FT.com / Technology - What’s on CIO wishlists?

FT.com / Technology - What’s on CIO wishlists?

What’s on CIO wishlists?
By Alan Cane

Published: December 5 2007 04:40 | Last updated: December 5 2007 04:40

Aligning technology with the business, while dealing with the pressure on space and power in the data centre and addressing green issues are the priorities for many chief information officers next year.

Security is now so critical that it automatically figures near the top of every agenda. Steven Bandrowczak, CIO for Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications manufacturer, points out that a security contingency plan is there to prevent a breach of security that can badly damage a brand.

A thoroughly unscientific straw poll of CIOs, principally from the US and UK, revealed, nevertheless, that a few other themes come to the fore. Steve Bozzo, CIO of New York based online florist 1-800-Flowers.com, places business alignment at the top of his list.

“For 2008, as always,” he says, “companies will be most successful if IT is strongly aligned with the businesses it supports” going on to point out that companies must migrate to an “agile” architecture if they are to bring products to market that will have a meaningful impact on earnings and revenue: “Migrating to a Services Oriented Architecture will be the only way to accomplish this.”

This is in line with preliminary findings on 2008 priorities by research firm Gartner, which shows CIOs seeking to focus on aligning IT with growth and innovation. “Looking at costs is straightforward but prioritising growth and innovation is much more challenging,” says Dave Aron, a Gartner analyst looking at CIO issues.

Guy Lidbetter, chief technology officer for the big European computing services group Atos Origin, agrees, noting that the CIO agenda is being driven by a need for managed innovation.

He emphasises the importance of demonstrating to managers the value that IT investments bring to the business and ensuring IT is agile enough to support changing business needs. “In the context of infrastructure, standardisation, virtualisation and automation will deliver. In applications, enterprise architecture, service-oriented architecture and – potentially – Web 2.0 and collaboration will deliver.”

Note how quickly methodologies such as “agility” – developing software in a quicker, less formal way – and “service-oriented architecture” – ways of persuading legacy systems to work with the smart, new stuff – have moved from “might have” to “must have”.

Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer of Savvis, a US-managed service group, says, however, that to make the most of virtualisation, businesses need to invest in a secure and robust IT infrastructure. He says: “Both vendors and organisations are embracing new, virtualised technologies to yield more flexible and cost effective solutions. As it continues to mature, I predict it will become less of a differentiator for businesses and more of a commodity.”

Rorie Devine, chief technology officer for the online gambling organisation Betfair, concurs: “Virtualisation is definitely part of the mainstream now.”

Mr Devine’s chief priority next year will be to execute the business plan while helping to shape the business strategy. The processing load will be substantial: “The number of transactions we process will again be more than all the other years of our existence added together.”

Web 2.0 and social networking may be becoming candidates for the mainstream, although some CIOs have their reservations. Bob Worrall, for example, CIO of Sun Microsystems, reckons to have talked to well over 100 of his contemporaries over the past year and believes that social networking represents a new threat. “There is a lot of information out there on blogs and wiki, but there is no easy way to harvest that information and make it available to the organisation” he says.

Sun, however, has created a virtual Californian building in cyberspace and is experimenting with its use as a meeting place for remote staff.

Mr Worrall says that every CIO is struggling with the problem of power and space in the data centre. Sun itself is downsizing from seven corporate data centres to three, aided by a combination of new, more powerful servers based on novel chip technology and virtualisation – running several operating systems and/or applications on the same server.

Brian Jones, a former CIO for both the spirits group Allied Domecq and Scottish Power, says that IT in large companies often grows in an uncontrolled fashion. “There is often a need to remove the complexity that has grown up over time and set a simplification agenda directly linked to the objectives of the business overall,” he says, arguing that this latter aim can often be lost if the transformation is poorly focused.

He expects pressure on IT costs will not ease and that CIOs will be forced to balance the need for innovation against tightening budgets. “One trick that CIOs are going to have to learn, if they have not already, is how to take advantage of the latent value in their suppliers.” Suppliers have often spent millions on research and development which could benefit a company. While at Allied Domecq, for example, he formed a partnership with the telecommunications group that transformed Allied’s messy, “basket case” of a communications network, while reducing costs by £3m a year.

Mr Bandrowczak of Nortel, is using virtualisation and centralisation to get more efficiencies out of the IT assets the company already has and the investments it has already made. “That’s my first big trend. Second is how to integrate all these disparate and separate technologies. One trend I am driving at Nortel is unified messaging, handling voice, text and fax in one mailbox, so it can be retrieved by any device. Moving between applications causes inefficiencies – I call it business latency.”

His ambition is to combine a single log-on with authentication, so that if an individual was on the road and logged on, and another individual in the company wanted to share information with them, the system would indicate he or she was travelling and therefore available only by SMS but that they had the time to discuss that particular issue. “But we’re not there yet,” Mr Bandrowczak says.

RM, the supplier of IT to UK schools, places collaboration and mobility at the top of its list. Chris Clements, the CIO comments: “Our vision for collaboration goes beyond our employees and includes our customers. We have a large candidate list of opportunities to add value to our core systems by providing tools that will enable customers directly to influence product development and enable them to do business at any time of the school day that is convenient to them. One of the biggest challenges is to evaluate Web 2.0 opportunities and select those which will add real value to the business.”

And the green agenda? A study by Symantec (see “Vendors’ View”, Page 4) suggests organisations are not yet successfully rolling out green centres.

But the bandwagon is on the move. The consultancy Quocirca thinks companies will finally make better use of advanced communications capabilities such as web 2.0 and videoconferencing to reduce travel. But it concludes a little wearily that style will defeat substance in some cases. “There will still be those who want to be seen to be green but who do not really take the issue on board and resort to half measures such as carbon off-setting.”

One thing all those questioned agreed on, however, was that it is going to be an interesting year.

CIO priorities, based on Alan Cane’s informal straw poll:

1 Business alignment and strategy
2 Hiring and retaining the best staff
3 IT innovation/new methodologies
4 Security
5 Collaboration technologies
6 Controlling costs
7 Compliance and regulation
8 Virtualisation
9 Customer service
10 Mobility (Green issues came 11th)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007