Enterprise CIO Decisions

Enterprise CIODecisions
Guiding technology decision makers in the enterprise

INSIDE: Walking the Green Walk Warding Off Rogue IT
OCTOBER 2012 VOLUME 16
x 1111111111111111111 1111111111111111111 Security 1111111111111111111 Policies 1111111111111111111 for Next1111111111111111111 Generation 1111111111111111111 IT 1111111111111111111 IT security threats 1111111111111111111 are evolving faster than 1111111111111111111 management practices 1111111111111111111 can keep up. Heres how to stay ahead. 1111111111111111111 1111111111111111111 1111111111111111111
Balancing Corporate Risk and Consumerization How Do You Solve a Problem Like Big Data? Agile Practices Wooing the Business Putting Customers Needs First
ENTERPRISE CIO DECISIONS OCTOBER 2012
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EDITORS LETTER
Flag on the Play

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CONSIDER THIS SCENARIO: The
EDITORS LETTER
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WARDING OFF ROGUE IT
BALANCING CORPORATE RISK AND CONSUMERIZATION
HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE BIG DATA?
AGILE PRACTICES WOOING THE BUSINESS
PUTTING CUSTOMERS NEEDS FIRST
IT department, worried that certain websites or applications will expose the company to security risks or rob the network of bandwidth, has switched off administrator rights on user desktops, banned applications like instant messaging and blocked websites like Facebook, only to restore rights and access when users rebelled. Its happening. When you consider the impact of the loss of productivity on the part of the users and IT staff in this untenable situation, you see how security and productivity are opportunity costs, and that a balance must be struck between the two. This balance, the subject of this months Enterprise CIO Decisions cover story by Executive Editor Christina Torode, can be described terms of evolution. The process of how we got to where we are today looks a lot like the NFL referee lockout this fall. When smartphones became de facto corporate email clients, liberated users felt like the NFL players without the real refs: They would try to get away with whatever they could. Dropbox, YouTube, anything goes until someone uploading video to the Internet causes the network to crash, and IT has to start throwing penalty flags all over the place. Users are too far down the road of
newfound productivity gains to be able to exist in the world of limited access, so IT has to create policies that work with the users, enable device and application freedom, and still cover their risk management and compliance bases. Terri Tyler, IS officer for the Los Angeles Metro Transportation Authority, gets it. I always tell users to come to me before they decide to use a new device or service so I can explain the risks and educate them on acceptable use policies, she told Torode. Talking to people, not making a big deal if they do make a mistake, saying, I can do that or we have that service will encourage them to come to you before they start using something new. When planning your consumerization productivity vs. security strategy, recall the upheaval that the shift to PCs and client/server caused everyone. We are in the middle of a similar transition. New ways of doing things must be discovered, and its going to come down to people listening to each other in order to find the way through. Scot Petersen Editorial Director, CIO/IT Strategy Media spetersen@techtarget. com
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NEWS, VIEWS AND REVIEWS FOR SENIOR TECHNOLOGY MANAGERS
EDITORS LETTER
UpFront
News, views and reviews for senior technology managers
ON THE JOB
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walking the green walk

YOU KNOW THAT song,
I Was Country When Country Wasnt Cool? Well, I was green before green was cool, laughs Janet Claggett, CIO for Richland County, S.C. For those of us who have green running through our veins, none of this is new. What is new is there are newer and better technologies that make it easier. Claggett not only talks the talk but walks the walk. In fact, she was pursuing environmentalsustainabilitysolutions even before Earth Day became a mainstream event and well before 2008, when the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, or NASCIO, called for its members tolead the charge for green technology solutions. By applying her personal philosophy on environmental sustainability
and efficiency to her work as a CIO, Claggett has helped save Richland County money and reduce its carbon footprint significantly. Claggetts IT organization promotes two rules when approaching a project: First, do no harm; then, look for the green technology solution. If with every project, you think about that on the front endwhich I ask my team to do, then youre always on the lookout for that opportunity to find a sustainable solution, Claggett said. I do believethe CIOs roleshould include such a commitment. If we embrace a strategy that strives to make things better for future generations, we will make better decisions. Its that mode of thinking that put Claggetts department in perfect position to share in a U.S. Department of Energy Energy Efficiency and Community Block Grant(EECBG) in 2010. With the grant money, she hired two contractors to round out her project
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team as it focused on creating a Webbasede-recording system for the countys Register of Deeds. The software system allowed citizens, attorneys and abstractors to file documents and record deeds from their homes or offices 24/7. This reduced trips to the Register of Deeds office, saving fuel and paper, as well as time. The county estimates the system is saving residents $174,000 per year, based on 75,000 transactions annually, average mileage, and the cost of gas and parkingbenefits that now reach beyond Richland. Its really providing this type of benefit to attorneys across the country who want to do land transactions and recording of deeds in our state, Claggett said.
Around the same time, the organization was awarded additional community block grant funds from the EECBG to put toward aserver
The county estimates the system is saving residents $174,000 per year.
virtualizationproject that was in progress already. The grant let Claggett get more aggressive with implementation. Whilevirtualization projectsarent always seen this way, they are one of a few quantifiable sustainability solutions. For every one server that replaces five servers,
WHATS THIS?
enterprise mashup: An enterprise mashup is the
integration of heterogeneous digital data and applications from multiple sources for business purposes. An enterprise mashup is also sometimes known as a business mashup or, less precisely, as a data mashup. A mashup is created from modular components that the end user can assemble and reassemble as desired to serve current needs. In an enterprise mashup, the product is typically a combination of internal corporate data and applications with externally sourced data,SaaSand Web content.
SOURCE: WHATIS.COM
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we computed an 80% energy savings and reduction of four tons of carbon emissions, she said. Green projects extend outside the IT department as well. When the county facilities department received its own grant to replace all of the countys lighting fixtures and add timers and movement controls, Claggett was eager to help. The project, poised to reduce energy use in county buildings by 30%, involved a great deal of infrastructure work. Its the sort of outside-the-data-center project with which her organization loves to get involved, she said. We were running all the network cables to connect the lighting controllers from floor to floor and back to
the main network switching infrastructure; we installed the virtual servers; we did a lot of technical infrastructure to help roll out that project,
Its all part of being green, doing the right thing and saving money.
JANET CLAGGETT CIO, Richland County, S.C.
Claggett said. It may sound boring to some, but its all part of being green, doing the right thing and saving money. KAREN GOULART
ON THE AGENDA
morphing the cio role

What technology has the most potential to fundamentally change the role of the CIO?
Cloud computing On-demand computing Mobile technology Business intelligence
Shared services Social media/collaboration Virtualization Web services Other

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%
SOURCE: TECHTARGETS 2012 ROLE OF THE CIO SURVEY, WITH 629 RESPONSES TO THIS QUESTION; PERCENTAGES DO NOT TOTAL 100.
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ONE ON ONE
warding off rogue IT

Rick Roy TITLE: Senior vice president and CIO TIME IN THIS ROLE: Four years ORGANIZATION: CUNA Mutual Group HEADQUARTERS: Madison, Wisc. EMPLOYEES: 4,000
NAME:
EDITORS LETTER
serve up our products on themobile devicesfor the actual consumer? We have examples of both. One is more of an internal productivity play, and the other is [to] serve up an app, available via your Droid or iPhone, to consumers that helps them through a transactionand, by the way, helps them buy one of our insurance products in a more seamless way. Are you developing that app in-house, or are you shopping that out to an outsourced developer? Our approach, to this point, with regards to apps has been to develop them in-house. I think the big question outstanding is if the number of apps explodes, that will not be practical. So we are actually in conversations with our labor partners, our strategic partners, people we use for doing labor work on our behalf, asking what their capability is to adjust if that demand does go up. Given our business, it is not clear to us whether that will actually explode in the numbers, or if it will have relatively low numbers. If it stays pretty small, we will continue to develop apps inhouse. What technology are you most interested in exploring in the next 18 to 24 months? I think that the technology that most of us are watching really closely is how the very cloud-based solutions can provide an alternative to solutions we are running in-house. So,
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Rogue IT? Not a problem at CUNA Mutual Group in Madison, Wisc., where the focus is on aligning IT with business strategy and building strong, tactical partnerships between departments. In this interview, Rick Roy, senior vice president and CIO at CUNA, describes how technology serves business, why the company continues to develop apps in-house and how he avoids IT surprises through a solid governance program. How are you using technology to serve your business strategy? Were really using technology to enable thebusiness strategieswe have in our various business lines and product areas. We do that two ways: One is to use technology to enable employees to work better, faster, smarter, more collaboratively. Thats more of an internal view. The external view, the outside-in view, is how can we use technology, like some of the mobile technologytoday, to actually
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to me, cloud is not a technology, per se, but a delivery vehicle. And yet, it is one of the areas that can be most compelling in terms of us being able to offer a different value proposition from IT to our customers. While certainly things like mobility and the innovation curve are vertical, and we are watching that very closely, the reality is that its a vertical innovation curve, so no one is really quite sure where that is going to land. Specifically with cloud, especially with the Software as a Service-type offering, while there is plenty of innovation there, it is something you can attach a strategy to and think about it as a two- or three-year timeframe instead of a one-year timeframe. Inside CUNA Mutual, we have deployed a number of cloud-based solutions and have had great success doing that. We dont think it is a silver bullet, but we also think it can be a very compelling alternative to running all of these applications within our own data science environment, as many of us have done historically. Have you had any experience with rogue IT? We have only had some minor examples of what I would call rogue IT, especially related to the cloud. I attribute that to two things. One is we have our teams really embedded in the customer groups they serve, so they generally have a really strong feel and pulse of what the customer
is thinking and what they are contemplating doing. So that alignment, to use a really overused word, is really your first line of defense. The second is we are pretty particular, and very deliberate in communicating within the company, who is authorized to
Cloud is not a technology, per se, but a delivery vehicle. And yet, it is one of the areas that can be most compelling in terms of us being able to offer a different value proposition from IT to our customers.
enter into technology-related contactsand that is a really small list, starting with me. And cloud-based contracts are every bit of a technology contract, just like a software license would be. So we dont lead with that governance hammer; we lead with alignment and partnership. Hopefully we wont have to pull out the governance hammer, because obviously that is not how you want to work with your customers day-to-day. The combination of these two has worked pretty well for us.
WENDY SCHUCHART
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Balancing
Corporate Risk and Consumerization
IT executives are walking a tightrope to balance the productivity gains of social, mobile and cloud services against their quite-real security risks. BY Christina Torode
to consumerization whether youre referring to social media, mobile devices, cloud services or all of the above99.9% of employees will use common sense in considering data security policies and information sharing, believes Dave Trigo, vice president and corporate CIO at The Hanover Insurance Group. But, its that .1% that can kill you, Trigo said. Terri Tyler, information security officer at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has similar faith in her user base. For her, educating users about the risks of Facebook, Twitter or an Android smartphone go a long way toward not having to make major changes to security policies in light of consumerization. I always tell users to come to me before they decide to use a new
WHEN IT COMES
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device or service so I can explain the risks and educate them on acceptable use policies, she said. Talking to people, not making a big deal if they do make a mistake, saying, I can do that or we have that service will encourage them to come to you be fore they start using something new. Talk to an information security officer in charge of a heavily regulated company likedefense and aerospace systems maker Raytheon Co. about the use of cloud services or mobile devices, however, and that .1% that can kill you skyrockets. I dont think you can go with saying [to auditors] that we educated our users about our security policies. Legally its not defensible, said Michael Daly, corporate directorof information technology security at Raytheon. We need to do more due
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diligence, to the extent of being able to explain what we do to enforce [a security policy], how we measure compliance andwhen we discover that someone is out of compliance how we handle that.
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SPEAK SOFTLY BUT CARRY A BIG SECURITY STICK
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Trigo does have faith that users will do the right thing, but that doesnt mean he doesnt have a data security arsenal on the back end. His multipronged security strategy is farreaching, but it doesnt put the onus on the user, but on the vendor. Trigo and his chief architect worked with Software as a Service vendors to develop single sign-on for the many SaaS applications used by Hanovers 5,000 employees. And when a user does attempt to buy a cloud service directly from a vendor, Trigo has the network set to block the use of that service. We have excellent relationships with the business, so they usually come to us to review a vendor and the contract before they buy something, but we also have a firewall and a central contract group that reviews all technology contracts before a serviceinside or outside of our walls can be bought, he said. Trigo is pretty comfortable keeping large amounts of information in the cloud, whether with Microsofts hosted Exchange service or Salesforce. com, based on the due diligence that
goes on behind the scenes, he said. One breach could ruin us, so before we engage in a contract, we ask how [the vendor] does backups, what they have for DR (disaster recovery), what their security posture and capabilities are, who is responsible should something happen. Contractually, we make sure we are covered very well. When signing with a new service provider, Tyler writes into the contract the right to audit the vendors systems and examine their logs to see how they are coding; on the front end, she has workstations set up for timed lockdowns if a user is careless. But she also puts some of the security burden on business managers, in some cases asking them to sign a disclaimer if they want a service despite warnings from IT not to use it. Humor is the best weapon and thats how I approach it if they still want to use something after I explain the possible ramifications and tell them its not a good idea, she said.
FOUR WAYS TO MANAGE MOBILE DEVICES
Because employees want to be able to use their iPads or Android devices to get their job done, theyre very willing to sign acceptable-use agreements, which often give IT the right to wipe their device clean, said John Pescatore, vice president and distinguished analyst at Stamford, Conn.based consultancy Gartner Inc. Ive had CIOs and CISOs say,
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There is no way that Ill get employees to download a software agent on their mobile device or sign an agreement giving us the ability to wipe their device, but that is untrue, Pescatore said. If you give employees
Pescatore said enterprises have four main approaches to consider for securing employee-owned devices: A heavy-handed approach that is server-based. To gain access to company information, the device user must use a Citrix Receiver on his or her device. Its very secure, and users hate it, he said.
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A little less Draconian approach is VDI, wherein users have to run VMware View on their iPads when connecting to work programs.
the opportunity to use their favorite toy, they are willing to compromise. Even the largest enterprises, including a $1 billion low-tech manufacturer, have had no problem getting thousands of employees to abide by such bring-your-own-device (BYOD) rules, he said. Hanover Insurance Groups BYOD program supports Blackberrys, iPads and iPhones for business use and has very straightforward rules of engagement for its program. Employees must download a mobile device management (MDM) agent on the device to access emails and calendars. If they leave the company, corporate data is wiped clean from that device. All they have to do is go to a website to request the [MDM agent] download, and security policies are pushed down to the device, Trigo said.
A little less Draconian approach is virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), wherein users have to run VMware View on their iPads when connecting to work programs, for example. They have to use a locked-down image that IT controls, but they can at least work offline, he said.
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Then, there is what Pescatore calls the middle-of-the-road approach, where an MDM agent is loaded onto the device. Enterprises take on some risk, and employees have to do something, but for the average enterprise this is a workable approach, he said.
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The final approach is a bit of a freefor-all, where the thinking is, OK, these devices are secure enough because the mobile device maker has made them secure enough, but I dont think theres much hope for that model in the enterprise. It didnt work with Microsoft and Windows, he said. [Mobile device makers] are driven by consumernot business demands, so they arent focusing on security.
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The best approach, Pescatore said, is a mix of an MDM agent for access to less-sensitive data and a Citrix Receiver for access to more-sensitive data.
EDITORS LETTER
THE SOCIAL MEDIA SECURITY CONUNDRUM
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From a security perspective, its a bit easier to control employee-owned mobile devices than it is to constantly monitor social media access and usage. Questions abound, from who is liable should an employee tweet sensitive company information to what is the business case for allowing employees to use Facebook during work hours. I think you have to build a whole new set of security policies and test them in a legal framework for [social media, cloud services and mobile devices], said Raytheons Daly. Then, there is the whole liability issue. [In one case], the government subpoenaed Twitter for deleted tweets [produced by an Occupy Wall Street protester]. That is a perfect example of how data in the cloud is outside your control. After all, the subpoenas, and Twitters response to some of them, make it clear that you dont own your tweets. Trigo is more interested in how social media platforms like Facebook
can be used than in how access to them can be blocked; as such, Hanover employees are allowed to use Facebook at work. I heard about a 15-year-old girl who set up a Facebook page after a tornado to use as a communication vehicle with the Red Cross and find family members, Trigo said. Should we do that? Could we run a business from [Facebook]? How to use it and what to use it forthose are the things that really need to be thought through. Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense said it was considering blocking all social media access, stating that military members were giving away too much information including their locationwhen communicating with their social networks. The next day, the Marines put out a [press] release saying that they had exceeded their recruiting goals because of the use of social media, Pescatore said. So, you had one side blocking it for security reasons, and another promoting it because it helped their business. Guess which side won? The Department of Defense now operates its own Social Media Hub.
Christina Torode is executive editor for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at ctorode@techtarget.com.
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Big Data?
Theres a growing consensus among business experts that extracting value from big data will be a deciding factor in which businesses stay on top and which just get by. BY linda tucci
often defined as data that is too large to process by traditional means. The volume of big data, its velocity and the varietyall of that unstructured data pouring inmake it a bad fit for traditional database technologies. The issue of value adds a fourth v to the attributes that make big data problematic for traditional IT shops. Finding patterns and correlations in big data that could yield business insights requires new kinds of IT experts, from statisticians to so-called data scientists. Big data is difficult to corral and difficult to capitalize on. Yet, if the growing consensus among business gurus is correct, extracting business value from big data will mean the difference between industry superstars and mere survivors. We are going to see companies
BIG DATA IS
How Do You Solve a Problem Like
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that start on this learning curve sooner accelerate their gains, said Michael Chui, a principal at the McKinsey Global Institute and author of a massive McKinsey report on the value of big data. Collecting and analyzing large data sets is already driving changes in health care: The McKinsey research predicts that health care could reap up to $300 billion in value from the effective use of big data, including $200 billion in reduced spending. James Noga, CIO at Partners HealthCare System, a Boston-based health care nonprofit, said he is already seeing how the voluminous data now being collected by emergency rooms will be aggregated and analyzed for patterns that could lead to huge breakthroughs, including the ability to better predict adverse
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drug reactions. Pointing to the drug Vioxx, whose users were shown to experience a higher rate of heart attacks and strokes than those taking a placebo, Noga said, We know that even with our small data set, we could have detected the problems with Vioxx a year before it came to light if we had been doing the right analytics.
in an optimum way, he said. Logistics companies are also hot on the trail of big data. The voluminous exhaust data collected on supply chains is being analyzed for economic predictions, from retailer optimism about the Christmas season to the impact of political uprisings on oilrich countries.
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For all of its promise, big data presents a big challenge for most companies and their CIOs.
The gains from mining big data are hardly limited to fields like the health care industry, where research scientists are used to dealing with large data sets, or the retail sector, which has been collecting and buying customer data for decades, said Tom Davenport, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School and the author of many books on analytics. Based on his recent work with industrial firms, Davenport is convinced that big data and analytics will help turn around U.S manufacturing. Machines and devices of all kinds throw off tons of data just waiting to be mined, he said. You can use analysis to show when things need to be fixed, and when parts get created
FALLING BEHIND ON BIG DATA
For all of its promise, however, big data presents a big challenge for most companies and their CIOs. In a recent report from the nonprofit industry association CompTIA, 63% of IT and business executives said they dont have a firm grasp of the concept of big data. The 44-page Big Data Insights and Opportunities report, based on two online surveys of some 500 IT and business executives in July, makes it clear that companies are hyperaware of the importance of being able to manage and analyze big data. Twothirds of respondents, for example, strongly agreed with the statement If we could harness all of our data, we would be a much a stronger business. Participants in the CompTIA study cited lower productivity, lack of business agility, internal confusion over priorities and reduced margins due to operation inefficiencies as the top negative consequences of being unable to manage and analyze big data. Few companies are where they
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want to be in managing and using big data, the study found. Respondents said they fall short on analyzing Web patterns (80%), measuring email campaigns (85%) and monitoring social media (88%). Unstructured datathe audio and video files and social streams of data that dont easily fit into the traditional databases is passing them by. Shvetank Shah, executive director of The CEB, a Washington, D.C., technology consulting firm, said that workforces, by and large, lack the requisite mental habits to use big data and analytics to drive business decisions. In its recent study of roughly 500 companies, CEB found that one-fifth of employees go by gut instinct when making business decisions; about half of all employees over-trust data; and about one-third are what CEB calls informed skeptics, or people who can blend judgment with data to drive the business forward. The good news? Companies are
making a concerted effort to get their arms around big data, according to the CompTIA study. Over the next two years, 41% of large companies
Over the next two years, 41% of large companies plan on hiring new employees to meet the data analysis and business intelligence requirements to leverage big data.
plan on hiring new employees to meet the data analysis and business intelligence requirements to leverage big data, while 39% plan to use outside consultants or vendors.
Linda Tucci is news director for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at ltucci@techtarget.com.
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Agile Practices Wooing the Business

Enterprises are relying on Agile practices to create new services and improve project management across business lines. By christina torode
LONG-TIME AGILE project-manager-
turned-project-trainer Joseph Flahiff, president and CEO at Whitewater Projects Inc., has noticed a new crop of students trickling into his classes. One client is in marketing and sales and wants to figure out how to use Agile methodologies to solve problems with the way projects are being run in his organization. Another client works in a logistics environment shipping goods, and is trying to figure out how to use Agile to do that. People are looking at Agile and saying, Hey, theres a lot of success around it and a lot of buzz around it, so how can we apply it? Flahiff said. But, at the same time, they need to ask, Where are the problems that were experiencing and how can we resolve them?
Before employing any methodology, the people in charge must figure out their departments and companys value propositions and how theyre measured, and then look at what is slowing the delivery of that value, Flahiff said. For British Airways PLC (BA), economic necessity spurred the Londonbased airline to adopt Agile practices, believing they would speed up and deliver new business value. During the economic slowdown in 2008, a focus on generating new revenue led us to using Agile to both drive the business proposition and develop IT, said Mike Croucher, head of IT architecture and delivery at BA. Agile practices allowed BA to develop new services, as well as make changes to existing programs. Often, the
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payback period for these investments was less than a month. The airline recently launched an iPad application for its cabin service directors to give them up-to-the-minute information on the preferences of executive club members. The application went from idea to production in 90 days using Agile practices. Early demos of the application were given to the service directors, and their feedback played a key role in the ultimate design. These directors in turn gave direct feedback to BAs business leadership team, which in turn reinforced the positive view of the project and IT delivery, Croucher said. The concept behind BAs Agile practices is to go live with a minimal set of functions to derive an early ROI, Croucher said. The process also prioritizes requirements by value. Projects are stopped once the majority of the agreed-upon benefits are achieved. Then the Agile team moves on to the next idea.
seen Agile practices move beyond software development into corporate project and portfolio management, he said.
Agile and lean are the first practices Ive seen in 20-plus years that are truly helping to solve the business-IT alignment issue.
ALEX ADAMOPOULOS CEO, Emergn
AGILE PRACTICES AND BUSINESS ALIGNMENT
Agile and lean are the first practices Ive seen in 20-plus years that are truly helping to solve the businessIT alignment issue, said Alex Adamopoulos, CEO at New York-based Emergn, an Agile and lean consulting firm whose customers include BA, Standard Life PLC and British Telecom. For the past two years, hes
This movement, in turn, has led CIOs to become more involved in project management discussions. The CIO is spending more time with business heads and portfolio heads, becoming a true partner to them, versus [IT being] a cost center, Adamopoulos said. The benefits of combining Agile practices with lean methodologies are becoming so pronounced that one day a new term that encompasses both will emerge, according to Forrester Research Inc. It makes sense, said Dave West, vice president and research director at the Cambridge, Mass.-based consultancy. If youre doing [an Agile] sprint of only three weeks, you bet you have to reduce waste, and you bet you have to economize the amount of functionality, the delivery and the code writing. Its a
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natural segue from Agile to lean. General Electric Co.s Software Solutions Group (SSG), which is replacing a mix of software development methods, including waterfall, with Agile practices, appreciates the connection. Its next step is interjecting lean into the process, not only for software development but also across such other GE business lines as the engineering division, said Paul Rogers, executive manager of SSG. Weve gotten a lot out of Agile, but it is lean that makes you hyperproductive. Lean optimizes the whole lifecycle of work, Adamopoulos said, and its goal is to remove as much waste as possible. Combined, Agile and lean will focus a project on three things:
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Whether applied to the software development lifecycle or to the project development lifecycle, Agile practices, combined with lean, allow for midcourse project corrections, which
Agile practices, combined with lean, allow for midcourse project corrections, which are difficult to achieve with traditional project management approaches.
are difficult to achieve with traditional project management approaches. They also simplify release cycles through iterations, and reduce waste and complexity. Companies should be prepared, however, for a rough ride initially. The other side of the Agile-lean coin is culture shock. Business and IT groups might have a hard time adjusting to monthly or even weekly releases of new features. Lean practices will rein in Agile release cycles, but governance is needed too. Accordingly, BA and GE both have a governance plan in place, in some form or another.
Christina Torode is executive editor for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at ctorode@ techtarget.com.
V alue, to ensure that the team is working on the right projects. F low, so the team is working on the right projects, in the right order. Q uality, to make sure that quality is built in early enough in the process.
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Value, flow and quality [together are] a means of defining Agile and lean, and many of the practices are synonymous, even if the terms differ, Adamopoulos said. In the lean world, they use the term kanban board. In the Agile world, its called a story board, but theyre identical. Its a big wall with four columns and Post-its.
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IT must work with marketing to develop Web services that bring customers into the fold. BY karen goulart
TO SEE ONES customers
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Putting Customers Needs
clearly, organizational leaders must develop a clear vision of whom they serve. At Aetna Inc., a 160-year-old Hartford, Conn.based company, that required a radical shift in how the business viewed its bread and butter: health insurance. Previously, company leaders felt the health insurance industry was based on business-to-business transactions. Recently, they realized the advantagesreally, the necessityof making sure customers has access to as much information as possible, leading to better decisions around health care. Aetnas actions are part of a larger trend of enterprises fostering a combinedtechnology and marketing strategy. Rather than leaving customers shouting into the void, IT and marketing are increasingly working
together to bring customers closer to the business. Aetna foresaw that shift four years ago, when discussions with the CEO led to the formation of a technology and marketing strategy at the core of which was a commitment to putting technology into the hands of customers. The challenge of bringing usable information directly to consumers meant tackling a 10-year-old infrastructure that Aetna CIO Michael Mathias called redundant, complex and inflexible. While the process is ongoing, the infrastructure now is integrate-able, extendable and scalable built-in, not built on, he said. At the heart of this,SOAwas the buzzword; we made it work in a big way. As a result, Aetna continues to add
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features to its interactive member website and mobile app. Users can access insurance cards and mobile records; find the costs of plans and surgical procedures; and even query David, a virtual benefits adviser, about health plans. David is the direct result of a working technology and marketing strategy at Aetna. Marketing identified a disconnecthuman resources saddling employees with a bulky packet of health insurance informationthat often caused members to avoid picking a plan. What if employees could just hop online, answer a few questions and get quick answers? Its about understanding the problem and putting the technology behind it, Matthias said.
ENGAGING CUSTOMERS THROUGH TECHNOLOGY
Technology is contributing to a fundamental shift in the way customers engage with businesses andconsume their products and services, according to Glenn Schneider, CIO at Discover Financial Services in Riverwoods, Ill. He aims to address this head-on by forming an alliance with marketing, e-business and other groups within Discover, he said. We need to start building an ecosystem, a marketplace. We need to look at how we can converge solutions so that we function much more as an aggregator of services, Schneider said. People dont want to
have to go elsewhere, and we need to makeWeb services available to create that convenience for the customer. Version 1.0 of the technology and marketing strategy alliance began when Discovers IT department was renamed thebusiness technology[BT] department, said Harit Talwar, president of the companys U.S. Cards division. Its notIT, itsBT, and that seems very trivial but it isnt, Talwar said. It was a crucial first step that curbed antagonism between the business and IT in the name of enlightened self-interest, he said. That simple change opened the door to partnerships between departments and leaders like Talwar, Schneider and Vice President for E-Business Mike Boush. Those have allowed Discover to become customer-obsessed, Talwar added. I think people are underestimating what it takes to succeed in this marketplace, Talwar said. Theres not going to be high ground in this economy for long. There are market pressures for [technology and marketing] to work togetherotherwise, we cant deliver more choices and better services to customers. Its as simple and complex as looking at what a customer does in real life and making it virtual, Boush said. Think about a customer paying a bill, and the information he needs to carry out the taskthe amount due, the balance. Then imagine the customer
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gathering up the paperwork, the checkbook, the envelope, the stamp. Of course, online bill paying is so commonplace now as to be pass. Its here where marketing provides the next need for technology to fulfill. In Discovers case, its the recent soft launch of Money Messenger, an app that lets customers use their cards to do typical cash transactionspaying the babysitter or reimbursing a friend the $20 you owe himthrough Discovers partnership with PayPal.
Enterprise CIO Decisions is a SearchCIO.com e-publication. Rachel Lebeaux Managing Editor Linda Koury Director of Online Design Scot Petersen Editorial Director Christina Torode Executive Editor Linda Tucci News Director Wendy Schuchart Site Editor Karen Goulart Features Writer Corey Strader Director of Product Management cstrader@techtarget.com TechTarget USA 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com
2012 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group. About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.
CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND MARKETING
No enterprise with a successful IT-marketing partnership got there without someone taking the first step. It sounds obvious enough, but the institutionalized discord between the two departments is enough to make that step feel like a giant leap. Forrester Principal Analyst Jeff Ernst, a former chief marketing officer, said he understands the hesitation. What makes it hard is where theyre coming from. History is their biggest obstacle, Ernst said. Expectations are super-high; theyre shaped by the digital experience customers are having with other companies, and it raises the bar. If youre not doing the disrupting, youre going to be disrupted.
Karen Goulart is features writer for SearchCIO. com. Write to her at kgoulart@techtarget.com.
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Enterprise CIODecisions

Guiding technology decision makers in the enterprise

OCTOBER 2012 VOLUME 16

Flag on the Play

CONSIDER THIS SCENARIO: The

WARDING OFF ROGUE IT

BALANCING CORPORATE RISK AND CONSUMERIZATION

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE BIG DATA?

AGILE PRACTICES WOOING THE BUSINESS

PUTTING CUSTOMERS NEEDS FIRST

NEWS, VIEWS AND REVIEWS FOR SENIOR  TECHNOLOGY MANAGERS

WARDING OFF ROGUE IT

BALANCING CORPORATE RISK AND CONSUMERIZATION

walking the green walk

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE BIG DATA?

AGILE PRACTICES WOOING THE BUSINESS

PUTTING CUSTOMERS NEEDS FIRST

NEWS, VIEWS AND REVIEWS FOR SENIOR  TECHNOLOGY MANAGERS

WARDING OFF ROGUE IT

BALANCING CORPORATE RISK AND CONSUMERIZATION

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE BIG DATA?

enterprise mashup: An enterprise mashup is the

AGILE PRACTICES WOOING THE BUSINESS

PUTTING CUSTOMERS NEEDS FIRST