Professional Documents
Culture Documents
68
BIG THINKING
Thought provoking interviews with Malcolm Gladwell (on innovation), Nicholas Carr (on the cloud) and
Thomas Davenport and Vivek Ranadive (on business analytics and decision making)
How to deliver the connected customer experience and use mobile applications to gain competitive advantage.
Plus a pullout poster, Raising Enterprise Productivity Through Mobility
BIG DATA
STRAIGHT TALKING
Actionable insights from the CIOs of Xerox, Air Canada, Deutsche Bank, Old Mutual
and other forward-looking companies
PAGE 6
STRAIGHT TALKING
PAGE 14
BIG THINKING
PAGE 46
TRENDS 2013
PAGE 51
Cover Article
Big Thinking
56
Sandeep Kishore
06
58
Welcome to the Big Data Zoo (pullout poster) A Very Short History of Big Data
Straight Talking
14
Getting IT to
Think Like the Business
Jean-Marc Chicco, CIO, Lafarge
20
James Riley
Context, Interpretation,
Integration. . .and Alligators
38
42
29
62
25
46
33
60
Trends
2013
64
Mobile Computing:
Ground Zero for IT Disruption
51
Naresh Nagarajan
66
54
The Fracturing of
Corporate IT
Rajiv Sodhi
Sadagopan Singam
68
Highlights from
Issue Number 2
CIO
CIO Straight Talk Team
Editor Paul Hemp
Managing Editor Anirban Sanyal
Contributing Editor Gil Press, Abbie Lundberg,
Stephanie Overby
Copy Editor Amy Halliday
Acknowledgements
KSR Siddharth, Chris Connors, Alok Roy, Vivek Iyer,
Amit Mehrotra, Manu Sharma, Kartik Mehta, Rao
Bhavaraju, Alok Mirchandani, Jayabrata Nag,
Shimona Chadha, Vittal Devarajan, Asvin Ramesh
Contact Us
straight.talk@hcl.com
Paul Hemp
HCL America, Inc.
400 Crown Colony Dr.
2nd Floor, Suite 203
Quincy, Mass. 02169
United States
Tel: +1-408-328-7501
Anirban Sanyal
HCL Technologies
2nd oor, A-9, Sector - 3
Noida - 201 301,
Uttar Pradesh
India
Tel: +91-120-4069000
5
CIO Straight Talk
Editors Note
Cover Article
So whats the
big deal about
big data?
The term big data originated in the late 1990s, when
scientists at NASA used it to describe the large data sets
produced by computer visualization, which were taxing
the capacity of the main memories, and even the hard
drives, in use at the time. In 2008, a number of prominent American computer scientists popularized the
term, predicting that big data computing would
transform the activities of companies, scientific
researchers, medical practitioners, and our nations
defense and intelligence operations.
While there are certain parallels with previous developments that changed the IT landscape, and while many
long-established activities, products, and services are
being recycled with the big data label slapped on them,
there is certainly a lot that is new: technology- and
people-related developments that present fresh
challenges to any company. Although these developments can be perceived as threats to the IT organization,
the challenge of distilling revenue-generating insights
from the data potentially puts the CIO in a position of
leading rather than following business strategy.
Cloud Computing
Cloud-based platforms provide an easy-to-use and
cost-effective sandbox for IT-related experiments by
business executives, increasing the presence within
many organizations of a shadow IT function. Indeed,
Data Privacy
External data brings with it a long list of issues the IT
department did not have to contend with before,
certainly not on such a scale. Are the data sources
secure and legitimate? Are they in compliance with the
privacy policy of the organization? Has everything
been done to avoid a breach of confidentiality?
Open Source
Some of the most important big data tools are based on
open-source technologies. Many IT executives are just
beginning to get over their reluctance to embrace open
source and recognize its benefits, such as lower cost and
continuous crowdsourced quality assurance and innovation. Consequently, the skills, expertise, practices, and
processes required to leverage open-source technologies are often lacking in the IT organization, providing
another reason to circumvent IT in the adoption of big
data.
Brent Richter, Director of IT at both Massachusetts
General and Brigham and Womens Hospitals and
Director of Enterprise Research Infrastructure and
Services at Partners HealthCare, has first-hand experience with both the research and clinical sides of these
leading healthcare organizations. Over the last ten
years a vast amount of genetic information has been
accumulating in research databases. Physicians today
can compare a patients specific genomic profile to
whats in the database, in order to pinpoint personalized
courses of treatment.
Not surprisingly, this is where healthcare organizations
see a clash of cultures. For the IT organization thats on
the clinical side, the metrics are stability and 24x7
support, says Richter. On the research side, its agility
and the speed of developing new applications. The
research side relies on open-source tools that are
constantly changing, but its OK because researchers
like to use the latest and greatest and expect change. On
the clinical side, each change necessarily requires
External Data
IT teams have gotten used to the
relentless growth of data generated
by their organizations and the
practice of building firewalls
around it. But big data involves first
and foremost the ingestion of data
that is created outside the enterprise.
How IT organizations
respond to big data
will determine if they
are in business in
three to five years, or
if everything goes to
the cloud.
A lot of big data is also unstructured rather than structured that is, it does not fit into a preconceived
design as it does in traditional databases. With
business intelligence and analytics in the 1990s, says
Flavio Villanustre, of LexisNexis, you had almost
9
CIO Straight Talk
many big data pilots in large companies are the initiative of a business unit or a function, such as the marketing department, and frequently do not involve the IT
organization.
A Very
(Condensed from A Very Short History of Big Data, by CIO Straight Talk Contributing Editor Gil Press, which can be found
at http://whatsthebigdata.com/2012/06/06/a-very-short-history-of-big data/.)
(le
ad
ing
to
Inf
o
Zookeeper: A centralized service for
maintaining conguration information,
naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services for
distributed applications.
ive
Flume: A tool for collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log
data from applications to Hadoop.
Dr
Big
Da
ta
y
pay igpa
Eakings implesay.
isay
atinlay
Server Farm
rm
atio
nH
igh
way
)
Hive: A data
warehouse
infrastructure built
on top of Hadoop,
providing data
summarization,
query, and analysis.
It permits queries
over the data using
a familiar SQL-like
syntax.
total control over the data inputs and you knew what to
expect, given how the data was formatted. A row with
a company ID could be joined with the companys IDs
in some other table. Big data comes from external
sources, and even the internal data sources do not
necessarily have the structure that you were expecting.
Big data doesnt fit standard methodologies.
Finally, theres a shift in attitude about what to do with
the data collected, toward preserving rather than
discarding data of no apparent use. In the past, the bias
ran the other way. For too long, IT organizations have
been giving themselves a pat on the back about how
little they let the data grow, says Sanjay Mirchandani,
Executive Vice President and the former CIO of EMC
Corporation. The growth of data has always been
considered a bad thing. Today, companies that understand big data see it as an incredible asset that may provide a
competitive advantage.
Data Science
CIOs can use big data as an opportunity to update ITs role to include
discovery and agility, and add a new
functionality and service data
science, the uncovering of important
new insights to their offerings.
Internal Competition
The direst predictions concerning big
data portray it not merely as a
challenge for the IT organization but
as a tidal wave that will actually
sweep the function out of existence.
The marketing department is
frequently the champion of big data,
eager as it is to uncover new insights
about customers and prospects.
Indeed, Gartner has predicted that by
2017, the CMO will spend more on
IT than the CIO, part of a general
trend of IT responsibility and spending moving out of the IT organization
and into business units and functions.
committee ascertained that Hadoop would be insulated and isolated. The executive added that Hadoop
provided the company with new and useful insights
from the kind of data the company had discarded in the
past.
So are CIOs doomed to become as dispensable within
organizations as the light switch they are supposed to
keep turned on? Avoiding irrelevance will require
rethinking their role and even their title.
There is increasing talk of companies designating
chief digital officers, who will oversee the digitization of different parts of the business, from marketing
to customer service. The chief digital officer will
prove to be the most exciting strategic role in the
decade ahead, Gartners David Willis said at a recent
Gartner Symposium, and IT leaders have the opportunity to be the leaders who will define it.
Although many envision CDOs residing in the
business units, CIOs could take on this strategic role
for the entire enterprise if they are able to transform IT
into a function that thrives on agility, adaptability, and
speed. To lead rather than follow, CIOs should
cultivate an IT organization that is able to master
constant and rapid change and whose hallmark is an
entrepreneurial culture of fail fast. IT should be
perceived and managed as an evolving organism
rather than a well-oiled machine. While management
of various IT activities may migrate to the business
units, responsibility for digital strategy should remain
with the successor of todays IT function.
11
CIO Straight Talk
10
Business
transformation
in the digital
economy
The discussion of big data tends to start and often to
stay with volume, the big in big data. But the
volume of data has been rapidly increasing for years.
I dont think of big data as just the increasing volume
of data, says David Harkness, the CIO of Xcel
Energy. To me, big data is where youre drawing
connections between data that was previously not
connected, extracting new knowledge out of these
large data sources.
Indeed, each of the 3Vs that are supposedly the defining characteristics of the big data phenomenon
volume, variety (new data formats), and velocity (the
speed with which it is available) are familiar to
anyone managing IT over the past two or three
decades.
Even the new big-data-related challenges described
above such as cloud computing, open-source
technologies, and external data while presenting
new and important dimensions to the CIOs role, are
just another stage in the ever-changing work of IT.
What is truly new is the context of these changes, a
qualitatively different business environment and
entirely new requirements.
It was a new business environment that gave rise about
eight years ago to what we today call big data
technologies. These initially addressed new problems
associated with processing large amounts of data. The
most fundamental was that although the storage
capacities of hard drives had increased, the rate at
which data could be read from drives hadnt kept up.
This created a bottleneck that engineers at a start-up
13
CIO Straight Talk
12
Straight Talking
Jean-Marc Chicco
jean-marc.chicco@lafarge.com
Jean-Marc Chicco
jean-marc.chicco@lafarge.com
14
Position
Chief Group ERP Program and
Information Ofcer
Company
Lafarge SA
Works from
Paris
Professional Background
Before being named CIO of Lafarge,
in 2010, Chicco spent nine years as
the Chief Operating Ofcer of the
companys 1.6 billion roong
division and two years leading an
initiative to reduce the companys
working capital. Before joining
Lafarge, he served in various marketing and general management roles at
the auto parts manufacturer Valeo
and at TRW Semiconductors. In
1983, he founded a company that
specialized in the design, production,
and distribution of power electronic
systems.
Education
MBA, University of Texas at Austin
Masters in Engineering,
cole Suprieure d'lectricit
Personal Passions
Trekking, philosophy, social change
When I was asked to take over the CIO job at Lafarge, I said,
Guys, Im not your man. I have spent my career managing
companies, business functions, geographic regions. What do I
know about managing IT?
(I didnt say that I also had some apprehension about seeking
support for IT initiatives from former colleagues on the
business side. Would they tune me out just as I had tuned out
IT people when I was heading up a business division?)
The company had an answer to my misgivings: You know
Lafarge and the business, and that will make a big
difference.
So I decided to test the water what seemed likely to be very
cold water. Today, Im having lots of fun. The IT function is
little by little changing the operations at Lafarge. I believe its
mostly because IT now thinks like the business does.
The Seonyu Footbridge of Peace, Seoul, constructed using a lighter and stronger Lafarge building material called Ductal.
Standardizing Applications
Lafarge is the worldwide leader in building materials
number one in cement and number two in aggregates
and concrete. The company operates in 78 countries and
owns nearly 2,000 industrial sites.
When I started as CIO, I realized that my experience
managing a working capital initiative at Lafarge would
help me demonstrate the value of a business perspective
to the IT group. My assignment to lead that earlier
initiative was as much of a surprise as being offered the
CIO job. Traditionally, a Finance guy was responsible
for managing working capital. But after seeing little
headway in reducing working capital, senior management asked me to bring my business perspective to the
task.
As it turned out, we were able to free up 1 billion in
cash; improving the management of spare parts was one
avenue for achieving this. A cement plant is like a big
machine, with a lot of equipment and lots and lots of
spare parts. In early 2009, when I took over the
program, we had about 650 million of spare parts in
inventory. Working closely with the factories, we
reduced that to about 400 million.
So when I became CIO, I immediately said, Lets ask
the factories how IT is helping them manage their spare
parts. I discovered that across the organization Lafarge
had several ERP templates talking to about seven
Maximo (IBMs asset management software) templates
and about 20 different types of application interfaces.
Even worse, only half of the plants had Maximo. The
other half was waiting for it.
We launched a major program to upgrade and roll out a
common standard for Maximo to more than 160 plants
over the next three years. When the program is
complete, those plants will all work with the same
version of the application, driving further savings and
efficiencies.
The situation with Maximo was typical of the way we
had been going about developing applications. Once we
developed an application, we let anyone at Lafarge
tweak it. The result was many different versions of the
same application. Every time we upgraded an application, we spent a lot of unnecessary time and money on
the effort.
So we decided to mandate standardization for many key
applications, including those for CRM and sales force
effectiveness, HR, and e-purchasing, to mention a few.
Be Prepared
Data-center consolidation is no small task, and I have
some advice to anyone starting out on such an adventure: Do not underestimate the amount of comprehensive and detailed preparation required to succeed.
Initially, we did not budget enough time for the preparation phase and discovered when we were about to start
the project that we were not ready. So we added six
months of preparation time.
During the preparation stage, its crucial to make sure
that the business side its concerns, work patterns,
processes, anything that could impact the success of
migration and consolidation is taken into account.
This also includes risk assessment, identifying the best
time for migration, and understanding the applications
used by the business, how old they are, and what
problems could arise with each one at the time of migration. Ultimately, you need to have a business model that
will help you understand the implications of the ongoing changes to your infrastructure and adjust your plans
accordingly. Your IT assets at the beginning of the
project will not be the same six or twelve months later.
As a result of the European data-center-consolidation
initiative, we believe we will see a reduction of 25
percent in operating costs in about two years. Its more
difficult to quantify the gains from standardization, but
it is obvious that this will make it a lot easier for the
business and a lot cheaper for IT to use and manage key
applications.
17
CIO Straight Talk
16
Keep in mind, though, that any medal has two sides, and with the benets
come increased responsibility for the organization in operating such a
concentrated hub. So service level agreements, disaster recovery plans,
and business continuity scenarios have to be drastically challenged
and regularly tested.
The Takeaways
decentralized IT structure.
19
CIO Straight Talk
Straight Talking
david.c.harkness@xcelenergy.com
Position
Vice President and
Chief Information Ofcer
20
Company
Xcel Energy
Works from
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Professional Background
David Harkness joined Xcel Energy in
2009. As CIO, he drives innovation
and transformation in the company
by leveraging technology to create
business value. He is also responsible for all IT development, operations
and governance, cybersecurity
functions, and the companys business continuity program. Harkness
was previously at PNM Resources,
where he was Vice President and
CIO. He held a number of key
leadership positions at PNM
Resources, including Executive
Director of Business Transformation
and Executive Aide to the CEO.
Harkness also held a variety of IT
leadership roles at MCI, McLeodUSA,
and Rockwell International.
Education
BS, University of Iowa
Personal Passions
Iowa Hawkeye sports; boating;
and basketball, football, and
lacrosse with his two sons
Xcel Energy is a pioneer in "smart grid" technology, having piloted the world's rst
adoption of smart grid tools in a real-world urban setting in Boulder, Colorado.
Managing
Value
22
Remotely,
Proving
Straight Talking
Prior to the smart grid, in order to determine the boundaries of an area affected by an
outage, many utilities relied on customers calling in. It was like playing pin the tail on
the donkey. Now intelligent devices in the network provide that information, and its
very precise. We can restore power more quickly because we have better information
about what equipment actually failed.
andy.nallappan@avagotech.com
Position
Vice President,
Chief Information Ofcer
The Takeaways
Andy Nallappan
Company
Avago Technologies
Works from
San Jose, California
Professional Background
Andy Nallappan has served as Vice
President and CIO of Avagos Global
Information Services Division since
2012. He is responsible for the
continuous improvement of Avagos
business processes through costeffective IT.In his long career with
Hewlett-Packard, Agilent, and Avago,
he has held a variety of positions
overseeing enterprise applications,
enterprise infrastructure, and RandD
computing. He has been a pioneer in
deploying cloud solutions and helped
transform Avagos IT function into an
industry leader.
Education
MS, University of Texas at El Paso
Bachelor of Engineering,
University of Madras
Personal Passions
Hiking in high-altitude area such
as Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount
Whitney, and Machu Picchu; running
How to Get
Your IT Budget
to 1 Percent
of Revenue
Meeting an audacious goal such as
this requires intelligent outsourcing,
aggressive migration to the cloud,
and savvy management of change.
Andy Nallappan , CIO, Avago Technologies
25
CIO Straight Talk
24
And now Ive set a goal that some might call crazy:
bring IT costs down to 1 percent of revenue in the next
two years. I think we can do it. We will have to look at
our fixed costs which mostly come from ERP
software giants, server and storage and make them
variable costs through SaaS and other cloud offerings.
We are considering cloud for server and storage, at least
for development, testing, and disaster recovery. We will
also continue to look at more cloud applications as they
become relevant to Avago.
What to Outsource
IT leaders should nd outside solutions for all the
operational, non-critical, non-value-adding parts of
IT. There are companies where IT is core, but in our
industry, its the RandD, marketing, and sales that
are core. I want to move up in the value chain and
enable those teams to bring in more revenue and
get higher margins. The revenue is important, but
the margin is more important. When you liberate
your IT team to move up in the value chain, you
get closer to the core of your company.
27
CIO Straight Talk
26
Straight Talking
Today Im proud to say that Avagos IT budget is 1.34 percent of revenue
no one in our industry has that. It wasnt hard to go from 4.5 percent to 3 or 2.5.
But from 2.5 to 1.25 that is hard.
how the vendors must work with one another and resolve
dierences.
billrogers@outlook.com
Position
Former Chief Information Ofcer
and Commissioner
Organization
State of New Hampshire
Works from
Concord, New Hampshire
Professional Background
As the CIO and Commissioner of New
Hampshire, Rogers was responsible for
managing and coordinating the states
technology resources and developing
and implementing strategies to enhance
services and create statewide efciencies. During his tenure, Harvard University honored the New Hampshire state
government with the Bright Idea Award
for the implementation of the countrys
rst statewide Geospatial Information
System (GIS). Prior to his role in government, Rogers spent more than three
decades in global companies including
Goss International, AlixPartners, Johnson
Controls, Deloitte Consulting, and
Honeywell. He held corporate senior
executive positions and has leadership
experience in information technology,
nance, operations, strategic planning,
business development, and consulting.
The Buy-In
Challenge
Serving as CIO of the State of
New Hampshire means selling
your ideas to a particularly wary
group of users, which generates
lessons on buy-in relevant to
CIOs in almost any setting.
29
CIO Straight Talk
28
Bill Rogers
Education
MS, Central Michigan University
BS, University of Maryland
Personal Passions
Family and outdoor activities with his two
grown sons and two dogs, and cooking.
I dont bake because you have to follow
a process. When it says a teaspoon of
this you cant put in a tablespoon.
From Global
Public Service
to
31
CIO Straight Talk
30
Restructuring
Straight Talking
The Takeaways
To sell new ideas, especially in the public sector,
the CIO must have a clear sense of the
organizations appetite for change and innovation.
Gaining buy-in starts with a lot of listening. Find
out what peoples goals and problems are before you
propose any new ideas.
32
The technology exists today to do all sorts of things better. The hardest part
and this is true for private enterprise as well as the public sector is getting to a
clear and commonly agreed upon understanding of the problems the
organization is trying to solve and then nding the simplest, most effective way
to achieve that. Thats the CIOs challenge.
Ian Cohen
ian_cohen@jltgroup.com
Position
Group Chief Information Ofcer
Company
Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group
Works from
London
Professional Background
As Group CIO, Ian Cohen is responsible
for JLTs global technology strategy as
well as the development and delivery of
all IT services and systems used within
the company. He also has accountability
for procurement and purchasing in the
UK. Most recently, he has been the
driving force behind JLTs global digital
transformation program, focused
primarily on enabling corporate strategy
through the adoption of socialenterprise tools and techniques. Before
his role at JLT, he spent several years as
CIO at Associated Newspapers and was
group IT Director for theFinancial Times
after holding the position of CTO for
FT.com in 2001. Cohen has a strong
nancial services background, having
held a variety of leadership roles at
Lloyds TSB in the 1990s.
The
Unexpected
Driver of
Digital
Transformation
33
Personal Passions
Social media, his family (hes married
with three daughters), music (he was a
session musician in a previous life), and
Chelsea FC (a team he has followed
since 1967)
Technology as a
Transformative Force
Were trying to change the behavior of people
around the use of and outcomes from
technology. Most business transformation is
about changing behavior and culture
technology is just the enabler.
34
Stuff that you have, and you know where it is, but you
want to know more about it.
Stuff you think you have or believe you should have,
but youre not quite sure where it is.
Stuff you know you dont have and may not even have
considered but might find if you only knew where to
look and looked long and hard enough.
The first two are easy with todays search and data
management tools. If you organize your data more
effectively, youll find more stuff. When all I owned
was a filing cabinet, and the document I wanted was
buried in a sea of unfiled papers just thrown into the
cabinet, did I have a big data problem? I certainly had a
retrieval problem that was quickly sorted by indexing
and structure. And as storage requirements have grown,
so have the retrieval technologies, with increasingly
sophisticated structured and unstructured search
techniques.
36
The thing is, there arent that many businesses that need
the level of serendipity often used to hype up big data
in order to drive value. Indeed, it would be good if some
organizations came to grips with the data they already
have and know they have. The arguments people often
make are around social media that if they could mine
Facebook and Twitter and pull all that conversational
information together with buying patterns, they would
get a better view of the customer. Maybe they would.
But the real skill is working out what to do at that point
when you actually hear that nugget of information.
Thats a people skill. Thats a business skill. Big data
systems arent going to help you with that. A lot of
companies have leapt into social media conversations
about their brand only to make the situation worse. And
frankly, is this serendipitous search even necessary?
One of the big parts of social media is the conversation,
and consumers are more open than ever about their
views on your brand, products, goods, or services.
Perhaps we should focus more on big listening and
smart responding.
The Takeaways
Business transformation doesnt necessarily require
new technology; sometimes it requires guring out how
to use what you already have more eectively.
Traditional BI techniques are expensive. The new
in-memory analytics solutions can be a faster and less
expensive way to nd the valuable nugget of information
in a sea of data.
The publishing industry has moved from telling
to engaging and sharing. Other businesses
must make that same shift to deepen
relationships with clients.
37
Salesforce.com: CRM
Qlickview: In-memory analytics solution
Microsoft: Publishing Technologies
Salesforce Chatter,
Collaboration
Microsoft
Lync:
Straight Talking
Using IT to Achieve
Business Integration
A robust IT function that intelligently outsources and invests in new
technology can lead the transformation to a centralized business model.
Barry Libenson
BJLibenson@landolakes.com
38
Company
Land OLakes
Works from
Arden Hills, Minnesota
Professional Background
Barry Libenson joined Land OLakes in
January 2010. In addition to his role
as CIO, he is a member of the
companys senior strategy team. Prior
to joining Land OLakes, Libenson was
a Vice President and the CIO at
Ingersoll Rand, leading the IT staff
through strategy development, signicant improvements in company-wide
efciency and effectiveness, the IT
integration of a major acquisition, and
the successful implementation of ERP.
During the 1980s, Libenson joined
Oracle as its 90th employee.
Education
MBA, Duke Universitys Fuqua School
of Business
BA, Colgate University
Personal Passions
Physical tness and creating the
perfect New York-style pizza dough
Butter and cheese are among the well-known consumer products of Land O'Lakes' dairy foods business.
39
CIO Straight Talk
But never underestimate the challenges of major organizational change. I knew from experience how difficult it
can be. As the CIO of Ingersoll Rand, I oversaw the
shift from a highly decentralized model to a federated
one, implementing an international shared-services
organization. We were done by the time I left the
company eight years after wed started.
Position
Senior Vice President and
Chief Information Ofcer
Global Outsourcing
Its a business imperative to nd cost-effective
ways to work globally. Offshore outsourcing will
expand.
Even with all this change, the reliability of our systems, thanks to partners like HCL,
has gone up dramatically. I have a fundamental philosophy about dealing with
third parties. Every company I work with is either a vendor or a partner. The key is to
gure out who is who and treat them accordingly.
40
A Change in Priorities
Like IT departments at most companies, in recent years
we had paid a lot of attention to managing costs. But we
realized that in order to lead our industry we also had to
actively embrace and invest in new technology.
Our CEO, who came up through the dairy business, is
very open-minded. My job is to help him and the rest of
the senior management team visualize how technology
could be a business enabler, whether its 4G out in the
field or business intelligence to drive insight and
operate more efficiently. And its been the CEOs job to
drive those changes from the top. For example, using
technology to change the way people do their jobs asks
a lot of them. Change management training as we rolled
out the new technology and applications helped ease the
transition. But having the CEO support this significant
shift in IT tools, approach, and business process was
critical.
As a result, we were the first customer to go live, in
October 2011, with Oracle Fusion Procurement to run
our source-to-pay process. We werent even supposed
to be the first to launch this, but we had a great team
41
CIO Straight Talk
The Takeaways
An IT partnership frees up your internal resources
to work on projects that can transform the business.
Its crucial to nd a balance between managing costs
and investing in new technology.
The CIO helps senior managers visualize how
technology enables innovation and eciency. The
CEO drives those changes from the top.
Straight Talking
simon.hollins@emimusic.com
Position
Consultant Chief Information Ofcer
Works from
London
Professional Background
Simon Hollins joined EMI Music as
Consultant Chief Information Ofcer in
2010. Prior to joining EMI, he held a
number of senior IT positions at BT
Group, including CIO of BT Syntegra
and member of the BT Wales Advisory
Board. Hollins previously held CIO
roles at J. Walter Thompson and PA
Consulting Group. He is also a
Director of Red Raven Consulting and
a Non-Executive Director of DCV
Technologies. He began his career in
software engineering.
Education
BS, University of Birmingham
Personal Passions
Football (season ticket holder at
Arsenal), motorsports (mainly
watching but a bit of driving),
and art (some favorite venues:
the Ufzi in Florence, the Museo
Reina Sofa in Madrid, the
Summer Exhibition at the Royal
Academy in London)
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Company
EMI Music
With the support of the CEO, we cancelled more than half of the projects in the pipeline.
And I appointed transformation directors and embedded them in the business. Now,
were running at twice the pace we were eighteen months ago.
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The Takeaways
Transformation isnt just about doing
something new; its about making innovation
sustainable.
Before IT can partner with the business on any
strategic initiative, it must make sure it has
excellent service levels, project delivery rates,
and technology architecture.
The role of IT is to show the
business whats possible instead
of pushing new systems and
processes.
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Big Thinking
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Context,
Interpretation,
Integration. . .
and Alligators
A conversation
about big data
with Bill Inmon,
the father of
data warehousing
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Trends
2013
than widely discussed likely to appear on the
horizon, whether they involve an emerging
technology or the role of the CIO.
Virtualization
15%
Cloud Computing
Enterprise Mobility
15%
38%
Big Data
(including real-time analytics)
32%
Based on 747 responses to a survey of IT
professionals on LinkedIn
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The Fracturing of
Corporate IT
The traditional IT organization is disintegrating but will
reemerge as the domain-smart and customer-focused
manager of an IT ecosystem.
BY RAJIV SODHI
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From Features to
Experience . . .
to the Heart of the
Customer
IT will move beyond applications and software and help
product managers ride a major shift in business focus
from products and services to the way a customer feels
when using them.
BY SANDEEP KISHORE
Convergence of
industries in a single
product is leading
many companies to
ask what business
theyre in. It may not
be the companys
traditional business or
in fact any of the
traditional industries.
In fact, an automobile is no longer simply an automobile; its an automobile with an overlay of telecommunications, consumer electronics, and other elements of
the driver and passenger experience. This convergence of industries in a single product is leading many
companies to ask what business theyre in. It may not
be the companys traditional business or in fact any of
the traditional industries. Companies in todays
automotive industry instead will need to look at what
value they can create for customers and what
partner ecosystem they must develop to make that
happen.
Automobiles are just one of numerous products and
services in which user experience is becoming
paramount. Smart lighting in commercial airliners is
reducing the jet lag of long-haul passengers. Sensors
in homes and assisted living facilities are improving
the quality of life for elderly residents by monitoring
their well-being. Mobile telephones, with a penetration
in emerging markets that is many times higher than
that of credit or bank debit cards, are serving as
payment portals that bring financial services to
traditionally underserved populations.
Creating such experiences requires complex online
platforms that can analyze vast amounts of data to
facilitate decision making. And this is an area thats in
the CIOs area of expertise. But if the IT function is to
aggressively adopt a product development and thus
business-crucial role, it will have to think beyond
software applications and become more focused on
consumers. Collaboration between CTOs and CIOs will
have to significantly increase. And for both the CIO
and the CTO, technology will be only a means to an
end that is, an experience that will delight the
users of their products.
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Big Data
Will Get Small
The enormous scale of big data will keep many businesses
from realizing the tremendous value embedded in it a task
that will require bringing big data down to a manageable size.
BY VIKRAM DUVVOORI
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Coming disruptions
for the CIO
--Its a combined trend: For the first
time in computing history, we are
experiencing revolution on three
fronts simultaneously the user
experience (mobile), where
processing takes place (cloud),
and what processing is taking
place (big data). That is why it
seems like we are in the midst of
so much disruption, and
opportunity, in IT.
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Tearing Up the
Traditional Outsourcing
Contract
Fed up with agreements that put them in a straitjacket
while the world changes, companies will increasingly
demand supplier contracts that are flexible and focus
on collaboration rather than SLAs.
BY VINOD CHANDRAN
The changing nature of the outsourcing contract has structural implications for CIOs and their internal organizations. Under SLA only agreements, outsourcing governance focused almost exclusively on whether
delivered services were operating smoothly. The new agreements will
require a deeper, more collaborative relationship between CIOs and their
service providers, as well as between IT and the rest of the business. But
collaboration doesnt just happen, and many IT functions arent equipped
to capitalize on it. So enterprises will restructure their IT organizations to
better encompass this shift from managing SLAs to enabling service
providers to drive innovation and value creation. We are already witnessing customers investing in innovation councils that bring together the
business, the IT organization, and the service provider to drive a
business-focused innovation agenda.
Ultimately, CIOs will have to reenvision not only their outsourcing relationships and the contracts that govern them but also their own role. Well
see CIOs focusing less on the nitty-gritty of IT operations and more on the
core business issues of delighting customers and generating revenue. As
technology becomes increasingly ingrained in every aspect of business
operations, CIOs will be the catalysts of this shift. Theyll orchestrate the
many moving parts of new collaborative relationships. In this role, the CIO
will need a dependable partner who can rapidly execute plans that will
drive business change.
Trapped in rigid,
traditional sourcing
arrangements,
CIOs have become
increasingly
frustrated by their
inability and the
unwillingness of
incumbent IT
providers to
respond swiftly to
these changes.
CIOs will
increasingly
demand sourcing
contracts that
allow for exibility
and agility.
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CIO Straight Talk
Consequently, CIOs will increasingly demand sourcing contracts that allow for
flexibility and agility. In addition to provisions for contingencies and variable
conditions, they will require greater transparency and alignment between the
service provider and the customer. The five- or ten-year fixed, black-box
contract will become an artifact of the past. Contract language will shift from
no to now, as CIOs reject inflexible providers and monolithic contracts in favor
of partners willing and able to respond to new situations on the fly.
Mobile Computing
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oday, youre using it to talk to a friend about vacation plans. Tonight, youll
be using it to post a Facebook update about the house youre buying
upstate. Tomorrow, youll use it to reach a call center with a complaint
about your credit card. A single device the mobile phone in your hand
makes all that possible. It has structured data. It has unstructured data.
But more important, it provides an instantaneous connection that opens
up a myriad of opportunities for businesses (both B2B and B2C) to add to
their top lines.
Transformation will
not take place by
implementing the
latest analytics
software or social
media platform.
Thats a fairy tale.
Real transformation
will not take place in a
vacuum; it will be built
on existing systems.
BY SADAGOPAN SINGAM
That customer power will be the driving force behind a digital revolution,
one in which mobility, social media, big data, and cloud computing
converge to anticipate and meet customer needs in a hyperconnected and
personal way. The customer-driven digitization of the economy will generate
information at far greater levels of personalization, across a wider variety
of activities, and around more customer touch points than ever before.
Social networks, mobile check-ins, engagement apps, online and offline
sales transactions, customer support interactions the entire customer
experience, from brand awareness to after-market upselling, will be digital,
creating an unprecedented volume of new data.
Its no wonder that businesses will be inclined to jump headfirst into
emerging technology initiatives that promise to help them take advantage
of this new information and prepare for the customer-driven future. But
companies making such moves risk falling flat on their faces rather than
gaining a head start.
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