Tony Bishop

Founder and CEO

Adaptivity

Robert Keefe

CIO, Mueller Water Products

President, The Society for Information Management

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

Fortune magazine has called the 40-year-old Society for Information Management or SIM the IT field's top professional group. In fact, Robert Keefe, CIO of the $1.8 billion dollar Mueller Water Products, attributes his successful career in IT to his involvement with SIM. Keefe is SIM's current president.

Membership in SIM is open to qualified senior IT professionals, academics, and consultants. SIM currently has about 3,600 members in 36 U.S. chapters. (Yes, each SIM chapter does due diligence on each prospective member.) SIM's offerings fall into several categories: information exchange through chapter meetings; educational programs, and chapter-sponsored venues, such as the MIT Sloan School CIO Symposium. SIM also holds an annual conference called the SIMposium.

About 16 years ago, Keefe went through SIM's year-long Leadership Forum. He says, "At the time I took the course I wasn't a CIO. I quickly landed a CIO position and then had my company join SIM's Advanced Practices Council."  Each year about 300 professionals attend monthly Leadership Forum classes in 10 major cities. Keefe says, "These people have good IT skills and business acumen, but this program helps them to think outside of the box." The course curriculum blends about 40 different pieces of media, mostly books ranging from The Old Man and the Sea to The Innovator's Dilemma.

The Advanced Practices Council, another SIM educational program, consists of about 40 member companies that contract with academics to do IT research. The research can range from a look at new, emerging technologies to different segments of IT leadership. Recently, Boston University delivered a paper about the competitive levers for leading innovation in the 20th century. Keefe says, "It's not all about technology but how business models are changing. For example, google.com gives away a search engine, but charges for it through advertising. How do compelling changes in the marketplace like this one translate into decisions that a CIO must make?"

Keefe says that SIM is a great environment for senior IT professionals to share ideas. He says, "You can network with people at the meetings or you can contact anyone in the directory. As you get to know more and more people, you'll find someone who has done what you're asking about.  We have a growing virtual community as well."

Each year SIM surveys its members about the top 10 concerns on their minds. For the 2007 survey, the three top concerns included: attracting and retaining good IT professionals; making sure IT professionals develop good business skills that enable them to understand the business strategy, and properly aligning the needs of the business with services IT can effectively provide.

In addition to speaking about SIM in this podcast, Robert Keefe also gives his perspective on key IT management issues.

Don Tapscott
Chairman, nGenera Insight

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

Dr. Jerry N. Luftman
Executive Director of Graduate IS Programs
Stevens Institute of Technology

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

When Dr. Jerry N. Luftman established the information systems (IS) graduate program at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, he didn't envision that it would someday become one of the world's largest, with more than 1,000 students. Most of the graduate students have at least 10 years of professional experience. The effective alignment of IT (or IS) with the needs of a business has become a critical part of the curriculum and a major research area for Dr. Luftman. Students put themselves in the tactical role of a CIO, and then in the strategic role where a CIO builds business strategy driven by IT.

During the past 20 years, many processes have evolved to improve the over-arching relationship between IT and business. Business service management, or BSM, has emerged as an important concept for improving availability and performance. It's also a complement to the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. BSM tries to ensure that IT processes are in harmony with business processes so IT can improve a business's services. Specifically, BSM looks at what effect each of the different services and technologies supported by IT can have on a business.

Dr. Luftman says that BSM has become necessary because today's systems are tightly integrated. He says, "You have a myriad of different hardware and different software technologies, such as Web servers, databases, file servers, middleware, and virtual servers. If there's a problem with any of these things, how can you stay out in front to be more proactive, to be responsive to your business, and to be able to minimize the impact it might have on the business? That's where BSM comes in."

Steve Papermaster
Chairman and CEO of nGenera

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

The first-generation Web focused on pushing out content in a one-way mode. In contrast, Web 2.0 provides a dynamic, highly interactive user experience, similar to consumer Web sites, such as amazon.com or ebay.com. Steve Papermaster, chairman and CEO of nGenera, a company that offers a platform for transforming next-generation enterprises, says, “You don’t notice the technology. Instead, you’re completely tied in with your environment. It’s like you become one with it.” 

Enterprise 2.0, which is Web 2.0 technologies taken one step further, includes a portfolio of newer, mostly on-demand technologies designed for the enterprise. These technologies could include open source, on-demand software as service applications, or other types of on-demand, cloud-based applications and services. Papermaster says that the key question is how do these new technologies impact and power capabilities in the enterprise. “You need to understand the business benefit and the economic benefit before you seriously start to deploy them.”

Papermaster’s company has established itself as one of the forthcoming providers of next-generation enterprise applications to major companies. In fact, Rob Carter, CIO of FedEx, says that nGenera’s collaborative platform enables companies like FedEx to develop new business models and stay ahead of the competition.

In this podcast, Papermaster talks about some of the business models that Web 2.0 can produce for global companies that deploy it, but also the new types of business models their customers can derive from dealing with it.

Brad Kenney
VP of IT Infrastructure, Avnet Inc.

Seventy-six percent of executives surveyed at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in May 2008 said they didn't have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 percent said that greening their data centers is crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives. This wasn't the case for Avnet Inc., $14 billion worldwide distributor of electronic components, computer products, and technology services. In fact, Avnet received Computerworld's Best Practices in Green IT Award for a three-year project to create a more energy-efficient data center.

Avnet's 13,000-square-foot data center houses 1,200 logical servers, more than 200 terabytes of disk storage, a central tape backup system and redundant UPSs, generators, and switch gear. For Brad Kenney, vice president of infrastructure at Avnet, the greening of the company's data center wasn't another IT project, but an on-going process that has saved the company thousands of dollars in unnecessary power consumption, under-utilized servers, and inefficient UPSs. He says, "Most of all it's saved us the millions of dollars it would cost to build out our data center to house more servers we didn't need."

Kenney began the process by looking at every piece of equipment on the data center floor. Two important factors included the age of the device and its energy efficiency. Because manufacturers have become more concerned about energy consumption, Kenney found it more cost-effective to replace older air conditioners and older UPSs with new devices that were at least 20 percent more energy-efficient. He even looked at replacing floor tiles, lighting, and making adjustments in air handling. He says that little things like these can save up to 30 percent in energy consumption.

Server virtualization enabled Kenney to liquidate about 300 severs. Twenty-four physical ESX hosts now represent 378 virtual servers, and 39 AIX servers have more than 200 servers on them. Other consolidated efforts include moving to a centralized tape backup system and a storage area network.

Kenney is also amazed by the improved energy consumption that has resulted from virtualization, as well as from the other system consolidations. He says, "We went down by 44 percent in kWs per server. We've freed up more than 5,000 square feet on the data center floor."

Don Hopkins
CIO, SunGard Availability Services
and Former CIO, NCR Corp.

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

When Don Hopkins retired as chief information officer at NCR, he decided to join SunGard Availability Services, a business unit of the $5 billion SunGard Corp. SunGard Availability Services provides the company's more than 10,000 customers in North American and in Europe with solutions that ensure uninterrupted access to mission-critical data and systems. By reporting to SunGard's CEO, Hopkins has insight into the company's strategic initiatives and, as a result, has the opportunity to understand what technologies would be good enablers to those strategic decisions.
 
In 1979, Hopkins joined NCR where he moved up the IT ranks from the director of general-purpose products to vice president of technology and infrastructure in NCR's IT services group, and to his last position as chief information officer. In fact, he played a leadership role in NCR's transformation and performance turnaround. In 2007, he successfully completed the very complex IT spin-off of Teradata as a separate company. Although this event happened during a very aggressive timeframe, Hopkins and the management team did it under planned budgets, both before and after the spin-off.
 
In this podcast, Hopkins talks about how he has translated his IT experiences at NCR and applied them as CIO at SunGard Availability Services. He also talks about NCR's strategy to cut its IT infrastructure costs and increase the company's profitability, its process for making investment decisions in technology, and its methodology for measuring the value of those investments.

Christina Hollingsworth
Corporate IT Director
Genworth Financial Investment Services Inc.

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

Despite the downturn in the economy, some financial services companies are holding their own and hiring people, especially in areas such as IT. Genworth Financial Investment Services Inc. (Genworth Financial) is one of those companies. With more than $103 billion in assets and 15 million customers worldwide, Genworth Financial is comprised of Genworth Financial Securities Corporation, a full-service broker-dealer, and Genworth Financial Advisers Corporation, an SEC-registered investment advisory firm. Genworth has earned the highest company ratings in its industry. It is a leader in long-term care insurance and annuities.

Christina Hollingsworth will be the first one to tell you that IT resides at the core of Genworth Financial's business operations. As corporate IT director at Genworth Financial, she oversees the strategy, planning, and execution of the company's enterprise finance technology acquisition and integration. Hollingsworth has earned a stellar reputation for leading global teams and initiatives and partnering with multiple suppliers.

Like many IT executives, Hollingsworth has to be sure that she has a well-stocked pool of qualified personnel who are not only technically savvy but can lead IT projects. She says, "In the past, IT professionals have been very good about executing on initiatives, or basically carrying out what they were told to do. Today, things have changed. Given the speed at which technology is evolving, we need people who can develop strategy based upon trends in the industry, can translate those trends into action, and then can execute on those initiatives."

In fact, Genworth Financial has deployed new technologies such as desktop video and software as a service, which manages travel expenses and investment portfolio expenses. The company also has a social networking pilot underway that is similar to Facebook. In fact, they call it Facebook. Hollingsworth says, "As a global company, we have both employees and contractors working at a variety of locations. The best way to get good ideas is to have many ideas coming from our global talent pool. Our Facebook will make it very easy for people to tap into these resources."

In this podcast, Hollingsworth talks about what skills people in IT need today, how recent IT graduates can chart a course for leveraging their skills, and what unemployed IT professionals need to think about when looking for a job. In addition, she also talks about Genworth Financial's career development program and the company's green initiatives. 

Dr. Kishore Swaminathan
Chief Scientist at Accenture

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

As chief scientist for Accenture, a $19 billion global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing firm, Dr. Kishore Swaminathan tries to understand the major trends that will shape the technology landscape over a 3- to 5-year period. According to Swaminathan, CIOs can't afford to ignore three major trends: cloud computing, light systems, and analytics.

He defines cloud computing as the sourcing of some capability from somewhere out there, typically through the Internet, and you, as a user, neither know nor care where this capability is coming from. The four types of cloud computing include software clouds, such as software as a service; hardware clouds, such as data backup; desktop clouds, such as Google applications, and business process clouds, such as PayPal. Swaminthan says he isn't sure where cloud computing is going because of the unresolved issues in areas such as data security and performance.

Swaminathan calls the second trend light systems because they allow the IT organization to use independent but related technologies to push data from multiple streams so end users can manipulate it. Technologies such as the RESC protocol, mashups, and widgets free the IT organization of a lot of unnecessary work, especially having to build a new system or a new application.

In the last 18 months, major software companies such as IBM and Microsoft have acquired analytics companies. Swaminathan says that this third trend will take the drudgery of getting analytics out of backup systems, and build the analytics capability right into the technology platform, such as Oracle Enterprise Suite or SAP. As a result, people won't have to depend on the IT organization or a small number of research gurus to get the analytics they need. They'll be able to access the analytics capability.

In this podcast, Swaminathan also talks about why CIOs have failed to contribute to the innovation process when it comes to pursuing new revenue sources.

Mark Steinke
Vice President of Global Recruiting at SAP

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

What is the chief concern of chief information officers? According to a recent annual survey by the Society for Information Management, the number one concern of CIOs is attracting, developing, and retaining good IT professionals. If you’re looking to move up the corporate IT ladder or you’re a first-time IT job-seeker, consider sharpening your enterprise software skills at SAP, or working for a SAP partner, or getting SAP training and then going to work for an SAP customer. With revenues of about $10.5 billion and 50,000 employees, SAP ranks as the world’s second-largest business software company and the third-largest independent software provider in revenues. SAP ERP deployments can be found in more than 41,000 companies, in more than 25 industries, and in about 120 countries. Unlike Oracle, which has grown through 30 acquisitions, SAP has grown organically by hiring people.

No one knows more about the SAP hiring picture, as well as the hiring needs of the IT industry, than Mark Steinke, vice president of global recruiting at SAP. He oversees SAP’s recruiting and staffing for professionals, senior executives, university graduates, interns, and contingent staff. According to Steinke, the demand for IT professionals with SAP knowledge has never been greater than today. He says, “The quantity of IT candidates has dropped off because of the demands of skills in our space.” While Steinke strongly suggests that IT candidates at all levels consider SAP training, he says that technical skills might get you in the door, but won’t give you staying power. He says that today’s business needs demand that IT employees at all levels know how to manage change, to think strategically, and to communicate effectively. “Universities do a good job of incorporating the IT skills in the curriculum, but fall short in those other areas."

In this podcast, Steinke talks about the global challenge of finding qualified IT talent, provides tips for IT job seekers at all levels, and gives an overview of hiring and training opportunities at SAP.

John E. McDermott
CIO, Xerox Corporation

Play Podcast (Right-click to download)

When John E. McDermott joined Xerox as chief strategy officer, the $18-billion copier and printing giant was in recovery mode. McDermott worked alongside Anne Mulcahy, Xerox's CEO, to crystallize the business and turnaround strategies. In 2007, with the turnaround handled, Mulcahy decided that the company needed to do a faster job of carrying out certain aspects of the business strategy. To bridge the gap between the IT organization and the business, McDermott moved into the CIO role when Patricia Cusick, the former CIO, retired.

McDermott spent his first few months on the job asking customers' CIOs how much they spend per seat to do printing and copying activities. He says, "Most CIOs can't come up with an answer. They can tell you down to the very nickel how much they spend per seat to provision workplace-computing services. The print and copier world has been treated as a second-class citizen by the IT organization."

In this podcast McDermott describes the elements of Xerox's service strategy that will leverage existing hardware resources by moving documents seamlessly between physical and virtual worlds. He is the first to acknowledge that building a services business as a companion to a hardware business is a great idea, but it's hard to carry out.

Jim Champy
Author and Chairman, Perot Systems' consulting practice

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

In the early 1990s, Jim Champy saw the writing on boardroom walls -- companies have to change the way they work if they want to be effective and profitable. No wonder Champy's book, Reengineering the Corporation, became an immediate best-seller, being translated into 17 languages. Although the Internet didn't exist when Champy wrote this book, he says that the concept of work flowing horizontally inside a corporation and across the boundaries of a corporation hasn't changed.

In his book X-Engineering the Corporation, Champy argues that companies have to go beyond their walls and think about how their processes, their systems, and their technology can connect across organizational boundaries to customers, suppliers, and partners. According to him, the new version of the corporation will have much built-in transparency.

To write his latest book, Outsmart--How to Do What Your Competitors Can't, Champy embarked on a journey to find out how companies have devised new ways to do things, and what we can learn from them. Using a filter of triple-digit growth, he came up with more than 1,000 companies. He selected nine companies to profile in Outsmart. He says, "Companies, such as Partsearch, that are innovating how to deliver a better customer experience use a combination of high-tech and high-touch. Of course, IT plays a role in this process."

In this podcast, Champy talks how about the new corporation will expand the CIO's role, what the CIO must do to identify and to create corporate innovation, and what a CEO should expect from a CIO.

Ian Patterson
CIO, Scottrade

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

Since joining Scottrade as CIO in 2005, Ian Patterson has racked up a series of IT accolades for the stock brokerage firm, which manages $55.7 billion in assets. In both 2008 and 2007, Computerworld named him to its Premier 100 IT Leaders. In 2007, under Patterson's leadership, Scottrade was named to the CIO magazine's CIO 100, an award that recognizes outstanding strategic IT leadership. Scottrade has also made it on the InformationWeek 500 list of the most innovative users of IT in the U.S.

What has made Patterson so successful? As a former consultant with Deloitte, Patterson realized that many companies view the IT organization as an outsider, different from other business units. He says, "This never made any sense to me. Why should IT be treated any differently from marketing or finance?" At Scottrade, Patterson created an environment to converge IT into the overall corporate strategy to promote growth and profitability.

In this podcast, Patterson talks about how Scottrade's governance council plans and executes on key technology initiatives, how the company measures the success of these initiatives, and what the company has done to improve the customer experience.

Suzanne Gordon
VP of Information Technology, CIO
SAS

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

During her climb up the corporate ladder at SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, Suzanne Gordon, vice president of information technology and CIO, developed an air-tight strategy for how IT could work in lockstep with internal SAS customers to reinforce the company's success. A roadblock stood in the way of selling her idea to management. Meanwhile, she decided to move out of IT and into the sales consulting side of SAS. It was here that she saw IT from the customers' perspective.

In 2003 when the CIO position came open at SAS, a company that provides 44,000 customers with analytics software, Gordon got the job. She now could turn her vision into a reality with her IT staff of more than 300 employees. In fact, that same year, Computerworld recognized Gordon's leadership talents by including her in the list of Premier 100 IT Executives.

In this, her second interview with EnterpriseLeadership, Gordon talks about how the collaborative governance process makes IT project decisions, how the value of IT gets measured, how innovation gets carried out at SAS, and what it takes to develop a culture of trust between IT and its internal customers.