CIO Straight Talk Issue 3

Highlights from Issue Number 2
CIO Straight Talk
68
SO WHAT DO CIOs WANT?

60 global CIOs help us create a CIO wish-list
BIG THINKING
Thought provoking interviews with Malcolm Gladwell (on innovation), Nicholas Carr (on the cloud) and
Thomas Davenport and Vivek Ranadive (on business analytics and decision making)
SOLUTION SPOTLIGHT: Enterprise Mobility
How to deliver the connected customer experience and use mobile applications to gain competitive advantage.
Plus a pullout poster, Raising Enterprise Productivity Through Mobility
BIG DATA
A Rare Business Leadership

Opportunity for CIOs
STRAIGHT TALKING
Actionable insights from the CIOs of Xerox, Air Canada, Deutsche Bank, Old Mutual
and other forward-looking companies
PAGE 6
Read all issues of CIO Straight Talk at

http://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/
STRAIGHT TALKING
PAGE 14
BIG THINKING
PAGE 46
TRENDS 2013
PAGE 51
Cover Article
Big Thinking
56
From Features to Experience . . .

to the Heart of the Customer
A Rare Business Leadership Opportunity for CIOs
Sandeep Kishore
06
58
Welcome to the Big Data Zoo (pullout poster) A Very Short History of Big Data
Big Data Will Get Small

Vikram Duvvoori
Straight Talking
14
Getting IT to
Think Like the Business
Jean-Marc Chicco, CIO, Lafarge
20
Who Owns What?

The Blurring Boundary
Between IT and Operations
David Harkness, CIO, Xcel Energy
Ian Cohen, Group CIO, Jardine Lloyd Thompson
Using IT to Achieve Business

Integration
Barry Libenson, CIO, Land OLakes
Andy Nallappan, CIO, Avago Technologies
Simon Hollins, CIO, EMI Music
The Buy-In Challenge

Bill Rogers, Former CIO, State of New Hampshire
James Riley
Context, Interpretation,
Integration. . .and Alligators
38
42
29
The Year of the Real-Time

Enterprise
62
A Conversation with Bill Inmon
25
How to Get Your IT Budget to

1 Percent of Revenue
46
33
The Unexpected Driver of

Digital Transformation
60
The New Model Behind the

Music
Trends
Tearing Up the Traditional

Outsourcing Contract
Vinod Chandran
2013
64
Mobile Computing:
Ground Zero for IT Disruption
51
Naresh Nagarajan
The Year of the CIOs?
Views from members of the

CIO Straight Talk LinkedIn group
66
Optimizing the Old to

Enable the New
54
The Fracturing of
Corporate IT
Rajiv Sodhi
Sadagopan Singam
68
Highlights from
Issue Number 2
CIO
CIO Straight Talk Team
Editor Paul Hemp
Managing Editor Anirban Sanyal
Contributing Editor Gil Press, Abbie Lundberg,
Stephanie Overby
Copy Editor Amy Halliday
Editorial Advisory Board Anant Gupta, Shami Khorana,

Krishnan Chatterjee, Abhishek Shankar
Perhaps most important, its a community

(http://partner.linkedin.com/CIOStraighttalk).
Printing Quality Printing, Pittseld MA

Impress Prints, New Delhi
The CIO Straight Talk Interactive group on LinkedIn is a

community of more than 1,000 CIOs and senior IT
executives. The group, sponsored by HCL, offers
peer-to-peer learning on current IT issues particularly
those related to the adoption of emerging technologies
and the changing role of the CIO through discussions,
interactive webinars, and idea-driven articles and videos.
This experience-based perspective (from CIOs, for
CIOs) is an often-overlooked source of industry insights.
Acknowledgements
KSR Siddharth, Chris Connors, Alok Roy, Vivek Iyer,
Amit Mehrotra, Manu Sharma, Kartik Mehta, Rao
Bhavaraju, Alok Mirchandani, Jayabrata Nag,
Shimona Chadha, Vittal Devarajan, Asvin Ramesh
Contact Us
straight.talk@hcl.com
Paul Hemp
HCL America, Inc.
400 Crown Colony Dr.
2nd Floor, Suite 203
Quincy, Mass. 02169
United States
Tel: +1-408-328-7501
Anirban Sanyal
HCL Technologies
2nd oor, A-9, Sector - 3
Noida - 201 301,
Uttar Pradesh
India
Tel: +91-120-4069000
CIO Straight Talk is a periodical published by HCL Technologies (HCLT)

meant for its existing and prospective clients for information purposes. The
information contained in the publication contains general views based on
the experiences of technology practitioners and subject matter experts
within and outside of HCLT, expressed by them in their individual capacity
and in no event shall HCLT (including its affiliates and group companies)
be liable for any claim, damages or any other liability arising out of or
resulting from this publication. You are advised to seek professional advice
before making any decision that may affect your business.
All contents are copyright 2013 by HCL Technologies Ltd.
All rights reserved. Excerpts may be reprinted with attribution to HCL
Technologies.
CIO Straight Talk Interactive members (prospective

members are screened to ensure they are senior IT
practitioners) get early access to CIO Straight Talk
magazine content for example, excerpts from an
interview with a CIO or thought leader that will serve as
the basis for a magazine article.
But its a two-way street: The magazine also
group-sources content from the community. In this
issue, for example, the thinking of community members is
featured in the cover article on big data and the Trends
2013 articles about emerging IT developments, in the
form of poll results and predictions by individual CIOs.
So join the conversation at CIO Straight Talk Interactive. I
think youll learn something. I know that we will.
Paul Hemp
Welcome to the third issue of CIO Straight Talk.

Those of you who are new to the publication will see that Straight Talk highlights the professional insights of IT
practitioners like yourself. In this issue, we offer this practitioner perspective not only in the Straight Talking
articles by individual CIOs but also in the cover story on Big Data and in the Trends 2013 section both of
which include observations from members of the CIO Straight Talk Interactive community on LinkedIn.
Trends 2013 also features the predictions of several HCL subject matter experts on topics ranging from mobile
computing to customer experience management. Let me briefly add a thought or two on where I see IT headed.
It goes without saying that the industry is facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty and change, both business
and technological. Over the last 5 years, with the financial slowdown and the changing economy, companies
have been forced to deal with unpredictable demand cycles, increased cost pressure, and uncertain revenue
streams.
Meanwhile, the technology landscape is evolving into an ecosystem of partners for disruptive technologies like
social, mobility, analytics and cloud. These technologies have become ubiquitous and are changing not only how
we connect with others but also how we do business and deliver services.
These developments are changing the very nature of IT outsourcing. The traditional relationship, centered around
cost optimization and enhanced efficiency, is being replaced by one in which IT partners help their customers
create business value for the enterprise through enhanced operational flexibility, the adoption of new processes,
the opening of new markets, the development of innovative business models.
This new kind of partnership what I call Generation 2 Outsourcing will be characterized by flexible
engagement models, which are responsive to an organizations dynamic needs in an ever-changing business
environment, and transparent engagement practices, which eschew the black box solutions of many traditional
outsourcing agreements. That flexibility and transparency result in the kind of trust that makes IT service
providers and their customers true strategic partners in the innovative creation of business value.
As this new kind of partnership evolves, CIOs and other IT practitioners will gain valuable insight into how
Generation 2 Outsourcing relationships can best succeed. And this brings us back to CIO Straight Talk, which
will be an important forum for the exchange of such experience-based, peer-to-peer insights.
We hope you find both this and future issues of the publication both interesting and enlightening.
Anant Gupta
CEO
HCL Technologies
5
CIO Straight Talk
Community Director Mishtun Chatterjee
Digital Innoraft Solutions
CIO Straight Talk
As you may know, CIO Straight Talk is more than a

magazine.
Its a webinar series. Its a website
(www.straighttalkonline.com). Its a YouTube channel
(http://www.youtube.com/user/CIOStraightTalk).
Its a Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/CIOStraightTalk).
Art Director Harsh Khaneja
Editors Note
Cover Article
A Rare Business Leadership Opportunity for CIOs

Jean-Marc Chicco
Big data is the buzzword du jour in IT circles, where it appears to have

jean-marc.chicco@lafarge.com
CIO Straight Talk
edged out cloud computing in frequency of appearance on the agendas of

industry forums. Despite the hype and even the lack of a clear definition
big data is indeed an important development, one that presents
numerous challenges to companies and their IT organizations.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is realizing that big data isnt really
about the abundance of data but about the business value that can
be extracted from it.
But in the flurry of white papers and conference sessions and
blog posts, something important is being overlooked: the
unusual opportunity big data presents for CIOs
traditionally seen as operational or technology leaders to
assume a long-sought business leadership role in their
organizations. Rather than contributing to the obsolescence
of the CIO and the IT function, as some have predicted, big data
actually opens the door for a CIO to lead the transformation of
his or her organization into the data-driven, digital enterprise
of the future.
After all, the abundance of data, the currency of the
information economy, essentially makes every company an
information company and should therefore place the chief
information officer at the center of the organization, or even at
the head of the entire enterprise.
So whats the
big deal about
big data?
The term big data originated in the late 1990s, when
scientists at NASA used it to describe the large data sets
produced by computer visualization, which were taxing
the capacity of the main memories, and even the hard
drives, in use at the time. In 2008, a number of prominent American computer scientists popularized the
term, predicting that big data computing would
transform the activities of companies, scientific
researchers, medical practitioners, and our nations
defense and intelligence operations.
While there are certain parallels with previous developments that changed the IT landscape, and while many
long-established activities, products, and services are
being recycled with the big data label slapped on them,
there is certainly a lot that is new: technology- and
people-related developments that present fresh
challenges to any company. Although these developments can be perceived as threats to the IT organization,
the challenge of distilling revenue-generating insights
from the data potentially puts the CIO in a position of
leading rather than following business strategy.
Cloud Computing
Cloud-based platforms provide an easy-to-use and
cost-effective sandbox for IT-related experiments by
business executives, increasing the presence within
many organizations of a shadow IT function. Indeed,
But CIOs could embrace, standardize, and lead the use

of cloud computing, including the big data experimentation taking place in the cloud. Flavio Villanustre,VP,
Information Security at LexisNexis Risk Solutions and
head of HPCC Systems, the open source initiative of
LexisNexis, argues on the basis of many discussions
with IT executives that how IT organizations respond
to big data will determine if they are in business in three
to five years, or if everything goes to the cloud. This is
the time for them to show how the business can [use big
data to] become more competitive. If CIOs are unable
to take the lead on this, theyll find that their business
customers bypass them and go to the cloud to get what
they need.
testing with a testing cycle taking many months. So, if

you are constantly changing you will be constantly
testing. As the research and clinical sides converge, we
need to figure out the metrics and processes for supporting these types of evolving applications.
Rather than resist the use of external data, CIOs can

demonstrate how it can be used to develop a new product,
deliver a new service to customers, streamline a process,
or gain a knowledge advantage over competitors.
Many industries, government services, and nonprofit

organizations experience a similar culture clash as
massive private and public databases need to be mined,
often in real time, to provide new insights from a variety
of data sources. CIOs can lead by inventing and implementing new processes for the IT organization that
accommodate rapid change and emerging technologies
while providing high-quality, continuous support.
Instead of fighting chaos by resisting change, CIOs
should work to find ways to create
some order out of the chaos, thus
neutralizing the conflict between
the need to access data instantly and
to ensure its quality, stability, and
integrity.
Data Privacy
External data brings with it a long list of issues the IT
department did not have to contend with before,
certainly not on such a scale. Are the data sources
secure and legitimate? Are they in compliance with the
privacy policy of the organization? Has everything
been done to avoid a breach of confidentiality?
Open Source
Some of the most important big data tools are based on
open-source technologies. Many IT executives are just
beginning to get over their reluctance to embrace open
source and recognize its benefits, such as lower cost and
continuous crowdsourced quality assurance and innovation. Consequently, the skills, expertise, practices, and
processes required to leverage open-source technologies are often lacking in the IT organization, providing
another reason to circumvent IT in the adoption of big
data.
Brent Richter, Director of IT at both Massachusetts
General and Brigham and Womens Hospitals and
Director of Enterprise Research Infrastructure and
Services at Partners HealthCare, has first-hand experience with both the research and clinical sides of these
leading healthcare organizations. Over the last ten
years a vast amount of genetic information has been
accumulating in research databases. Physicians today
can compare a patients specific genomic profile to
whats in the database, in order to pinpoint personalized
courses of treatment.
Not surprisingly, this is where healthcare organizations
see a clash of cultures. For the IT organization thats on
the clinical side, the metrics are stability and 24x7
support, says Richter. On the research side, its agility
and the speed of developing new applications. The
research side relies on open-source tools that are
constantly changing, but its OK because researchers
like to use the latest and greatest and expect change. On
the clinical side, each change necessarily requires
External Data
IT teams have gotten used to the
relentless growth of data generated
by their organizations and the
practice of building firewalls
around it. But big data involves first
and foremost the ingestion of data
that is created outside the enterprise.
How IT organizations
respond to big data
will determine if they
are in business in
three to five years, or
if everything goes to
the cloud.
Even seemingly anonymous data

can, when aggregated and
subjected to powerful analytical
tools, identify individuals and
predict their behavior. This is
obviously useful to marketers, but
it raises privacy issues that may
damage a companys brand. CIOs
should respond by taking charge of
this increasingly difficult and
expanding scope of risk management, an area of expertise that is
increasingly important to the
success of any organization.
New Views of Data
The accuracy of the data supplied

by IT has been of paramount
At Land OLakes, a member-owned
importance for years. But compacooperative that offers an extensive
nies are now realizing the value of
line of supplies to agricultural
data that is directional as well as
producers and markets branded
accurate. Revenues have to be
dairy-based food products to
accurate, says Venky Rangachari,
consumers, the growing availability
the Global Head of Technology at
of public data has become a catalyst
Flavio Villanustre
Thomson
Reuters,
but
for business innovation. Farmers
Vice President, Infrastructure and
e-commerce
gives
you
trending
are required to report their yield
Security, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
data that is perhaps only 60 percent
information to the U.S. regulatory
accurate. However, it tells you
bodies in order to get subsidies,
where you need to spend your
says
Barry
Libenson,
the
money. The ability to look at
companys CIO. We can find out for every acre what
unstructured
data
and
make sense of it, even if its not
was planted and the corresponding yields and analyze
100
percent
accurate,
is
a new maturity that marketing
that information against what would have been
executives
are
developing
within companies today.
achieved in the same scenario with different seed or
different chemicals to protect the crop. Thats incredibly
powerful it goes straight to the bottom line and is an
effective way to market and sell to the grower community.
A lot of big data is also unstructured rather than structured that is, it does not fit into a preconceived
design as it does in traditional databases. With
business intelligence and analytics in the 1990s, says
Flavio Villanustre, of LexisNexis, you had almost
9
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
But the concept predated the term. Just about anyone

defining big data today refers to its 3Vsvolume,
variety, and velocity. The fact that the 3Vs were first
described by industry analyst Doug Laney as data
management challenges for enterprises as early as
2001 may lead a skeptical executive to conclude that
there is nothing new under the sun. In fact, we may see
a replay of events that marked previous waves of data
growth: growing buzz as business units and departments (especially marketing) adopted new technologies; concern about these technologies immaturity,
security risks, and noncompliance with corporate IT
standards; and finally a restoration of IT organization
control over the experimentation with new data sources
and new tools.
many big data pilots in large companies are the initiative of a business unit or a function, such as the marketing department, and frequently do not involve the IT
organization.
A Very
Short History of Big Data
1944 Fremont Rider, Wesleyan

University Librarian, estimates that
American university libraries are
doubling in size every 16 years and
that in 2040 Yale will require a
cataloging staff of over six thousand
persons.
1949 Claude Shannon (later known
as the father of information theory)
records estimates of the bit storage
capacity of items such as a punch
card, genetic constitution of man,
and phonograph records. The largest
item on Shannons list, at 100 trillion
bits, is the Library of Congress.
Youll find a wide variety of

colorful big data technologies
and tools, including the Hadoop,
the Oozie, and the Sqoop.
1983 Ithiel de Sola Pool, looking at

growth trends in 17 communications
media from 1960 to 1977, concludes
that words made available to
Americans (over the age of 10)
through these media grew at a rate of
8.9 percent per year words actually
attended to from those media grew at
just 2.9 percent per year.
1961 Derek Price concludes that the

number of new scientic journals
has been doubling every 15 years.
1997 Michael Cox and David

Ellsworth publish an article that
begins, Visualization provides an
interesting challenge for computer
systems: data sets are generally quite
large, taxing the capacities of main
memory, local disk, and even remote
disk. We call this the problem ofbig
data. It is the rst academic article to
use the term big data.
1971 Arthur Miller writes inThe

Assault on Privacythat too many
information handlers seem to
measure a man by the number of
bits of storage capacity his dossier
will occupy.
1997 Michael Lesk concludes that in

only a few years, (a) we will be able
[to] save everything no information
will have to be thrown out, and (b) the
typical piece of information will never
be looked at by a human being.
1975 Japans Ministry of Posts and

Telecommunications introduces
amount of words as the unifying
unit of measurement across all media
and nds that information supply is
increasing much faster than
information consumption.
1998 K.G. Coffman and Andrew

Odlyzko argue that if the 100%
growth rate of Internet trafc
continues, data trafc in the U.S. will
overtake voice trafc around the year
2002 and will be dominated by the
Internet.
1980 I.A. Tjomsland asserts at a

symposium on mass storage
systems: Those associated with
storage devices long ago realized
that Parkinsons First Law may be
paraphrased to describe our
industry Data expands to ll the
space available.
2000 Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

publish the rst study to quantify, in
computer storage terms, the total
amount of new and original
information (not counting copies)
created in the world annually and
stored in four physical media: paper,
lm, optical (CDs and DVDs), and
magnetic. The study nds that in
1999, the world produced about 1.5
exabytes of unique information.
1981 The Hungarian Central Statistics

Ofce starts a research project, which
continues to this day, to account for
the countrys information industries,
including measuring information
volume in bits.
2001 Doug Laney publishes a

research note titled 3D Data
Management: Controlling Data
Volume, Velocity, and Variety. A
decade later, the 3Vs become the
dening dimensions of big data.
2007 IDC estimates that in 2006, the

world created 161 exabytes of data and
forecasts that between 2006 and 2010,
the information added annually to the
digital universe will double every 18
months.
2008 Randal E. Bryant, Randy H. Katz,
and Edward D. Lazowska state that
just as search engines have
transformed how we access
information, other forms ofbig data
computingcan and will transform the
activities of companies, scientic
researchers,medical practitioners, and
our nations defense and intelligence
operations.
2009 Roger E. Bohn and James E.
Short nd that in 2008 Americans
consumed information for about 1.3
trillion hours, an average of almost 12
hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6
zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words,
corresponding to 100,500 words and 34
gigabytes for an average person on an
average day.
2011 Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez
estimate that the worlds information
storage capacity grew at a compound
annual growth rate of 25% per year
between 1986 and 2007, and that in
1986, 99.2% of all storage capacity was
analog, but in 2007, 94% of storage
capacity was digital.
2011 The McKinsey Global Institute
estimates that 7.4 exabytes of new data
were stored by U.S. enterprises and 6.8
exabytes by U.S. consumers in 2010.
2012 Neuman, Park, and Panek
(following the methodology used by
Japans MPT and Pool, above) estimate
that the total media supply to U.S.
homes has risen from around 50,000
minutes per day in 1960 to close to
900,000 in 2005. And they estimate that
people in the U.S. are approaching a
thousand minutes of mediated content
available for every minute available for
consumption. Bounie and Gille
(following Lyman and Varian, above)
estimate that the world produced 14.7
exabytes of new information in 2008,
nearly triple the volume of information in
2003.
(Condensed from A Very Short History of Big Data, by CIO Straight Talk Contributing Editor Gil Press, which can be found
at http://whatsthebigdata.com/2012/06/06/a-very-short-history-of-big data/.)
Oozie: A workow scheduler system developed to

manage Hadoopjobs.
A world of colorful tools and technologies

Peta Zoo*
Data Warehouse
HDFS: A distributed, scalable, and
portable le system written in Javafor
the Hadoop framework.
Hadoop: A batch-oriented programming framework that

supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. Hadoop is written in the
Java programming language and is a top-level Apache
project (Apache is a decentralized community of
developers supporting open-source software).
Mahout: A library of Hadoop

implementations of common
analytical computations.
(le
ad
ing
to
Inf
o
Zookeeper: A centralized service for
maintaining conguration information,
naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services for
distributed applications.
ive
Flume: A tool for collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log
data from applications to Hadoop.
Dr
Pig: A platform for analyzing large data

sets that consists of a high-level language
(Pig Latin) for expressing data analysis
programs, coupled with infrastructure for
evaluating these programs.
Big
Da
ta
y
pay igpa
Eakings implesay.
isay
atinlay
Server Farm
rm
atio
nH
igh
way
)
Sqoop: A tool facilitating the

transfer of data from relational
databases into Hadoop.
HBase: A non-relational, column-oriented distributed

database written in Java. A column-oriented database
stores data tables as sections of columns of data rather
than as rows of data, as in most relational databases,
providing fast aggregation and computation of large
numbers of similar data items.
Cloud Safari Chairlift
*For children ages 4-8 (these animals do not byte)
Hive: A data
warehouse
infrastructure built
on top of Hadoop,
providing data
summarization,
query, and analysis.
It permits queries
over the data using
a familiar SQL-like
syntax.
total control over the data inputs and you knew what to
expect, given how the data was formatted. A row with
a company ID could be joined with the companys IDs
in some other table. Big data comes from external
sources, and even the internal data sources do not
necessarily have the structure that you were expecting.
Big data doesnt fit standard methodologies.
Finally, theres a shift in attitude about what to do with
the data collected, toward preserving rather than
discarding data of no apparent use. In the past, the bias
ran the other way. For too long, IT organizations have
been giving themselves a pat on the back about how
little they let the data grow, says Sanjay Mirchandani,
Executive Vice President and the former CIO of EMC
Corporation. The growth of data has always been
considered a bad thing. Today, companies that understand big data see it as an incredible asset that may provide a
competitive advantage.
Data Science
CIOs can use big data as an opportunity to update ITs role to include
discovery and agility, and add a new
functionality and service data
science, the uncovering of important
new insights to their offerings.
For too long, IT

organizations have
been giving themselves
a pat on the back about
how little they let the
data grow. Today,
companies that
understand big data see
it as an incredible asset.
Internal Competition
The direst predictions concerning big
data portray it not merely as a
challenge for the IT organization but
as a tidal wave that will actually
sweep the function out of existence.
The marketing department is
frequently the champion of big data,
eager as it is to uncover new insights
about customers and prospects.
Indeed, Gartner has predicted that by
2017, the CMO will spend more on
IT than the CIO, part of a general
trend of IT responsibility and spending moving out of the IT organization
and into business units and functions.
To mine the data and demonstrate

its value to the organization, we
have a new profession that of
Sanjay Mirchandani
data scientist.
Part software
Executive Vice President and
engineer, part statistician, the role
former CIO, EMC.
is a mix of skills and expertise
thats hard to find. In a May 2011
report that was the first compreIndeed, when it comes to big data, the IT function
hensive study of big data, the McKinsey Global
often appears to be trying to make itself irrelevant. An
Institute predicted that, in the United States, demand
executive in the CTOs office of a large company, who
for deep analytical positions in a big data world could
exceed supply by 140,000 to 190,000 positions. The
is responsible for testing and certifying new technolostudy also projected a need for 1.5 million additional
gies, says that he had to battle for nearly a year with
the IT governance committee to get permission to
managers and analysts who can ask the right
introduce Hadoop (a programming framework that
questions and consume the results of the analysis of
supports the processing of large data sets in a distribbig data effectively.
uted computing environment). He got it only after the
committee ascertained that Hadoop would be insulated and isolated. The executive added that Hadoop
provided the company with new and useful insights
from the kind of data the company had discarded in the
past.
So are CIOs doomed to become as dispensable within
organizations as the light switch they are supposed to
keep turned on? Avoiding irrelevance will require
rethinking their role and even their title.
There is increasing talk of companies designating
chief digital officers, who will oversee the digitization of different parts of the business, from marketing
to customer service. The chief digital officer will
prove to be the most exciting strategic role in the
decade ahead, Gartners David Willis said at a recent
Gartner Symposium, and IT leaders have the opportunity to be the leaders who will define it.
Although many envision CDOs residing in the
business units, CIOs could take on this strategic role
for the entire enterprise if they are able to transform IT
into a function that thrives on agility, adaptability, and
speed. To lead rather than follow, CIOs should
cultivate an IT organization that is able to master
constant and rapid change and whose hallmark is an
entrepreneurial culture of fail fast. IT should be
perceived and managed as an evolving organism
rather than a well-oiled machine. While management
of various IT activities may migrate to the business
units, responsibility for digital strategy should remain
with the successor of todays IT function.
How can CIOs

respond to big
data?
To ensure that their enterprises acquire the capabilities
that big data demands, CIOs can demonstrate leadership in at least three ways each of which redefines
their role.
The three approaches are not necessarily mutually
exclusive and may even serve as stepping stones on
the way to a full embrace of data as the essence of the
enterprises mission and strategy.
Chief Integration Officer

The first approach is data transformation, in which
data governance and the creation of a unified data
platform for the enterprise become the main occupation of the CIO. He or she works to ensure a complete
breakdown of data silos across the organization; full
integration with all new external data sources; the
delivery of a constantly updated and timely single
version of the truth; and the provision of full support
to data-driven decision making.
Bill Rogers, until recently the CIO of the State of New
Hampshire, saw clearly the need to transform the data
set that existed in his organization: There are 68 state
agencies with business data and citizen data in isolated
pockets, with no master data plan. So we got a pilot
going to pull that data together using a big data
solution like Hadoop in order to make it easier for
citizens and businesses to do business with the state.
And instead of trying to go to a single unique identifier, we were looking at a big data solution that would
be able to tell that Joes Diner is this number for this
agency and that identifier for that agency and still be
able to join all these records together.
Although this data integration work is crucial to the
success of most organizations, many are still working
to get a single view of their data and the CIO is well
positioned to achieve that. This role involves determining what data to focus on, how to define it, and how to
ensure everybody in the organization not just those
at the top looks at the same version of a clean,
updated data set. The CIO works closely with business
and functional executives to uncover new data needs
and requirements, continuously update data governance processes and procedures, and provide a stable but
agile infrastructure supporting the work of data scientists based in the business units and departments.
Chief Insights Officer

The second approach is IT transformation, in which
the CIO leads the transformation of the IT organization into a big-data-as-a-service function, working
with the business to ensure that the best insights are
derived from the available data.
In this approach, there is complete alignment between
IT and the business, and the IT team is the glue that
connects all the strategic thrusts of the organization,
coordinating and optimizing data-driven decisions.
The CIO is well positioned to do this. IT sees the
11
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
10
The onus is on CIOs and their

teams to make sure that the enterprise does not discard potentially
useful data just because its
unstructured or hasnt been used
before or takes too much storage
space. With this comes the
responsibility to make sure the
organization understands the
value to be realized from mining
such data and to create guidelines
for recognizing and handling data
that has specific value to the
organization.
The demand for upgrading traditional IT skills and for

the services of data scientists presents a careerdevelopment opportunity for IT staff and a potential
budget expansion to accommodate new training and
hiring. But the IT organization may end up becoming
less relevant if data scientists are hired and trained
elsewhere in the organization. In a Fall 2012 article in
MIT Sloan Management Review, How Big Data Is
Different, analytics guru Tom Davenport and his
coauthors provided an early warning to IT with their
recommendation to move analytics from IT into core
business and operational functions. They argued that
the traditional role of IT automating business
processes imposes precise requirements, adherence
to standards and controls on changes, whereas the
advantages of big data and data science are based on
discovery and agility the ability to mine existing
and new data sources continuously
for patterns, events and opportunities.
bigger picture and sometimes is more knowledgeable

than the business about business processes, according
to Jay Vaughn, the CIO of Advanstar, an international
business media and events company, speaking during
a webinar he recently gave as part of a CIO Straight
Talk webinar series. Jeanne Ross, the Director of
MITs Center for Information Systems Research,
made the same point in an article that appeared in
Issue 1 of this publication: IT often has a far better
understanding of a process whether existing or
proposed than people on the business side, because
IT people see the entire process from end to end and
thus can wrap their minds around the whole thing.
Adds Sanjay Mirchandani of EMC: Only IT has a
complete picture of all the data in the enterprise. At the
same time, IT today cannot have a
monopoly on information. That
changes the role and responsibilities
of IT and the business.
Chief Innovation Officer

The third approach is enterprise transformation, in
which IT becomes the business of the organization.
This will require the transformation of business
models
and
management
practices, and that transformation will be driven by innovation
new products, services,
business models, public sector
initiatives based on the power
of digitization and its offspring,
big data.
The ability to look at

unstructured data and
make sense of it, even
if its not 100%
accurate, is a new
maturity that
marketing executives
are developing within
companies today.
In Big Data: The Management

Revolution (Harvard Business
Review, October 2012), Andrew
McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
argue that big data will transform
all businesses, not just webbased businesses: The familiarity of the Amazon story almost
masks its power. We expect
companies that were born digital
to accomplish things that
business executives could only
dream of a generation ago. But in
fact the use of big data has the
potential to transform traditional
businesses as well. It may offer
them even greater opportunities
for competitive advantage.
With this approach, IT itself becomes

a business, focused on delighting its
internal and external customers.
Filippo Passerini, the CIO and President of Global Business Services
(GBS) at Procter & Gamble, brought
IT into GBS and changed its name
from IT to Information and Decision
Venky Rangachari
Solutions to highlight its transformed
Global Head of Technology,
role. Similarly, Peter Dew, the CIO at
Thomson Reuters
Because data has been the
CEVA Logistics, changed the name
business of IT, the CIO has an
of the IT organization to Information
opportunity
to
lead
this
Services and Solutions, reinforcing
enterprise-transforming innovathe goal of focusing on internal and external customers.
tion, giving him or her once and for all a seat near the
head of the C-suite table. CIOs are being asked by
For Sanjay Mirchandani of EMC, this transformation
their CEOs to help develop new offerings for customis a must for IT given todays realities: I know that
ers, said Ronald Blahnik, a former CIO and senior IT
when I speak to my peers, other CIOs, we are all
executive at retailers the Hudsons Bay Company and
focused on transforming IT. The essence of this transLowes, in an article in Issue 1 of CIO Straight Talk.
formation is changing our go-to-market model. Thats
That means the I in CIO now stands for innovation,
because the traditional tool sets and competencies are
not information.
Digitization has made data an indispensable resource for

any enterprise, second only to people. Big data is about
applying this resource in the most optimal way. This shift
in emphasis may well mean a significant change in how
IT is managed, developed, sold, and bought.
Business
transformation
in the digital
economy
The discussion of big data tends to start and often to
stay with volume, the big in big data. But the
volume of data has been rapidly increasing for years.
I dont think of big data as just the increasing volume
of data, says David Harkness, the CIO of Xcel
Energy. To me, big data is where youre drawing
connections between data that was previously not
connected, extracting new knowledge out of these
large data sources.
Indeed, each of the 3Vs that are supposedly the defining characteristics of the big data phenomenon
volume, variety (new data formats), and velocity (the
speed with which it is available) are familiar to
anyone managing IT over the past two or three
decades.
Even the new big-data-related challenges described
above such as cloud computing, open-source
technologies, and external data while presenting
new and important dimensions to the CIOs role, are
just another stage in the ever-changing work of IT.
What is truly new is the context of these changes, a
qualitatively different business environment and
entirely new requirements.
It was a new business environment that gave rise about
eight years ago to what we today call big data
technologies. These initially addressed new problems
associated with processing large amounts of data. The
most fundamental was that although the storage
capacities of hard drives had increased, the rate at
which data could be read from drives hadnt kept up.
This created a bottleneck that engineers at a start-up
called Google had to address without simply buying

more hardware as their Web search operations grew
rapidly.
Googles solution was to break the data into smaller
pieces and process it in parallel over a cluster of
commodity computing and storage devices and to
develop software that combines the data and makes it
available for analysis. But Googles engineers came up
with the solution not only because the data they dealt
with was of a type and scale that couldnt be cost
effectively addressed with traditional IT tools. Their
solution was also a response to the new requirements
of the new business environment.
Google was a new type of business based on the analysis of Web data, which allowed it to provide users with
fast and accurate search results and to support this free
service with relevant and targeted advertising. Google
showed how big data could become a big business.
Less than a decade later, this new business environment is spreading fast to all businesses and to the
public sector. While the amount of data created and
consumed continues the rapid growth that we have
been seeing for decades, data is now becoming the
most important aspect of virtually any organization.
Call it the Googlization of business. Instead of becoming overwhelmed by volume, companies must pay
close attention to the most relevant sources of data,
which now are frequently outside the organization,
and to the best ways to analyze that data. Instead of
becoming overwhelmed by variety, companies must
analyze data that in the past was discarded for
example, text-based data in search of new insights
on such business imperatives as how to retain and
satisfy customers. Instead of becoming overwhelmed
by velocity, companies must make decisions in real
time in order to match competitors moves or target
their customers.
Certainly, the IT organization and CIOs may become
irrelevant in the digital economy. But the digital
economy offers the chance to rise with and ride the big
data wave, to lead the digital transformation of their
businesses, nonprofits, or government agencies. CIOs
should see this as an opportunity to demonstrate
leadership that is based on deep experience with and
understanding of what data, big or small, is all about
its management, its analysis, and its use in the
service of innovation, the driving force of any enterprise.
13
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
12
According to Simon Hollins,

Consultant CIO of EMI Music: Big
data changes the way the technology
team needs to engage with the parts
of the business that use that kind of
data and who are themselves very
well informed and insightful not
just about the data but about the
technologies that support it. We try to
encourage that. They the business
have become the experts and we
have to align with them and support
them and encourage them.
no longer our monopoly; they are readily available to

the business. CIOs, he adds, must think like CEOs:
If you want to run IT as a business, youve got to look
at the competitive forces. Anyone with a corporate
credit card can buy whatever IT resources they need;
they can buy IT as a service. We understand that the
transformation in how we go to market is our number
one priority.
Straight Talking
Getting IT to Think Like the Business

A career managing businesses provides a first-time CIO with a fresh view of IT challenges.
Jean-Marc Chicco, CIO, Lafarge
Jean-Marc Chicco
Jean-Marc Chicco
CIO Straight Talk
14
Position
Chief Group ERP Program and
Information Ofcer
Company
Lafarge SA
Works from
Paris
Professional Background
Before being named CIO of Lafarge,
in 2010, Chicco spent nine years as
the Chief Operating Ofcer of the
companys 1.6 billion roong
division and two years leading an
initiative to reduce the companys
working capital. Before joining
Lafarge, he served in various marketing and general management roles at
the auto parts manufacturer Valeo
and at TRW Semiconductors. In
1983, he founded a company that
specialized in the design, production,
and distribution of power electronic
systems.
Education
MBA, University of Texas at Austin
Masters in Engineering,
cole Suprieure d'lectricit
Personal Passions
Trekking, philosophy, social change
When I was asked to take over the CIO job at Lafarge, I said,
Guys, Im not your man. I have spent my career managing
companies, business functions, geographic regions. What do I
know about managing IT?
(I didnt say that I also had some apprehension about seeking
support for IT initiatives from former colleagues on the
business side. Would they tune me out just as I had tuned out
IT people when I was heading up a business division?)
The company had an answer to my misgivings: You know
Lafarge and the business, and that will make a big
difference.
So I decided to test the water what seemed likely to be very
cold water. Today, Im having lots of fun. The IT function is
little by little changing the operations at Lafarge. I believe its
mostly because IT now thinks like the business does.
The Seonyu Footbridge of Peace, Seoul, constructed using a lighter and stronger Lafarge building material called Ductal.
Standardizing Applications
Lafarge is the worldwide leader in building materials
number one in cement and number two in aggregates
and concrete. The company operates in 78 countries and
owns nearly 2,000 industrial sites.
When I started as CIO, I realized that my experience
managing a working capital initiative at Lafarge would
help me demonstrate the value of a business perspective
to the IT group. My assignment to lead that earlier
initiative was as much of a surprise as being offered the
CIO job. Traditionally, a Finance guy was responsible
for managing working capital. But after seeing little
headway in reducing working capital, senior management asked me to bring my business perspective to the
task.
As it turned out, we were able to free up 1 billion in
cash; improving the management of spare parts was one
avenue for achieving this. A cement plant is like a big
machine, with a lot of equipment and lots and lots of
spare parts. In early 2009, when I took over the
program, we had about 650 million of spare parts in
inventory. Working closely with the factories, we
reduced that to about 400 million.
So when I became CIO, I immediately said, Lets ask
the factories how IT is helping them manage their spare
parts. I discovered that across the organization Lafarge
had several ERP templates talking to about seven
Maximo (IBMs asset management software) templates
and about 20 different types of application interfaces.
Even worse, only half of the plants had Maximo. The
other half was waiting for it.
We launched a major program to upgrade and roll out a
common standard for Maximo to more than 160 plants
over the next three years. When the program is
complete, those plants will all work with the same
version of the application, driving further savings and
efficiencies.
The situation with Maximo was typical of the way we
had been going about developing applications. Once we
developed an application, we let anyone at Lafarge
tweak it. The result was many different versions of the
same application. Every time we upgraded an application, we spent a lot of unnecessary time and money on
the effort.
So we decided to mandate standardization for many key
applications, including those for CRM and sales force
effectiveness, HR, and e-purchasing, to mention a few.
One of the big challenges facing a CIO is getting top

managers to pay attention to no, be curious
about IT. If they arent curious (just as I wasnt
three years or four years ago, when I was running
Lafarges roong business) then its very difcult to
launch big programs that will really change
business performance. Having a CEO and executive board who are curious about technology means
that they will work with the CIO not on all the
details, of course, but on the CIOs major programs.
The more attention they pay to IT, the better they
will understand how IT can help the overall
business.
One of my challenges has been to explain how a
social collaboration platform can change the way
we work together and share knowledge in the
company. Today our platform, called Lafarge Online
Village, is used by close to 5,000 managers,
engineers, commercial staff, and even by the entire
executive committee. Several hundred thematic
groups, such as cement kiln best practices, fuel mix
optimization, and new concrete usages, are active,
fostering intensive lateral teamwork. Explaining the
potential benets of new technologies like enterprise social media is not easy, yet it will make a step
change in many companies culture effectiveness.
Consolidating Data Centers

But standardization, even when mandated from above,
cannot really work well in a decentralized IT structure.
This was one of the major reasons we embarked on a
very large initiative to consolidate our European data
centers. A limited number of data centers ensures that
there will be a limited number of versions of a given
application.
Lafarge was founded in France in 1833, and it expanded
first to other countries in Europe. In the Americas and
Asia, we have centralized IT operations. But in Europe,
theres a long history of decentralized operations, and
we have never made a concerted effort to upgrade and
update the way we run IT. As a result, Lafarge has been
operating 15 data centers across Europe.
Its difficult when you are spread out this way to have
good governance and optimize costs. As of 2010, these
Jean-Marc Chicco on. . .
The consolidation of these data centers will end up

taking about three years. In 2011, we consolidated four
of them: one in Spain, two in Paris, and one in Germany.
Were now in the process of consolidating an additional
three or four. A few of the smallest of the existing 15
data centers will be excluded from this initiative the
economics of migration simply arent there for them.
But by the end 2014, most countries in Europe, the
Middle East, and Africa (the EMEA region) will be
served from a dual-site data center in Paris (an activeactive configuration of two data centers).
What IT People Already Know

about Business
Be Prepared
Data-center consolidation is no small task, and I have
some advice to anyone starting out on such an adventure: Do not underestimate the amount of comprehensive and detailed preparation required to succeed.
Initially, we did not budget enough time for the preparation phase and discovered when we were about to start
the project that we were not ready. So we added six
months of preparation time.
During the preparation stage, its crucial to make sure
that the business side its concerns, work patterns,
processes, anything that could impact the success of
migration and consolidation is taken into account.
This also includes risk assessment, identifying the best
time for migration, and understanding the applications
used by the business, how old they are, and what
problems could arise with each one at the time of migration. Ultimately, you need to have a business model that
will help you understand the implications of the ongoing changes to your infrastructure and adjust your plans
accordingly. Your IT assets at the beginning of the
project will not be the same six or twelve months later.
As a result of the European data-center-consolidation
initiative, we believe we will see a reduction of 25
percent in operating costs in about two years. Its more
difficult to quantify the gains from standardization, but
it is obvious that this will make it a lot easier for the
business and a lot cheaper for IT to use and manage key
applications.
We run a large program at Lafarge called

Customer One, which aims to review and
improve our customer relations. As part of this
program, all IT employees spend a lot of time
with customers, something they havent been
used to doing. This experience helps IT people
connect with the marketing and commercial
teams and design better customer-reaching
strategies. The business executives are often
surprised how much the IT professionals know
about our customers and what services theyd
like.
How IT People Can Become

Even More Business Savvy
A program like Customer One is great, but how
do you institutionalize the IT functions
adoption of a more-sophisticated business
perspective? One way is to create career
bridges between IT and the rest of the
business. Were currently taking a couple of
our most promising IT executives and moving
them into business jobs. One of them, for
example, has become a country general
manager. When they return to IT, theyll
understand the business, like I did when I
became CIO not just strategy and
operations, but the business executives
mind-set and perspective. Id like to see the
successor of my successor be a young
executive say, 35 years old who had
already spent at least part of his career on the
business side. I should add that its equally
important for people on the business side to
do a stint in IT so that they will be
sophisticated consumers of IT services, with
an awareness of technologys potential to
transform how business is done.
Data-center consolidation is no small task, and I have some advice to

anyone starting out on such an adventure: Do not underestimate the amount of
comprehensive and detailed preparation required to succeed.
17
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
16
Getting Business to Think Like

(Or, at Least, About) IT
data centers were operating at a small portion of their

capacity. Clearly we had to do better than that.
Keep in mind, though, that any medal has two sides, and with the benets
come increased responsibility for the organization in operating such a
concentrated hub. So service level agreements, disaster recovery plans,
and business continuity scenarios have to be drastically challenged
and regularly tested.
Keep in mind, though, that any medal has two sides,

and with the benefits come increased responsibility for
the organization in operating such a concentrated hub.
For example, several countries in several time zones
(from the UK to Russia), each with many diverse
applications (from order entry to ticketing at the
weighbridge, or from plant maintenance inspection to
spare parts reordering), are all dependent on the data
center and its surrounding network. In our EMEA data
center, we now have more than 1,000 concurrent users.
So service level agreements, disaster recovery plans,
and business continuity scenarios have to be drastically challenged and regularly tested.
The Trends Supporting Our Vision

I think that a confluence of business and IT trends
supports what we are trying to do at Lafarge. From a
technology perspective, the advent of virtualization
and commodity servers helps a lot with any consolidation effort. From the business point of view, globalization drives centralization and uncovers opportunities
for consolidation, standardization, and large-scale cost
efficiencies.
The Takeaways
At Lafarge, we made sure that

the trade-offs between country
ownership and group ownership were clear to everybody.
Working with the business
leaders, we got everybody to
understand how the business
units would continue to maintain
important aspects of their
autonomy while enjoying the
benefits of standardization and
consolidation.
decentralized IT structure.
In preparing to consolidate data centers, pay

attention to the many issues on the business side that
could make or break the eort.
With the benets of consolidation comes the
requirement of regularly testing your disaster
recovery plans and business continuity
scenarios.
In about three years, we hope to operate

only three data centers: one for the Americas,
one for Asia, and one for EMEA. The only way to
make this vision a reality is to get IT thinking like the
business.
The Absolute City Centre development in Mississauga, Ontario, known colloquially as the "Marilyn Monroe
Towers" for its sinuous curves, was constructed using Lafarge's highly uid and owable Agilia concrete.
19
CIO Straight Talk
The structure of the business makes a big difference in

how the business and IT relate to each other. When I
talk to CIOs at other large international and
industrial companies, I find that some still
work in a fully decentralized business
structure. Each business unit does what
it wants and doesnt want to be told
what to do. Its practically impossi Even if standardization of key applications
ble in this kind of environment to
is mandated from above, it cant work well in a
standardize and consolidate.
Straight Talking
Who Owns What?

The Blurring Boundary Between
IT and Operations
As the power industry is transformed, the evolving role of
IT foreshadows changes soon to affect other types of businesses.
David Harkness, CIO, Xcel Energy

David Harkness
david.c.harkness@xcelenergy.com
Position
Vice President and
Chief Information Ofcer
CIO Straight Talk
20
Company
Xcel Energy
Works from
Minneapolis, Minnesota
David Harkness joined Xcel Energy in
2009. As CIO, he drives innovation
and transformation in the company
by leveraging technology to create
business value. He is also responsible for all IT development, operations
and governance, cybersecurity
functions, and the companys business continuity program. Harkness
was previously at PNM Resources,
where he was Vice President and
CIO. He held a number of key
leadership positions at PNM
Resources, including Executive
Director of Business Transformation
and Executive Aide to the CEO.
Harkness also held a variety of IT
leadership roles at MCI, McLeodUSA,
and Rockwell International.
In the face of changing energy needs, the utility industry is undergoing a
massive transformation. Embedding information technology into a utilitys

operating equipment transformers, capacitors, meters, etc. is creating new
opportunities for power companies to transmit electricity more efficiently,
restore power more quickly, and help customers reduce costs by directing
demand to off-peak hours, among other things.
The so-called Smart Grid (see sidebar, page 22) is creating new challenges as
well. Because its so new, it can be difficult to demonstrate the benefits to
regulators and customers during the necessary period of up-front investment.
Its also difficult to sort through who inside the company owns which
technology and data, and how all that should be governed. To benefit the
most from this new way of operating, our business leaders must become more
conversant with technology and data analytics, and our technologists need to
learn more about how the utility business runs a challenge facing IT
executives in many industries.
Education
BS, University of Iowa
Personal Passions
Iowa Hawkeye sports; boating;
and basketball, football, and
lacrosse with his two sons
Xcel Energy is a pioneer in "smart grid" technology, having piloted the world's rst
adoption of smart grid tools in a real-world urban setting in Boulder, Colorado.
What is a Smart Grid?

A smart grid uses controls, computers, automation,
and new technologies and equipment to monitor
whats happening throughout the power grid,
diagnose and respond quickly to problems, and
accommodate changing demand. It does all this
through sensing capability along transmission lines;
high-speed two-way communication between
utilities and consumers; analytics to solve problems
and maximize efciency; and smart meters and
in-home controls.
Managing
Value
CIO Straight Talk
22
Remotely,
Proving
In 2008, Xcel Energy launched SmartGridCity, a

technology pilot in Boulder, Colorado, to explore the
use of fully integrated smart-grid tools. Weve already
learned a lot from this experiment about customer
engagement, in-house devices, different rate options,
and other things that you just cant know without
making them real. For example, not all customers want
or need a device inside their homes to monitor energy
use, while others will spend hours each week studying
the data. We also learned a considerable amount about
the security needs for such a connected grid. The results
are going to have value throughout our service territory
in eight states.
Integrating IT into the technology that runs the utility
both allows us and requires us to do things differently.
For example, we used to put a capacitor bank up on a
pole and then not think much about it for 30 years. Now
that capacitor bank is a computing device, and so we
have to figure out how to load security patches, get
remote access, and pull the analytics. These things are
easy when youre talking about a data center, where all
the equipment is in the same location, but weve got
these devices out on poles across our grid. So we need
to put more thought into that infrastructure in order to
keep the network secure.
We also need to have a different kind of conversation
with customers and regulators. You cant necessarily
see the value of one of these new capacitor banks or the
data that you can pull off of a transformer things that
help with outage management and power restoration.
Prior to the smart grid, in order to determine the
boundaries of an area affected by an outage, many
utilities relied on customers calling in. It was like
playing pin the tail on the donkey.
Now intelligent devices in the network provide that

information, and its very precise. We can restore power
more quickly because we have better information about
what equipment actually failed. We also prevent a lot of
outages by using real-time monitoring to predict equipment failure and make repairs before an outage even
occurs. This also helps us anticipate when equipment is
about to reach the end of its life, which lets us do a
better job with inventory planning and warehouse
management. But demonstrating the value of these
capabilities can be a challenge. All that consumers
really see is the new meter on their houses or their new
in-home displays.
CIOs also have to exert leadership beyond their own teams.

My director at MCI used to tell me, Anybody can get people to
follow them if they work for them. A real leader is someone who
can get the people who dont work for them to follow them.
That has stuck with me.
The Disruptive Force of IT/OT Convergence

As IT and OT converge, utilities are wrestling with the
question of who owns what. Its pretty clear that an
e-mail server is ITs, but a capacitor bank on a pole has
always belonged to distribution. Who owns it now? Is it
an IT device? IT doesnt necessarily understand all the
analytics that are being extracted from it. Thats still got
to be part of the operating group. Regardless of who
owns the device, there has to be closer collaboration.
Whatever industry youre in, as OT and IT converge
youve got to break down the walls between IT and the
operating groups. Currently IT is saying to the operating
group, You tell me what devices youre going to have,
tell me what data youre going to pull off those devices,
and Ill make the data accessible in this manner so that
you can monitor the performance of those particular
assets. But IT has to be pulled in early enough so that
we can plan storage and connectivity requirements. Its
the same in the rest of the business. As we move to more
mobility and to deeper customer engagement, IT and
the customer care groups have to be closer together.
David Harkness on. . .

IT Insularity
IT groups can get lost in their own world Look at
this awesome data center. Im the king of this
domain. But its good to remember what youre there
for. Dont lose sight of what your company does for a
living. Your IT organization needs to do things that
help the company do that better. You also need to
develop the relationships and transparency with the
business that get you out of the order-taker mode.
And not just the CIO its something your directors
and individual contributors need to be good at, too.
In recent years, about 15

percent of Xcel Energy's
power supply has come
from wind, solar, hydro and
biomass resources.
Straight Talking
Prior to the smart grid, in order to determine the boundaries of an area affected by an
outage, many utilities relied on customers calling in. It was like playing pin the tail on
the donkey. Now intelligent devices in the network provide that information, and its
very precise. We can restore power more quickly because we have better information
about what equipment actually failed.
Leading Through Influence

To be a good IT leader, you dont have to know the bits
and bytes; you have to know how to drive engagement.
You must know how to give your employees what they
need to connect with your company and department,
align them with the mission, and get the information
you need from them.
CIOs also have to exert leadership beyond their own
teams. My director at MCI used to tell me, Anybody
can get people to follow them if they work for them. A
real leader is someone who can get the people who
dont work for them to follow them. That has stuck
with me.
We try to talk about our projects as business projects.
We really need that ownership and leadership by the
business. But we cant just say, Hey, this is not my
project; this is your project. Im just the provider of the
service. Youve got to get company leaders and teams
outside IT to believe it and act on that ownership.
andy.nallappan@avagotech.com
Position
Vice President,
As you increase that transparency, its amazing how

everybody starts to agree on priorities. You can
probably get 75 percent to 80 percent alignment. I dont
know that were there yet, but thats what we have to
strive for.
The Takeaways
Andy Nallappan
Company
Avago Technologies
Works from
San Jose, California
As IT becomes embedded in all corners of the

business, business leaders need to become conversant with
technology and data analytics. Technologists, for their part,
need to learn how the business runs.
As IT and operations converge, many wonder who owns
what. But whats really important is closer collaboration and
involving IT in ways to improve the customer experience.
Providing even a little bit of transparency about IT

budgets and projects can help align the entire
organization around IT and business
priorities.
Andy Nallappan has served as Vice
President and CIO of Avagos Global
Information Services Division since
2012. He is responsible for the
continuous improvement of Avagos
business processes through costeffective IT.In his long career with
Hewlett-Packard, Agilent, and Avago,
he has held a variety of positions
overseeing enterprise applications,
enterprise infrastructure, and RandD
computing. He has been a pioneer in
deploying cloud solutions and helped
transform Avagos IT function into an
industry leader.
Education
MS, University of Texas at El Paso
Bachelor of Engineering,
University of Madras
Personal Passions
Hiking in high-altitude area such
as Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount
Whitney, and Machu Picchu; running
How to Get
Your IT Budget
to 1 Percent
of Revenue
Meeting an audacious goal such as
this requires intelligent outsourcing,
aggressive migration to the cloud,
and savvy management of change.
Andy Nallappan , CIO, Avago Technologies
Avago Technologies semiconductor

products are used in wireless
communications, wired infrastructure,
industrial and automotive electronics, and
consumer and computing peripherals.
25
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
24
We start by making sure that all parts of the business

have more information about whats going on in IT. A
lot of IT shops, especially in big corporations, operate
like a black box the rest of the organization doesnt
really know whats going on. Its important to share all
the projects in your portfolio in order to give business
leaders a perspective beyond their own projects. You
dont need to spend hours and hours on this. But you
can give them a little bit of visibility and say, I spend
20 percent of my budget on customer care applications,
and I spend 15 percent on these types of applications,
and these are the capabilities were delivering for other
parts of the business.
As a semiconductor company, Avago has thin margins,

and the market changes from one year to the next. Our
IT cost structure has to be flexible enough to go up and
down with revenue, but with traditional IT, your costs
dont flex.
We were fortunate to have the opportunity to build IT
from the ground up when Avago was spun out from
Agilent, in 2005. First we outsourced the whole
infrastructure and all of our applications. That gave us
flexibility and scalability. But our CEO set some
extremely tough goals for lowering the IT budget.
Thats when we began to get serious about moving
applications to the cloud.
We have monthly reviews and give recognitions and

awards to any vendor team that helps another vendor
resolve an issue. That sends a message that when you
work for Avago, it doesnt matter what badge you wear;
youre an Avago employee, and were all one team.
It took us about a year and a half to get this model working well. Since then, there have been no issues. I havent
heard anybody complain about our vendors in the past
three years.
These two moves have allowed us to drastically reduce

our spending. In fact, with support from our CEO and
CFO, we changed the whole cost structure. Today Im
proud to say that Avagos IT budget is 1.34 percent of
revenue no one in our industry has that. It wasnt hard
to go from 4.5 percent to 3 or 2.5. But from 2.5 to 1.25
that is hard.
Of course, outsourcing is not cheap. But you end up

spending more if you keep IT in-house. Thats because
people on the business side think the service is free, so
they ask for features and functions they dont really
need. They say, I dont like the color. I dont like the
comma here. I dont like this or that. This is human
nature.
And now Ive set a goal that some might call crazy:
bring IT costs down to 1 percent of revenue in the next
two years. I think we can do it. We will have to look at
our fixed costs which mostly come from ERP
software giants, server and storage and make them
variable costs through SaaS and other cloud offerings.
We are considering cloud for server and storage, at least
for development, testing, and disaster recovery. We will
also continue to look at more cloud applications as they
become relevant to Avago.
Not only does business ask for more we give it to

them. Our people are not able to push back because
someone always comes up with a business case. They
keep on tweaking. The system becomes more customized, more complicated. It has a higher maintenance
cost.
Making Multi-Vendor Outsourcing

Work
Our first big step in reducing costs was outsourcing our
noncore IT functions. We didnt want to have too many
vendors because we wanted end-to-end service level
agreements (SLAs). But we used to have just one
vendor, and that had its drawbacks, too. We lost our
power to negotiate and influence, and the flexibility was
not there. So we changed our model quickly. Now we
have three strategic outsourcers: Wipro for applications,
HCL for infrastructure, and Orange for our voice and
data networking. Using a few vendors really works
well.
The biggest challenge with multi-vendor outsourcing is
avoiding finger-pointing when there are problems. So
from the beginning we established a one-team concept
that our vendors had to buy in to and use as the framework for working together. Each vendor signs an Operational Level Agreement, or OLA, that runs through the
whole process and spells out how the vendors engage
Key Technologies at Avago
When youre paying an outside vendor, you think twice.

You make sure that what youre asking for is something
that you really need. The business people have to justify
what theyre asking for. Moreover, you dont have the
whole governance nightmare of who gets priority. If Im
using my own people, projects are in a queue and have
to be prioritized by the governance council which
business gets their project done first, which one gets it
second. With outsourcing theres no queue. As long as a
business leader brings money to the table, Ill get the
people. Scalability is not an issue. I go to Wipro and
HCL and Orange, and they love to do more work.
I have unlimited capability now, but people arent
asking for everything they want. They only ask for what
is necessary.
Cutting the Cord with Microsoft

Weve also realized significant cost savings by moving
applications to the cloud. In perhaps our boldest move,
in 2009, we moved employees e-mail, calendar, and
contact applications to the cloud, making a complete
switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google. It was a big
deal: We were the first $1 billion company to go live
using Googles personal organizer tools instead of
Microsoft Outlook. We did it for two reasons: cost and
productivity. Cost-wise, the savings are black and white
about $1.5 million a year for a product that suits us
much better. With Exchange, I was giving people only
100 megs of storage for their inboxes. Then I increased
it to 200. I increased it to 400. Nothing was enough. I
was not able to catch up with the demand. With every
increase, we needed to add more disc space and
backup-and-restore and high-availability. Also, people
Andy Nallappan on. . .

Working with Cloud Vendors
Avagos cloud-based solutions include Google for
mail, contacts, calendar, sites, and IM; Workday for
HR and employee expenses; Taleo for recruitment;
SumTotal for learning management; Box for
document storage. We just signed on with Okta for
single sign-on identity management. Were also
deploying a service called Kyriba for treasury
management. And we use Enlighta for ITIL
management in the cloud. Its really important to
do the right due diligence when working with cloud
vendors. We are evaluating DocuSign for contract
management and e-signatures. There are a lot of
mom-and-pop companies out there. The risk is not
only around data privacy and security, but also the
vendors nancial stability. So we scrutinize them.
We talk to the architect and the security team. And
we look at whos investing in them, what type of
support they have.
What to Outsource
IT leaders should nd outside solutions for all the
operational, non-critical, non-value-adding parts of
IT. There are companies where IT is core, but in our
industry, its the RandD, marketing, and sales that
are core. I want to move up in the value chain and
enable those teams to bring in more revenue and
get higher margins. The revenue is important, but
the margin is more important. When you liberate
your IT team to move up in the value chain, you
get closer to the core of your company.
Google: Mail, contacts, calendar, sites, and

IM
Workday: HR and employee expenses
Taleo: Recruitment
SumTotal: Learning management
Box: Document storage
Okta: Single sign-on identity management
Kyriba: Treasury management
Enlighta: ITIL management in the cloud
DocuSign: Contract management and
e-signatures
Its really important to do

the right due diligence
when working with cloud vendors...
The risk is not only around
data privacy and security,
but also the vendors nancial
stability. So we scrutinize them,
talk to the architect and
the security team. And
we look at whos investing
in them, what type of support
they have.
Avago is a pioneer in optical sensing for mouse
technology and holds more than 5,000 patents.
27
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
26
with each other and resolve conflict. Everybody who

works with Avago has to pass a test that confirms that
they understand this.
Straight Talking
Today Im proud to say that Avagos IT budget is 1.34 percent of revenue
no one in our industry has that. It wasnt hard to go from 4.5 percent to 3 or 2.5.
But from 2.5 to 1.25 that is hard.
were saving their e-mail onto their local drives. When

the hard drive fails, it becomes a critical issue. It was a
nightmare.
And it was a productivity killer because everyone in the
company had to clean out their inboxes at least once a
week. They couldnt get e-mail on their personal phones
or home computers, which was a problem because we
are a global company, and the work schedule is 24/7.
We had multiple instances of Exchange Server 2003, all
locally hosted in each region. Providing web access to
e-mail through Exchange at the time would have cost
much more, with higher risks. When we went to
Google, it liberated our employees. They can now
access e-mail through their smartphones wherever they
are, more securely, and at lower cost.
how the vendors must work with one another and resolve
dierences.
Initially we were only focusing on e-mail,

calendar, contact, and IM. We knew that
Microsoft Office was much better than
In terms of cost and productivity, moving applications such
Google
Docs, so we left that alone. But a lot
as e-mail and calendar to the cloud is a no-brainer. But
of people even the COO are using Google
beware the change management challenge: give people
Docs for collaboration in staff meetings and
lots of time to prepare for the switch.
project meetings. They can see the meeting
minutes as people type them. Theyre using the
spreadsheet to work on numbers together. We didn't
anticipate this because we knew Google Docs doesnt
have all the bells and whistles that Microsoft Office has.
So that was a surprise.
When we first made the e-mail switch and proved that it
was more effective and improved productivity and
brought costs down, we got a lot more support. The
productivity has increased multiple times especially
now that everyone has smartphones. Now nobody
would let me take Google mail out of our model.
billrogers@outlook.com
Position
Former Chief Information Ofcer
and Commissioner
Organization
State of New Hampshire
Works from
Concord, New Hampshire
As the CIO and Commissioner of New
Hampshire, Rogers was responsible for
managing and coordinating the states
technology resources and developing
and implementing strategies to enhance
services and create statewide efciencies. During his tenure, Harvard University honored the New Hampshire state
government with the Bright Idea Award
for the implementation of the countrys
rst statewide Geospatial Information
System (GIS). Prior to his role in government, Rogers spent more than three
decades in global companies including
Goss International, AlixPartners, Johnson
Controls, Deloitte Consulting, and
Honeywell. He held corporate senior
executive positions and has leadership
experience in information technology,
nance, operations, strategic planning,
business development, and consulting.
The Buy-In
Challenge
Serving as CIO of the State of
New Hampshire means selling
your ideas to a particularly wary
group of users, which generates
lessons on buy-in relevant to
CIOs in almost any setting.
29
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
28
Making the switch wasnt hard from a technology

standpoint, but the change management was really
The Takeaways
challenging. We spent about three months making
sure everyone in IT understood it well and was
prepared to manage it. We made sure that the
Outsourcing isnt cheap, but you spend more keeping
CEO and the CFO supported it. There were
noncore IT functions in-house. People on the business side
some concerns from legal. And so we had a
ask for features they dont need. And IT says yes.
lot of discussions with the Google architect
and the Google security team. We did a lot
To make multi-vendor outsourcing work, establish rules for
of preparation and planning.
Bill Rogers
Bill Rogers, former CIO, State of New Hampshire
Education
MS, Central Michigan University
BS, University of Maryland
Personal Passions
Family and outdoor activities with his two
grown sons and two dogs, and cooking.
I dont bake because you have to follow
a process. When it says a teaspoon of
this you cant put in a tablespoon.
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
For the past 25 years, as Ive led technology and

business organizations, Ive always been a business
person first and a technologist second. Part of this has
come naturally from my career path Ive worked in
engineering, procurement, operations, quality control,
sales and marketing, and IT. Ive worked for for-profit
companies, a nonprofit, a private equity firm, a consulting firm, and state government. And Ive learned from
all these experiences that to be a successful CIO in any
realm, you have to understand how and why the
business operates as it does and what the organization
and its people are trying to accomplish.
Its a lot easier to sell your ideas and innovation if you
understand the problems that people are trying to solve.
The CIO role is also about selling new ideas, so its
important to understand your organizations appetite for
change and innovation, and what motivates different
groups of stakeholders.
From Global
Public Service
to
In 2005 I was recruited by a Wall Street private equity

firm that was merging two leading manufacturers of
printing machinery: Goss International and Heidelberg
AG. Goss makes the printing presses that produce the
Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston
Globe, Time Warner magazines, and many other publications. The Goss press that we put in for the New York
Times on Long Island cost millions of dollars and was
four stories high and the length of a football field. These
are behemoths of machinery that have to be laser
accurate.
Goss International was highly decentralized. Each plant
had its own systems, its own part numbers everything
was discrete. My charge was to create a single global
platform that would encompass the 15 or so manufacturing and engineering sites the two companies had in
Europe, North America, and Asia. The enterprise transformation was supported by the implementation of SAP.
It allowed us to bring everything together, creating the
capability to get an order in from anywhere around the
globe, source that to any one of our factories or suppliers, produce the press in sections, and then ship those to
the customer to be installed on-site. We not only
reduced our costs but also dramatically cut the time to
deliver, which increased customer satisfaction. The
combined company was much more globally focused
Being a CIO in the public sector has been a totally

different sort of experience. For starters, decisions
arent based on profit or ROI but on statute or politics or
other things. Plus, everything takes so much longer
because of the multiple levels of approval. New Hampshire has 400 representatives, 24 senators, and an
executive council that works side by side with the
governor and is basically the CIOs board of directors.
The budget is determined by the legislature and is set
for two years. Ninety-eight percent of state government
employees are unionized. What the CIO can do on his
own is very, very limited.
The Art of Getting Buy-In

Getting things done in this kind of environment takes a
lot of salesmanship and socializing of your ideas
something familiar, in varying degrees, to any CIO. I
learned a lot about how to do this through my experience in the nonprofit world. For almost seven years I
served as Chairman of the Board for the Red Cross here
in New Hampshire. During that time, I worked to
consolidate the number of individual chapters, modernize IT, and establish as many best practices as possible
that allowed us to fulfill our mission, which was service
delivery.
We had a workforce of 1,500 volunteers and only
around 20 paid staffers. Anyone at any time could say
they didnt want to do this anymore. Getting things
done required a lot of cajoling. We needed to sell the
vision and the strategy and then work with people. That
helped prepare me for the government role.
Its a lot easier to sell your ideas and

innovation if you understand the
problems that people are trying to solve.
The CIO role is also about selling new
ideas, so its important to understand
your organizations appetite for change
and innovation, and what motivates
different groups of stakeholders.
My takeaway from those two roles, both of which had

acute buy-in challenges, is that if you want people to
buy in to your ideas, first you have to listen a lot. You
have to find out what their goals and objectives are and
what problems they have, and then come back with
proposed solutions.
For example, I worked with the New Hampshire state
police to develop an e-ticketing system. Every state has
a significant problem with police officers on the shoulder of the road or in the breakdown lane when they pull
someone over to write a ticket. I listened to that problem
and went on some ride-alongs. When you are sitting
there and a tractor trailer goes by, a foot or two away,
you feel the car rock back and forth. Thats a problem.
It was taking 10 to 40 minutes for a police officer to
issue a citation. When the officer and the citizen are on
the side of the road, its a very dangerous situation. We
came up with a laptop-based system with a thermal
printer and scanner in the police car. The officer gets
out, gets the drivers license and registration, brings it
back, scans it, and right away on the screen it says
whether this person is wanted or is okay. He or she
clicks what the violation was and hits a button, and the
thermal printer spits out a ticket. Then the officer walks
it back to the citizen and says, Have a good day.
That new approach reduced the time it takes to issue a
citation to three to five minutes, which has greatly
increased safety. And because we also instituted an
online ticket paying system, most people are now
paying their tickets online. This has improved cash
flow, because instead of taking 90 days to pay a ticket,
they pay it in a day or two.
Mobile Opportunities and Challenges

Being the CIO of New Hampshire didnt only school
me in the art of buy-in. It also immersed me in the
opportunities and challenges of mobile computing.
With over 1,000 mobile state workers, the opportunities
are huge. A lot of workers still use paper forms. Probation and parole officers keep files and maps and other
things in a metal storage clipboard that is what they
use to do their jobs. Inspectors for everything from
boilers to elevators to restaurants travel the state and fill
out a piece of paper and then take that back to an office
and type it into their computers. Going to direct data
entry from the field on a mobile device saves time and
increases accuracy, whether the state employee is a
child abuse investigator or someone on a mountain

search-and-rescue team.
Probably 20 percent of the states mobile workers
already have some kind of mobile data device, and
pilots are under way that will take that to 50 percent in
the next six months. The challenges are around connectivity. About one-third of the northern part of our state
doesnt have good cell reception. So in some extraordinary cases, you actually need to bring in mobile cell
towers to the area. Now the state is piloting a device
from a company called Global Relief Technologies that
lets you input data when youre out of range and holds
the data until you get a cell signal or can connect
through satellite.
The technology exists today to do all sorts of things
better. The hardest part and this is true for private
enterprise as well as the public sector is getting to a
clear and commonly agreed upon understanding of the
problems the organization is trying to solve and then
finding the simplest, most effective way to achieve that.
Thats the CIOs challenge.
Bill Rogers on. . .

CIO Success Factors
Successful CIOs put business before technology.
They focus on their organizations goals and
operations. Before proposing solutions, they seek
to understand what people are trying to accomplish
and what their reality is like. They calibrate their
proposals to the organizations appetite for
innovation and change. Getting things done
requires earning the buy-in of various stakeholders,
so good CIOs are also effective listeners,
salespeople, and inuencers.
Learning from Peers

No CIO should try to go it alone. None of us is as
smart as all of us are together. Thats why I created
the New England State CIO Collaboratorium, which
brings the regions six state CIOs together quarterly
to work on common problems, share ideas, and get
to know each other. It turns out there is a lot you
can learn from someone in a similar situation.
Getting things done in this kind of environment takes a lot of salesmanship

and socializing of your ideas something familiar, in varying degrees, to any CIO.
31
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
30
Restructuring
and profitable when we sold it to Shanghai Electric, in

China.
Straight Talking
OPEN SOURCE FIRST

Cost is a huge consideration in a state that doesnt have an income tax or a broad-based sales tax, and that was one of the
drivers behind New Hampshires open source rst law. This law requires that state agencies consider the use of open
source before buying new commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, software. This doesnt mean that we are going to replace our
ERP system or our Oracle database or our GIS systems. It means that when new requirements come up, we are going to
consider open source rst. This may not save us a lot today, but we believe it will over time.
The law also requires the open-data format. That doesnt mean that we cant use a COTS product, but we do have to save
the material or make it available to citizens as an open data format. There are states that have open source policies
Vermont has a policy. But no one else has a law requiring it. What this really was meant to do was to memorialize the
decision so that 20 years from now, unless the law is changed, New Hampshire will still be required to consider open source.
The Takeaways
To sell new ideas, especially in the public sector,
the CIO must have a clear sense of the
organizations appetite for change and innovation.
Gaining buy-in starts with a lot of listening. Find
out what peoples goals and problems are before you
propose any new ideas.
CIO Straight Talk
32
The opportunities to do things more eciently

through mobile technology are huge. The hard
part is agreeing what problems to address.
New Hampshire is the rst American state to mandate that

state agencies consider the use of open-source software.
The technology exists today to do all sorts of things better. The hardest part
and this is true for private enterprise as well as the public sector is getting to a
clear and commonly agreed upon understanding of the problems the
organization is trying to solve and then nding the simplest, most effective way
to achieve that. Thats the CIOs challenge.
Ian Cohen
ian_cohen@jltgroup.com
Position
Group Chief Information Ofcer
Company
Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group
Works from
London
As Group CIO, Ian Cohen is responsible
for JLTs global technology strategy as
well as the development and delivery of
all IT services and systems used within
the company. He also has accountability
for procurement and purchasing in the
UK. Most recently, he has been the
driving force behind JLTs global digital
transformation program, focused
primarily on enabling corporate strategy
through the adoption of socialenterprise tools and techniques. Before
his role at JLT, he spent several years as
CIO at Associated Newspapers and was
group IT Director for theFinancial Times
after holding the position of CTO for
FT.com in 2001. Cohen has a strong
nancial services background, having
held a variety of leadership roles at
Lloyds TSB in the 1990s.
The
Unexpected
Driver of
Digital
Transformation
33
Technology contributes to success but

is much less important than how people
use IT to achieve business outcomes.
Ian Cohen , Group CIO, Jardine Lloyd Thompson
Personal Passions
Social media, his family (hes married
with three daughters), music (he was a
session musician in a previous life), and
Chelsea FC (a team he has followed
since 1967)
Jardine Lloyd Thompson provides insurance brokerage and

risk management services to sectors ranging from utilities to
cargo to construction to nancial services.
Business transformations today are being driven by the

convergence of digital and traditional operations. But
most companies dont need more technology to be
successful; more often than not, they already have all
the tech they need. Like any journey, you need to understand what and where you are, be clear about what and
where you want to be, and then figure out how to get
there.
At JLT a leading global insurance, reinsurance, and
employee benefits business the heart of our strategy is
a commitment to be client-first and knowledge-led,
bringing the very best of JLT to every client engagement and relationship. The challenge is how to make
this real. If you want to be something, you have to do
something to get there.
To be client-first, we need to know our clients better
than anyone else does. We need to get closer to them so
that we truly understand their needs. Its not enough to
just go see clients once a year at renewal time. We must
think about them differently and look to build relationships that add genuine value to their business.
It was these ideas and discussions that drove the

creation of our Insight program. The original questions
had focused on what technology we would need. But
this quickly changed to how we could use the technologies we already had more effectively. We were already
using Salesforce, had taken our early steps into the
world of in-memory analytics with QlikView, and were
an existing Microsoft shop. We already had all the tools.
The challenge in becoming a different kind of JLT was
to change peoples behavior around the use of and
outcomes from technology. Most business transformation is about changing behavior and culture technology is just the enabler.
Becoming a Social Enterprise

When describing our client-first, knowledge-led,
connected, and collaborative journey, we sometimes
refer to it as JLT becoming a social enterprise,
because the underlying behavior we are creating
Understanding our clients. If were going to know more

about our clients and how to meet and consistently
exceed their expectations, then we have to understand
their business, markets, and challenges better than the
competition. And thats not just a past-tense view
what business they did with us it also has to be a
current-tense and future-tense view: what they are
doing with us now and what they might do in the future.
Our technology challenge here was to make better use
of Salesforce and all its capabilities. Its a great solution,
but very few companies use it to its full potential. We
realized there was a lot more we could do with our
implementation through greater training and awareness
so that our colleagues understood its capabilities and
how to use them more effectively. Again, the challenge
was not just about the technology but about changing
peoples perception of the solution and demonstrating
its value to their daily business lives. Once clients see
the data and the opportunities to deepen their relationships, they are hooked.
Interpreting business information. We chose the word
interpret rather than analyze intentionally. Theres a real
gap between the people who analyze the minutiae of
data until theyre blue in the face and the people who
have to base their actions on the information. In many
cases the Business Intelligence industry has become a
self-fulfilling black art, often creating complex
solutions that generate more questions than there were
to start with. That is very different from interpreting
data so that executives, employees, or clients can act on
it quickly and efficiently. Very often, actionable information is just a small subset of the whole. You need to
analyze the rest, but if you can identify and interpret
that subset, you can actually make some decisions. Like
many in our industry, we have numerous systems
around the globe, all at varying levels of maturity, and
traditional BI or data warehouse techniques would be an
In many cases, the Business

Intellegence industry . . . [creates]
complex solutions that generate
more questions than there were to
start with.
Business transformations today

are being driven by the
convergence of digital and
traditional operations. But most
companies don't need more
technology to be successful. . .
[Y]ou need to understand what
and where you are, be clear
about what and where you
want to be, and then gure out
how to get there.
expensive route to find the data we need. The new class

of in-memory analytics solutions applications like
QlikView that store queries and data in a servers RAM
allow us to see the vital trends in our data right from
our source systems and get that insight out to our
colleagues and clients in a fraction of the time and at a
fraction of the cost.
Thinking like a publisher. The way that publishers
connect with readers has changed radically in recent
years. Traditional publishing was a tell medium, but
that changed with the rise of citizen journalism and the
growth in social media in the mid- to late-2000s.
Collaborate, share, engage became the new verbs for
information and knowledge. Today, the challenge is for
businesses to start thinking like modern-day publishers
both inside the enterprise and with customers and
clients. Anyone can fulfill a transaction, handle a claim,
or whatever thats just the cost of entry but if you
can offer genuine business insight, then your client is
more likely to stay loyal. We have recognized experts
across all our business sectors, yet we were relying on
traditional print and web publishing techniques to
engage with our clients, partners, and colleagues. Our
current focus is on finding the best ways to use our
content to deepen client relationships as well as informing and engaging our colleagues. And that hasnt meant
huge investment in publishing technologies we
simply make better use of our existing Microsoft suite
of products but it has required us to think differently
about content, to think like a publisher.
Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. So, if we just got
better at capturing information about our clients and
partners to better understand their needs, found new
ways to interpret that information alongside the data
that already exists in our source systems, and then
published that in a personalized and targeted way alongside timely and relevant content, wed already have
something special. That would be enough for any of our

operating companies, divisions, or regions alone, but
what if we brought it all together? What if collaboration
was at the center of all this? Then the value would be
multiplied many times over. That is the very essence of
social enterprise the special sauce that occurs
when clients, colleagues, and partners work together to
make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, when
that one nugget of information shared can make the
difference in closing a deal or delighting a customer.
Collaboration doesnt just happen, though. Its not like
throwing a switch. While we do use specific technologies like Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft Lync to
enable our global conversations, the key has been to
champion collaboration as a change activity in itself.
Finding the Value in Big Data

Its really disappointing that so much of the big data
debate is just marketing hype (much the same as where
cloud computing was back in 2009 and 2010). Ive
actually grown to hate the term. For me, there is no big
data; theres just data always was and always will
be. I try to think in simple terms, and there are basically
three categories when it comes to data:
35
Ian Cohen on. . .

Big Data Marketing Hype
There arent that many businesses that need
these new big data capabilities to drive value.
In most cases, companies have more data
than they know what to do with and would be
better served making the most of what they
already have rather than looking for yet more.
Technology as a
Transformative Force
Were trying to change the behavior of people
around the use of and outcomes from
technology. Most business transformation is
about changing behavior and culture
technology is just the enabler.
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
34
To be knowledge-led, we need to harness the expertise

that resides within our global specialties, to empower
our colleagues to better serve their clients. However,
JLT is a not a big company we have only some 7,500
employees worldwide and so to compete with the big
guns we also need to be better connected and highly
collaborative.
through this program is about being more social. Such a

journey requires focus. You cant boil the ocean, so we
decided to focus on four key themes:
Stuff that you have, and you know where it is, but you
want to know more about it.
Stuff you think you have or believe you should have,
but youre not quite sure where it is.
Stuff you know you dont have and may not even have
considered but might find if you only knew where to
look and looked long and hard enough.
The first two are easy with todays search and data
management tools. If you organize your data more
effectively, youll find more stuff. When all I owned
was a filing cabinet, and the document I wanted was
buried in a sea of unfiled papers just thrown into the
cabinet, did I have a big data problem? I certainly had a
retrieval problem that was quickly sorted by indexing
and structure. And as storage requirements have grown,
so have the retrieval technologies, with increasingly
sophisticated structured and unstructured search
techniques.
CIO Straight Talk
36
The last category is interesting, however: this idea that

if you analyze huge amounts of data you would find
things out that you wouldnt have otherwise known. Im
not saying that doesnt happen, because it clearly does.
In the UK, you only have to look at the way the police
are analyzing crime data or globally the way the
aerospace industry correlates aircraft data to see that.
And certainly, there are a growing number of data
sources where information about your brand, products,
or services could reside, and new tools are required to
mine data from these diverse sources. However, I
would argue that this is just an extension of looking for
things you already know about.
A lot of companies have leapt into

social media conversations about
their brand only to make the situation
worse.
The thing is, there arent that many businesses that need
the level of serendipity often used to hype up big data
in order to drive value. Indeed, it would be good if some
organizations came to grips with the data they already
have and know they have. The arguments people often
make are around social media that if they could mine
Facebook and Twitter and pull all that conversational
information together with buying patterns, they would
get a better view of the customer. Maybe they would.
But the real skill is working out what to do at that point
when you actually hear that nugget of information.
Thats a people skill. Thats a business skill. Big data
systems arent going to help you with that. A lot of
companies have leapt into social media conversations
about their brand only to make the situation worse. And
frankly, is this serendipitous search even necessary?
One of the big parts of social media is the conversation,
and consumers are more open than ever about their
views on your brand, products, goods, or services.
Perhaps we should focus more on big listening and
smart responding.
The Takeaways
Business transformation doesnt necessarily require
new technology; sometimes it requires guring out how
to use what you already have more eectively.
Traditional BI techniques are expensive. The new
in-memory analytics solutions can be a faster and less
expensive way to nd the valuable nugget of information
in a sea of data.
The publishing industry has moved from telling
to engaging and sharing. Other businesses
must make that same shift to deepen
relationships with clients.
37
Key Technologies at JLT
That is the very essence of

social enterprise the special
sauce that occurs when
clients, colleagues, and
partners work together to make
the whole greater than the sum
of its parts, when that one
nugget of information shared
can make the difference in
closing a deal or delighting a
customer.
Salesforce.com: CRM
Qlickview: In-memory analytics solution
Microsoft: Publishing Technologies
Salesforce Chatter,
Collaboration
Microsoft
Lync:
Commercial aviation insurance is one of JLTs many lines of business.
Straight Talking
Using IT to Achieve
Business Integration
A robust IT function that intelligently outsources and invests in new
technology can lead the transformation to a centralized business model.
Barry Libenson, CIO, Land OLakes

When I became the CIO of Land OLakes, in 2010, with
a mandate to shift from a holding company model to a
centralized one, everything seemed to be in place for me
to succeed. The CEO was driving the change. The
senior executive team was on board. The technology
had been chosen.
Barry Libenson
BJLibenson@landolakes.com
38
Company
Land OLakes
Works from
Arden Hills, Minnesota
Barry Libenson joined Land OLakes in
January 2010. In addition to his role
as CIO, he is a member of the
companys senior strategy team. Prior
to joining Land OLakes, Libenson was
a Vice President and the CIO at
Ingersoll Rand, leading the IT staff
through strategy development, signicant improvements in company-wide
efciency and effectiveness, the IT
integration of a major acquisition, and
the successful implementation of ERP.
During the 1980s, Libenson joined
Oracle as its 90th employee.
Education
MBA, Duke Universitys Fuqua School
of Business
BA, Colgate University
Personal Passions
Physical tness and creating the
perfect New York-style pizza dough
Butter and cheese are among the well-known consumer products of Land O'Lakes' dairy foods business.
The move to centralize IT and business processes at

Land OLakes began as a revolution not just in technology but in mind-set in IT as well as in marketing and
sales, supply chain, and operations. The goal is to get as
much efficiency as possible across our three lines of
business: dairy, animal feed, and seed and crop protection.
Each is a huge business in its own right. We produce a
million pounds of butter a day during the holiday season
and four million tons of feed a year. But there is
reciprocity in our customer base. A dairy farmer we buy
milk from may buy seed and crop protection from us as
well as feed. Theres an incredible opportunity to
harness those synergies.
The Benefits of an IT Partnership

We run a fairly lean technology organization, yet we
have a complex systems footprint thats growing
significantly each year: more and more mobile apps,
more supply-chain technology, new financial systems, a
new Oracle footprint. With those come increased
support requirements.
Everyone still associates the use of an offshore partner

with reduced head count. But that is not the case here.
We are growing and need all our internal resources to
focus on new projects.
Like any partnership, it takes two to make the relationship work. It doesnt matter how many times youve
done it or how ironclad your contract is it takes work.
It takes time to figure out how best to work together and
get the relationship operating at maximum efficiency.
Today, were expanding our partnership in ways we
never would have expected. The business units work
directly with HCL. For example, our farm seed business
has hired HCL to monitor electronic data interchange
transactions. Being able to outsource tasks such as these
to a trusted partner HCL, which initially was
supporting just a handful of applications but now
supports more than 200 frees up my resources to
work on new projects that transform the business.
Like any partnership, it takes two to

make the relationship work. It doesnt
matter how many times youve done
it or how ironclad your contract is
it takes work. It takes time to gure out
how best to work together and get the
relationship operating at maximum
efciency.
39
CIO Straight Talk
But never underestimate the challenges of major organizational change. I knew from experience how difficult it
can be. As the CIO of Ingersoll Rand, I oversaw the
shift from a highly decentralized model to a federated
one, implementing an international shared-services
organization. We were done by the time I left the
company eight years after wed started.
Position
Senior Vice President and
We made a conscious decision that our internal

resources people with a high degree of subject matter
expertise would not spend a lot of time on support.
Instead, we launched a large-scale procurement project
to find the best partner to support our legacy systems as
well as our new systems after they go live. That search
led us to HCL.
Barry Libenson on. . .

The CIOs Role
Its table stakes for a good CIO to be a part of the
business, looking for ways to work with the
leadership team to meet long-term objectives by
leveraging technology as efciently as possible.
Vendors Versus Partners

Every company I work with is either a vendor or a
partner. A vendor wants to sell me something. A
partner has a genuine interest in my organizations
success. The key is to gure out who is who and
treat them accordingly.
Global Outsourcing
Its a business imperative to nd cost-effective
ways to work globally. Offshore outsourcing will
expand.
Even with all this change, the reliability of our systems, thanks to partners like HCL,
has gone up dramatically. I have a fundamental philosophy about dealing with
third parties. Every company I work with is either a vendor or a partner. The key is to
gure out who is who and treat them accordingly.
We have also moved early into mobility. We rolled

out a suite of mobile apps to help businesses,
including one that 400 of our sales professionals
can access on their tablets in the middle of a corn
field to show a grower what he could have planted
to maximize his yield. That directly impacts our
bottom line, most notably in our farm seed
business, which has grown significantly over the
past year.
Three years ago, we had nothing in the cloud. Now
were running Fusion, our service desk, Oracle
CRM, and SuccessFactors (SAPs HR performance
management software) in the cloud, and we plan to
move more applications to the hosted model so we
can focus internal resources on core competencies.
We partnered with our marketing organization to
develop a social media strategy to leverage
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and embrace them
as properly branded customer-facing systems.
40
A Change in Priorities
Like IT departments at most companies, in recent years
we had paid a lot of attention to managing costs. But we
realized that in order to lead our industry we also had to
actively embrace and invest in new technology.
Our CEO, who came up through the dairy business, is
very open-minded. My job is to help him and the rest of
the senior management team visualize how technology
could be a business enabler, whether its 4G out in the
field or business intelligence to drive insight and
operate more efficiently. And its been the CEOs job to
drive those changes from the top. For example, using
technology to change the way people do their jobs asks
a lot of them. Change management training as we rolled
out the new technology and applications helped ease the
transition. But having the CEO support this significant
shift in IT tools, approach, and business process was
critical.
As a result, we were the first customer to go live, in
October 2011, with Oracle Fusion Procurement to run
our source-to-pay process. We werent even supposed
to be the first to launch this, but we had a great team
41
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
working aggressively on the project, so we

leapfrogged everyone else. We rolled out a suite of
Oracle solutions in our farm seed business JD
Edwards for financials and manufacturing, Demantra for demand planning, and Oracle Transportation
Management for logistics on time and on budget
in 2011. We implemented Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition across the company.
To do all this, we made organizational changes

aligning the IT leadership team with lines of
business, introducing better project management
discipline, and bringing in new thought leaders. But
the IT rank and file is largely unchanged. They are
tremendously loyal and have such deep subject
matter expertise that we couldnt afford to lose
them.
Even with all this change, the reliability of our
systems, thanks to partners like HCL, has gone up
dramatically. I have a fundamental philosophy
about dealing with third parties. Every company I
work with is either a vendor or a partner. The key is
to figure out who is who and treat them accordingly.
A vendor just wants to sell me something; they
dont care about our success. So I want to pay the
lowest price possible for their product or service. A
partner has a genuine interest in my organizations
success, so its important that we support them, as
well. As the success of IT depends increasingly on
strong partnerships, managing those relationships is
more important than ever.
The Takeaways
An IT partnership frees up your internal resources
to work on projects that can transform the business.
Its crucial to nd a balance between managing costs
and investing in new technology.
The CIO helps senior managers visualize how
technology enables innovation and eciency. The
CEO drives those changes from the top.
Land OLakes WinField business is a leading

distributor of agricultural seed and crop
protection products. The companys Purina
Animal Nutrition business is a leading provider
of feed for livestock and other animals.
Straight Talking
As CDs and other hard copies of recorded music

are replaced by digital downloads, EMI
whose Abbey Road recording studio was made
famous by the Beatles has reinvented itself.
The New Model

Behind the Music
IT is central to the transformation of the music supply chain,
from recording to distribution to consumption.
Simon Hollins, CIO, EMI Music

Simon Hollins
simon.hollins@emimusic.com
Position
Consultant Chief Information Ofcer
Works from
London
Simon Hollins joined EMI Music as
Consultant Chief Information Ofcer in
2010. Prior to joining EMI, he held a
number of senior IT positions at BT
Group, including CIO of BT Syntegra
and member of the BT Wales Advisory
Board. Hollins previously held CIO
roles at J. Walter Thompson and PA
Consulting Group. He is also a
Director of Red Raven Consulting and
a Non-Executive Director of DCV
Technologies. He began his career in
software engineering.
Education
BS, University of Birmingham
Personal Passions
Football (season ticket holder at
Arsenal), motorsports (mainly
watching but a bit of driving),
and art (some favorite venues:
the Ufzi in Florence, the Museo
Reina Sofa in Madrid, the
Summer Exhibition at the Royal
Academy in London)
Collaboration, communication, and standardization

became essential, but we did not want to stifle local
creativity. So we put in a single global network, e-mail,
and intranet system but ensured that it fostered crossborder creative and media planning among our employees and clients. We also created a common platform for
analysis and planning tools, one that has developed into
the much more sophisticated systems in use today.
I came into my role as CIO of EMI Music in 2010 a
tumultuous time for the company and the music industry itself. As everyone knows, CD sales are plummeting, while downloads and streaming are exploding. The
ways for fans to consume music and interact with artists
are multiplying. In fact, the whole business model and
music business supply chain are changing. And we had
to figure out how to be part of this revolution and then
take it to the next stage.
Our strategy is to create lasting success for all of our
artists not just the top sellers by uncovering new
sources of revenue for them, connecting them to fans in
ways we never could have in the past, and embracing
innovation and agility in a quickly changing marketplace.
When I joined EMI Music, the companys private

equity owner had brought in a new management team
to turn the company around. All the major music labels
were facing challenges, but EMI was the smallest, and
our owners were strongly encouraging us to capitalize
on that by innovating faster than the competition. But
what Ive found is that transformation is not just about
trying to do something new. Lots of clever people can
come up with great ideas to change the way an industry
works. The key is making innovation sustainable so
that you can drive it through to reality. You have to have
the right people, processes, and suppliers all working
together to make transformation stick.
A Fundamental IT Shift: Seeking

Better Business Outcomes
Every music company wants to achieve better
outcomes for artists, but we are taking a broader view
of what that means. It would be nice for every artist to
have a hit single, but not everyone can. You can still
We are correlating information about

individual fans who have registered on
artists websites and Facebook pages
with broader listening preferences and
demographic information collected
through fan surveys, then relating the
insights to buying and listening patterns
derived from sales and other data.
43
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
42
Company
EMI Music
The opportunity to innovate and change the way a

business or an industry operates has always
appealed to me. The first major transformation I led as
CIO was at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.
There was no industry more dynamic than advertising
during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The digital
production revolution was just beginning, and JWT
evolved from a network of international offices to an
international business capable of servicing global
clients.
have a successful career, though, if you take a larger

view about how people consume music. EMI is
approaching artist development in new ways, focusing
on how to connect fans to artists be it through social
media, downloads, or one of the 400 streaming services
we work with. Were also looking at areas like music
licensing for television programs, commercials, and
video games once a marginal area thats now growing fast.
For IT, that new business strategy requires a fundamental shift, from being a reactive team to a strategic
business partner, from spending most of our time
supporting legacy systems to spending the majority of
our time on new projects. I had to change the way the IT
function operated, get an awful lot more out of our
suppliers by partnering with a few that gave us the
firepower we needed, and inspire my team to become
world-class innovators.
Before we could partner with the business side of EMI
on any strategic transformation, we had to address three
major IT problems: Service levels were in decline, the
rate of project delivery was low, and there was no real
technology architecture.
ITs Role in the Business

In many ways, the role of the CIO now is to nd
ways to connect the business to customers and
then to get out of the way. Good discipline, strong
supplier partnerships, and good design are critical.
Its our obligation as an IT team to provide that to
the business. But we cannot let that become
governance for governances sake, because that can
stie creativity. You do enough to make sure the
solutions you offer are innovative and sustainable,
and then you get out of the way.
Poaching Good Ideas from

Elsewhere
Dont be afraid to adopt best practices from other
industries. The music industry is unique, but it can
benet from best practices and forward thinking in
areas like outsourcing, enterprise architecture, and
technology delivery. People always told me that you
couldnt use IT approaches from other industries in
advertising. But you can and you should. Those are
the things that will help your business succeed.
Our low project-delivery rate was caused by a lack of

discipline and standardization, which we addressed
early on by introducing project management practices
and enlisting our business partners in prioritization and
delivery. With the support of the CEO, we cancelled
more than half of the projects in the pipeline. And I
appointed transformation directors and embedded them
in the business. Now, were running at twice the pace
we were eighteen months ago. When a new business
initiative is kicked off, IT is involved from the start.
To address the lack of architecture, we built a complete

picture of the application portfolio using HCLs application portfolio optimization service. We then identified
which applications were already being used across the
enterprise (making them good candidates for global
capabilities), which were necessarily geographyspecific, and which needed to be retired.
The ways for fans to consume music

and interact with artists are multiplying.
In fact, the whole business model and
music business supply chain are
changing. And we had to gure out
how to be part of this revolution and
then take it to the next stage.
We hired experienced enterprise architects to create a

platform view of the systems and processes necessary to
run the business, taking into account the future evolution of operations, particularly in regards to innovation,
agility, and the supply chain. We built application
closure targets into every transformation delivery
project so that rationalization was locked into the
strategy rather than being an afterthought. We have
continued that application decommissioning approach
as we have pursued our integration with Universal
Music Group, which completed its acquisition of EMI
in September 2012.
With the support of the CEO, we cancelled more than half of the projects in the pipeline.
And I appointed transformation directors and embedded them in the business. Now,
were running at twice the pace we were eighteen months ago.
Learning to Get out of the Way

Today, IT is delivering transformative systems faster
than ever. A good example is our global rights management system. In the music industry, it typically takes 28
days to deliver a digital product for download. By
implementing a single database of all music assets,
along with the associated and extremely complex rights
information, EMI is now able to do that in half an hour.
We delivered the prototype for the global rights
management system in 90 days, and it took seven
months from the planning stages to delivering the first
single to iTunes.
We are also taking a leadership position in digital
marketing. Our job from an IT point of view is to
support that work without getting in the way. That is,
our role is to show the business the transformation that
is possible and partner with it to make those changes,
rather than pushing new systems and processes onto the
business. Business ownership of the change is the key to
lasting transformation. For example, we aligned our
tech team around the business units driving this change.
One result is our unique CRM system for fans. Its easy
for a music company to collect e-mail addresses of
people interested in a particular band or kind of music.
But theres an awful lot more information available.
Our Digital Marketing and Consumer Insight teams
have developed more-effective ways to connect artists
with fans who like or might like their music. We
are correlating information about individual fans who
have registered on artists websites and Facebook pages
with broader listening preferences and demographic
information collected through fan surveys, then relating
the insights to buying and listening patterns derived
from sales and other data.
We have put in place a portfolio of systems and tools on
a single global campaign platform to gather this information, one that allows us to tailor our marketing efforts
to maximize the outcome for the artist. Since putting in
place this platform and new processes, response rates
and fan engagement have increased dramatically.
We dont have a huge IT organization there are 130

of us. But we have at least that many professionals
supporting us in our supplier universe. We get to leverage the standards and insights of companies like HCL
that have done this in other industries and can bring that
knowledge to bear on the music industry. Music is a
global industry, but its a small community. Our partnerships give us a reach we wouldnt otherwise have,
bringing us innovative ideas and technical capabilities
that we can mash up to create something unique and
lasting.
45
The Takeaways
Transformation isnt just about doing
something new; its about making innovation
sustainable.
Before IT can partner with the business on any
strategic initiative, it must make sure it has
excellent service levels, project delivery rates,
and technology architecture.
The role of IT is to show the
business whats possible instead
of pushing new systems and
processes.
CIO Straight Talk
CIO Straight Talk
44
Once HCL took responsibility for our central systems

and we strengthened our own service operations
management, service levels rose. Our incident rate is
less than half of what it was two years ago, and we
continue to focus on what we can do tomorrow to
improve service levels.
Simon Hollins on. . .
Big Thinking
CIO Straight Talk
46
Context,
Interpretation,
Integration. . .
and Alligators
A conversation
about big data
with Bill Inmon,
the father of
data warehousing
ill Inmon is a sought-after

speaker and author on
data warehousing. In fact,
he wrote the first book,
held the first conference,
wrote the first column in a
magazine, and was the first to offer
classes on this subject, which in the late
1980s earned him the moniker the
father of data warehousing. With
over 35 years of experience in database
technology management and data
warehouse design, he understands the
parallels between the successful
adoption of data warehousing and the
promise and challenges of big
data, as you will see in this edited
conversation with CIO Straight Talk
Editor Paul Hemp and Contributing
Editor Gil Press.
Bill Inmon has a tuna on the line, not an alligator

but he knows the problems that gators can cause for CIOs.
record, youve got to have a lot of intelligence about

how to interpret what that log record means.
I have to say that the big data vendors dont
understand this. They vaguely understand that Oh
yeah, there are some challenges with unstructured
data. But in terms of actually understanding what
those are, the vendors are much more concerned with
how they interface with Hadoop, how they use
MongoDB, how they use HBase, how they use Hive.
Theyre concerned with the technology of big data.
They just assume that once the organization gets its
hands on big data and the new technologies, its
going to automatically be able to understand how to
turn that big data into business value. To be honest
with you, the big data vendors just dont get it.
The advice I would give companies considering
investing in big data is that once theyve got a handle
on the technologies they should address the
challenges of context and interpretation in order to
unlock business value from unstructured data.
Could you give an example

of unlocking business value
from unstructured data?
Is big data more than a
quickly passing buzz
phrase?
Theres no question that its real, that big data is not
just a bunch of hype. There are at least three reasons
why its here to stay: new technology, new sources of
useful data, and real business value. New
technologies such as Hadoop allow you to capture
data from entirely new sources. This leads to the
analysis of useful data that you couldnt lay your
hands on before, analysis that results in real business
value.
But there are also some serious challenges. The
biggest one from a CIOs standpoint is getting from
big data to business value. The vendors [of big data
software and tools] have done a good job of hyping it
and telling people about the promise of big data. In
most cases, theres this underlying assumption that
you go and build it and then the business value will
suddenly appear. That is a genuine problem, because
everything in big data is unstructured.
Why is unstructured data

problematic?
You see, organizations are used to dealing with
structured data, with nice, neat little tables and
attributes and metadata and structure. But thats not
there in big data. In big data, you have nothing but
unstructured data.
To understand what unstructured data means and to
be able to use it in any way for business decision
making, youve got to understand context. Thats the
first challenge of taking unstructured information and
starting to do anything with it. Let me give you a
simple example: Suppose we see the number seven in
the data. What does seven mean? The answer is that
seven by itself means nothing. Are we talking about
seven dollars? Seven days of the week? Seven seas?
Until you can tell me the context, it remains pretty
meaningless.
A second major challenge in taking raw text and
turning it into business value is interpretation. For
example, have you ever tried to look at a log record
and understand what its saying? To use a cryptic log
I was talking to a major auto manufacturer just the

other day about doing warranty claims analysis. Do
you know how they do warranty claims analysis?
They have individuals who sit in this huge building
and look at a warranty claim and say, Well, is this
company responsible for it? Are we going to honor
the claim? If we arent, why not? They process over
eight million warranty claims a year. They do them
all manually because they cant figure out how to
take the raw text and treat it in an analytical fashion. I
asked them, When you finish processing the claim,
do you enter it in a database? The answer was,
Heavens, no. We have a hard enough time
processing eight million of these warranty claims
manually. But a database built from warranty claims
could be incredibly valuable to automobile
manufacturers because it would relate directly to the
quality of the manufacturing process.
Its not enough, however, to build a database of
warranty claims. You must understand the context for
all the data in the claim. If you fail to understand or
manage the context properly, youre going to be
making incorrect decisions on how the warranty
claim is to be handled. And so the consumer is going
to be mad and even have grounds for a lawsuit.
The answer is no, but theres a good reason. The

whole world of unstructured data and taking business
value out of it is brand new. Its like the big data
vendors. They just assumed that since the data is
there, it could be done. They assumed that if one or
two companies have done it, then everybody can do
it. Thats simply not true.
Its like going into a bears den in the month of
March and poking the bear with a stick. The bear is in
hibernation and very soon is going to come out of
hibernation and be hungry. The world and the
marketplace are just now waking up to the fact that
theyre going to have to deal with unstructured data,
and how you deal with it is not how you dealt with
the structured data of the past. The techniques and
approaches are completely different. Is that
understood by either the vendors or the marketplace
now? No. There are a few people who are awakening
to it, but its generally so early in the life of the
technology and the marketplace that the world is still
asleep, in a state of hibernation.
Are there parallels

between peoples
perception of big data
today including their
ability to extract value
from it and peoples
perception of data
warehousing when you
were first talking to them
about this in the late
1980s?
Actually, yes, very much so. In the early days of data
warehousing, people thought a data warehouse was
merely where you stack together a bunch of data like
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Have you seen any

examples of companies
that seem to be
somewhat ahead of the
curve?
cordwood. I and other people said from the

beginning, no, a data warehouse is how you integrate
data, and integration of data is very different from
gathering and capturing it. Ill never forget Sybase
standing in front of a group of people and saying,
Well, you take your operational systems and you
copy them into a file. Thats your data warehouse. I
was in the back of the room just cringing, saying,
Boy, these people really dont understand what a
data warehouse is all about. They missed the major
point that in order to build a data warehouse, you
need to integrate the data coming from all those
different systems. Yes, theres very much a parallel
there.
Whats the first step

companies should take to
unlock the promise of big
data?
What made the alligators

go away so that data
warehousing could
succeed?
The strategic momentum for data warehousing came
from the business person, because of business
opportunities and the need to be competitive. I think
the same thing is going to happen with big data. In
order to unlock the promise of big data, two or three
companies are going to need some really good
success stories and then everybody under the sun is
going to come along and say, If they can do it, we
can do it, or we can do it even better.
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They should turn unstructured data into a form and

structure that can be integrated with their existing
structured data. Right now when you start to mix
structured and unstructured data, its as fundamental a
disconnect as trying to mix electricity that is from
England and electricity thats from the United States.
Youve got to do something to bridge that gap.
have six alligators snapping at your face. Most CIOs I

talk to are in a position of fighting the immediate
issues and battles so vigorously that they dont have
time for vision. They spend their time dodging the
next alligator that wants to take a piece of their flesh.
CIOs are beleaguered. They are so consumed with
day-to-day problems that most of them dont really
have any energy or enthusiasm for looking at the
future.
Theres a new technology called textual ETL that puts

unstructured data into the form where context,
interpretation, standardization, and a whole lot of
other things are done so that there is compatibility.
That is the path of least resistance for most
organizations and corporations. We call this textual
disambiguation, which allows you to read in raw text
and do all of the things that are necessary to turn it
into structured information so you can understand its
context and analyze it.
Do you see CIOs leading

the organization toward
capturing all the value
that is latent in
unstructured data?
When I think of Chief Information Officers, I think of
the old saying about draining the swamp when you
The Year of the CIOs?
Trends
2013
than widely discussed likely to appear on the
horizon, whether they involve an emerging
technology or the role of the CIO.
We asked HCL experts and IT practitioners like you to

predict IT-related developments were likely to see in the
coming months. We got some interesting responses and
not all of them had to do with SMAC!
A senior executive at HCL describes his

unusual medical condition this way: As he
imagines a word in his head, he sees both
the word and its mirror image. So, for
example, 2013 displayed in, say, the font
of a digital clock. . .
Or so he claims. Whether that second

meaning even suggests itself to you go
ahead, look at this in a mirror this savvy
industry observer is convinced his vision
has significance: 2013 is an auspicious
time for IT professionals, the Year of the
CIOs.
Scoff, if you will. But you dont need to see
things in reverse to realize that the IT
profession is facing unprecedented
technological and professional upheaval.
And while this disruption threatens the very
existence of the CIO role, it also poses
interesting opportunities for reinvention.
Given that, we felt it worth examining some
of the changes that lie ahead. We asked
seven HCL subject matter experts to share
their views on developments they foresee
taking shape in the next 12 months or so.
We werent looking to showcase the Top
Trends of 2013. And we already knew
that some of the most sweeping
developments will be directly related to
social-mobility-analytics-cloud, or SMAC.
We were simply looking for the articulation
of interesting trends significant if not
earthshaking, somewhat surprising rather
Virtualization
15%
Cloud Computing
Enterprise Mobility
15%
38%
Big Data
(including real-time analytics)
32%
Based on 747 responses to a survey of IT
professionals on LinkedIn
We turned to CIO Straight Talk Interactive, a group

of more than 1,000 CIOs and other senior IT
practitioners that meets on LinkedIn. The group,
sponsored by HCL, offers community discussions,
interactive webinars, and idea-driven articles and
videos, all by and for senior IT leaders. Discussions
range widely, from technology to IT-driven business
transformation to the reinvention of the CIO role.
Go to http://partner.linkedin.com/CIOStraighttalk)
if you're interested in joining.
Straight Talk Interactive members get an early look
at articles that appear in this magazine, and they
reciprocate by providing group-sourced content. So
we sought their opinions on emerging trends
through a variety of polls - on topics ranging from
mobility to platform-as-a-service, or PaaS - as well
as through individual contributions to discussion
threads. We have included several comments from
the discussion threads on the following pages, under
the label Voice of the Community.
One survey of IT executives in the broader LinkedIn
population asked which emerging technology their
organizations were most likely to invest in over the
coming year. Nearly 40 percent of the 747
respondents chose cloud computing, more than big
data and real-time analytics combined a sign that
the cloud continues to surge as an area of interest
and concern for businesses.
One emerging technology that generated
considerable discussion among Straight Talk
Interactive members was PaaS. They saw numerous
benefits not just cost reduction but the speeding
up of application delivery and the freeing up of time
for an IT staff to focus on innovation.Most
companies generate revenue via the products and
services atop the platform, commented Richard
Robinson, VP, Business Technology and CIO at
SunPower, a global manufacturer of
high-performance solar electric systems. PaaS
allows you to focus your most precious resources on
creation and enhancement of these products and
services. And if your PaaS is true cloud (meaning it
autoscales), your developers can move from concept
to production with little to no friction. . . IaaS and
PasS are key enablers for DevOps, the collaborative
software development method.
Technology, technology don't you love it? Are we

asking CIOs the wrong question? Dino Russo - the
CTO, Consumer Packaged Goods Sector, at BT
Global Services - commented in a pointed response
to a survey on emerging technologies. Instead of
running a poll on emerging technologies, he said,
How about, What are key business problems you
are solving, or key opportunities you are enabling
with your IT investments? Trying to expand your
market? Maybe BI [business intelligence] and
analytics would help. The company is pushing hard
on new product development? Perhaps advance
collaboration technologies are part of the answer.
Point taken, Dino. As CIOs everywhere are learning
or not, at their peril IT exists not as an end in itself
but as the means to achieve a spectacular
experience for customers and strongly positive
business outcomes.
If that realization sweeps the profession, changing
CIOs' approach to everything they do, it will ensure
the continued relevance and value provided by IT
professionals and will truly make 2013 the
Year of the CIOs.
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. . .conveys to him not just the current

year but, in reverse, the letters C-I-O-S.
Which emerging technology

is your organization most likely
to invest in this year?
This magazine aims to showcase the insights of IT

practitioners for the benefit of their peers as you
can see in much of the rest of this issue. So we also
wanted to find out what changes are anticipated by
people working on the front lines of IT.
Of course, technology is only one area in which IT

trends emerge and as several of our HCL experts
note in the following essays can be an area of
secondary importance.
The Fracturing of
Corporate IT
The traditional IT organization is disintegrating but will
reemerge as the domain-smart and customer-focused
manager of an IT ecosystem.
BY RAJIV SODHI
To get an idea of how this transformation will affect

businesses, just take a look at a successful software
company: It is asset light. It carries little inventory. Its agile.
Its prepared to change tools or processes on a dime. It
operates as every successful business soon will as part
of a well-oiled digital ecosystem.
Ultimately, this new model will be welcomed by traditional
enterprise IT organizations currently struggling to meet
demands for cloud computing, analytics, mobility, and social
media. IT can let go of the old way of doing business
being responsible for everything end-to-end and embrace
this new digital ecosystem of strategic partners, increased
agility, and lower costs. The business will dream up its
vision, IT will offer technology options in support of that
vision, and a team of vendors will deliver it effectively. The
relationship will evolve from partnership to co-creation to
co-innovation.
This transformation will not happen tomorrow, but were
already seeing the signs. Businesses that are early adopters
will reap the benefits while the others wait and see.
As a result, we will soon witness the beginning of the end of

the IT organization as we know it but not the end of the
modern enterprises IT demands. Businesses will need more
highly skilled technical talent in the future than ever before, as
corporate systems grow even more complex and critical.
Consumption of data structured and unstructured, internal
and publicly available will increase. Employees will demand
access from anywhere on any device. And real-time and
actionable analysis of that data will become a requirement.
Meanwhile, IT organizations once built on the foundation of
servers and mainframes and software and human resources
will reduce their dependence on all classes of technology
assets.
The skills of the average corporate IT professional are already
becoming redundant or obsolete. We are about to see the IT
organization morph into a business operations group
dominated by intimate domain knowledge, internal customer
management, and business change. As a result, the internal IT
organization of the future will forge relationships with a
consortium of suppliers that have the talent and assets it no
longer possesses in-house.
Rajiv Sodhi is a Senior Corporate Vice

President and the Chief Customer
Officer at HCL Technologies. He blogs
regularly about business technology
issues at www.rajivsodhi.com and can
be reached at rsodhi@hcl.com.
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ne of the biggest threats to corporate competitiveness on the

horizon is a shortage of key skills, and nowhere is that risk
more acute than in the corporate IT organization. By 2015,
less than 25% of the current IT workforce is estimated to
remain in standalone IT roles, according to analysis by the
Corporate Executive Board. And top tech talent will migrate to
the best opportunities, more likely working for a
technology-centric organization than an enterprise IT
organization.
These new relationships will be more symbiotic and

strategic than the term outsourcing implies, requiring a
master supplier to ensure alignment and agility. That will
spur the remaking of IT service providers themselves. Those
who fail to adapt will be out of work. And customers who fail
to change will fall behind their rivals.
n recent years, the success of a consumer product has

depended less on whether it has the latest technology and
more on whether it offers the coolest overall customer experience. The iPhone is, of course, the iconic example of this
trend. People came to love the iPhone not just for its features
but for the whole experience of using it the way it looks and
feels, the means by which they control the device, how they
acquire and use apps, and so on.
We are about to see experience-centric products driving new
behavior not only in consumer goods but also in the B2B
space. And as information technology becomes more
enmeshed in the overall product experience and hence the
products technology footprint, CIOs will play an increasingly
important role in the development of this crucial driver of
business success. However, this can happen only if CIOs
expand their horizon to encompass the entire customer
experience.
Creating a product that delivers a great end-to-end user
experience requires a much more integrated approach to
engineering, one in which information technology is embedded
in a product ecosystem from the initial design stage. Take the
automobile. Increasingly, a buyers choice of car is based on
the software on board and its ability to manage the overall
driver and passenger experience through multiple systems
entertainment and communications, remote diagnostics, driver
and passenger safety.
This will become increasingly true as traditional products
become more like services. For example, an intelligent car will
From Features to
Experience . . .
to the Heart of the
Customer
IT will move beyond applications and software and help
product managers ride a major shift in business focus
from products and services to the way a customer feels
when using them.
BY SANDEEP KISHORE
One less obvious but crucial aspect of automobile

user experience is safe travel, and software-centric
technology is central to achieving this. For example,
many in-vehicle amenities related to telecommunications, entertainment, and gaming will have to be
redesigned so they dont create a distraction for
drivers known in the industry as distraction-free
convergence. Next-generation connected cars will
talk to each other and provide drivers with such safety
enhancers as parking assistance and lane departure
warnings. The ultimate software-driven customer
experience, of course, will be the driverless vehicle
now being tested in several states in the U.S.
which will make the issue of driver distraction
irrelevant.
Convergence of
industries in a single
product is leading
many companies to
ask what business
theyre in. It may not
be the companys
traditional business or
in fact any of the
traditional industries.
In fact, an automobile is no longer simply an automobile; its an automobile with an overlay of telecommunications, consumer electronics, and other elements of
the driver and passenger experience. This convergence of industries in a single product is leading many
companies to ask what business theyre in. It may not
be the companys traditional business or in fact any of
the traditional industries. Companies in todays
automotive industry instead will need to look at what
value they can create for customers and what
partner ecosystem they must develop to make that
happen.
Automobiles are just one of numerous products and
services in which user experience is becoming
paramount. Smart lighting in commercial airliners is
reducing the jet lag of long-haul passengers. Sensors
in homes and assisted living facilities are improving
the quality of life for elderly residents by monitoring
their well-being. Mobile telephones, with a penetration
in emerging markets that is many times higher than
that of credit or bank debit cards, are serving as
payment portals that bring financial services to
traditionally underserved populations.
Creating such experiences requires complex online
platforms that can analyze vast amounts of data to
facilitate decision making. And this is an area thats in
the CIOs area of expertise. But if the IT function is to
aggressively adopt a product development and thus
business-crucial role, it will have to think beyond
software applications and become more focused on
consumers. Collaboration between CTOs and CIOs will
have to significantly increase. And for both the CIO
and the CTO, technology will be only a means to an
end that is, an experience that will delight the
users of their products.
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know if its fan belt is likely to break in the next 50

miles. Using its 4G or LTE communication chip, it will
check the inventory at the nearest repair center, tell
you that they have the part, book an appointment for
you, and order a replacement part to replenish the
repair centers inventory.
Sandeep Kishore is an Executive Vice

President and the Global Head of Sales and
Practice for Engineering and R&D Services
at HCL Technologies. He blogs at
www.sandeepkishore.com. and tweets
regularly @skishore. He can be reached at
skishore@hcl.com.
Big Data
Will Get Small
The enormous scale of big data will keep many businesses
from realizing the tremendous value embedded in it a task
that will require bringing big data down to a manageable size.
BY VIKRAM DUVVOORI
The initial reaction, and rightfully so, is how

in the world are we going to deal with all
this?
But while much of the attention has been on
the three Vs of big data volume, velocity,
and variety the most important aspect
has been on the back burner: the actual
value to the business.
What will separate the winners from the
losers will be the ability to sift through the
mounds of new and emerging data to
uncover the few precious nuggets with
significant business value. And that will
require something that few, if any, companies have today: the ability to make big data
seem small.
As we all know, there is more and more
valuable data available to the enterprise
than ever before. But its all over the place
and in all kinds of formats. Figuring out how
to efficiently capture, process, and analyze
all that information is daunting and, at the
moment, virtually impossible which is why
companies shouldnt even try.
Voice of the Community

CIO Straight Talk Interactive on LinkedIn
One way to deal

with the deluge of
data
---
In-memory database (IMDB)

technology allows you to, on the fly,
calculate group figures in seconds
based upon transactions and
seamlessly drill all the way down to
each individual transaction to
eliminate any doubts. IMDB moves
the discussion from technology to
logic: How was the data derived
and what was the definition? To
exemplify the performance of
IMDB, the best-performing IMDB
technology I know processes 1
billion records per server and also
scales horizontally and with linear
performance. Twenty servers
process 20 billion records in 1
second. How many of your reporting systems can do that?
Lars Wikstrom, Director, Enterprise
Architect Finance IT, HSBC
Instead, were going to see sophisticated

companies creating methods for discerning
which types of incoming data are likely to have
business value. They wont form a dozen
executive committees, hold endless meetings,
and develop five-year plans. They will instead
create agile but relevant and actionable data
blueprints that, overlaid onto their business
objectives, will clarify their big data analytics
initiatives. If a priority is to enhance customer
experience, for example, they will focus only on
information that can improve the supply chain
or time to market or customer service as
appropriate. This data blueprint will be mapped
to a subset of new IT capabilities that quickly
deliver value to the business.
This doesnt mean that a tight, central group

will oversee an enterprises big data strategy
and operations. To the contrary, the owners
and stakeholders of big data efforts will expand
and change over time the CIO or CMO one
day, the COO or line of business leader the
next. Companies will collect, process, and
analyze big data in different places throughout
the organization. But in each place, they will
maintain a single-minded focus on business
alignment and value so that even the largest
amounts of information can be made relevant.
Big data success wont be a big bang for the
enterprise. Those who succeed will take an
incremental, iterative approach to unlocking its
value over time. Not every company will transform itself into the next Amazon or Google
overnight or ever nor should they.
But a health insurance company will be able to
reduce fraudulent claims. A pharmaceutical
company will be able to improve drug efficacy
and safety. Manufacturers will create predictive
supply chains. Financial service firms will
manage risk more effectively. Telecom companies will reduce customer churn. Retailers will
master real-time inventory and pricing.
Big data can effect big transformation, but one
focused step at a time.
Big data focus will be different for every

enterprise. But one thing is clear: Without that
blueprint and frequent iterations to test for
business value, there will be some big big data
disasters. Enterprises that continue to be
absorbed by the enormity of the task will
overspend on data warehousing and capacity.
The computing power required to keep pace
with the explosion of data will skyrocket.
Meanwhile, these companies will have to eat
the opportunity costs associated with spinning
their wheels on the wrong priorities. Big data
spending may not only consume the IT budget
but also become one of the businesss biggest
costs. For a look at whats ahead for those that
refuse to focus their efforts and iterate rapidly,
just look back at the multimillion-dollar ERP
failures, when companies overspent without a
value compass.
The distinction between wasted investment and
effective transformation the ability to convert
this big data opportunity into value will be
focus and agility. Thats what will make big data
small.
Vikram Duvvoori is a Corporate Vice President

and the Global Head of Transformation Services
at HCL Technologies. He can be reached at
vikramd@hcl.com.
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t the dawn of the big data era, business

leaders are being bombarded with a virtual
shock and awe campaign. The 1.8 zettabytes thats 1.8 trillion gigabytes of
information generated in 2011 will grow by a
factor of nine over the next five years,
according to IDC. Gartner predicts that the
big data market, now valued at $5 billion in
revenues annually, will explode to $53 billion
by 2016.
While much of the attention

has been on the three Vs of
big data volume, velocity,
and variety the most
important aspect has been
on the back burner: the
actual value to the business.
There isn't a single industry

in which the potential of
these technologies cannot
be realized. The challenge
we face is dening but not
limiting the art of the
possible.
For example, in the past, companies leasing and

maintaining equipment at customer locations
collected large volumes of data across a variety of
systems about equipment failures and the cost of
resolving them. Now these companies can detect
and predict failures before they happen by analyzing
historical data, identifying likely symptoms of
impending failure, and by combining all this with
real-time, machine-to-machine diagnostics. The
impact: reduced downtime and improved customer
service, avoidance of costly failures, and greater
productivity for field service technicians.
There isnt a single industry in which the potential of
these technologies cannot be realized. The
challenge we face is defining but not limiting the
IT will finally make the shift from business enabler to

business differentiator.
BY JAMES RILEY
owerful forces are exerting pressure on CIOs and IT departments

today. Companies compete in markets where structural constraints
such as the cost of entry and geographic location are greatly
diminished. Their success depends on an ability to continually differentiate their product and service offerings from those of increasingly agile
global competitors.
A new breed of truly disruptive technologies in-memory databases,
mobile computing, cloud computing, and social media presents
possibilities that simply didnt exist before. For the first time, business
is looking to IT to drive the transformation agenda, not simply to
implement it.
These technologies will fundamentally change the way we do business.
Event-driven supply chain optimization, predictive maintenance,
dynamic price optimization, and product and service differentiation
based on a segment of one are all within reach. The value of historical data will be unlocked, revealing retrospective insights that will form
the foundation of increasingly sophisticated predictive models. These
models, when augmented with a constant flow of increasingly granular
current data, will transform us all into real-time organizations.

Coming disruptions
for the CIO
--Its a combined trend: For the first
time in computing history, we are
experiencing revolution on three
fronts simultaneously the user
experience (mobile), where
processing takes place (cloud),
and what processing is taking
place (big data). That is why it
seems like we are in the midst of
so much disruption, and
opportunity, in IT.
Defining the art of the possible is a team sport,

requiring participation from the CIO, business
leaders, and, more often than not, a partner to act
as the catalyst. The right partner will bring domain
expertise allied to technical know-how and a new
perspective to help identify, prioritize, and ultimately
realize the use cases that can genuinely transform
the business.
Venturing into such new territory is not without risk.
These technologies have a high cost of entry, there
are many competing and often overlapping options
to choose from, and the skills to deploy them
effectively are scarce. Furthermore, transformational change will require effective change management to ensure a smooth transition to new organizational structures, business processes, and more.
But these risks can be managed.
The greatest risk will be to do nothing at all.
Evan Quinn, Senior Principal Analyst

(Data Management, Analytics, Big Data,
and PaaS), Enterprise Strategy Group
James Riley is a Senior Vice President

and the Global Head of Innovation for
HCL Technologies. He blogs regularly
at www.hcltech.com/blogs. He can be
reached at james.riley@hcl.com.
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The Year of the

Real-Time Enterprise
art of the possible. Historically, we have used

technology to deliver incremental changes to
well-defined business processes. It is no longer
about incremental change; it is about creating
brand-new business processes and models. CIOs
and their business partners, aware of the potential,
are feeling the pressure to leverage these technologies before their competitors do yet in many
cases they dont know where to begin. For example,
according to IDG Research, 71% of senior IT
leaders see mobile computing as transformational
or strategic to their business, yet only 18% have
developed a comprehensive mobile strategy.
ompanies today find themselves in an almost untenable position. Business cycles

are much shorter, making long-range planning a thing of the past. Changes in
technology and consumer expectations are driving companies to adapt, innovate,
and transform at an unprecedented pace. Simultaneously, the global economy
continues to languish, so there is little easy money to fund the necessary
innovation.
Outsourcing may not at first blush seem to solve this conundrum, and certainly
the current IT outsourcing model has little to offer in this regard. Thats why well
see CIOs completely rethinking their relationships with suppliers, starting with
the contract.
The recession was a wake-up call for the industry. A lot of outsourcing contracts
signed before 2006 did not allow for the dramatically changing revenue profile
that many Fortune 1000 companies experienced during the 2008 downturn.
Nor did those agreements anticipate other critical developments: shorter
business cycles; the evolving business models spawned by the rise and confluence of social media, mobile and cloud computing, and business analytics; and
the consumerization of IT, as employees dumped company BlackBerrys in favor
of their own iPhones. Trapped in rigid, traditional sourcing arrangements, CIOs
have become increasingly frustrated by their inability and the unwillingness of
incumbent IT providers to respond swiftly to these changes.
CIO Straight Talk
62
Next-generation contracts will eschew fixed-cost arrangements and instead

provide for utility-style, pay-per-use services, allowing companies to scale up or
down almost on demand. Service agreements will move away from an exclusive
Tearing Up the
Traditional Outsourcing
Contract
Fed up with agreements that put them in a straitjacket
while the world changes, companies will increasingly
demand supplier contracts that are flexible and focus
on collaboration rather than SLAs.
BY VINOD CHANDRAN
The changing nature of the outsourcing contract has structural implications for CIOs and their internal organizations. Under SLA only agreements, outsourcing governance focused almost exclusively on whether
delivered services were operating smoothly. The new agreements will
require a deeper, more collaborative relationship between CIOs and their
service providers, as well as between IT and the rest of the business. But
collaboration doesnt just happen, and many IT functions arent equipped
to capitalize on it. So enterprises will restructure their IT organizations to
better encompass this shift from managing SLAs to enabling service
providers to drive innovation and value creation. We are already witnessing customers investing in innovation councils that bring together the
business, the IT organization, and the service provider to drive a
business-focused innovation agenda.
Ultimately, CIOs will have to reenvision not only their outsourcing relationships and the contracts that govern them but also their own role. Well
see CIOs focusing less on the nitty-gritty of IT operations and more on the
core business issues of delighting customers and generating revenue. As
technology becomes increasingly ingrained in every aspect of business
operations, CIOs will be the catalysts of this shift. Theyll orchestrate the
many moving parts of new collaborative relationships. In this role, the CIO
will need a dependable partner who can rapidly execute plans that will
drive business change.
Trapped in rigid,
traditional sourcing
arrangements,
CIOs have become
increasingly
frustrated by their
inability and the
unwillingness of
incumbent IT
providers to
respond swiftly to
these changes.
CIOs will
increasingly
demand sourcing
contracts that
allow for exibility
and agility.

The move toward exible outsourcing

relationships
With [a suppliers] familiarity [with your business] comes speed. I
like to ensure that elasticity is increased as the engagement
progresses from year to year. Something like a 10% YOY
improvement in service levels to be filled by new requirements
without increased costs over, say, the first three years of the
engagement. It only stands to reason that you will not have thought
of everything when first engaging outsourcing. Rather than each
newly identified opportunity becoming a change order for additional
costs, I have had great success having them absorbed by the
increased efficiencies the outsourcer is to provide YOY. Of course
not all new work can be absorbed, but the elasticity of your
business should be accommodated by your outsourcer without
increased cost at every turn.
Ronald Blahnik, Managing Partner, Blahnik Consulting Services;
former SVP/CIO, Hudsons Bay Company
63
CIO Straight Talk
Consequently, CIOs will increasingly demand sourcing contracts that allow for
flexibility and agility. In addition to provisions for contingencies and variable
conditions, they will require greater transparency and alignment between the
service provider and the customer. The five- or ten-year fixed, black-box
contract will become an artifact of the past. Contract language will shift from
no to now, as CIOs reject inflexible providers and monolithic contracts in favor
of partners willing and able to respond to new situations on the fly.
focus on Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, to a requirement that

providers deliver business value, innovation, and a high-quality customer
experience. More and more CIOs will expect their partners to help them
not only control expenses but also invest the realized savings in the
creation of new capabilities.
Vinod Chandran is a Senior Vice President

of HCL America and the Head of
Infrastructure for HCL Technologies North
America region. He can be reached at
vchandran@hcl.com.

Mobile Computing
Ground Zero for IT Disruption

Mobile devices will accelerate the proliferation of
disruptive technologies and create for businesses able
to stay ahead of the changes big revenue opportunities.
BY NARESH NAGARAJAN
Because mobility will provide the central thread connecting businesses to

end customers, some of the major currents of IT investment today
social media, business analytics and big data, cloud computing will
converge around mobile devices. Mobility may not make billions for any one
company, but it will be the capability that jump-starts billion-dollar transformations.
I recently met with the head of the Asia-Pacific region for a leading global
food service and facilities management corporation. He came into the
meeting with one goal: to move IT to a private cloud in Singapore that
would support IT operations in 40 countries, including challenging environments in remote locations, on the assumption that the move would cut
costs and increase efficiency.
Mobility may not make billions for

any one company, but it will be the
capability that jump-starts
billion-dollar transformations.
Will tablets replace

company PCs and
laptops?
---
In another example, the CEO of a large hospital

specializing in oncology knew he wanted to apply
technology to improve the business but didnt know
where to start. What he did know was that breast
cancer was the most common disease his employees were treating. Ultimately, they deployed a
genetic test that would determine if a patient would
benefit from chemotherapy; developed a mobile
field force application for healthcare advisors with
back-end workflow integration, graphics, and
real-time content to educate and alleviate fear
among new patients; and rolled out a program
based on FaceTime a video-calling application for
Apple products that enabled patients to discuss
concerns with their caregivers and oncologists. All
three initiatives were rolled out for use on mobile
devices that were tied into the hospitals ERP
system. Revenues from that part of the business
have since grown 12 percent through an increase
in referrals.
Steven Stell, Director of IT-Americas,

IMI Cornelius
This is a growing trend, but for the

foreseeable future PCs and
laptops for non-mobile business
users will still be the logical tool of
choice. Physical security of the
devices, and the ability to
have/add more power and
computing peripherals, will keep
the PC and laptops in business for
at least the next four to six years.
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CIO Straight Talk
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64
oday, youre using it to talk to a friend about vacation plans. Tonight, youll
be using it to post a Facebook update about the house youre buying
upstate. Tomorrow, youll use it to reach a call center with a complaint
about your credit card. A single device the mobile phone in your hand
makes all that possible. It has structured data. It has unstructured data.
But more important, it provides an instantaneous connection that opens
up a myriad of opportunities for businesses (both B2B and B2C) to add to
their top lines.
But as we dug into the potential business case, we

found that the project would be expensive $15
million to achieve savings of perhaps $500,000.
And then there were all the regulatory requirements and divergent business processes to
address across the region. A better option was to
consider mobility. By mobilizing support staff
throughout the region, the company could save
more than 30 percent and increase efficiency. The
company now plans to introduce the mobile project
first and then use those savings to consider
cloud-enabling the back end.
Mobility-enabled IT changes like these, while having

a business impact similar to that of the major ERP
implementations of the past, will need to occur
many times faster. If they dont, a companys new
mobile capabilities will be a step behind competitors, even as they are launched. For instance, well
see companies demanding that their IT partners
develop, in as little as 90 days, a business case for
how such an initiative would fuel top-line growth.
This will allow them to quickly move forward with
the project or move on.
Business leaders will continue to be enamored with
social media, cloud computing, and big data
because its cool stuff. But whats really cool is
increasing customer wallet share without burning
through capital budgets. Companies will need to
stay focused on the business value generated by
mobility initiatives and not the technology itself.
Mobile technology will be increasingly amazing
but only to the extent that it allows a company to
give its customers something that will create value
for them and for the business.
Naresh Nagarajan is a Senior Vice President

and the Global Head of Customer Experience
Management and Enterprise Mobility at HCL
Technologies. He can be reached at
naresh.nagarajan@hcl.com.
Optimizing the Old to
Enable the New

Rather than immediately joining the rush to invest in
emerging technologies, smart companies will stop and
assess how their existing systems can help them ride
the new-technology wave.
Transformation will
not take place by
implementing the
latest analytics
software or social
media platform.
Thats a fairy tale.
Real transformation
will not take place in a
vacuum; it will be built
on existing systems.
BY SADAGOPAN SINGAM
That customer power will be the driving force behind a digital revolution,
one in which mobility, social media, big data, and cloud computing
converge to anticipate and meet customer needs in a hyperconnected and
personal way. The customer-driven digitization of the economy will generate
information at far greater levels of personalization, across a wider variety
of activities, and around more customer touch points than ever before.
Social networks, mobile check-ins, engagement apps, online and offline
sales transactions, customer support interactions the entire customer
experience, from brand awareness to after-market upselling, will be digital,
creating an unprecedented volume of new data.
Its no wonder that businesses will be inclined to jump headfirst into
emerging technology initiatives that promise to help them take advantage
of this new information and prepare for the customer-driven future. But
companies making such moves risk falling flat on their faces rather than
gaining a head start.
Smart companies will take a different approach,

looking back before leaping ahead to ensure that
their existing infrastructure is optimized to
exploit the new technologies. Transformation will
not take place by implementing the latest
analytics software or social media platform.
Thats a fairy tale. Real transformation will not
take place in a vacuum; it will be built on existing
systems. Those systems will have to provide a
foundation that ensures cost-effective operation
and can accommodate and enable speed, agility,
and scale. No matter how forward-looking the IT
industry is, it cannot afford to ignore the past.
At the most basic level, optimizing your IT
infrastructure will generate savings and unlock
value that can be redirected toward new
technology initiatives and innovation. A major
obstacle for a company trying to transform itself
into a customer-centric organization is flat or
reduced technology budgets. By optimizing its
current operations, the average company should
be able to cut its infrastructure budget significantly, freeing up funds for the new initiatives.
One characteristic of an optimized IT infrastructure is its alignment with business processes.
Such alignment will, among other benefits,
increase a companys speed to market. A retail
chain that wants to open ten stores in a quarter
might face a nine-month wait in terms of IT
planning and readiness. With a more flexible
infrastructure, it will be able to get there in
three months or less.
In the coming years, companies will be able to

detect changing customer needs in near real
time, interact with customers consistently, and
change product offerings on the basis of this
feedback. Cloud computing, mobility, and big
data will present IT organizations with new
options for rapidly deploying and scaling online
applications and business services. What will
separate the corporate winners from the losers
will not be whether theyre big or small but
whether theyre fast or slow.
But first, the savviest IT organizations will pause
and take the time to look back, rethink their
existing infrastructure, and rebuild it for the
customer-driven future.
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CIO Straight Talk
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66
heres no question were entering a brave new corporate world, in which

customer experience will be the only differentiator between which enterprise succeeds and which fails no matter the size of the company, the
industry it operates in, or the market it sells to. Customers will have
greater power than ever before, and they wont hesitate to assert it.
An optimized infrastructure will also enable

enterprise IT to scale vertically and horizontally
depending on demand, making it a better
foundation for the new customer-centric
technologies that will drive corporate competitiveness in the future. Theres no CEO in the
world who isnt demanding that IT address big
data analytics. Everyone is excited about
in-memory processing. But the potential benefits
wont be realized if a robust infrastructure isnt
in place that can be ramped up or down at will.
Sadagopan Singam is a Global Vice

President for Enterprise Transformation
Services at HCL Technologies. He blogs
regularly at http://123suds.blogspot.com
and tweets @suds. He can be reached at
sadagopan.s@hcl.com.
Read CIO Straight Talk on your laptop, iPad,

iPhone or other mobile device.
http://magazine.straighttalkonline.com/ciostraighttalk_issue3
Join the conversation on
intera tive
CIO Straight Talk Interactive is a LinkedIn
community of more than 1,000 CIOs and other
senior IT executives. The group, sponsored by HCL
Technologies, offers community discussions,
interactive webinars, and idea-driven articles and
videos, which in turn provide practitioner insights on
topics ranging from the adoption of emerging
technologies to IT-driven business transformation to
the reinvention of the CIO role.
To join the community, scan the QR code or visit
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Highlights from Issue Number 2

CIO Straight Talk

SO WHAT DO CIOs WANT?

SOLUTION SPOTLIGHT: Enterprise Mobility

A Rare Business Leadership

Read all issues of CIO Straight Talk at

From Features to Experience . . .

A Rare Business Leadership Opportunity for CIOs

Big Data Will Get Small

Who Owns What?

Ian Cohen, Group CIO, Jardine Lloyd Thompson

Using IT to Achieve Business

Andy Nallappan, CIO, Avago Technologies

Simon Hollins, CIO, EMI Music

The Buy-In Challenge

The Year of the Real-Time

A Conversation with Bill Inmon

How to Get Your IT Budget to

The Unexpected Driver of

The New Model Behind the

Tearing Up the Traditional

The Year of the CIOs?

Views from members of the

Optimizing the Old to

Editorial Advisory Board Anant Gupta, Shami Khorana,

Perhaps most important, its a community

Printing Quality Printing, Pittseld MA

The CIO Straight Talk Interactive group on LinkedIn is a

CIO Straight Talk is a periodical published by HCL Technologies (HCLT)

CIO Straight Talk Interactive members (prospective

Welcome to the third issue of CIO Straight Talk.

Community Director Mishtun Chatterjee

Digital Innoraft Solutions

CIO Straight Talk

As you may know, CIO Straight Talk is more than a

Art Director Harsh Khaneja

A Rare Business Leadership Opportunity for CIOs

Big data is the buzzword du jour in IT circles, where it appears to have

CIO Straight Talk

edged out cloud computing in frequency of appearance on the agendas of

But CIOs could embrace, standardize, and lead the use

testing with a testing cycle taking many months. So, if

Rather than resist the use of external data, CIOs can

Many industries, government services, and nonprofit

Even seemingly anonymous data

New Views of Data

The accuracy of the data supplied

CIO Straight Talk

But the concept predated the term. Just about anyone

Short History of Big Data

1944 Fremont Rider, Wesleyan

Youll find a wide variety of

1983 Ithiel de Sola Pool, looking at

1961 Derek Price concludes that the

1997 Michael Cox and David

1971 Arthur Miller writes inThe

1997 Michael Lesk concludes that in

1975 Japans Ministry of Posts and

1998 K.G. Coffman and Andrew

1980 I.A. Tjomsland asserts at a

2000 Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

1981 The Hungarian Central Statistics

2001 Doug Laney publishes a

2007 IDC estimates that in 2006, the