CIO Straight Talk Issue 1

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CIO
HCL Technologies and Unstructure™ launch Straight Talk, a platform for peer-to-peer
exchange of practical ideas on a variety of topics and for a variety of audiences —
including CIOs. If you’d like to share your thoughts, there are three ways to join the
conversation: subsequent issues of Straight Talk publications; a Straight Talk Web site
and discussion forum; and in-person Straight Talk events in your geography. The online
forum will help maintain continuity in conversations across all three mediums.
Visit the online forum at www.unstructure.org/straighttalk
Write us with questions or suggestions at straight.talk@hcl.com
ARE YOU A
“REINCARNATE CIO”?
If not, how do you achieve this
enlightened state?
PAGE 9
DISPATCHES FROM
THE FRONT LINES
Experience-based insights about
current CIO challenges.
PAGE 23
WHAT LIES AHEAD?
Maryfran Johnson, Jeanne W.
Ross and Ellen Kitzis on
looming CIO challenges.
PAGE 72 Issue Number 1

CIO
an
publication
Issue Number 1

From the CEO's Desk: Leading Across Boundries
Vineet Nayar
Editors’ Note: Continuing the Conversation
Are You a “Reincarnate CIO?”
Evolution of the CIO's Role; “Employees First” and the CIO; Snapshots of
Reincarnate CIOs
Straight Talking: Dispatches from the Front Lines
Generating Value For Internal Business Operations
Many Brands, One System
Virginia Guthrie, Chief Information Officer, Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc.
Case Studies: Optimizing Business Services
KLA-Tencor Corp., UTC Fire & Security, and 3M Co.
Measuring and Maximizing the ROI of ERP
Glyn Evans, Corporate Director of Business Change, Birmingham City Council
Case Study: Achieving Sweeping Business Transformation
Fonterra Co-operative Group Limited
Generating Value For Customers
Building “One AEGON”
Kees Smaling, Chief Information Officer, AEGON N.V.
Case Study: Getting IT Right the First Time
British Telecom Group P.L.C.
Life After a Crisis: Lessons for IT
Jeff Carlson, Chief Information Officer, SunAmercia Financial Group (AIG)
Generating Value Through Innovation
Leading by Example
David Evans, VP, Information Technology, Quest Diagnostics Inc.
Case Study: Achieving Fleet and Field-Force Optimization
Australian subsidiary of Veolia Environnement S.A.
Going Mobile in Wiltshire
Assistant Chief Constable Patrick Geenty, Wiltshire Police Force
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Generating Value By Effective Collaboration & Planning
Changing Contracts on the Fly
Rob Hornby, Chief Information Officer, Wealth Management Group, Old Mutual P.L.C.
Case Study: In Search of Agility and Savings
Dixons Retail P.L.C. (previously DSG International)
Getting Ahead by Getting Along
Chuck Ciali, Chief Information Officer, Teradyne Corp.
Creating the IT Blueprint
Bruce Carver, Chief Information Officer, Cummins Inc.
CIOs @ HCL: How to Pitch Your Transformation Plan
Kris Hillstrand, Satish Chandrasekaran, Greg Black and Raymond Siebert, HCL Technologies
Solution Spotlight
Using the iPad to Boost Sales Productivity
A sales order tracking tool currently being built on the iPad platform
A Systematic Approach to Developing Your Cloud Strategy
Deciding which business tasks and applications should move to which types of clouds
What Lies Ahead?
Three Outside Perspectives on Tomorrow's CIO
Maryfran Johnson (CIO Magazine), Jeanne W. Ross (MIT Center for Information Systems Research),
Ellen Kitzis (Gartner)
Appendix: 15 Questions
A Checklist of Things to Consider as You Begin Your Annual IT Planning
Pullout Poster: “Envisioning Our Cloud Strategy”
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CIO
Editorial Team
Paul Hemp, Anirban Sanyal, Jayabrata Nag, Sameer Chandiramani,
Joel Kurtzman (Kurtzman Group), Glenn Rifkin (KG), Fred Eliason (KG),
Claire Meirowitz (KG)
Design Team
Mukund Arora, Amy Detrick (KG)
Editorial Advisory Board
Shami Khorana, Krishnan Chatterjee, Dharmender Kapoor,
Rupak Rathore
Circulation/Distribution
Laurance Allen
Acknowledgments
While it isn’t possible to name everyone who has contributed to CIO Straight Talk,
the following are particularly worth mention:
All HCL senior sales leaders; the entire Cost-Out Idea Owners team; Abhay
Chaturvedi, Amitabh Dasgupta, Ajay Nair, Anand Narayanaswamy, Ankit Kumar
Duggal, Aravind Venkataramanaiah, Chandraraj Ramachandran, Franck Henri
Jean Ridon, Gaurav Sharma, Gowri V Shankar, Harsha Rao, Kunal Purohit, Neha
Chopra, Ninad Kamlesh Parikh, Raj Singh, Rakesh Raman, Robert DeSouza, Robert
MacDougall, Sandeep Malik, Srivathsan Sridharan, Sudhanshu Gupta, Sudip Lahiri, P
Sunilkumar, Vijayakumar, Vinod Sathrukhnan.
For information on reprinting articles and all other correspondence,
please e-mail straight.talk@hcl.com or contact the editorial team at:
Paul Hemp
Anirban Sanyal
HCL America, Inc.
HCL Technologies
400 Crown Colony Dr.
2nd floor, A-9, Sector - 3
2nd Floor, Suite 203
Noida - 201 301, Uttar Pradesh
Quincy, Mass. 02169
India
United States
Tel:+91-120-4069000
Tel: +1-408-328-7501
CIO Straight Talk is a periodical published by HCL Technologies for its clients and
friends. The contents are copyright © 2010 by HCL Technologies Ltd. All rights
reserved. Excerpts may be reprinted with attribution to HCL Technologies.
Articles can be found at our soon-to-be-revamped website:
www.unstructure.org/straighttalk.
Chris Barendregt CIO Fonterra Cooperative Group
Greg Black Former CIO American Safety Insurance
(currently with HCL Technologies)
Ronald Blahnik VP/IT Engineering Lowe's Co.
Scott Bonneau VP/IT, Service
Management
Dr Pepper Snapple Group
Jeff Carlson CIO Sun America Financial Group (AIG)
Bruce Carver CIO Cummins Inc.
Satish Chandrasekaran Former VP/IT Target Corporation India
(currently with HCL Technologies)
Chuck Ciali CIO Teradyne Inc.
Dean Del Vecchio CIO, CAO Dow Jones & Co.
David Evans VP/IT Quest Diagnostics Inc.
Glyn Evans Corp. Director,
Business Change
Birmingham City Council
Patrick Geenty Assistant Chief
Constable
Wiltshire Police Force
Tim Graumann VP/IT and CIO Brocade Communications Systems Inc.
Phil Gray CIO/Australia Veolia Environnemental S.A.
Mike Green Operations Manager 3M Company
Virginia Guthrie CIO Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc.
Rob Harris SVP/IS U.S. Foodservice
Kris Hillstrand Former CIO Energy Future Holdings
(currently with HCL AXON)
Rob Hornby CIO Wealth Management Group, Old
Mutual P.L.C.
Maryfran Johnson Editor in Chief CIO Magazine
Paul Johnson EVP, CIO BB&T
Ellen Kitzis Former Group VP Gartner; co-author, "The New CIO
Leader"
Dan Lambert VP/Service Integration British Telecom P.L.C.
Deb Hall Lefevre VP/IT Enterprise McDonald's Corp.
Tim Marks Customer Service &
Business Process Mgr.
3M Company
Albert Perruzza SVP, Global Ops, IT
& Business Redesign
The Reader's Digest Association
Martin Racioppi Head, PMO & IT
Service Sourcing
Pearson P.L.C.
Jeanne W. Ross Director MIT Center for Information Systems
Research
Kees Smaling CIO AEGON N.V.
Raymond Siebert Former VP and CAO;
Sr. VP/Corporate
Operations
Zurich North America
Insurance Co. (currently with
HCL Technologies)
William T. VanCuren CIO NCR Corp.
Walter White CAO Allianz Life Insurance Co.
with orat
We thank those who agreed
to be interviewed and share
their insights and experiences,
as well as those who allowed
us to feature their companies
in case studies.

From the CEO's Desk
Vineet Nayar
Stop for a moment and look 10 years into the future. What do you see?
Over the next decade, business will face daunting challenges:
Emerging markets characterized by rapid growth but products selling
at a fraction of their developed-economy prices. Countries with aging
workforces trying to leverage the entrepreneurial energy of younger labor
pools in places like China and India. Sustainability issues that bedevil
not just business but all of society. These will be overtaken by new issues,
just as we’re learning to deal with the old ones.
What will spark the innovation needed to address these cascading
challenges? The promise of great personal wealth from a successful
startup? Increased government funding of R&D? I believe the answer lies
in a new kind of organization.
Fostering Collaborative Thinking
Certainly, today’s business organization, with its hierarchical pyramid
and well-oiled but inflexible systems, isn’t equipped to tackle tomorrow’s
challenges. We need organizations in which trust, based on transparency,
creates a culture of constant innovation; in which managers are as
accountable to their employees as employees are to their bosses; in which
responsibility for change is pushed down the ranks to young workers.
Organizations that put their “employees first” to drive innovation at the
bottom of the pyramid.
This approach can deliver strong business
results as well as solve sweeping global or
industry challenges. Over the past five years,
HCL’s experiments in this area have contributed
to growth that has outpaced others, including 20
percent year-over-year growth during the depths
of the economic downturn.
The dismantling of the traditional hierarchy
leads to strong business results because it frees
up possibilities for collaborative thinking, the
kind needed to find solutions to problems made
increasingly complex by an ever-accelerating
explosion of information. Instead of a few individuals
with all the answers holding leadership positions,
We need organizations in which trust, based on
transparency, creates a culture of constant innovation.
many different people — depending on the situation
and their individual talents — step forward to lead
efforts to solve problems. Though not always in
leadership roles, everyone is always prepared to lead.
As for the traditional leader at the top: He or she
is left with the job, a crucial one, of enabling and
encouraging new leaders at every level.
Sometimes those who step forward to lead are
people who aren’t even in your own organization
— your customers, for example. Some of the most
innovative solutions, after all, come from give-and-take
between a company and the people it serves.
Other answers emerge from collaboration among
peers at different, even competing, companies.
Practical “Thought Leadership”
Which brings us to CIO Straight Talk, a publication
that is, at its heart, “for CIOs from CIOs.” That is,
most of the voices you’ll hear in this issue are not
those of “experts” — even our own experts at HCL
— but of your peers: CIOs and other IT executives.
The publication’s aim is to facilitate a conversation
among CIOs about their experiences battling it out
in the trenches — a conversation that taps their
collective expertise and insights.
Think of it as crowdsourcing for IT professionals.
We do offer some of our own points of view
in CIO Straight Talk (and even, at the end of
this issue, the opinions of a few outside experts),
but these insights are drawn from our work with
clients. The lead article of the issue, “Are You a
Reincarnate CIO?,” reflects our belief that CIOs
have a transformational role to play in their
organizations and that to play this role they may
need to be transformed themselves. It’s something
we’re increasingly hearing from our customers — and
they’re increasingly hearing from each other.
This publication is an attempt to capture and
share with you some of the practical insights that
emerge from this kind of dialogue across company
boundaries, one in which individuals will take the
lead in offering their ideas and then step back to
listen to others’. It’s a dialogue that will continue long
after you put down this issue of CIO Straight Talk,
in both a Straight Talk online discussion forum
(at http://unstructure.org/groups/straighttalk) and in
Straight Talk events around the world.
We hope you will join us in the conversation —
one that will help us all face the challenges of the
next decade. //
Leading Across
Boundaries
Vineet Nayar
CEO, HCL Technologies
6 // CIO Straight Talk From the CEO's Desk: Leading Across Boundaries // 7

Editors’ Note: Continuing the Conversation
The idea driving CIO Straight Talk is that IT professionals can learn as much, if not
more, from their peers than from “full-time experts” – consultants, academics, analysts,
management gurus. After all, professionals who face similar challenges in similar situations
are likely to have especially relevant and practical insights that others can benefit from –
insights that simply wouldn’t occur to outsiders, however smart and however broad their
perspective on an industry or profession.
And many of the best practitioner insights burst into consciousness during candid and
honest conversation. The interplay of ideas and the friction of debate create the spark of a
new idea. CIO Straight Talk is an initial and still-evolving effort to begin such a conversation
in printed form. We hope you will respond to the ideas of your peers in these pages and that
your thoughts will serve as starting points for articles in an upcoming issue.
A Movable Forum
But that conversation will continue in other forms after you put down this publication.
(Some of you may in fact be reading an iPad, Kindle or Nook version of CIO Straight Talk,
which will be available at the end of 2010. Others may be reading one of our translated
editions, scheduled to appear in January.)
Another conversational venue will be an online CIO Straight Talk forum, in which
CIOs and other IT executives will be able to raise problems, debate issues, and air their
views. The forum will have its home on the website www.unstructure.org, an online
platform for contemporary thought leaders, bloggers and professionals. Although the site
was developed and is maintained by HCL, it is driven by participants eager to discuss the
important management issues of the day – especially those that raise questions about the
management status quo.
CIO Blogs, Breakfast Debates
The CIO Straight Talk site (www.unstructure.org/straighttalk) will also offer an online
version of the print publication; and individual home pages where a CIO will be able to
upload a profile, host a blog and begin discussion threads.
There also will be the opportunity for conversation among CIOs at CIO Straight
Talk live events, which will be held periodically in locations around the world. Whether
breakfasts featuring a single speaker or after-work panel discussions, these events will be
informed by the same spirit of inquiry and peer-to-peer idea sharing. We hope you’ll join us
for one of these gatherings.
We also hope you'll share your thoughts on how we can improve CIO Straight Talk –
whatever form it takes. Send your suggetions, your responses to articles in this issue and
your ideas for articles or case studies in future issues to straight.talk@hcl.com.
The Editors
8 // CIO Straight Talk
Are You a
Reincarnate
CIO?
As the IT landscape becomes transformed almost
beyond recognition and as CIOs are called upon
to transform their companies, they may find that
they also need to transform themselves —
be “born
again,” reincarnated in a new form with a new role
and a new way of thinking. A number of CIOs offer
their thoughts on what a Reincarnate CIO looks like
and how the change takes place.

Are You a
Reincarnate
CIO?
A new set of skills – and mindset – may be needed to
succeed in the evolving CIO role.
CIOs are being asked by their CEOs to help develop new offerings
for customers. That means the “I” in CIO now stands for innovation,
not information.
Ronald Blahnik, VP/IT Engineering, Lowe’s Co.
The CIO must be viewed throughout the organization as a trusted
business partner and leader.
Dean Del Vecchio, CIO and CAO/Corporate, Dow Jones & Co.
For IT to drive business transformation, an IT leader must couple a CEO-like
grasp of emerging business strategies within his or her industry with
CTO-like understanding of emerging technologies outside of that industry.
Walter White, CAO, Allianz Life Insurance Co.
These are the kind of candid comments we hear as we talk to
CIOs and other IT executives about the challenges they face these
days. You yourself may have voiced similar thoughts to a colleague or
business partner.
The Environment
Applications Portfolio
Transaction processing from order
through delivery
Executive Attitudes
IT for cost displacement and
automation; from enthusiasm to
cost consciouness
'60s-
'70s
The CIO
Role
Operational manager of
specialist function
Tasks
On-time delivery; reliable operations
The Various
Incarnations
of the CIO
Mainframe Era
10 // CIO Straight Talk Photo by SuperStock/Getty Images.
Are You a "Reincarnate CIO"? // 11

Such statements highlight an all-too-real risk
facing IT professionals, especially those who see
their job as mainly involving technology. Many say
privately that, no matter how successful they have
have been in the past, they fear becoming stuck in an
organizational backwater, marginalized within their
own company.
Call this straight talk from CIOs – in this case,
about the transformation of their role.
* * *
The idea of expanded CIO responsibilities isn’t
new, of course. That the IT leader is well-positioned
to help define and develop business strategy, rather
than simply enable it, has been discussed for a decade
or more.
But as we emerge from the downturn facing
the prospect of a sustained period of relatively low
growth, pressure on the CIO to perform more
than the position’s traditional tasks will continue to
increase. Keeping the IT systems up and running,
reducing IT costs, improving operational efficiency
– delivering these will be just table stakes for anyone
seeking to build a successful career. “The current
economic climate and increased business expectations
for technology have certainly added complexity to
the CIO’s role,” says Scott Bonneau, VP/IT, Service
Management, at beverage company Dr Pepper
Snapple Group.
As we make the transition to an era of cloud
computing, these operational roles become even
less relevant. Increasingly, CIOs will be expected to
champion initiatives that spur top-line growth, build
market share, generate new products and services,
even transform a company’s business model.
None of this comes as much of a surprise to most
CIOs. After all, information technology in many ways
drives business strategy today, with countless products
and services and nearly every business transformation
reliant on IT in some way.
In a recent survey of 230 business executives at
global organizations in numerous industries, co-sponsored
by HCL Technologies and Knowledge@
Wharton, two-thirds of the respondents, representing
Glenn M. Renwick, CEO, Progressive Corporation
Snapshot of a
Reincarnate CIO
In the leap from CIO to CEO of Progressive Corporation, Glenn M. Renwick has overseen impressive growth since taking over
the top spot at the highly rated automotive insurance provider in 2001. Under Renwick, Progressive has increased revenues from
$6 billion to $15 billion. But more important, Progressive has maintained its reputation as one of the top auto insurers in the
nation and a dominant Internet player in the auto insurance marketplace. As CIO from 1998 to 2000, the native New Zealander
drove Progressive online well before other insurance providers understood the power of the medium. Progressive.com was the first
to offer comparison insurance quotes online, and today it continues to find innovative ways to lure customers to its website with
such options as Name Your Price, an opportunity to build an insurance plan around a price the consumer suggests. In addition,
customers can file claims online and follow their claims with online claims reporting and tracking. Progressive.com has been rated
the best website for buying and owning car insurance by Keynote Systems, Inc. every year but one since 2000. With his CIO
background, Renwick was able to envision the competitive advantage that technology offered early on, and under his leadership,
Progressive has woven technology into the fabric of the corporation. //
'80s Distributed Era
The Environment
Knowledge worker support;
interorganizational systems;
process reengineering; ERP
systems
Executive Attitudes
Increased involvement in IT issues
and governance; polarization of
attitudes: IT as strategic asset or
cost to be minimized
Photo by Tim Brown/Stone/Getty Images.
The CIO
Role
Executive team member;
organizational designer; strategic
partner; technology architect;
informed buyer
Tasks
Manage "federal" IT organization;
recruit and develop staff; educate
line management; align IT with
business; design corporate
architecture; scan technologies;
stabilize and standardize
infrastucture; scan services market;
develop alliances with key vendors
12 // CIO Straight Talk Are You a "Reincarnate CIO"? // 13

a variety of functions, said they view the CIO
as a business leader and innovator. Just as many
respondents said that their organization sees the IT
function as a “strategic driver for transforming the
business” as said that IT only plays its traditional role
as an “enabler for running the business.”
And yet despite all the talk about CIOs getting a
seat at the strategy table, most have been offered only
the occasional folding chair. So what stands in the
way of IT expanding beyond its traditional support
function?
And yet despite all
the talk about CIOs
getting a seat at the
strategy table, most
have been offered
only the occasional
folding chair.
Some of the barriers are external: the longstanding
relegation of IT to an organizational ghetto where
people aren’t exposed to business issues, for example,
or mistrust among senior executives who’ve been
burned by too many failed or underperforming IT
projects.
But barriers to assuming an expanded role also
exist within the individual. Removing these barriers
may require a kind of metamorphosis, a fundamental
change in how you view your capabilities and
responsibilities. Is it time to be “born again” into a
more enlightened and evolved professional state?
Is it time to become a “reincarnate CIO”?
What Is a Reincarnate CIO?
We use this somewhat unusual term in an effort to
capture – and draw attention to – the nature of the
professional transformation that CIOs tell us is now
required to meet the demands of the future.
In numerous Eastern spiritual traditions,
reincarnation is a process by which an individual’s
identity, capabilities, knowledge, feelings and mind
move through time in various forms, all the while
enhancing their perceptive and creative powers, their
understanding and ability.
Whereas spiritual reincarnation involves multiple
lives, in today’s world of intense change, a CIO can
live the equivalent of multiple lives in a single career
in a single lifetime. Still, the transformation involved
in becoming a reincarnate CIO doesn’t happen
overnight; it’s a journey, both for the CIO and for his
or her organization.
Although the notion of the reincarnate CIO more
reflects a state of mind than a list of defining traits, let
us sketch out a profile for this evolved professional. A
reincarnate CIO:
• Focuses more on business than on technology,
more on strategy than on operations.
• Without abandoning the traditional tasks of
controlling IT costs and increasing operational
efficiency, views IT primarily as a driver of greater
business innovation (through better alignment of
IT with business strategy) and business impact
(through IT-enabled transformational change).
• Is as accountable to the CEO and business unit
heads, who set strategy, as to the COO and CFO,
who oversee operations and the cost of running
them.
• Serves as a change agent within the organization
by emphasizing communication and transparency
and using negotiating skills gained over the
years while building numerous outsourcing
partner relationships.
• Develops capabilities that open up a career path
extending beyond the IT function.
Of course, information technology – and the people
who manage it – have always had the potential to
redefine or even create businesses. Think of the way
that IT shaped the revolutionary business models
of companies as different as FedEx, Dell, eBay and
Facebook.
But over the years, and especially during
economic downturns like the one we’re emerging
from, circumstances and perceptions generally have
boxed in CIOs as cost controllers, first; business
enablers, second; and strategic business thinkers, a
distant third.
In the post-recession world of 2011 – with its
slower growth, heightened competition, and the
emergence of potentially game-changing technologies
like cloud computing – the CIO may find herself
called upon to perform all three tasks, and in reverse
order of priority.
This requires both a granular understanding of
specific business operations and an appreciation of
the strategic needs of the company as a whole. “The
biggest challenge for IT leaders is to rise above the
chaos of multiple vertical functions and to provide
a consistent companywide platform for agility,”
says William T. VanCuren, CIO at NCR, a global
business technology company. “This platform must
be accessible via multiple channels, such as mobile,
kiosk, Internet and voice technologies.”
In fact, in today’s business world, even more may
be required; cutting costs, improving operational
efficiency, and ensuring that your IT strategy is in
sync with your company’s business strategy may
Snapshot of a
Reincarnate CIO
Dawn Lepore, CEO, Drugstore.com
When Dawn Lepore became CIO at Charles Schwab
& Co. in 1993 at age 39, she was the rare woman
technology leader. In fact, she may well have been the
only woman CIO at a major company at the time, and
she knew she would be challenged. To make things
more difficult, she did not have a computer science
degree or an MBA. She was, in fact, a music major,
which made her a target for naysayers who didn’t
believe she was qualified for such a technology-centric
position. But she had some traits that served her well
as CIO and eventually helped elevate her to a CEO’s
position. She told The New York Times, “The reason
I got (the CIO) job was that I took on really tough
assignments, things nobody wanted, things that people
thought were kind of impossible or thankless tasks.
So I proved that I could take on things I didn’t know,
and learn ... And I was good at building relationships
across the company.” Under Lepore, Charles Schwab
began online stock trading in 1996, a pioneering move
that changed the industry. Lepore served as Schwab’s
vice chairman and CIO for 11 years before joining
Drugstore.com as CEO in 2004. Ironically, Lepore
isn’t the first former CIO to lead Drugstore.com. Her
predecessor, Kal Raman, was the company’s CIO and
COO before taking over the top spot. //
not be enough. “A transformation is a fundamental
change in the way a business operates, whether
that be a new market or a new operating model,”
says Tim Graumann, VP/Information Technology
and CIO at Brocade Communications Systems, a
provider of data center networking solutions. “And
successful businesses are in a permanent state of
transformation.” IT, he says, has to be a fundamental
enabler of such transformation and the subsequent
business advantage it creates.

How Do You Become a
Reincarnate CIO?
Talk to enlightened CIOs about how they have
evolved professionally, in order to keep up with
their evolving role, and they’ll point to a number of
important factors to consider.
Reset your thinking. As we mentioned above,
becoming a business transformer may well require a
personal transformation. An obvious starting point is
to get savvy about your business and your industry
in general.
There's an
interesting litmus
test of a CIO's
business orientation:
Ask him who his
customers are.
Ask yourself.
“To focus and enable transformational-type
change requires a deep understanding of business
opportunities, as well as excellent execution abilities,”
says Paul Johnson, EVP and CIO of BB&T, a
regional U.S. bank.
Some CIOs point out that a typical IT mindset
can trap IT executives in techno-centric thinking —
a view of the world that doesn’t encourage support
from corporate leadership.
It doesn’t matter whether such a mindset is
because of hard-wired differences — IT attracts
people who are inherently analytical and rational,
business attracts people who are intuitive and
impulsive — or simply because technology is all that
IT people are typically exposed to in their segregated
corner of the corporation. Whatever the reasons,
today’s CIOs are increasingly discussing the need to
broaden their horizons.
Keep in mind that, in the role of what we’re
calling the Reincarnate CIO, technology won’t in
fact be CIOs’ primary job. They must understand
technology, but they don’t need to be technologically
adept. What CIOs must do is think about the future
and position their IT efforts so that the company is
headed in the right direction.
Align IT strategy with business strategy.
There’s an interesting litmus test of a CIO’s business
orientation: Ask him who his customers are. Ask
yourself. If you immediately think of the guys in
Procurement who are always calling about glitches in
the new ERP system, you fail the test, according to a
growing number of CIOs.
An overwhelming 70 percent of respondents in
the HCL-Knowledge@Wharton survey said that
IT alignment with business plans was the most
important factor in helping IT play a strategic role.
And in order to adopt this business focus, it’s
worth expanding your definition of “customer”
beyond your internal customers to the end users
of your company’s product or service — that is,
your customer’s customers. How can IT enhance
their experience, as well as the experience of that
demanding customer segment in Procurement?
Remember that end users very often drive the
innovation that IT can enable. For example, the
profound generational shifts in the use of technology
— most young people don’t have landline phones,
prefer texting to calling, and don’t e-mail — will
'90s
'00s The Environment
Web-Based
Era
require companies in almost every industry to change
the way they do business.
Consider recent customer initiatives at home
improvement retailer Lowe’s. During the economic
downturn, rather than focusing exclusively on costs,
Lowe’s was thinking about the customer experience,
according to Ron Blahnik, the company’s VP/IT
Engineering. With the top two players in the home
retail industry (Home Depot and Lowe's) accounting
for just 28 percent of the $450 billion market, there
is a lot of room to grow if the company can figure out
ways to engage customers and deepen the company’s
relationship with them.
Automated business processes; electronic
commerce; knowledge management; virtual
organization and supply chain reengineering.
Executive Attitudes
IT, particularly the Internet, viewed as
transformational, a driver of strategy; IT
investments now more attractive in terms of
costs and time scales
The CIO
Role
Internet developer and manager
Tasks
Develop new business models for the
Internet; introduce management processes
that leverage the intranet
But, Blahnik notes, most Lowe's stores were
designed for Baby Boomers; the Millennial generation
behaves differently. They research the pros and cons
of products before they come into the store. Once
there, they’re linked with friends, texting. Lowe’s
knew it had to begin rethinking its retail experience
— and IT would be central to that effort.
The future store experience will make the
stores hubs of the community — nodes on the
neighborhood network. Dot-com functions on
countless devices — wired and wireless — will bring
associates and customers closer together in a simple
and seamless collaboration that makes it easy for

customers to do business with Lowe’s. Customers
will leverage special bar-code tagging to access greater
information on products and services, comparison
shop and communicate with knowledgeable
product specialists.
Blahnik says that, of the 11 major strategic
initiatives at Lowe’s, nine have IT at the heart of value
realization. “The evolution is in the role of the CIO,”
he says. “In the past, CIOs were about cutting costs
and about aligning technology with strategy. Today
the CIO is expected to drive innovative business
strategy, while delivering the technology that enables
speed to market.”
There was a time when a CIO would never be
deeply involved in customer initiatives like those at
Lowe’s. But Lowe’s is hardly an anomaly. Deb Hall
Lefevre, VP, IT Enterprise at McDonald’s, says she
has some traditional IT responsibilities – for example,
simplifying, standardizing and modernizing the
company’s technology – and less traditional ones,
such as helping to shape the customer experience
and brand-building. “Technology remains an
important enabler of our growth as we seek to further
differentiate our brand,” she says.
Focus on ROI. Many CIOs point out that one of
the surest ways to align IT with business — and to
earn the respect of senior business executives — is to
measure the ROI of IT investments in terms of their
business benefits.
Assessing the returns on technology investments
can be devilishly difficult, though, as any CIO knows.
Although nearly one-third of the HCL-Knowledge@
Wharton survey respondents said they were able to
track and estimate return on investment from IT
projects, more than half reported being able to do
so only sometimes — and nearly one-fifth said they
never could.
To determine the benefits of an IT investment,
it’s important to track and capture business data and
then measure its value to the company. Tracking data
has become easier, and many companies now collect a
great deal of information. The problem is that many
aren’t aware of what data they have and, if they are,
what to do with it.
Today Smart Computing Era
The Environment
Deep vertical industry focus;
blended elements of hardware,
software, and network
technologies, which optimize
process results and ROI
Executive Attitudes
Real-time situation awareness
and automated analysis to help
firms solve smarter and more
complex business problems
The CIO
Role
Business visionary, industry-specific
manager
Tasks
Build more industry-specific
solutions, as the task of
optimizing the value of
assets and liabilities will vary
dramatically from industry
to industry
Filippo Passerini, President, Proctor & Gamble’s
Global Business Services unit, and CIO
Snapshot of a
Reincarnate CIO
Filippo Passerini joined Procter & Gamble as a systems analyst in its Italian offices in 1981. For two decades, Passerini held both
technology and global business posts within the $80 billion consumer products giant before being named CIO in 2004. Today,
Passerini, a native of Rome, retains his CIO title but he is also president of P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS) unit, one of
the company’s four “pillars” that form the core of its organizational structure. The GBS unit was created in 1999 to handle the
company’s IT needs, and its unique business structure has saved P&G more than $600 million through shared services over the
years. Rather than being viewed as simply a services organization, GBS is itself a brand within the company and Passerini has
used his post to broaden the impact on technology throughout P&G. Prior to 2004, IT was a separate organization but as CIO,
Passerini brought IT into the GBS fold. He changed the name from IT to Information and Decision Solutions so that the focus
would be less on providing technology and more on providing business solutions. Passerini believes that IT people are often given
short-shrift and are, in fact, well-equipped to be change agents within the organization. //
Sources:
Andrew H. Bartels, “Smart Computing Drives the New Era of IT Growth,”
December, 2009.http://blogs.forrester.com/vendor_strategy
Jeanne W. Ross, David F. Feeny, “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” August 1999,
MIT Center for Information Systems Research white paper

Even the business dashboards that some companies
have developed to interpret the significance of captured
data and thus create a window onto business operations
have mostly been inadequate, serving up abstract sum-maries
of monthly or regional financial reports.
A growing number of CIOs see this as an
opportunity to establish methods for better analyzing
the raw information, moving operations data through
the IT layer to provide insights and intelligence that
will help business decision making. An enlightened
CIO has a dashboard with predictive indicators that
are more actionable and real-time than a typical
passive business dashboard.
For example, final sales figures aren't the sole
metric. IT systems are linked to operations and
highlight detailed drill-downs into key databases.
Instead of, say, simply reporting monthly statistics, a
progressive dashboard might signal in red, green or
amber the status of current costs or inventory levels
and issue alerts when the levels would have a material
impact on sales.
Rethink the nature of partner relationships.
Most large companies have, to varying degrees,
engaged IT service companies as partners to carry
out an array of IT tasks. “The way technology is
changing, no one person or group or company can
stay on top of it all and do everything on its own,”
says Marty Racioppi, Head of the Technology
Sourcing Office at Pearson, the London based
education, business information and consumer
media company. Because of that, though, a CIO
“must understand how to create and manage
partnerships whose result is innovation, within the
boundaries of costs.”
This kind of relationship goes far beyond the
traditional arms-length outsourcing or offshoring
agreement that is designed primarily to cut a
Snapshot of a
Reincarnate CIO
Philip Clarke, CEO-Designate, Tesco
Philip Clarke first worked at supermarket giant Tesco as
a 14-year old shelf stacker in his native Liverpool. As the
son of a Tesco store manager, the famed British retailer has
literally always been a part of Clarke’s life. After earning
his university degree, Clarke returned to Tesco in 1981
and has spent his entire career at the world’s third largest
retailer, its $95 billion in sales behind only Wal-Mart and
Carrefour. As Tesco’s CIO, Clarke has managed to combine
his oversight of the company’s technology efforts with deep
immersion on the business side. He has not only sat on
Tesco’s board since 1998 but he served as a store manager,
a buyer, a marketer and the leader of the company’s
international expansion, especially across Europe and the
Far East. Tesco operates in 14 countries and has planted
a flag in the U.S with its Fresh and Easy stores. Clarke
managed the company’s supply chain and added the CIO
title in 2004. Overseeing technology for a global retail giant
with more than 2000 stores and nearly 500,000 employees
is a daunting task, especially when that company has been
in a major growth mode for more than a decade. But when
Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s acclaimed CEO, announced his
decision to step down in March, 2011, he and the board
didn’t hesitate in naming Clarke as his successor. //
company’s IT costs by farming out IT functions to
low-cost programmers in a country like India.
Albert Perruzza, SVP, Global Operations, Global
IT and Business Redesign for The Reader’s Digest
Association, says the primary goal of a partnership
is to help Reader’s Digest “evolve IT from a ‘service
provider’ to a ‘value creator.’”
Rod Harris, SVP, Information Systems, at U.S.
Foodservice, a major food distributor, calls the
optimal partner relationship “right-sourcing” – that
is, a means of enabling his company’s IT function
to “bring the right resources with the right cost
“Employees First” and the
Reincarnate CIO
The Reincarnate CIO drives innovative transformations
not just of IT operations but of the entire business. But while
the CIO may establish this as an IT goal, he or she isn't
likely to personally come up with all – or any – of the specific
innovations that together result in the transformation.
For those innovations, the CIO must rely on the people
of the IT organization. And that includes those who work far
down the IT hierarchy, directly with their counterparts from
IT’s internal customers – Marketing, Sales, R&D, Logistics.
In fact, the CIO should realize that many of the most valuable
innovations won’t come from R&D or edicts from the senior IT
management team.
Instead, they will emerge from day-to-day interactions
between IT employees and their customers in other parts of the
business, as they together work to find value-creating solutions
for those internal customers. With any luck, these innovations
will find a path to rise up through the organization, so they can
be utilized in other situations and parts of the company.
HCL’s efforts to adopt this kind of approach across the
entire business is the subject of the book “Employees First,
Customers Second,” by CEO Vineet Nayar (Harvard Business
Press, 2010). Through a variety of relatively simple initiatives,
Nayar and senior HCL managers set out to “enable, encourage,
and enthuse” employees, particularly those who work in a
company’s “value zone” – that is, the place where value is truly
created, the locus of interaction between customers and front-line
employees. The aim was to inspire employees to come up with
innovative solutions that would create value for both customers
and HCL.
The “Employees First” approach has several important
elements:
• Creating the need for change, through a process dubbed “Mirror
Mirror,” in which the organization and individuals candidly
assess where they are now and where they dream of going
• Creating a culture of change, by increasing transparency
throughout the company, from financial results to employees’
360-degree review of senior managers, which are posted on
the intranet
• Building a structure for change, by making managers as
accountable to employees – especially customer-facing
employees, who create most of a company’s value – as
employees are accountable to their managers
• Transferring the responsibility for change, by pushing it down in
the organization and empowering employees to make changes
that have the potential to transform the entire business
The “Employees First” philosophy helped fuel a surge in
HCL's growth in the past five years. It has attracted the attention
of academics (Harvard Business School did a case study on
the approach), the media (Fortune magazine has characterized
HCL management as “the world’s most modern”), and analysts
(a Gartner research report highlighted the customer benefits of
“Employees First”).
The approach has also yielded numerous employee-generated
ideas for innovative products and services. These include
innovations in cloud computing, described beginning on
page 67; an iPad application that can boost sales productivity
through an interactive order management and tracking system,
described on page 66; and the IT cost-reduction ideas described
in the Appendix.
Whether cost-reduction, greater operational efficiency,
or business transformation is the goal, a Reincarnate CIO
will benefit from an appraisal of whether an “Employees
First” approach could yield similar benefits in his or her own
organization. //
More information on “Employees First, Customers Second” can
be found at www.employeesfirstbook.com.

Straight
Talking
Dispatches
From the
Front Lines
This section is the heart of this issue of CIO Straight Talk, the presentation of a diverse array of CIO and
other voices. Some of the articles, based on in-depth interviews, feature the experiences of individual
CIOs or others who have overseen IT implementation projects. Other articles are concise case studies that
examine the ways companies have addressed various IT challenges.
A number of other pieces look at current issues affecting CIOs. In fact, most of articles focus less on
technology than on broad concerns of top technology executives. All of the articles – which are loosely
grouped into four sections about different types of value creation – relate to the day-to-day work of IT
professionals.
The articles aren’t meant to offer definitive solutions that apply to the situation of every reader. Rather, they
are designed to stimulate thinking about the challenges faced by the CIO and to what degree the solutions
represent “transformational” responses to those challenges.
The companies mentioned in the articles and the case studies are HCL clients. Many of the featured ideas
and insights grew out of HCL’s work with the company or the featured CIO.
to deliver high-impact solutions to business in the
accelerated time frame that business demands.”
“The driver today is the total cost of operations,
which includes driving up service levels,” says Racioppi.
“But relationships with partners should also be about
innovation. That puts more of the responsibility on
your outsource partners to understand your business
and where it is going. In some ways, they have to be as
conversant with your business as you are.”
Racioppi adds that an external partner also brings
to the table insights gained in its work with other
clients. “Ideally, in my view, partnering works best
when you have access to everything an outsource
firm learns, leveraging those learnings across different
industries. The goal of a partnership is not simply
to have a good working relationship between two
organizations. Rather, it is to cross-pollinate ideas
across a wide spectrum of organizations to really get a
grasp on the way things are changing,” he says.
To do that, though, CIOs must develop their
relationship-building skills. “Good partnering doesn’t
just happen on its own,” Racioppi says. “It takes
management, on both sides of the partnership, and it
requires transparency. Good partnering takes work.”
Do You Dare Become a
Reincarnate CIO?
The transformational goal that characterizes a highly
evolved Reincarnate CIO is an undeniably challenging
one. The stakes are high. The demands take most
people far outside their comfort zone. Leadership
skills will be required to get people to follow you on a
journey to an uncertain destination, one that will be
marked by sometimes painful change.
Many CIOs say privately that it takes tremendous
confidence and even courage to break out of their
familiar responsibilities, to assert themselves in
the senior executive suite by taking the lead on a
corporate transformational initiative. In fact, a lack of
confidence may be the biggest barrier to becoming a
Reincarnate CIO.
One of the ways to gain confidence is to
share experiences and insights with peers at other
companies – which is a primary purpose of this
publication and the online forum and in-person
activities that grow out of it. We hope that hearing
the experiences of fellow CIOs and other IT
managers – engaging in conversation with them –
will lend confidence to your own efforts at tackling
transformation challenges, in your organization
and yourself. //

// Generating Value For Internal Business Operations
Many Brands,
One System
//
Virginia Guthrie
Position: Chief Information
Officer and Senior Vice
President for Information
Technology
Company: Dr Pepper
Snapple Group, U.S.
Professional Background:
Virginia helped drive
the legal and technical
separation from Cadbury
Schweppes P.L.C., putting
in place the team and
processes for DPS to
operate as a stand-alone
IT function. Earlier, she
had been CIO at Coors
Brewing Company and
handled leadership roles
at Frito-Lay and Celanese
Corporation.
Education: Bachelor of
Science, Western Kentucky
University; Master of
Business Administration,
University of Dallas
Don’t get me wrong. I love this job because it’s
one of the jobs in the company where you really see
what is going on end to end. That is truer now than
ever. We’ve had to understand the entire business, in
order to make the systems work and that has helped
us positively impact the business process. The pace
of change today is just out of sight. Things have
always been fast in IT, but now if we are not buying
something, selling something or making a whole new
venture, it’s just not a typical week here.
The pace of change today is just out of sight. Things have
always been fast in IT, but now if we are not buying
something, selling something or making a whole
new venture, it’s just not a typical week here.
A Collection of Antiquated Systems
Just two years ago, DPS was part of Cadbury. Less
than a year before that, the company began buying
up many of its independent bottlers. Even before
that, the Mott’s and Snapple brands had their own
individual IT systems, as did the Concentrate
division. All the systems were antiquated, and the
bottlers, most of whom were independent companies,
were each on different systems. My mandate is to pull
all this together into a single coherent IT entity that
crosses all brands and business units. Inside DPS, this
is referred to as “one source of the truth,” a single
information system aligned across all the businesses.
My focus has been on five key requirements:
• Align IT to the business
• Enable the business to “Grow Sales and Cut Costs”
• Reduce the cost of operations
• Ensure that the level of service is fit for purpose
• Enhance the business knowledge of my IT team
Connecting to the Business
I knew as soon as I became a CIO that running help
desks and data centers was not where DPS needed to
“own” expertise.
It is important that I have a very strong business
role in the organization. Outsourcing much of our IT
development work affords me the time to focus on
business issues. Along with the good work we’ve done
with HCL, there are also some subject matter experts
in IT who are very strong from a business perspective,
and they have good architectural and configuration
skills. I’ve outsourced much of our IT requirements
to HCL, and we’ve put together a long-term plan that
focuses everything around our business process. We
are getting key metrics right up front and lining up
our key processes. We track those by doing a lot of
our process flows during the projects. Usually, when
we turn those projects over to operations, the process
flows totally fall apart. We turn the project over to
HCL and we’re going to hold them accountable,
along with IT and our business units.
For example, we’ve started a high-level project
involving our customer-to-cash process. One of our
key metrics is that we want to do a perfect order;
in other words, the customers get exactly what they
ordered exactly when they want it. Any deviation
from that perfect order can be tracked and corrected.
The business alignment is definitely better
than when we were with a global candy company.
However, IT has also been a big piece of the
change and consolidation in the company, which
When Dr Pepper Snapple Group spun off from Cadbury Schweppes,
the beverage maker seized the chance to consolidate its different IT
operations and align them with business goals.
Having been a CIO in the beverage industry for more than 10 years (and
having spent many more years as a consumer packaged goods industry
finance executive), I’ve lived through some dramatic technology and
business shifts during my career. But few things could have prepared me
for the challenges of my last four years as CIO at Cadbury Schweppes
and now the Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS), which was spun out
of Cadbury as a separate company in 2008. Though DPS is a new
company, it is at the same time a huge, thriving business made up of
more than 50 top brands of carbonated soft drinks, juices, teas,
mixers, waters and other beverages. With names like Snapple, Mott’s,
7Up, Canada Dry, A&W, Schweppes and Welch’s, DPS is one of the
largest beverage companies in North America, with $5.5 billion in sales
in 2009.
Unlike a CIO at a true start-up, which has a clean technology
slate from which to build efficient IT systems, I inherited an eclectic
mix of technology infrastructures that somehow had to be melded
into a cohesive, state-of-the-art IT organization. And given the highly
competitive nature of the beverage marketplace, along with the
ceaseless need to cut costs and promote growth, my job has been
more than challenging.
24 // CIO Straight Talk Straight Talking: Dispatches from the Front Lines // 25

KLA-Tencor, UTC Fire & Security, 3M
Optimizing Business Services
Case 1
A Holistic Approach to Procurement
The Company: KLA-Tencor
The KLA-Tencor Corporation, based in Milpitas, Calif., is a
$1.5 billion supplier of process-control and yield-management
solutions for the semiconductor and related nanoelectronics
industries. Its products are also used in a number of other
industries, including light-emitting diode (LED) and data
storage manufacturing, data storage, solar process development
and control, and general materials research.
The Challenge: A Workout Regimen to Improve Agility
In 2006, KLA-Tencor identified a number of goals that it felt
were imperative to achieve if it was to improve the flexibility and
agility of its operations. It needed to enhance the oversight of its
supply system. It needed to synergize operations across multiple
business divisions. It wanted to enhance the satisfaction of both
its vendors and its internal customers. And it had to reduce the
back-office costs of procurement as manufacturing shifted to the
Asia-Pacific region (APAC).
The Solution: A Radical New Approach
With the help of HCL Technologies, KLA-Tencor decided to
adopt a radical new way of looking at procurement operations.
It would put into effect a holistic vendor management and
supply approach. In the process, it would adopt new tools to
increase process automation, using carefully defined metrics and
service-level agreements.
Business Benefits: Reduced Cycle Time
KLA-Tencor was able to substantially reduce its purchase order
processing time — dropping it from four days to one day. At
the same time, unnecessary inventory returns were substantially
reduced. What is more, the cost of processing an average
purchase order dropped by as much as 67 percent.
Case Study
Case 2
Analytics for Controlling Spending
The Company: UTC Fire and Security
UTC Fire and Security is a $5.5 billion business based in
Farmington, Conn., that provides fire safety, combustion
control, and electronic and physical security solutions
internationally. The company offers fire safety products in
industrial, commercial and residential settings. UTC Fire and
Security is a subsidiary of the United Technologies Corporation.
The Challenge: Conquering Cost Concerns
For an increasing number of companies, analyzing and
optimizing spending has become an area of intense focus in
supply chain optimization. In 2003, the Aberdeen Group
issued a report concluding that savings opportunities totaling
close to $260 billion were being missed by companies across
the globe because of inadequate analysis capabilities related to
expenditures.
Like many other manufacturing companies, UTC believed
it needed mechanisms to control costs. In 2006, UTC set out
with several critical business objectives in mind. It needed
better oversight of spending across business units, regions
and headquarters. Data aggregation from multiple legacy and
enterprise resource planning systems (UTC at that time had 16
different ERP systems) had to be brought under control. Cost
compliance could be improved through variance reports for each
business unit or region. Cost analysis could be enhanced to help
identify suppliers with the lowest total costs.
The Solution: An In-House Management Tool
UTC sought HCL’s services in developing a Web-enabled
platform for reporting savings and managing spending. An
in-house tool was developed, tested and administered by the
HCL business process outsourcing function. As UTC and
HCL embarked on this journey together, they came across a
big hurdle: how to ensure data sanctity. Not only did the data
26 // CIO Straight Talk Straight Talking: Dispatches from the Front Lines //
27
has been very tough. And, yes, it’s tough on the
business to spend years on foundational work. For
example, we rolled out our handheld sales system
and implemented SAP in the same year. That was
a challenge. We impacted a lot of route drivers,
warehousemen, district managers — people who
don’t spend a lot of time with IT — and we changed
a lot of their processes. The systems worked well, the
information is much better, but it was a drain, a big
adjustment for many of them. But they understand
that this is like a foundation for a house. You have to
have it.
At DPS we work to be clear about roles in
projects — both IT and the business unit have a
place at the table. The business unit’s role is to define
their requirements and needs. I insist they prioritize
everything they need, and IT’s role is to figure out the
best way to deliver that requirement.
Starting the Journey to
"One Source of Truth"
As the business units are working on the strategy, I
want to be an important enabler, be on the team and
bring ideas as to what IT can do to make a difference.
Right now, we are revisiting our long-term IT plan.
We break it out in two different ways: a capability
model, which is very similar to the SID process model
in which you have commercial, supply chain and
your enabling capabilities. After establishing business
needs and our roadmaps, we prioritize programs
across three buckets. The first layer of programs is
foundational programs for the organization. These
are the transactional projects like ERP and handheld
selling systems, which feed a lot of our systems. The
second layer is what we call information, which
is where all our business warehouse, master data
management and decision support tools are. Once
our transactional information systems are established,
we’ll be working hard to manage our information
layer as the “one source of the truth.” The third layer
is where you can have the most direct impact on the
business. This represents our growth and efficiency
projects, where we work with the specific business,
usually ROI-driven needs — warehouse management,
trade promotion spending and many other marketing
and supply chain activities.
We’re about 70 percent of the way through the
first foundational layer; we have a good start on the
information layer, and have tremendous opportunity
with the growth and efficiency layer. Given the global
economy, IT also faces the DPS mantra to grow sales
and cut costs.
For example, DPS owns about 50 percent of our
bottlers today. Coca-Cola, Pepsi and independent
bottlers distribute the other 50 percent. Working
with more granular data in our data warehouse is
a large priority for our ability to grow sales. That’s
where we will do a lot of distribution analysis and
pricing scenarios.
Clearly, this is a journey, but we’re getting closer,
and what I expect is that we will achieve our goal of
a single source of the truth across our entire business.
With the investments we are making today, we should
be very close to that in a couple of years. It makes
coming into work pretty exciting for an IT team. //
Further reading:
Roy C. Wildeman, Mike Gilpin, Andrew Magarie, Forrester Case Study, “Dr
Pepper Snapple Group Partners With HCL To Drive Greater Service Centricity,”
April 2010. http://www.hcltech.com/insighthcl/pdf/case_study_dr_pepper_snapple_
group_partners.pdf
It is important that I have a
very strong business role in
the organization. Outsourcing
much of our IT development
work affords me the time to
focus on business issues.
High-technology and manufacturing companies are increasingly looking toward streamlining their
procurement, spend and order management business operations to achieve a long-term competitive edge.

//
// Generating Value For Internal Business Operations
Measuring and
Managing the
ROI of ERP
By quantifying returns on its IT investments, both in terms of cost
savings and service improvements, the Birmingham City Council
determined that it realized $600 million in “cashable benefits” over
three years.
Glyn Evans
Position: Corporate
Director of Business
Change
Organization: Birmingham
City Council, U.K.
Professional Background:
With 30 years’ experience
in local government,
in 2003 Glyn was
appointed Director of
Business Solutions &
IT at Birmingham City
Council to lead its
business transformation
program. As Corporate
Director of Business
Change, he ensured that
the transformation was
adopted, embedded
and implemented
across the council. Glyn
chairs the Society of IT
Management's Futures
Group and is a member
of the CIO Council, an
advisory body established
by the U.K. Cabinet
Office's e-Government
Unit, and the Local
Government Delivery
Council.
When people talk about business process reengineering and technology-driven
transformation, they tend to think about corporate entities. But
we in the public sector face similar if not tougher challenges within
our organizations, and as Corporate Director of Business Change of
Birmingham City Council (BCC), I face the same difficult challenges as
any corporate CIO.
Located in the British West Midlands, BCC is the largest local
authority in the European public sector. BCC has a budget of more
than $4.5 billion and 57,000 employees serving the one million citizens
of Birmingham. It is responsible for providing more than 250 services
including social care, public health, social housing, the environment and
urban development. In other words, our pressures are more widespread
and demanding than most companies.
Having served as BCC’s official CIO (what we then called Director
of Business Solutions and IT), I know what it’s like to drive business
transformation across multiple “business” units. I had a 500-person
department with a $70 million budget. Like other organizations, we
faced daunting changes due to financial pressures and the increasing
expectations of our customers. In April, 2006, BCC realized we needed
collection process have to be organized, but it had to result in
timely reporting, it had to avoid duplicating data and it had to
minimize changes in data.
The effort encompassed 200,000 supplier records across
40,000 vendors, and it resulted in process standardization across
various business units, continuous analysis and reporting of
spending data, and ongoing identification of opportunities to
reduce costs and realize savings.
Business Benefits: Sailing Past the Targets
As the Web-based system is used and refined, it has resulted in
improved decision-making capabilities and better cost control.
The use of e-auctions, for instance, is credited with producing
$50 million in savings. And e-sourcing overall has enabled UTC
to achieve savings of up to 29 percent, compared with a target of
7.5 percent.
CASE 3
Keeping the Goods Flowing
The Company: 3M
The 3M Company is a multinational corporation based in St.
Paul, Minn. 3M produces thousands of products for scores of
fields, including health care, highway safety, office products,
abrasives and adhesives.
The Challenge: Seeking Superior Processes
In a customer-driven market, organizations are constantly
seeking superior order management. This involves every process,
including planning and forecasting, acquiring and creating
accurate orders and contracts, handling order changes, and
resolving fulfillment and post-delivery problems.
The Global Channel Services division of 3M aspired to
significant improvements in its sales channels. It wanted to
reduce its costs of order management, but it was also determined
to fill orders and manage its supply chain effectively. And it
wanted to provide high quality internal and external customer
support that would drive additional sales. Finally, it set out to
create a proactive communication channel with customers,
providing round-the-clock order management and shipment
tracking support for APAC and Europe business customers.
The Solution: A Six Sigma Approach
In partnering with 3M, HCL adopted a Six Sigma approach
toward running the order-management process. The joint effort
had its share of challenges and roadblocks. Not only were there
minor quality issues to start with, there was resistance toward
implementing best practices. For instance, the immediate fallout
of improved quality was increased turnaround time (TAT). 3M
was faced with the difficult task of improving TAT without
compromising on quality of order processing.
Part of the solution involved transforming people's
attitudes, and the partnership had to make use of its knowledge
of the Hawthorne effect, cognitive dissonance theory and
other workplace factors to help to increase the productivity of
the team. As people's attitudes were transformed, there was
ultimately a deep impact on productivity.
Business Benefits: Better Performance,
Better Relationships
For 3M, the improvements were tangible. Information
flow within the 3M supply chain network was made over.
Coordinated orders for timely shipment and real-time
information about the status of shipments helped improve
on-time delivery by up to 92 percent. Order processing
turnaround time improved markedly. The average time taken
to process an order decreased from two days to three hours.
Thanks to increased responsiveness to customer needs, strategic
relationships with logistics providers and end customers have
been greatly enhanced. //
Reference:
Aberdeen Group, "The Spending Analysis Benchmark Report — Dissecting a
Corporate Epidemic," January, 2003

innovative changes in our business processes in order
to provide superior service to our citizens, save money
and be in line with the national government’s strategic
directives of the time. To achieve these three goals,
we set in motion a business transformation project
that was the largest of its kind in the British public
sector. We would come to invest more than $1 billion
in order to save nearly $2.3 billion (profiled over a
10-year time frame) and dramatically improve our
services through rethinking our ways of working. The
program was made up of nine individual business
transformation workstreams: Corporate Services
Transformation (CST), Customer First, Excellence
in People Management, Excellence in Information
Management, Working for the Future (housing), the
environment, adult social care, child social care and
housing.
The first of these programs, CST, would be the
pathfinder for all the others. Because SAP Business
Suite was selected as the foundation software for
CST, we needed a strategic partner to lead the project
and spearhead the SAP implementation. We chose
HCL AXON, a firm we had come to know well since
our first work together in 2005, to be our partner.
And our first challenge was a daunting one: the
entire program had to not only improve services but
deliver a financial return on investment of 2.5:1. If
we couldn’t bank the $1.35 billion in total benefits
generated from just the CST portion of the plan,
the overall 10-year program would not be funded.
In addition, the CST project had to be delivered
against a set budget and provide transparent and
comprehensive financial information to
all stakeholders.
Turning these ambitions into real-world results
was not easy. But we had a good plan and a strong
partner. There were three core elements to the project:
• Business transformation
• SAP implementation
• Business benefits realization
Finding the Right Methodology
I’ve read that, irrespective of sector, more than
50 percent of business transformation projects fail
to deliver the expected benefits. This would be a
problem in any organization, but in the public sector,
which tends to be highly risk averse, this is a very
significant issue. We decided we had to develop an
approach to managing the risk. So we developed a
change management methodology, which we called
CHAMPS 2.
What I’ve learned over the course of my IT
career is that business transformation inside any
organization calls for absolute commitment from
the business executives, expert guidance from
experienced professionals and a proven, well-designed
methodology. We were quickly able to check off
the first two and for the methodology, we worked
together with HCL AXON and other partners to
jointly develop the CHAMPS2 methodology.
CHAMPS2 requires us to have great clarity
about what outcomes we are aiming to achieve and
how they will be realized, and one aspect of this that
we put a lot of effort into developing the business
case. Our business cases go through four iterations:
We have the strategic business case, the outlined
business case, the full business case and the revised
full business case. And by the time we get to the
revised full business case, we have designed the future
operating model in detail. Every benefit that the
project will deliver is recorded on a benefit card. A
major part of my job now is to monitor the delivery
of those benefits and hold individuals to account for
their delivery.
One of the things CHAMPS2 does is focus
heavily on benefits. The benefit cards, an idea we
developed from working with AXON HCL, are
each owned by an individual officer with the council
who is responsible for its delivery. A benefit card
might record a saving to be realized or a service
But that’s not enough. $600 million in signed
benefits would make most SAP customers proud.
But BCC expects even more business benefits as we
continue to refine and implement the system. We’ve
received positive feedback from BCC suppliers, and it
is clear that efficient new processes were long overdue.
For example, more than 95 percent of invoices are
now paid on time, a vast improvement from the 65
percent of the past.
Every benefit that the project
will deliver is recorded on
a benefit card. A major
part of my job now is to
monitor the delivery of
those benefits and hold
individuals to account for
their delivery.
Lessons Learned
We’ve also tracked some key lessons learned during
the process. Among these are:
• Gather as much background data — benchmarks,
feasibility studies and current key performance
indicators — as possible to create a target of
achievable business benefits.
• Make sure you have full buy-in from all key
stakeholders, especially senior management and,
in the public sector, politicians.
• Design formal project deliverables with formal
measurement techniques.
• Communicate progress on a regular basis across
the enterprise.
• Get the right training for the right people.
• Celebrate all successes.
improvement to be made, and in each case it would
need to be measurable.
An example would be a benefit card aimed at
improvement in service, taken from our Customer
First program, which is establishing a consistent
approach to customer service across the organization.
We chose a target of driving up customer satisfaction
levels from 59 percent (i.e., who were either satisfied
or very satisfied with the council), up to 85 percent.
So that’s a measurable benefit. In the same way, if you
look at CST and the cashable savings around that,
our head of procurement has a savings target for each
year, which is defined on a benefit card.
Five Key Processes
There were five key processes at the heart of the CST
project. These classic back-office ERP applications
included:
• Business management, including reporting
and planning
• Business support, including systems and skills
• Record-to-report business process
• Service-to-cash business process
• Procure-to-pay business process
From the last of these — procure to pay — we
projected the most savings, which would be
accomplished with better spending controls,
renegotiated contracts, a consolidation of current
spending with fewer suppliers, and supplier contract
compliance across BCC.
Our SAP project, which we code-named Voyager,
successfully went live (though with the usual teething
problems you would expect from an implementation
of this scale) to 2,700 business end users and 100
super-users, in October, 2007. The results have been
impressive. CST has, to date, realized more than $600
million worth of savings in just over three years. Its
target is to deliver a projected savings of more than
$800 million.

Fonterra Cooperative Group Case Study
Achieving Sweeping Business Transformation
The Company: Fonterra Cooperative Group,
New Zealand
Fonterra Cooperative Group is the world's largest exporter of
dairy products, a leader in dairy science and innovation, owner
of a significant portfolio of brands in Asia Pacific, and a partner
to many of the world's leading food companies. New Zealand’s
largest company, with revenue of NZ$16 billion (US$11
billion), Fonterra is also the world’s largest dairy products
exporter, with offices in more than 40 countries and sales in 140.
The Challenge: Scaling Up Globally
Operating from a small market like New Zealand and having
diversified operations across multiple geographies run by a
centralized IT operations team, Fonterra was looking to scale
up operations on a global basis across the breadth of its services,
while demonstrating capability and maturity in the IT space.
The Solutions: Speed the Plow
Fonterra partnered with HCL in 2007 to ensure that all of its
applications across the entire value chain—
from the farms to
manufacturing to product distribution and logistics — were up
and running when required and that support across business
operations would be seamless.
Two key areas can be highlighted among the various tracks
of the engagement: SAP-based Global Trade Services (GTS) and
Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO).
GTS: With 95 percent of its product being exported, Fonterra
sought ways to increase productivity and reduce risk in handling
the large volume of trade documents required. With HCL’s help,
Fonterra turned to the SAP BusinessObjects GTS 7.2 solution,
which automates global trade processes and enables firms to
manage large numbers of business partners and high volumes of
documents, while also helping them to comply with constantly
changing legal regulations.
APO: As Fonterra is in the business of perishable goods, daily
sales and operations planning is one of the most critical business
processes. The company traditionally had disparate systems and
incongruent means of cataloging its products. For instance, the
same product produced across different factories may have had
different material codes in the SAP system, creating immense
inefficiencies across the supply chain, particularly in planning
and demand forecasting.
The Deployed Product Interchangeability functionality
developed by HCL, which at run time substitutes the original
product with the product made in the factory, helped Fonterra
bring integrity into the way it managed product classification
and thus sped up processing.
The Business Benefits: The Wonders of Automation
Fonterra realized enhanced performance through both the GTS
and APO initiatives.
GTS: In the first year of operation, automating and streamlining
the trade document processes have contributed to a 22
percent productivity increase. For example, automation of the
electronic Chamber of Commerce certification process, whereby
documents are now sent and received back electronically with
a single keystroke, has saved approximately 8 to 10 minutes of
user processing time per transaction. And the implementation of
various e-interfaces has significantly reduced printing, stationery,
and courier costs and allowed customers to expedite the import
clearance processes earlier.
There has also been a reduction in risk. By deploying GTS
in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Fonterra
now has a centralized platform that manages 80 percent of its
export business. HCL has worked closely with the Fonterra
Documentation Centre to implement uniform standards and
practices across all these export locations, including increased
system checks for incomplete data in a transaction (thus
eliminating the requirement that users manually verify import
country regulatory requirements) and improved processes for
the system to select the correct set of documents on country-customer-
product-payment term requirements. In addition,
technical risks have been reduced through, for example, the
standardization of coding patterns and coding standards for
discretionary deliveries.
APO: The Deployed Product Interchangeability function, by
eliminating the incoherent cataloguing of products, combined
with other enhancements to remove the biggest bottleneck in the
Level Management Chain. This reduced delays in procuring the
product catalogues, which had been resulting in needless hold-ups
in SAP BW report generation.
With this improvement, the daily processes of numerous
departments, which previously couldn’t begin until 1 p.m.,
now get under way at 8.30 a.m. In addition, “blackspots” — a
measure of the number of times APO issues prevent planning
activity — were reduced from a peak of six in February 2008 to
nearly zero. //
Sound project management is a must. But sound
change management is also required, including a
robust approach to business case development and
approval. I’m always amazed at how many projects
begin without defining the outcomes, including
ROI, in measurable terms. Unless we put these in
place, we won’t start a project. I’ve worked in the IT
community in local government for 30 years, and
for most of those 30 years, we could have done a
much better job by getting a return on investment
from our spend in technology.
In this regard, I believe CIOs must
make the journey to being much more
responsible for business change, not just
the technology. In a sense this is about
The CIO has to be the person to
change that perception, because
no one else is going to do it.
IT becoming a true profession, with CIOs taking
responsibility not just for their actions but also for
the implications and outcomes of their actions.
The CIO Mandate
To me, the role of IT is to be a strategic enabler of
change. I’ve spent much of my career with IT being
perceived as nothing more than a tactical add-on to
business. The CIO has to be the person to change
that perception, because no one else is going to do it.
Critical to a CIO’s success is his or her
relationship with the executive management team,
and in the public sector, with the politicians. You’ve
got to put serious effort into establishing and
building those relationships. This requires the CIO
to take on a business leadership role. If you want
to take the business with you, you have to sit down
with management and ask the key question: If we’re
going to start a business change process, what would
success look like? And then work with business
management to achieve that success. //
Reference:
Derek Prior, AMR Research, "HCL AXON Helps Birmingham City Council
Realize Huge Business Value from SAP," November 2009
Being in the public sector creates an added
dimension to the successful completion of such
initiatives. If you don’t have political ownership, as
soon as there’s a bit of a rough ride — and you can’t
install these change programs without some problems
— there is a danger that there will not be the support
required. At that point the project is likely to be
stopped; I’ve seen that happen many times in my
career. So politicians have to be actively engaged in a
major change program such as this.
If I was going to characterize the three main
causes of failure, that would be one of them: not
enough support at a senior level, either an executive
or a politician. The second cause of failure is a lack
of needed capacity and capability in delivering the
change. Managers can’t be responsible for delivering
a major change and still have the responsibility
of delivering business as usual. You’d have to be
superman to do that. So you have to make sure the
change process is supported by putting in place
additional capacity.
And the third reason for failure is not
having an approach to change management, an
effective methodology.
We certainly did not get everything perfect in
this initiative. For example, at the start we didn’t put
enough effort into engagement with staff and middle
management within the organization. Though we
were taking the top tier with us, there was often far
more skepticism lower down the organization. We’ve
now addressed this and we’re recovering from the
situation, but of course it’s a lot harder to recover
from a poor situation than to avoid it occurring in the
first place.

// Generating Value For Customers
Building
"One AEGON"
The global insurer launched a companywide customer-service portal.
Although it was a clear win for customers, IT had to convince the
various business lines that the benefits outweighed their loss
of independence.
Kees Smaling
Position: Chief Information
Officer
Company: AEGON N.V.,
Netherlands
Professional
Background: Kees has
more than 20 years’
experience in Information,
Communication &
Technology (ICT) — about
seven years of that working
on the other side with ICT
technology suppliers and
two years at AEGON.
He has diverse experience
in insurance, general
management, sourcing,
change and people
management. With
experience in both ICT
industry as well as the
financial services industry,
he brings a strong focus on
business-ICT alignment.
Kees was a panel speaker
at HCL’s Global Customer
Meet 2010.
//
As the second largest life insurance company in the Netherlands as well
as one of the top global insurers, AEGON is known for its private and
group life and pension insurance offerings. AEGON’s 30,000 employees
serve 40 million customers in 20 countries around the world. Like all the
players in our industry, AEGON faced a tough business climate during
the harsh global recession. It was clearly NOT business as usual. We
had to rethink our operational and strategic outlook and make timely
decisions about how we work and interact with our customers. Given
the difficult global economy, AEGON faced three key challenges in
order to ride out the crisis:
Regulation: Due to the stringent regulations in the Netherlands,
we in IT are under constant pressure to provide systems to fulfill all
the requirements from our auditors and bankers. I’d say that at least
80 percent of our work is aimed at legislative issues, so we must be
innovative and stay ahead of the curve.
Distribution: Most of AEGON’s revenues come through intermediaries
such as independent agents. But more than ever, customers are seeking
direct contact with AEGON. For example, when a customer needs to
change her address, she doesn’t want to go through an intermediary to
centralized service desk and multichannel access for
AEGON customers, regardless of the communication
and distribution channels through which they
bought products. Agents would also be able to access
customer information for AEGON products through
a single “agent desktop” portal. The portal is intended
to replace more than 100 contact telephone numbers,
e-mail addresses and interactive voicemail menus that
have created confusing customer access points over
the years.
This shift in our distribution channels was simply
not possible 10 years ago when the ability to access
data and products through a single channel did
not exist. It was difficult to interact with different
You can say that the
focus on efficiency
is just to stay in the
game, and the focus
on the customer is
more to win the game.
kinds of data, and the solution back then was to
build separate distribution channels. Today, we can
consolidate different channels using the same back-end
technology. But in order to do that we needed
to implement an integration layer. It took us two
to three years to build the infrastructure for this
integration layer. Building the portal was not difficult,
but having to build a whole new environment to
support that portal was daunting. Now that the
integration layer is in place, adding a data delivery
channel can be completed in weeks.
Another new challenge is the need to modify
our back-office process almost daily as opposed to
implementing three to four new applications per year
do so, she wants to connect directly with us. Though
we understand this desire, it puts IT in a difficult
position due to the great dependency we’ve always
had on our intermediaries.
New Competition: AEGON’s most challenging
competition is now from the “new kids on the block,”
the Internet-based insurers rather than the legacy
old-line insurance companies. These new competitors
are not burdened by “historical baggage” of legacy
systems and infrastructures, and most new products
are virtual, which means we must respond with new
ways of innovating.
Getting to Strategy
As CIO, I am fully aware that my role is changing
and the focus must be on strategic business initiatives
rather than serving as the technology service
organization. Nonetheless, IT remains critical to the
success of any organization in the financial industry.
The whole industry is information-centric and
though that is not much different from 20 years ago,
the focus on IT today is far more strategic.
In order to confront these daunting business
challenges, AEGON embarked on a “Loyal
Customer” program aimed at customer retention
by remaking the way customers interact with the
company. You can say that the focus on efficiency
is just to stay in the game, and the focus on the
customer is more to win the game. We decided to use
social media (Twitter, etc.) as a method for getting
closer to our customers and learning what they really
want. The aim is to build profitability and effective
business programs using initiatives that target growth
through innovation, better use of capital and creating
customer-focused organizations.
To that end, we created the Shared Customer
Contact Center Program, a project aimed at allowing
customers to access all of AEGON’s various products
through a single portal that would bridge our
traditional business silos. The aim was to create a

British Telecom Case Study
Getting IT Right the First Time
Anyone who has been lured by better rates, wider coverage
areas, better service and clever marketing schemes to switch
telecommunications providers is aware how competitive this
industry is. Customer loyalty is evanescent, and competitors
such as BT know only too well that it requires innovation and
focus to stay ahead of new technology, new customer bases and
faster delivery requirements. To get caught behind could give its
competitors the advantage.
The Company: British Telecom Group P.L.C.
BT is the largest fixed telephony provider in the U.K., and it is
among the world’s largest telecommunication companies, with
operations in more than 170 countries. But even the biggest
players must find ways to remain nimble and ahead of the curve.
To meet this challenge, BT’s executive leadership, in 2007,
set out a three-pronged initiative focused on addressing the
situation. The goal was to emerge as an even better customer-centric
organization.
The Challenge: End-User Experience, Time-to-Market
and Cost
The three key goals were:
• “Right First Time” – This is intended to enhance the end-user
experience by delivering services right the first time and
reducing cycle time required to repair defects and problems.
• New Services Faster – BT must reduce the time-to-market
in introducing new services, along with a reduction in cycle
time to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
• Reduce Costs – The goal is to optimize BT’s cost structure
by reducing the number of business-impacting incidents in
BT’s systems and creating added value by saving costs for
BT’s business units.
The Solution: A Partnership to Deliver the Right
Services at the Right Time
When BT approached HCL to help create and implement the
Right First Time concept to reduce the number of incidents,
HCL’s team decided to construct a 360-degree view of BT’s
customer base that helped HCL build a Services Operation
Framework. The idea was to create the “Right Services at the
Right Time” for every customer, recognize the customers’
preferences and proactively introduce solutions to their
problems. It also intended to reduce service errors, increase the
Right First Time experience for every customer, standardize
BT’s operations, reduce duplications and install rigorous
governance. In partnership with BT, HCL suggested a three-step
plan to enable the transformation: standardize, automate and
improve. The steps:
• to standardize BT’s operations, HCL took end-to-end
ownership of 270 different applications on multiple
platforms and worked across all four of BT's customer-facing
business units.
• to automate, HCL introduced a series of automation and
monitoring solutions for such applications as Wireless Field
Force management and Incident Monitoring.
• to improve, BT and HCL teamed up to create a number
of services that would be delivered automatically through
standardized, tested procedures. This led to a series of
proactive processes and technology improvements.
The Business Benefits: Enhanced Customer Centricity
For BT, the results have been a success. The partnership with
HCL, along with other BT initiatives, have brought a dramatic
reduction in the number of incidents over its applications
estate, from 10,800 to 3,400 — a great contribution to BT’s
overall Right First Time challenge. There was also a substantial
reduction in cycle time across incidents — by as much as
76 percent for Priority One incidents — which means higher
customer satisfaction scores. And service availability increased,
while order management processing time shrank from
62 minutes to five minutes.
As BT gears up as a major corporate service provider for the
2012 London Olympics1, these improvements provide optimism
that they’ll meet the ultimate Right First Time challenge. //
1. BT is the Official Communications Services Partner and a Sustainability
Partner for the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games.
as we did in the past. Having new and unprecedented
communications with our customers means that we
are more aware than ever of their changing needs.
So transforming customer requirements means that
we must have flexibility and agility to meet these
changing business requirements.
Given the time and costs of building the new
infrastructure, the Shared Contact Center project
drew some criticism along the way. We had to prove
to the business side that all this back-office work was
worth the time and money. We had to build trust
with the business units because we were taking people
out of the comfort zone of a single silo having its own
technology infrastructure. The portal connects across
If I had to do it over again, I’d work harder to
gain confidence and trust within the business
units before embarking on the project.
silos and forces people to rethink internal business-technology
alliances. The moment of truth came
when the portal went live and people quickly realized
that it had all been worth the effort. Of course, if
I had to do it over again, I’d work harder to gain
confidence and trust within the business units before
embarking on the project.
Some employees believe that their needs may
still be better served within the silos of the various
business lines. But we had to look at this from our
customer’s point of view, and that required the
creation of “one AEGON.” Customers don’t care
what the underlying business structure is. They want
answers and products that solve a problem.
The End and the Means
Needless to say, we’ve seen immediate increases in
customer satisfaction. Both agents and customers,
using the portal along with speech recognition and
knowledge systems, have access to a single view of
the customer and a complete trail of customers’
contact history. Customers now encounter “one call
and done,” rather than the nightmare of multiple
phone numbers and multiple attempts to reach the
company. We’ve installed technology that enables
a single telephone number to service all customer
inquiries without interactive voice response. All this
has decreased the average handling time and increased
the quality of service delivered, which was the goal
all along.
For me, one of the key lessons learned in this
project was to remain focused on the end goal and
not get caught up in territorial or philosophical
disputes. When building something like a portal
or integration layer, the tendency is to employ a
centralized approach. But in so doing, you can
easily get caught up in trying to create the best IT
performance and become IT-focused rather than
focusing on supporting an insurance company. Our
goal was not to have the best IT performance but to
find ways to make the company competitive.
Of course, that is easier said than done when you
are building a central initiative like a portal that is to
be overlaid across many business units. You encounter
less of the ownership mentality from the individual
business units because this isn’t their own unique
technology solution. Instead, the focus falls on the IT
organization and that can be problematic. Though
some initiatives just don’t have a natural business
owner to support them, the CIO has to find ways to
rally support from the entire organization in order
to create support and ensure success. Nobody said it
would be easy, but today’s CIOs must be ready to see
the new world differently. //

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