based on best practices that the business partners see. Other ones may be based on pure scale -- where we might be able to reduce the requirements for hardware because we're now dealing with companies that have a larger base that we had. Together we'll pursue more good opportunities as we continue down this path.
Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
posted by admin on Thursday, August 28 2008 permalink | comments (0)
Computer Sciences Corp.'s other CIO, Lem Lasher, talks about creating a comprehensive innovation program to benefit all constituents
When Dan Hill, CIO of Exelon Energy, the $14 billion owner of two of the nation's largest electricity utilities, decided to outsource a major project, he evaluated several companies and then awarded the contract to Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), a global $16 billion IT services company with more than 90,000 employees in 80 countries. According to Lem Lasher, CSC's chief innovation officer and president of CSC's global business solutions, says that Hill was impressed with depth and breathe of CSC's Office of Innovation. "Hill said that's what played a key role in earning his business.
Lasher has every right to blow his horn about CSC's Office of Innovation. In 2007, the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), the organization that sponsors the Malcolm Baldridge Award, did an independent benchmarking study of companies with programs to embed innovation within the organization. Lasher says, "Our competitors, such as IBM, Accenture, and Hewlett-Packard, funded the study. We didn't." After reviewing CSC's innovation programs on the company's Web site, APQC interviewed Lasher and his team, and then audited all of CSC's innovation programs. As a result, CSC received one of APQC's five Best Practice awards. The other winners included four product companies -- HP Printing and Imaging, Efficon Endosurgery, Boston Scientific, and Air Products. He says, "We were the only professional services firm to get this award. It has given us a huge competitive advantage."
Recently, enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Lasher to discuss the many programs that comprise CSC's Office of Innovation. Here is what he had to say:
EL. Why did CSC decide to create an Office of Innovation?
LL. We needed to do something different about the way we operated. We wanted to bring about a change that would reflect an appropriate innovation agenda for our customers and for the business. We began by reorganizing a number of activities and programs we ran across the enterprise. In April 2005, we set up the Office of Innovation to establish an explicit global innovation agenda within the company from idea generation through solutions development. The Office of Innovation functions as a funded corporate department which runs with unified governance and management structure responsible for CSC's innovation agenda to run the business.
EL. How does your office carry out thought-leadership programs for your customers?
LL. The Leading Edge Forum is the Office of Innovation's front-end piece where we do our basic research and development for thought leadership and business idea. This forum has two program activities. The executive program provides the thought leadership agenda for CIOs. The technology programs address socialization of intellectual capital rewards and recognition among the employees, and engagements with our customers.
EL. What do your customers' CIOs get from your innovation program?
LL. We'll create an account innovation program that we tailor to each customer. We have a formal taxonomy or a formal way of setting up those programs that includes agreed upon definition of innovation, objectives, governance, processes we'll put in place, funding mechanisms, commercial terms and conditions, and underlying technologies and tools that support that. Each program is unique and specific to each customer. My team spends much time with customers, designing account innovation programs that an account team runs and my office supports.
EL. Does your office have any type of a research component?
LL. Our internal research network comprises a group of individuals who do market-based analysis and research for CSC employees. We might use this group's findings for making investment decisions, for making offshore location decisions, for doing competitive analysis, and for investigating various types of technologies and products. This global research covers all of CSC's business lines and verticals.
EL. How do get ideas flowing from both employees and customers?
LL. The Office of Innovation program called CSC Collective Intelligence runs ideation campaigns for customers, for employees, for internal organizational challenges, or for specific account issues we have. We have a good record running these programs.
EL. Can you explain how an ideation campaign works?
LL. We view ideation as something done in a short-term, project setting that focuses on solving a particular problem. We call this activity a campaign. We'll identify a particular problem we want to solve, and then we'll create the appropriate executive ownership, the appropriate executive governance, and the taxonomy for triage of the ideas that come in. Each campaign ends with a solution that customers or employees can carry out. We do measure the results of the campaign. It's not a standing suggestion box.
EL. Can you discuss the strategic aspect of your office?
LL. Our Global Service Offerings (GSO) group runs the programs office for the development of all of our global strategic offerings. This office abstracts the taxonomy, and maintains the repository, the portfolio, the business case, and all of the governance associated with how we make strategic investments in service offerings across the business.
The people who run these programs engage directly with customers for validation of concepts, for explaining to them what those propositions are and for helping them to shape those concepts around particular solutions.
EL. Does your office have specific programs that leverage intellectual capital?
LL. The Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management program supports all of the CSC communities by harvesting, storing, and leveraging intellectual capital. This intellectual capital has been explicitly articulated and put in the repository. This program also provides technical support for groups of individuals who want to form communities across the business.
EL. How do you handle intellectual property for things that you develop in conjunction with a customer?
LL. We regard intellectual property as intellectual capital that we've protected in such as way to make it proprietary to CSC. As a services company, we aren't interested in acquiring intellectual property for patents. We have flexibility on the terms and conditions of how we would develop and use IT. We'll go through an analysis that says this particular intellectual capital warrants this level of protection and this position. If we've invested in something that would give us a competitive edge in the marketplace, we might be prone to get a patent on it. If we did something with a customer, we'd negotiate on a case-by-base basis about the ownership of the intellectual property.
EL. I haven't heard you mention breakthrough innovations or disruptive innovation. How much emphasis does your office put on them?
LL. We don't focus on breakthrough innovations, nor do we have an efficient way of managing them. Those types of innovations usually happen in a product company. We look at something we call the amplitude of innovation. It's the functional intersect between something being new to the company or being new to the marketplace. We look at the incremental and the adjacent innovations that result in leveraging a way to do something different to provide more economic value to our customers. If we came up with something we consider breakthrough, we'd probably figure out what to do with it. We're better off focusing our innovation activities on incremental and adjacent.
EL. What types of centers of excellence programs do you have?
LL. We refer to these programs as socialization of intellectual capital. We have centers of excellence and we have innovation centers. The 18 centers of excellence all have physical locations, have a dedicated team, and have a commitment from a group president to fund the center's activities for up to two years. Each center may or not focus on innovation, but each center has deep domain expertise. My office certifies each center of excellence as a way of establishing its importance to constituents within and outside the organizations. Each center's work must undergo a peer review process.
My office also runs some of the innovation centers in India, in Australia, and in the UK. The business groups supports the innovation center in Sweden and the U.S. We support those programs. These facilities do sandbox prototyping, workshops, and solutions demonstration showing vendor's products and technologies. Each center varies according to its geographical region. The centers share resources and communicate with each other. My office leverages the intellectual capital these centers provide. The centers run under their own governance structure.
EL. How do you reward employees for innovation?
LL. Our award programs run the gamut from an at'a boy to an at'a boy with stock options. Specifically, we have a paper's program, a grant's program, and the Chairman's Award for Excellence.
Employees can submit their original papers to the paper's program. If the peer reviewers come across an outstanding paper, it will get an award at the end of the year.
The grant's program funds both directed and non-directed work. We fund between 10 to 12 projects each year. For directed projects, we tell employees what we want them to research. In contrast, with undirected projects, employees tell us what they think they should research. Both types of research are subject to peer review. Although the grant's program doesn't offer any monetary reward, employees completing this program receive more recognition than those receiving a paper's program award.
The Chairman's award is the highest award employees can get for innovation. It's also the hardest award to win. Each year, the global division presidents nominate their respective candidates who've done an outstanding job on a project. Keep in mind, we do more than 10,000 projects a year. We narrow down between 100 to 150 nominations to 12 finalists, and then down to the six winners. The winners get stock options in CSC, and an invitation to a senior management award's meeting. We make up videos and issue employees a crystal glass reward.
EL. Do you also extend your office to academics?
LL. Our Leading Edge Forum manages relationships with professors at about 20 universities around the world. We look for universities where we can work with the leading professor whose innovative research is in an area germane to our business. We engage with those professors either on a contractual or on a retainer basis to do research work with us. We'll frequently rotate the list of universities we work with
EL. How do your work with David McCue, the CIO, to make IT investment decisions?
LL. My office's GSO group has a portfolio governance board that oversees the investment decisions we made. McCue is a member of this board. He is current with all the decisions we've made. He uses that as input for the kinds of things that make sense for him to do. He is a non-voting member of the board, but he sits on the board. The other people on the board include all of the global group presidents. They make the overall decisions for investments. The board of directors isn't involved at the service offering level. I negotiate a budget with the CEO, and have funds made available to me. I'm the custodian for this governance board. We vote that money in. Democracy rules! Each group president has one vote. We meet each month to discuss where we need to make investments and approve funding for some of them.
My office monitors and tracks those investments. For example, we track the revenue that comes in from the investments. We know what our rate of return is on investments.
We have some tools. I can't say off the top of my head what they are, but they aren't Excel spreadsheets.
Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
posted by admin on Thursday, August 14 2008 permalink | comments (0)
VC Firm Specializing in IT Welcomes Relationship with CIOs: Podcast interview with Robert Abbott, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners
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PeopleSoft. Brocade. and Forte. All of these IT companies got their start with funding from Norwest Venture Partners. Since its inception more than 45 years ago, Norwest has funded more than 400 IT companies in areas ranging from infrastructure to security. Today, the $2.5 billion fund concentrates on early-stage IT companies in areas such as semiconductors and components. enterprise software and service, communications systems and Internet infrastructure.
So what technologies does a VC firm like Norwest find particularly attractive these days? Robert Abbott, general partner at Norwest, says, "CIOs want to buy things that are easy to deploy and to manage over time. To this end, we like managed infrastructure services, such as outsourced security, and enterprise applications based on software as a service. We also like enterprise applications based on an appliance model. With so much emphasis on virtualization, we're looking for things that will take the challenge out of managing all those virtual machines. We still continue to fund things that make it easier to manage all the systems in a data center.
Like many venture capital firms, Norwest values its strong relationships with CIOs and other people in the IT industry. Abbott says, "We're always looking to expand our network of CIOs. We like hearing about the IT problems they're trying to solve. Likewise, we like to show CIOs portfolio companies with solutions that could potentially help them. If any CIO is interested in networking with Norwest Venture Partners, please contact Elizabeth Ferrarini at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
Bio
Since joining Norwest Venture Partners in 1998, Robert Abbott has focused primarily on infrastructure, systems and components. He sits on the board of ClariPhy, KACE, mBlox, Mozes, Occam Networks, Stream Processors and Xilient. He has also worked with such companies as Embark, Escalate (acquired by GERS), mPower (acquired by Morningstar), Quantum Effect Devices (acquired by PMC-Sierra), and Summit Microelectronics.
Abbott has nine years of operational experience in various roles, from engineering to marketing and product management. Before joining Norwest, Abbott was at Silicon Graphics. Prior to Silicon Graphics, he worked at IBM-ROLM Systems. He holds a bachelor of science and a master of science in electrical engineering and an MBA, all from Stanford University.
Resources
Spectator Business - Brits Go to Silicon Valley
VC Circle - Norwest Venture Partners Plans to Launch a $1 Billion Fund
Hindu Business Line - VC Firm Sees Huge Opportunity
Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production
Thanks for listening - if you have any questions, ideas or insights you want to share with us feel free to send an email at feedback@enterpriseleader.org - we look forward to hearing from you.
posted by admin on Friday, August 22 2008 permalink | comments (0)
Computer Sciences Corp.'s CIO, David McCune talks about business model for Information Technology
In 2003, Zurich Financial Services, one of the world's largest insurance companies, decided to transform its highly centralized IT organization to a highly decentralized managed by a small internal staff and a major outsourcing partner. After evaluating several global outsourcing companies, Zurich Financial signed a $1.3 billion outsourcing agreement with Computer Sciences Corporation or CSC.
Many large, global companies, such as Zurich Financial and Chrysler, have turned to CSC for innovation IT services in one of these areas: outsourcing, systems integration, and consulting. Founded in 1960, CSC has more than 90,000 employees in 80 countries and annual revenues exceeding $16 billion. CSC's service span most vertical industry segments and many horizontal lines of IT services, such as outsourcing and supply chain.
Recently, David McCue, CSCs's CIO and vice president, got named to Computerworld's 2008 Premier 200 IT leaders list, a carefully selected group of IT executives selected for their leadership capabilities in managing and executing IT strategies. enterpriseleadership.org recently said down with McCue to learn more about how he makes technology decisions that affect both the internal IT organization but also customers. Here's what he had to say:
EL. Can you provide an overview of your IT organization, especially what makes it unique?
DM. Our IT organization combines a blend of a federated model and a centralized model to achieve the best results for the business. Each of the main revenue areas has an embedded technology staff CIO. These staff CIOs represent the requirements of that particular area, such as a vertical like manufacturing or a horizontal like applications. The aspects of our business that fall into a central shared services type of model include, email, security, content for repositories, and portals. We use SAP to handle all of our financials.
I treat things that we do for ourselves, such as payroll, messaging, collaboration, customer relations management, financials, and business analytics, as if we were an outsourcer account with CSC global. We have about 1,250 people assigned to the CSC IT account. We're one of the largest IT customers of CSC global, the vendor.
Our CIO council comprises the embedded CIOs, along with some individuals. For example, I've appointed people to global HR, supply chain, and financial functions. Each area of the business has an advocate. The council does planning, strategy, and final review of policies. Some of the subcommittees will review policies in certain areas and report any changes to the CIO council.
EL. Does the company's outsourcing model complement your IT business model?
DM. We think of the CSC IT account as having several serious buckets of activities. The account needs these items. For example, we use SAP instead of Oracle. If I need Oracle expertise, then I'll leverage the capabilities of CSC, the outsourcing vendor. I'm the 800 gorilla customer. We have buckets of activities or commodities, which the entire business equally shared. I have a leverage capability that wouldn't be available if we didn't have our business model for IT. Every time we win an outsourcing deal, we gain a certain amount of infrastructure. We then rationalize and normalize it through the outsourcing process. We can re-deploy this excess infrastructure to other accounts that can use it. My cash expenditure doesn't actually represent the actual value of total services that I own, control, and direct. Leveraging what we've acquired changes our cash expenditure in terms of where it shows up on the balance sheet.
EL. Can you describe how your governance process goes works for getting projects and investments approved?
DM. I sit on two sides of the tables. I report to the chairman and attend his staff meetings. My peers include group revenue-unit presidents and the corporate vice presidents for each of the major functions. Our program governance board comprises the group president and me. We decide the research and development investments for the business. We take a blended approach toward governance.
From an axiom viewpoint, I put forward the business case, the strategic direction, and evaluation. Our go-to-market revenue decisions don't, in themselves, dictate internal choice and direction. A decision that we make for ourselves, such as a business case to go in a certain direction, has to make sense and pass hard dollar and soft benefits hurdles on its own, independent of alliances, partnerships, and go to market revenues. If selling something is the only reason for the business case, then it fails. If I have multiple choice business case decisions to make, I'll select the ones that can stand on their own, that have good relationships, and that have revenue potential. At the end of the day, we go to market, given the nature of our business, with all of the major players.
EL. How do you decide what technologies would be good fit for IT?
DM. Just because I run SAP, doesn't mean that I don't have a robust Oracle practice. I have to do what makes sense for our IT our account and the best practices. I can't possibly run everything. I can't run SAP for financials and Oracle for payroll. The same thing happens when we go to market. We might have multiple solutions within similar areas based upon the intellectual property needs, and the unique requirements and specifics of different verticals. For example, processing insurance claims has some similarities to handling returns in a manufacturing environment. However, the products used in each of these areas have some practical differences. Everyone would like to run every solution. That's not practical! Because we'd incur additional excessive expenses, it wouldn't be in the best interests of our stockholders to run every solution.
EL. How much of a say do stakeholders have in how you make technology investment decisions?
DM. Stakeholders always have had the ability to voice their views. We have command and control and there's direction. Any time we make a decision between choices, we can't always achieve a win-win scenario for everyone. Having a hybrid or central and federated model helps us to ensure a dialog to talk about all of the cards on the table. Our common services have to scale globally to provide attractive economies.
We do the traditional set of roadmaps for a specific number of years, and we review those roadmaps routinely to look at different technologies, best practices, or changes in functional requirements.
Those embedded individuals represent their stakeholders' internal needs, as they're appropriate to the larger revenue customer base. We don't do business in isolation. We know what we're doing in the market. I sit on the research and development governance board. I look at the business cases for things we're developing as potential go-to-market solutions. I work closely with our general counsel and with the president of our global marketing organization. We take all of that into account and bring that into the mix.
EL. Have you automated your governance and your portfolio process for investments?
DM. I don't run a single portfolio project management dashboard type of product. We've automated the reporting of variety aspects of that through different schedules. One schedule lists projects for each fiscal year. Each project goes through a multiple cycle process. If a project passes the business case review, we then release the funds to start that project. Each project has various reporting milestones. These milestones differ in their degree of specificity, timeliness and risk tolerance. The sponsoring business units do quarterly reviews and reporting of the overall portfolio of the projects. Monthly monitoring and reporting at the application or infrastructure level also supplement these quarterly project reviews.
EL. How does CSC handle innovation?
DM. We have a corporate office of innovation, which expands all aspects of CSC's environment, including go-to-market strategies. It has a concentrated, managed set of projects, programs, and strategies. It runs a leading-edge forum, conducts various conferences, give innovation awards to employees, and operates centers of excellence. I belong to the office of innovation steering committee. We leverage this organization as an approach to innovation for IT.
EL. What automated processes have you put in place to handle emergency communications with your customers?
DM. Our emergency crisis notation system can quickly mobilize key people from around the world to act on a critical situation. They get notified through SMS, text messaging, or whatever other media they use for critical situations. As a global outsourcer, we have formal processes if a situation arises, such as a data center going off the grid or an application fails. Once we assemble the restoration team, we establish multiple audio bridges which the customer and the technical people. Our management people review these audio bridges every one or two hours for updates. Once the customer's problem has been resolved, such as data center brought online, we go through a mandatory root-cause analysis process, which my staff reviews.
EL. Can you provide examples of some of your converged platforms to get closer to your customers?
DM. Our CSC account and our customers use some of the same applications, such as GCARS, a controlled release to production review-type application. We all use it whether the item released to production relates to the customer account's own equipment, or will run on a customer's account on our leveraged equipment. We have a variety of converged platforms like that one. Both our employees and our main customers have access to our global portals. Of course, it has areas restricted to specific accounts and customers.
Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
posted by admin on Wednesday, August 06 2008 permalink | comments (0)
How IT makes government work better and more economically viable for people of Michigan: Podcast interview with Ken Theis, director of Michigan Department of Information
Created: Fri, 15 Aug 2008
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The State of Michigan has become a pioneer in how to make IT work better and be more economically viable for its citizens. They focused on consolidating IT into one state agency, and then developing a strategic plan and an enterprise architecture to support the plan.
In 2001, the entire IT organization across the State of Michigan merged into the Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT), under the direction of Ken Theis. MDIT's 1,700 employees support 19 other state agencies. These agencies have a combined annual budget of $434 million, 800 business-critical applications, 55,000 desktops, and 1,300 telecom locations.
The consolidation reduced overall IT expenditures in Michigan by 34 percent, taking more than $100 million off the state budget. Some of these strategic moves included closing 23 data centers and creating three main data centers, reducing the number of email servers from 700 to 70, and centralizing one petabyte of data storage. Meanwhile, MDIT also addressed errors in programs, such as Food Stamps.
In this podcast, Ken talks about the agency's overall IT strategy, the components that comprise the enterprise architecture, the initiatives that are bringing smaller and more efficient government to the people of Michigan, and the challenge of managing IT investments.
Theis says, "If you can't measure it, you shouldn't be doing it. We continue to strive for returns on our IT investments. Sometimes the returns can be financial, and other times they might be services that benefit citizens. We're always looking to improve how we can increase the returns on our IT investments, especially in a tight economy."
Bio
Ken Theis is the director for the Michigan Department of Information Technology, where he reports directly to Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. He also serves in her cabinet. He was the deputy CIO for the Michigan Family Independence Agency (FIA), where he carried out a statewide child support enforcement system enabling the State to recover substantial federal penalties.
He previously worked for General Motors Corporation where he held several key business and technology leadership positions. While he was at General Motors, Theis received the GM Chairman's Honors Award and GM CIO Award.
He was recently named to Computerworld's Premier 100 list of top IT leaders in the country. He received his B.S. at Ferris State University and M.B.A. at Northwood University.
Resources
Converge Online - Michigan Department of Community Health Launches New Medicaid System
Converge Online - Michigan Joins Green Computing Initiative
The Michigan IT Consolidation Journal
Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production
posted by admin on Friday, August 15 2008 permalink | comments (0)