CIO June 1 2008 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

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From The Editor-in-Chief

Sometimes I’m tired, sometimes I’m shot Sometimes I don’t know how much more I’ve got Maybe I’m headed over the hill Maybe I’ve set myself up for the kill — Billy Joel (‘I Go To Extremes’)

A year ago, I’d asked in this column why a CIO’s day never seemed to end and

The Case of Mental Fatigue Denying stress is easy. But, living with denial isn’t.

how a CIO’s role could even be strategic if he’s in office at 8.30 a.m and left at 2.30 a.m., month after month through a rollout?A CIO told me then that the stress levels that many of his peers faced were a result of their playing technologically-skilled entertainers, providing a high-energy show — juggling multiple roles and hats in the process. But stress is not just about working long hours or even donning multiple hats. It can come from having too much to do as it can from Strangely, CIOs are given to having too little to deliver. understand that stress comes At a basic level, it’s about how we react with territory and needs to external circumstance. Critically, the to be accepted. response is internal. If you’re in a high life condition, you gear up to take on a challenge. However, if you’ve been facing high levels of stress for an extended period, chances are that you will knuckle under. And, with it come feelings of powerlessness, irritability, fear, anxiety, headaches, and fatigue. The strange soup of hormones that stressful situations trigger off do more than impact our health, though they do lead to diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma, among other ailments. Unrelenting stress also directly impacts the brain, messing up memory, concentration and in turn judgment and decision making. Enough to make one decide to change something, right? But, for some strange reason, CIOs and other senior executives are given to understand that stress comes with territory and needs to be accepted. What rot! This is not about what separates the men from the boys. Denial is easy. But, living with denial isn’t. This is also about admitting that the stress response is a ‘normal reaction by a normal person to an abnormal situation’. From that acknowledgement, will flow the answers to fixing your unique issues at work and in life. In this fortnight’s cover feature (Page 35) a dozen CIOs share their moments of epiphany and how they shake off work-related stress. I trust you will find some learning here. Write in and let me know your thoughts.

Vijay Ramachandran Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in 2

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content ntt n june 1 2008‑ | ‑Vol/3‑ | ‑issue/14

Twelve IT leaders share their stories of near burn-out, of how they cope with stress and the importance of putting stress in perspective.

CIO Career

COVER STORY | WhAT, mE STRESSED? | 35 I P hoto B y Sr SrIV IVat atS S a ShanDI Shan DIlya lya

Admitting that you have a problem is the first step to helping yourself, your family and your organization. Feature by Team CIO

3 5

Virtualization YOuR VIRTuAL STATE | 47 Users are working hard to figure out how far they can push virtual servers, according to CIO’s first survey on virtualization. Feature By Laurianne mcLaughlin

Career mE, mYSELF & I | 50 Five women leaders share advice for getting recognition — tips that work for everyone.

CoVE Co VEr: r: DESI DESIgn gn B y BI BIn n ES h S r EED EEDharan haran

Feature By Esther Schindler

Customer Service YOuR CuSTOmERS ARE TALkIng ABOuT YOu | 54 More CIOs are deploying text analytics technology to examine customer comments on websites and surveys. Feature By Stephanie Overby

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content

(cont.) departments Trendlines | 11

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Essential Technology | 57 Document Handling| Fit to Print

By Meredith Levinson Internet| The Social Networking Dilemma By Bernard Golden

From the Editor-in-Chief | 2 The Case of Mental Fatigue

By Vijay Ramachandran

NOW ONLINE

2 4

For more opinions, features, analyses and updates, log on to our companion website and discover content designed to help you and your organization deploy IT strategically. Go to www.cio.in

c o.in

Peer-to-Peer developing your commercial Instincts | 24 To develop commercial orientation, the CIO of FirstGroup had to rethink risk, ROI, idea ownership and what the CIO really has to offer.

5 7

Column By Darin Brumby

Applied Insight Compliance And the cio | 28 Here’s how to design and implement an effective compliance program. Column By Matt Podowitz & Brian Tretick

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ADVISORY BOARD

Advertiser Index

Abnash Singh Publisher Louis D’Mello Associate Publisher Alok Anand

Editoria l Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran

Resident Editor Rahul Neel Mani assistant editors Balaji Narasimhan

Gunjan Trivedi Kanika Goswami

President, IT Operations Center of Excellence, UCB Pharma

ADC Krone

Alaganandan Balaraman Vice President, Britannia Industries Alok Kumar

AMD

APC

Global Head-Internal IT, Tata Consultancy Services Anwer Bagdadi Senior VP & CTO, CFC International India Services

Chief COPY EDITOR Sunil Shah Copy Editor Shardha Subramanian

Arun Gupta

Avaya

22 & 23

Canon

Customer Care Associate & CTO, Shopper’s Stop Des ign & Production

Creative Director Jayan K Narayanan

Lead Visualizer Binesh Sreedharan Lead Designers Vikas Kapoor, Anil V K

Vinoj K N, Suresh Nair Girish A V (Multimedia) SENIOR Designers Jinan K Vijayan, Jithesh C C

Unnikrishnan A V Sani Mani (Multimedia) Designers M M Shanith, Anil T, Siju P

Arvind Tawde VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra Ashish K. Chauhan President & CIO — IT Applications, Reliance Industries

Production Manager T K Karunakaran

Fujitsu

Chinar S. Deshpande CEO, Creative IT India Dr. Jai Menon Group CIO Bharti Enterprise & Director (Customer Service

DY. Production Manager T K Jayadeep

& IT), Bharti Airtel

Ma rk eti ng and Sa l es VP Sales (Print) Naveen Chand Singh VP Sales (Events) Sudhir Kamath GENERAL Manager Nitin Walia Assistant Manager Sukanya Saikia Marketing Siddharth Singh, Priyanka Patrao, Disha Gaur Bangalore Mahantesh Godi Santosh Malleswara Ashish Kumar Kumarjeet Bhattacharjee B.N Raghavendra Delhi Pranav Saran, Saurabh Jain, Rajesh Kandari Gagandeep Kaiser Mumbai Parul Singh, Rishi Kapoor, Hafeez Shaikh Japan Tomoko Fujikawa USA Larry Arthur; Jo Ben-Atar

Manish Choksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints

IBM

25 & IBC

Intel

Interface

M.D. Agrawal Chief Manager (IT), BPCL Rajeev Shirodkar CIO, Future Generali India Life Insurance Rajesh Uppal

Itanium

8&9

Chief GM IT & Distribution, Maruti Udyog Prof. R.T. Krishnan Jamuna Raghavan Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship,

Microsoft

IFC

IIM-Bangalore S. Gopalakrishnan

Nortel

CEO & Managing Director, Infosys Technologies Prof. S. Sadagopan

Events VP Rupesh Sreedharan Managers Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya Pooja Chhabra

C.N. Ram Head–IT, HDFC Bank

P C Anoop, Prasanth T R Photography Srivatsa Shandilya

Emerson

Director, IIIT-Bangalore S.R. Balasubramnian Exec. VP (IT & Corp. Development), Godfrey Phillips

SAS

Xerox

Satish Das CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions Sivarama Krishnan All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, 10th Floor, Vayudooth Chambers, 15–16, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore 560 001, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027. Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

Executive Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers

This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

Dr. Sridhar Mitta MD & CTO, e4e S.S. Mathur GM–IT, Centre for Railway Information Systems Sunil Mehta Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT V.V.R. Babu Group CIO, ITC

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SaleS StyleS that a at Get Yo Y u GrowlinG When Craig Urizzola, CIO at Saladino's, a food service distributor, decided to make a seven-figure investment in an ERP system, he contacted his reseller to order hardware. "We told them exactly what we wanted. We said, 'We don't need SANs or clustering,'" he says. "But they came back with SANs and 10 more servers than we asked for. They just don't listen." That IT salespeople don't listen is a familiar refrain. Still, CIOs can't live without them. You need them to execute transactions, offer advice and suggestions, and give you a heads up about products that may solve real business problems. Here are sales archetypes that drive seasoned IT executives crazy: The Yes Man This is the type who oversells his product, promising you the moon and delivering

I T S T r aT e g y

nothing but trouble. He's known to say, "Sure! It will do that and unify all your systems and make everything run nice and smooth. And, it also cures baldness." (We're kidding about the last one — only. ) The sales rep might simply not know if his product meets your needs, but he's afraid to admit it, so he just nods and says yes to whatever you ask. "A lot of salespeople pretend to know our business and end up giving us stuff we don't need," says Joshua Koppel, assistant director of IT at the Chicago Department of Revenue. He adds that salespeople also gloss over compatibility and integration issues. "We end up tweaking and tweaking, and that costs money," says Koppel. The Armageddon Evangelist "Some [salespeople] present the doomsday approach, like you need to buy their service

Quick take

hot

unexpected

or product or something bad will happen," says Katie Goodbaudy, technical support specialist at Airgas Nor Pac. That's called spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), and often involves allusions to a competitor's products or some nebulous security vulnerability. Goodbaudy says she's wary of salespeople trying to upsell her by mentioning trumped-up security weaknesses. (Continued on Page 12)

IllUStratIon by anIl t

new

S. Narayanan on Mobility M o b I l I T y Mobility presents special pain points for CIOs, who have to deal with issues like security and compatibility. Balaji Narasimhan spoke to S. Narayanan, group IT manager — infrastructure and security, Hindustan Unilever and this how he manages those challenges:

through the device. Depending on the platform, an anti-virus scan is run — along with regular patching of the operating system. There are other issues where the security of data and passwords — especially if the device is lost — is concerned. However, on some platforms, both the device and the data can be disabled centrally.

What are the hidden costs of mobility? Hidden costs are associated with expensive phone models, the development of specific and customized applications, and a separate support structure for applications, phones, and software. VPN applications to secure connections to enterprise networks is another element that adds to hidden costs, along with increases in operational costs on GPRS and roaming.

How important is battery life? It is not a constraint for knowledge workers. We have given people on the field an additional battery or recharge unit for those who really require them.

How do you ensure security? Securing mobile devices is a challenge. A VPN client is used to securely connect to the enterprise network

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How do you manage servicing? We have service agreements and SLAs in place with vendors. These SLAs are meant to handle both the servicing of devices as well ensure a supply of spare parts. Spare devices also come in handy.

S. Narayanan REAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8

Do You Need a VMO?

Vendor management offices (VMO) help enterprises manage their deliverables better and provide greater value to IT users and the enterprise as a whole. So, should enterprises have a vendor management office to interact with vendors? Balaji Narasimhan spoke to some of your peers and this is what they had to say: IT

ManageMenT

"Managing multiple vendors efficiently is a challenge. We have appointed a VMO, who is responsible for SLA-based availability of our services."

TrendlIneS

arnab biswas CIo, oxigen

"Our VMO chooses the right vendor, based on various parameters. They help us acquire and use green technology. They also help us manage the legalities of our interactions with our vendors." shikha rai assistant Director-It, t, Canon t

"A VMO is always good for defining SLAs, monitoring

performance, and the contribution of vendors. It also helps give price advantages to the organization." Jayachandran b technical Director t eSecurity audit

Lend your

Voice

Write to editor@cio.in 12

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Sales Pitch Buzz (Continue from Page 11) But Saladino's Urizzola says he understands how some IT buyers might fall into the scare trap. "If you don't know what you're doing, you might spend more money than you have to," he says. The Stalker Sure, salespeople need to be tenacious to do their jobs. After all, their pay is usually based on what they sell. But the stalker goes too far. And in the process, he alienates potential customers. After being harangued by a persistent wireless service provider, Goodbaudy says the only thing on her mind was "What can I say to get this guy off the phone?" Relentlessness is a big turn-off, she says, adding that salespeople will often "say anything to get what they want." Mr. Know-It-All The salesperson who thinks he has all the answers is particularly annoying. His knowledge is doubtful but he's never at a loss for words. He won't admit that he can't answer your question, so he often responds like a slippery politician, talking around the question endlessly without providing any real detail. "I'm a technical person, so I listen to detail, but a lot of these guys speak in boilerplate," says Koppel. "I like it when someone says, 'I don't know, but I'll find out and get back to you.'" Cousin Clueless The flip side of Mr. Know-It-All is the salesperson who clearly hasn't done his homework, knows nothing about your business and comes to meetings unprepared. "I've dealt with reps that don't know what they're doing, and are clearly dealing from a script," says Goodbaudy. "Hardware resellers don't seem to do any homework and don't seem to care what we do," adds Urizzola. Maybe it's because hardware is more of a commodity, but the unresearched approach doesn't help grease the wheels of commerce. The Entourage This is the sales rep plus posse. He shows up at meetings with a large team of co-workers with the intention of upselling you. Larry Pritchard, CIO at Schaeffler Group North America, refers to this as "non-value-added overhead." CIOs say that this tactic rarely succeeds. "My team has already defined our requirements and we've talked to the rep, so now we've got to shut [the upsell team] down," says Pritchard. Koppel recalls when for a Rs 4 lakh purchase the vendor showed up with nine associates. "I was wondering how much of what I'm paying is to support the nine guys in suits," he says. Fighting Back Technology may change, but human nature is constant. So CIOs say that there's no substitute for due diligence â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and experience. "Salespeople have remained pretty much the same over the years," says Koppel. "But every time I see a new trick, I file it away." It also helps to have your baloney meter on high alert. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Lisa DiCarlo

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Forrester: IT Must Prove Need for Disaster Recovery Tools

trendlines

Dis a st e r recovery Even though more than a quarter of companies have faced a disaster over the past five years, according to Forrester Research, IT managers must still do a better job at convincing business leaders to invest in disaster recovery systems. Forrester analyst Stephanie Balarous said managers must work to convince corporate executives that disaster recovery is not simply an 'insurance policy', but can boost operational efficiency by protecting systems against potential failures. A Forrester survey of 250 disaster recovery professionals last October found that during the five-year period, 27 percent of companies were forced to declare at least one disaster, which the researcher defines as an event that requires activation of a disaster recovery plan. "IT knows their [systems] are vulnerable and it keeps them up at night," Balarous said. "They want to do

something about it but it's very hard to get funding for disaster recovery because you can't necessarily use models like ROI and TCO." She suggested that companies consider disaster recovery investment as a rolling upgrade that consistently augments existing infrastructure and application investments rather than a one-time event that can be delayed. Balarous said an egregious mistake made by businesses is to have a 'false sense of security' by considering the personal risk of a disaster based upon geography and the likelihood of enduring a catastrophic event such as a hurricane, flood, or earthquake. In the Forrester survey, respondents blamed most disasters on non-natural disruptions and incidents. For example, 42 percent of respondents said power failure was the most common cause of declared disasters and downtime, while

32 percent cited hardware failure and 21 percent network failure. Forrester recommends that IT managers sit down with corporate department heads to map out how an outage â&#x20AC;&#x201D; whether temporary or extended â&#x20AC;&#x201D; would affect operations, customers and revenues. From that, the managers should build a business report quantifying the risks, and what tools are needed to meet those risks. "It's much easier to get [disaster recovery] funding when you go to a business manager and say 'we're going to lose $300,000 an hour if this application goes down,' rather than 'I need a close to $500 to buy replication software," remarked Balarous. Forrester also suggested that IT managers position disaster-recovery preparedness as a competitive advantage. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Brian Fonseca

Hanging Up On Landline The cell phone has finally passed the landline as the hardest communication technology for people to give up. It also beat out the Internet, television, e-mail and the BlackBerry (or other wireless e-mail devices).

People say it would be harder to give up:

51%

45%

43%

37.5%

Internet

Television

E-mail

40%

36%

2007 Infograp hics BY pc an oo p

Cellphone

2002

38%

47%

35%

Landline Telephone

63%

BlackBerry

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

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BY K r I ST I n bu r na M

why hy it Modernization Should Be on Your radar

TrendlIneS

if it modernization isn't a top priority at your organization this year, it should be, according to a recent report from consultancy Gartner. The reason? By 2010, more than a third of all application projects will be driven by the need to deal with technology or skills obsolescence, according to the report. Gartner defines IT modernization as a movement that recognizes the strategies for and approaches to managing the evolution of business processes and applications, and supporting technology portfolios for optimized value, cost and risk objectives. To achieve that goal, CIOs need to address strategic planning capabilities and focus them on IT asset modernization. Three main factors drive the need to modernize now, says Dale Vecchio, research VP in application governance and strategy at Gartner. The most significant is the skills crisis. "It's a big deal. It's the first time a generational shift in developers and consumers of IT has been felt," he says. "Baby boomer retirement is becoming real. These retirements impact the availability of skills, and CIOs will have difficulty filling those open slots." Other factors include the agility gap (IT's ability to respond to business demands) and portfolio diversity (managing too many systems, resulting in additional costs). Digital natives brought up on Facebook, IM and the Internet are another factor. These employees have a different expectation of how IT systems should work, says Vecchio. Today's systems, he says, aren't necessarily built for that. So how do you know if your organization needs to modernize now? Review the status of your long-term strategic plan. If your IT management team has weak or nonexistent processes for keeping up with and replacing systems, IT modernization should be on your radar.

Best Practices Drive the agenda. As CIO, expect to drive the discussion around IT modernization directly, using the full resources of the IT management team. Gather information. Identify key asset portfolios across the IT domain, and assign management responsibility across the IT management team for each asset portfolio. Identify a point person. Find the best individual to take responsibility for comprehensive IT planning across all portfolios. Make this person a direct report. Get the big picture. Organize an offsite planning session where asset owners can explain the IT maturity and modernization issues inside their own portfolios.

IT Modernization Moves up As Issues Mount UP to

30%

of employees with IT legacy skills will be eligible to retire in the next three years. At the same time, many artifacts (old programs, databases, platforms, etc.) will need to be replaced between 2008 and 2015.

CIOs list legacy modernization, upgrades or replacements as their

no.4 priority for 2008. In 2006 it ranked No. 10.

Source: gartner

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Finding the True Processor

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The researchers use a pulse of light from a laser similar to the ones used in laser eye surgery, because it heats only a thin top layer of the flawed structures, which are made of semiconductors and metals, and causes no damage to whatever is beneath it. They designed the pulse so it melts only semiconductor and metal materials and leaves other parts of the chip untouched, the university reported. Chou also noted that he placed a thin quartz plate on top of the melting structures to guide the liquid flow. The plate prevents the molten structure from widening, while keeping its top flat and sides vertical. In one experiment, it made the edges of 70 nanometer-wide chromium lines more than five times smoother, according to Chou. "We are able to achieve a precision and improvement far beyond what was previously thought achievable," said Chou. "What we propose... is a paradigm shift. Rather than struggle to improve fabrication methods, we could simply fix the defects after fabrication. And fixing the defects could be automatic — a process of self-perfection." The next step for the Princeton researchers will be to try out this new technique on 8-in. wafers, the university reported. —By Sharon Gaudin

Illustration by BINESH SREEDHARAN

Researchers at Princeton University say they have found a way to literally melt away miniscule defects in computer chips, a discovery that could help manufacturers build more powerful processors. As chips get smaller and smaller, tiny defects in shapes, lines and dots that are etched into them can ruin performance. If the nanostructures aren't straight, thin and tall in integrated circuits, for example, it could cause current leakage and voltage fluctuation. "These chip defects pose serious roadblocks to future advances in many industries," said Stephen Chou, Princeton's Joseph C. Elgin Professor of Engineering. Chou worked with graduate student Qiangfei Xia on the research project. By getting rid of the tiny flaws, chip makers could create even smaller and more powerful processors, which, in turn, could mean smaller and more powerful devices. Chou and Xia's effort did not focus on finding ways to create chips with no flaws, but on ways to automatically erase existing ones. The process, which the inventors call Self-Perfection by Liquefaction, is designed to melt structures on the chip in a fraction of a millionth of a second — just long enough for the resulting flow of liquid to be guided so it re-solidifies into the proper shapes.

C P Us

Reducing Costs Harder Than Security Conquering IT security is a breeze for CIOs, according to IDC. The IDC Annual Forecast for Management report surveyed 363 IT executives from Australia (254 respondents) and New Zealand (109 respondents) across industries including finance, distribution, leisure and the public sector. Information security was rated last place in the Top 10 challenges for CIOs. Threats targeting the application layer were cited as the biggest concern (36 percent), while spyware (16 percent) was rated as a bigger threat than disgruntled employees, remote access, and mobile devices. The CIOs top priority for the next 12 months was reducing costs and addressing a lack of resources. This was followed by meeting user Study

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expectations and developing effective business cases. The top four IT investments for the next year will be in collaborative technologies and knowledge management; systems infrastructure; back office applications; and business intelligence. Maintenance fees were unsurprisingly identified as the biggest IT expense by almost 35 percent of respondents. The figures in the report suggest a slight increase in expenditure since last year. Hardware was the second biggest cost chewing up 23 percent of budgets, followed by software and then network costs. Outsourcing was rated the fifth biggest expense with costs set to continue to rise incrementally from 2007 to 2009. IT expenditure has doubled in five years, according to IDC. Business

splurges about 6.2 percent of operating expenses on technology, up from 3 percent in 2003, a figure which remained flat since 1996, with the exception of a .8 percent rise during the dotcom boom. CIOs will allocate budgets to document management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and workflow management systems. The top five hottest skills, according to respondents, are networking, IT service management, help desk, and enterprise applications. More staff are leaving the enterprise than smaller businesses, according to figures which show an average employee turnover of 8 percent.

—By Darren Pauli Vol/3 | ISSUE/14

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'Hyperconnected' Going on 16

Stepping Out of Theory

Il lustrat ion by pc an oo p

trendlines

M e m o r y Researchers at HP have developed a working unit of a memory circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it has retained. The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events. For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave the heating time for different food types based on the information it has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP. A memristor circuit requires lower voltage and less time to turn on than competitive memory like DRAM and flash, Williams said. "Because it [uses] less voltage and less time, of course, it uses much less power," Williams said. Denser cells also allow memristor circuits to store more data than flash memory. Memristor is the fourth fundamental circuit element, joining the other three — resistor, capacitor and inductor — that have been known for 150 years, Williams said. The element has properties that cannot be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements, Williams said. "It is as fundamental to electronic engineering as a chemical element is to chemistry or an electron is to physics," he said. In a 1971 academic paper, Leon Chua, a mathematician and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote that memristor would have properties similar to a synapse in a brain. HP is not going to reproduce all the functions of a brain in memristor, but the company is trying to build a relatively simple computing machine that operates on a different principle from today's computers, Williams said. Although the concept of memristor has existed for a while, the memory prototype is an academic device that will first work its way to academia. It could hit the commercial semiconductor market in five years, Williams said. —By Agam Shah

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I n t e r n e t Sixteen percent of workers across the world are 'hyperconnected' — using a minimum of seven devices for work and personal access plus at least nine applications like IM, text messaging and Web conferencing says a recent IDC study. The survey found that 36 percent are 'increasingly connected' by using a minimum of four devices for work and personal access to six or more apps. But these users will soon join the ranks of the 'hyperconnected', spurring a 40 percent growth in that category in five years, says IDC. This trend will create challenges for enterprises in managing new tools of connectivity while providing information reliably, and ensuring that this connectivity is productive, IDC states. Survey questions covered topics such as how many devices and applications an individual used, where they use them most frequently and what time of day. The survey also measured respondents' attitudes to current communications technology and assessments of how widely they adopt them for personal and business use. The study also found that: At 64 percent, Latin America has the largest percentage of hyper/increasingly connected. Asia Pacific has 59 percent, Europe 50 percent, and North America has 44 percent Europe and the Middle East rely heavily on instant and text messaging in business . Over 50 percent of EMEA respondents — more than twice the number of North American respondents — said they use instant and text messaging for business. Phones are more important than wallets and keys . When asked which item people would take if they had to leave the house for 24 hours, more than 38 percent of respondents chose their mobile phone over their wallet, keys, laptop and MP3 player. The hyperconnecteds preferred their laptops. Social network adoption is growing in the enterprise. More than one in three people use social networks and online communities for business communication, with Central America/Latin America workers leading the world. Enterprises are struggling with disparate communications. Nearly one in five respondents found it hard to manage multiple disparate sources of communication. Users in the finance and high-tech segments are the most dissatisfied with the way their companies manage multiple communications sources. Hyperconnectivity varies by industry , from 9 percent of respondents in healthcare to 25 percent in high tech and 21 percent in finance industries. Seventy percent of respondents connect to the Internet at home with more than one device. In Asia Pacific that number is 80 percent. Nearly 80 percent of 18 to 34 year olds connect to the Internet at home with more than one device. —By Jim Duffy

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Darin Brumby â&#x20AC;&#x201A;

Peer-to-Peer

How to Sharpen Your Commercial Instincts To develop a commercial orientation, the CIO of FirstGroup had to rethink risk, ROI, idea ownership and what the CIO really has to offer.

Illustration by MM Shanith

nformation technology is one of the only professions where you can reach the pinnacle of your career as a CIO of a major organization and still have significant weaknesses in critical leadership competencies. Because of these weaknesses, we don't represent a consistent brand to our customers. The CEO brand stands for strategy and execution, and it commands a degree of trust from day one. The CFO stands for financial excellence. But what does the CIO brand stand for? One of the ways we become top performers as business strategists, transformation experts, effective managers of people and masters of our IT domain is to hone our commercial instincts. We should be good at finding moneymaking opportunities for our organizations. Most of us (including me) become CIOs having had little experience with identifying and capitalizing on commercial opportunities. Since I was formerly a military officer, my distinctive strengths are in team leadership, and I took these strengths with me to IT-related roles where I had a strong passion. I didn't have a solid commercial orientation and experience in managing risk effectively. In this way, as a beginning IT manager, I had skills that corresponded precisely to the way respondents to this year's State of the CIO survey rated themselves on their proficiency in 10 leadership competencies. But, all 10 competencies are essential for a CIO who wants to transform the business by finding, developing and executing innovations that increase revenue opportunities. Innovating to increase revenue and improve productivity was among my key goals while I was at FirstGroup, the largest surface transportation company in the UK and now in the US. 24

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Darin Brumby

Peer-to-Peer

Here's an example: when FirstGroup changed its organizational structure from one of multiple operating companies to a federal structure, IT identified the possibility of managing spare parts for bus fleets (part of our engineering function) in a more coherent way across the country. We asked why we needed to have multiple parts stores around the country, and why we purchased replacement parts for buses that were still under warranty (in essence, paying for the parts twice). We stood to save a lot of money if we improved productivity and compliance. The technology component for this initiative was a single countrywide ERP platform based on SAP. From a commercial perspective, we thought of information within the system as currency that we put in the hands of key business decision makers. Today, the same system is used to procure new goods and services. It has enabled executives to understand the company's spending in detail, to leverage economies of scale and to improve cash flow management.

business that the disciplines of project management would enable the business to achieve better commercial results. But if we had to use normal business case metrics to justify it, it might never have gotten off the ground. This is not to say that such well-tested approaches are not necessary, but that you (and your company) should be open to the notion that some of the best commercial ideas may fall outside the criteria you use to assess business-as-usual activities.

The Importance of Marketing I also realized that marketing skills are essential to a commercial orientation. I must be able to showcase a business

No one puts constraints around IT's capability as much as we do ourselves. If you want to exercise business leadership â&#x20AC;&#x201D; no one's going to stop you.

Rethinking Risk To achieve a better commercial orientation, I had to start by understanding more about risk. If you want to bring in more revenue or reduce the cost basis of operations, and if you want to be a profit center, you have to understand enterprise risk management. I see a lot of risk-averse behavior in IT leaders. This attitude can stifle creative thinking and the ability to gain advantage over your competition. For example, we overhauled the legacy IT infrastructure at FirstGroup. This effort was initially seen as a risky technology project, and many questioned whether it needed to be done at all. But the implementation of this global infrastructure model was a key component of the five-year IT strategic business plan. It was a foundation layer upon which we could rationalize about 300 different and redundant business systems to a core set of applications based on a common architecture. Championing changes of such size and complexity means you must be prepared to educate your business on the risk of doing nothing versus the risk of doing something. In this case, doing nothing would not only have perpetuated escalating development and maintenance costs; the outdated infrastructure would have limited our ability to create new commercial applications. I have also come to learn that many commercial innovations may not necessarily satisfy the internal financial criteria that we often associate with the business case for change. Some of the most innovative ideas I have seen would never get off the page if they were decided solely on financial criteria like payback period. For example, we initiated a centralized Program Services Office to manage how we did projects across the company. We knew we would need to demonstrate to the 26

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Coloumn How to Sharpen Your Commercial Instincts.indd 26

opportunity and create momentum around it to appeal for resources. I market commercial ideas throughout the company (not just at the top) to build momentum, because if an idea takes off, I'll need engagement at all levels. One way to get your message across is to use every available resource on your team to help. I achieve this by creating very simple 'elevator scripts' that every IS staff member who may get an opportunity to market an idea can pass along. These are messages that people can readily identify with an idea. You need one or two paragraphs that you want not only the CEO to remember, but that even the desktop support engineer will internalize and be able to bring up when he interacts with a business partner. Consistency and simplicity in message will do the trick. Another path to marketing success is to give your idea to someone else. I try to ensure that the executive who would be the natural beneficiary of a successful outcome is the one who owns an initiative as part of his strategy. You might be the kick-starter for an idea, but you may not be the best-placed executive to promote or deliver on it. For example, the spare parts management idea I cited above came from someone in IS who supports the business. The idea was quickly adopted by the operations and engineering groups and incorporated into their strategy. Finally, let yourself participate in the commercial discussion. No one puts constraints around IT's capability as much as we do ourselves. If you want to expand your role â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to exercise business leadership â&#x20AC;&#x201D; no one's going to stop you. Or tell you you're not required or your comments aren't valuable. When you're wearing your business leadership hat, you have as much weight as anyone else. CIO Darin Brumby is former CIO of FirstGroup, based in Aberdeen, UK, and a member of the CIO Executive Council. Brumby is now director, business systems transformation, Nationwide Building Society. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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5/30/2008 4:52:31 PM

Matt Podowitz and Brian Tretickâ&#x20AC;&#x201A;

Applied Insight

Compliance and the CIO There are more government rules for companies to follow and more legal risks for not doing so. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how to design and implement an effective compliance program.

ith compliance emerging as one of today's most prevalent business issues, multiple corporate functions are beginning to converge in a federated approach to addressing quality, risk and overall compliance management. This convergence, though arguably a more efficient approach, may not be an intuitive state for policies and processes traditionally created in silos. Nor is convergence always a logical process for the people who operate, manage, and implement those policies and processes. As the visibility of compliance continues to rise, there is a concurrent increase in the importance placed on information technology and the role of the CIO. Like other parts of the enterprise responsible for risk and compliance, IT's mandate has expanded in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) environment. Beyond the traditional charge that comprises the fundamentals of keeping the lights on and the company out of trouble, IT and the CIO now share responsibility for making the business better. Ironically enough, one of the most siloed functions has become one of the most well-positioned to do just that. Il lustration by unnikrishn an AV

The Compliance Landscape Understanding how IT's role is evolving comes best with an understanding of the compliance landscape. Every company operates with rules and regulations, which may vary by industry, geography, size or other factors or may even have been self-imposed in a proactive effort to improve operational efficiency. Historically, the majority of compliance criteria have centered on financial or environmental issues. Many were created and implemented in response to a particular issue; 28

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5/30/2008 5:19:04 PM

Matt Podowitz and Brian Tretick

Applied Insight

likewise, they may have been executed and monitored at the business-unit or departmental level via spreadsheets or other manual means. As the regulatory environment continues to change with marked frequency and measurable complexity, so do the requirements for automated, repeatable controls and processes around the classic information compliance drivers: internal controls over financial reporting, controls to protect and govern the use of personal information, protection of intellectual property, records management and e-discovery rules. Legal risk and the implications of non-compliance are also expanding, with the potential for what could be called catastrophic consequences ranging from significant fines and irrevocable damage of company brand and reputation to jail time for executives. Information itself has become a regulated asset, with specific criteria for its protection, privacy, use and retention. Where non-compliance with a given regulation is a cause of harm, the settlements may be even larger. Inefficient processes, the increasingly complex regulatory and business environment, and shortage of talent are placing unprecedented demand on current systems and procedures. The ‘typical’ organization has core compliance accountabilities for multiple functions and business units, with HR, security,

finance, legal, risk, internal audit and others, each addressing compliance differently. Against the backdrop of this everexpanding compliance environment and the increasing number of business functions and operational areas it encompasses, come the growing expectations of stakeholders. They want not only effective compliance risk management and transparency in their strategies but also a reasonable return on the significant investments made in information technology, plus measurable means for improving the business overall.

The Convergence Conundrum The proactive CIO can leverage IT capabilities to help achieve sustainable compliance by designing and implementing an effective, integrated program with built-in components. These components will align and coordinate compliance functions, processes, and activities as well as provide adequate oversight and appropriate risk coverage. That, however, may be easier said than done. In an effort to see how far the reality of convergence has gone and how companies operate in that environment, Ernst & Young chats with clients as well as conducts formal studies and surveys, such as the 10th annual Global Information Systems Security Survey. One such survey focused on the financial

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5/30/2008 5:19:05 PM

Matt Podowitz and Brian Tretick

Applied Insight

Companies that used to invest in compliance programs because they had to are now investing because they want to. One of the drivers of this new mind-set is IT. services industry, a group accustomed to and well entrenched in the process of operating in a highly regulated environment. While there was universal familiarity with the concept of streamlining governance, risk and control processes, most companies were in the early stages of the convergence process and their activities driven by short-term objectives. While improving efficiency and reducing costs were common goals, there were the opposing forces of a corporation's natural tendency toward siloed infrastructures and people's natural resistance to change, particularly around the highly sensitive areas of risk management and compliance. So who can help? With so many interests, functions and entities trying to reach the goal of compliance and converging in the process, whether intentionally or not, it takes no great leap to envision overlaps, redundancies and conflicts. Also, with information as the common denominator, it's easy to see the role of information management, IT and the CIO taking on new importance and new responsibility. Leading companies are focusing resources on how they can better integrate compliance enterprisewide as a part of everyday business operations and decision making. Companies that once were more likely to invest in compliance programs because they had to are beginning to invest because they want to, seeing the value proposition in technology-enabled compliance measures that also improve business processes and performance. One of the drivers of this new mind-set — in fact, its primary enabler — is information technology. IT is often the expert in a company at facilitating broad business process improvement because of its instrumental role in SOX compliance, ERP implementation or other transformational projects. That gives IT and the CIO a justifiable seat at the executive table when compliance strategy is planned and strategic business goals are set. One way IT can help is by cataloging what rules, regulations and laws specifically apply to the company. While obtaining this information may not be its sole and precise responsibility, IT can create a robust infrastructure and repeatable mechanism for identifying and tracking any overlaps, inconsistencies, and conflicts. Though no one department is responsible for companywide compliance, IT is unique in its ability to move well beyond the four walls of the data center in response to its expanded mandate to create value, rationalize costs and manage risk for the entire enterprise. Conducting a risk assessment will help determine what regulations require full compliance, what's most important in terms of the company's definition of its own risk profile 30

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Coloumn Compliance and the CIO.indd 30

and where to focus corporate efforts in the expanding compliance universe. This will also determine the extent to which outcomes of the assessment are integrated into other business processes, such as strategic planning, internal audit or compliance training. IT can also identify the current state of the company's compliance controls, processes and capabilities. Many existing IT investments — ERP systems, reporting systems and controls monitoring systems implemented specifically to support SOX compliance — can be leveraged to improve the company's overall compliance position. The objective of risk convergence is to establish an integrated approach and consistent set of processes that reduce redundant control activities, eliminate duplication in the business units, drive down costs and support strategic decision making. Convergence can reduce compliance gaps overall and risk management fatigue in the business units. It can facilitate a risk and control model that is more efficient and effective in supporting business needs, responding to regulatory change, and addressing demands for more granular risk-related disclosure. Both internal and external stakeholders will have greater confidence in the quality of the risk management, compliance and assurance model, with reduced remediation activities and positive external ratings reinforcing its value. After all, the disparate kinds and sources of data notwithstanding, compliance mandates come down to the fundamental issues of integrity, availability, security, confidentiality and access. Expanding the overall charter and leveraging its potential for value delivery can establish IT as the center of excellence within the business, facilitating overall compliance and its resultant business process improvement. With IT at its best, risk convergence, although challenging, is possible. Choosing this path will reward the organization with a flexible, efficient, sustainable risk management framework that supports today's business requirements and those of the future. CIO

Matt Podowitz is an executive director in the Risk Advisory Services practice of Ernst & Young and is the firm's global IT effectiveness leader. He is also a Certified Information Systems Auditor and professional member of the Institute of Management Consultants. Brian Tretick is an executive director in the Risk Advisory Services practice of Ernst & Young. He has more than 20 years' professional experience in information security and has spent the past decade focused on privacy and data protection. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

Vol/3 | ISSUE/14

5/30/2008 5:19:05 PM

Cover Story | CIO Career

Admitting that you have a problem is the first step to helping yourself, your family and your organization. by Team CIO

Reader ROI:

Where stress comes from How you can beat it Why it is worth coping

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t’s Monday again. Piles of files and a mountain of work welcome you at work. Too many tasks, too little time, and you start shifting priorities. Slowly, the line between what you think is achievable and what you know isn't — between what you can finish and what you can't — is blurring. You can’t take it. An adrenalin rush and then… And then you are history. They call it ‘Cortisol’—the stress hormone. It’s the reason behind those uninvited headaches and uncalled for temper tantrums — severing more than just working relationships — and it's destroying your health. Research links stress to six causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis, and suicide. In India, heart disease, strokes and diabetes wiped off Rs 36,000 crore from India's national income in 2005. Let’s agree: stress isn’t going anywhere. So, how you deal with it matters more than ever. Each person has his own way of coping with it. Twelve IT leaders share their stories. REAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8

Cover Story | CIO Career

brEathE In Work, Breathe Out StreSS by V. SubramanI Subraman I am

P hotoS by Sr IVatSa Shan dIlya IM aGInG by an Il t

n this fast pace world, the reality our lives is that we work in a professional, challenging, and performanceoriented environment. We are constantly under physical and mental stress as we are continually pushed to perform and succeed. At the same time, I think it is necessary for us to remember that every company, every function, every team and every individual has strengths and limitations and that it is part of our job as CIOs to manage expectations mutually. Because it is when these expectations are not fulfilled that frustration, depression and agony are created. Naturally, these manifest as stress. However, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not the stress that kills us. It is our reaction to stress. It is our choice to be stressed or not. The reason for this stress is that we become slaves to desires and uncontrolled emotions such as hatred, jealousy, anger, etcetera. We feel powerless and limited in what we can do. But we should remember that one cannot control stress, but one can definitely manage it. And in that lies the secret to staying healthy. Being healthy is necessity. Staying healthy is an art. Work-life effectiveness means being effective at work â&#x20AC;&#x201D; as well as in life. Eating healthy 36

j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

V. Subramaniam CIO, OTIS How do you deal with stress? I meditate for spiritual fitness, visit places of worship and I attend spiritual discourses. I like reading books that are inspirational, motivational and spiritual. Have you ever suffered from burn-out? I burn-out stress without getting burned by it. When I am stressed, I focus immediately on my thoughts and feelings and picture myself connecting with the supreme. I never give stress an opportunity to burn me out.

Finding peace: "Yoga helps you stay agile and meditation elevates your soul to calmness. Combined, both can tune your body, mind and soul and lend effectiveness to work and life."

food, following healthy diet and exercising all help to stay healthy and keep stress at bay. I believe that if you are cool in stressful situation, you can turn around most situations and lead your team and your

project to success. By being stressed, all that you are doing is adding more stress to the situation. How do you ensure a cool mind? Yoga. Yoga can help you to stay agile and meditation can elevate your soul to

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Cover Story | CIO Career calmness. Combined, both can help tune your body, mind and soul and lend effectiveness to work and life. Here is some food for thought from Patanjali. (Patañjali was the compiler of the Yoga Sutras, a major work containing aphorisms on the philosophical aspects of mind and consciousness): When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. On a more practical note, to continually be able to beat stress, I practice yoga. I also follow well-defined values and principles. I believe that life is a series of principles that need to be applied. If you practice these principles, you will profit from them. Principles are non-negotiable and they are a way of life for me. I practice yoga to stay fit mentally and physically, and meditate to stay spiritually fit. I also like to spend quality time with those close to me. I de-stress by spending memorable moments with my family. I love to visit places of worship and attend spiritual discourses. I also read motivational and spiritual books. I try not to bring the office home. This helps me effectuate a well-balanced work-life approach. Professionally, I deal with stress as way of life. After all, it comes with the terrain. I like to spend quality time and efforts in leading, driving and 38

managing objectives and goals. These lead to high degree of performance through effective teamwork. As a team, we also learn continually in order to imbibe best practices to achieve excellence in terms of performance. This approach helps manage expectations and deliverables — in addition of having effective communication and collaboration. At office, I practice what I call Management by Walking Around (MBWA). I do this to meet and interact with my team and internal users so that I can render service to all. For me, this is also one form of exercise that helps to de-stress. I try to work with my team on maximizing our strengths to over come our limitations in order to create a winning situation. I believe in leading by example so I do not display any stress or signs of burn out to my team. I also groom them on leadership principles, and help them learn the art of de-stressing by being organized, focused and structured — besides giving them spiritual insights. Finally, be what you are. Don’t try to be what you are not. If you try to be what you are not, you will never be successful. You will always feel incomplete and unfulfilled. If you simply try to be what you are, you will have an incredible reawakening experience, a mystical transformation of consciousness. You will attain true and lasting peace and happiness. You will become one of a small elite group who realizes their full potential. Remember: three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for. —As told to Gunjan Trivedi

j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

lIVInG By the Gun

e lived by it. It took over his life. Work constantly demanded attention and was never satisfied -- until it burnt him out. All that David Briskman, VP and CIO of Ranbaxy, wanted to do when he joined two start ups in Silicon Valley was to ‘get things done.’ There was just too much to do and he was constantly on his toes. “I burnt out. I realized I had to take stock of my life and redirect myself in a more balanced way,” he recalls. And he got back on that horse. The experience made him stronger and from then on he began to respect work pressure. “Today, I thrive on pressure and usually can do my best work under the gun. Pressure does not always lead to too much stress. Without it, I think we can get too relaxed,” says Briskman. Briskman says that the secret of being an inspirational leader is finding happiness in life and leading by example. “It is good to understand the capabilities and limits of people.

David Briskman VP & CIO, Ranbaxy Labs How do you look at worklife balance? Family comes first. Yes, you miss some events; celebrate some anniversaries and birthdays the next day or miss one sports game. However, you better make every effort to ‘be there’ for and with your family. Which part of your job is most stressful? The classic CIO struggle to prove value in everything we do. embrace it: "I thrive on pressure and usually do my best work under the gun."

When you make people responsible for too much, it can create a bad situation or help them can rise to the occasion,” he says. Briskman credits stress with being the best motivator for teams. “Sometimes your team should be stressed. When there is too much time at hand, there is an equal amount of distraction. You can achieve an incredible amount in a shorter period of time. It forces people to be focused and productive.” A firm-believer in work-life balance, for Briskman family comes first and it is important to make every effort to ‘be there’ for his family. A top priority in his long ‘to-do’ list, is that simple - yet easily forgotten - word: fun. ”Have fun, never get personal. Remember that this is work, definitely not your life. Hunker down and get things done. Prioritize the important and delegate the urgent," he says. From victim to victor, Briskman has made his weakness his strength. Today, Briskman stands by the old adage: when you look back at life, you’ll never wish you had spent one more day at work or an extra meeting. But you will wish you had spent more time with your kids or gone for another vacation. —Shardha Subramanian

Cover Story | CIO Career

don't wOrk yOurSelf up

hat will I do if my servers crash? What if my DR plan fails? What if my team quits halfway through a project? ‘If’ is the operational word. In that word lies the seed of stress. Satish Das, CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions, knows this because he's been there. “When I had to trigger a business continuity plan as part of an annual BCP test, I came face to face with what they call ‘burn-out’. It was extremely stressful. The thought of not being able to recover some projects made me break into a sweat,” he says. It also made him realize that stress has its roots in the mind, when there is a perpetual

Arun Gupta Customer Care Associate & CTO, Shoppers Stop Is there a unique way in which you deal with stress? When I am stressed, I tend to get aggressive. I try to keep this under control with music and sometimes just taking a walk alone. This helps me focus on the issue — not on people. How do you help your team deal with stress? The best way to help your team is to lead by example and coach them if they are under workrelated stress. A word of caution though — stress cannot be an excuse for non-performance. Fork in the road: Work is not a choice — stress is. "Work pressure is a reality. It’s the stress that is optional."

anticipation of a crisis. “I feel most burn outs happen because of unrealistic expectations from people around you and the promises you makes to meet those expectations. I've learnt to identify the sources of such expectations,” he says. He figured that there was no point in fretting over things that were not in his control. “I decided to work around my problems with all the passion I could gather. I trained as many people as possible in DR and created a second line of resource to manage a crisis,” he says. But to use this approach, Das believes it is important to be disciplined for the benefit of your subordinates. “If you chasing work 24/7,

steady nerves: The secret is not to psyche yourself out.

Satish Das CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions What steps do you take to beat stress? Build a skilled and responsible next level team and keep them trained. Work which you think cannot be delegated — should be delegated. I don’t work during weekends and I switch off my BlackBerry after 10 pm. How do you look at worklife balance? It is very important. If this balance is ignored in the early stages of your career, then you are a definite candidate for a heart attack.

your subordinates will do the same. And then both will be completely stressed out.” But when stress does loom, Das beats it back with games — indoor on weekdays and outdoor games on weekends. He also jogs 5 km everyday and never misses an opportunity to watch movies with his family. He's happier because he believes in crossing a bridge once he gets to it. —Shardha Subramanian

takE It or leave It by arun GupTa

ork pressure is a reality. It’s the stress that is optional. It’s the balance between work and life, this see-saw that continues to keep me on my toes. There is no single aspect of the job that causes stress. It is always a combination of several factors. For me, the most challenging parts include

cross-team coordination and dealing with vendors who over promise and do not deliver. The problem is, when I am under severe stress, I tend to get aggressive. Occasionally, this hurts people. There was a point in my life, about a decade ago, when I took on a lot of stress. Eventually, it affected my ability to think rationally, my health and my family. It was more or less a burnout. That is when I realized that I needed to introspect. I asked myself where this stress was leading me. It took some hard decisions but I moved away from this adrenalin rush. Today, it takes effort to keep things this way, given the number of constituents exerting influence on the

team and I. I try to keep my aggression under control with help of music and sometimes just walking alone. This helps me focus on the issue rather than people. On most days, I am able to shut shop by 7:00 pm. Over the weekends, I rarely spend more than a few hours working. There are exceptions and on such weekends I try to devote one day to the family. While I treat listening to music as a great stress-buster, I have developed nature photography as my passion. These two habits help me keep stress at bay. Using my experience with stress management, I try to help my team with their stress. I also recommend leading by example. A word of caution though, stress cannot be an excuse for non-performance. —As told to Gunjan Trivedi

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Cover Story | CIO Career

nIp It In thE bUd

IOs aren’t just made of people with great technology and man management skills. It’s not just about beating project deadlines. It’s also about accepting that some things can’t be avoided. Certain things are inevitable — like stress.

the right mix: The creativity that cooking unlocks helps clear mental blocks.

It’s how you deal with it that differentiates you. Eicher Motors', DGM & Head-IT Ajay Khanna, doesn’t let stress build up. “The best way to handle stress is to take it head on, analyze the situation and the take necessary steps to deal with it immediately,” he says.

Ajay Khanna DGM & Head-IT Eicher Motors How do you beat stress? Other than cooking, I enjoy fixing broken things, like gadgets or toys. However, I have not yet attempted fixing broken hearts. What advice would you give your team to beat stress? Meditation, diverting attention to music, taking a walk and sleep can really help beat stress.

Which is exactly what he did when a stressful situation screamed for attention. “We were observing strange network and application problems — stuff we had never anticipated or observed in the past. But, a positive attitude and a confident team helped in resolving the crisis and completing the activity — in time,” says Khanna. He believes in handling stress pragmatically. And for him taking frequent but short vacations is one way of approaching it. “At times it becomes difficult to spend time on a regular basis with my family, more so if I have been travelling or have been involved in critical projects. I prefer taking a break once in a quarter to spend some quality time with them and create work-life balance,” he says. When stress begins to take its toll, Khanna turns to Reiki. “I learnt Reiki on the behest of a friend. I started feeling better. While we attempt to combat stress by diverting our attention to other activities, our bodies silently absorb stress. This starts damaging our body over the long run. High blood pressure, headaches, arthritis, back pain and diabetes are some of the outcomes of stress. Reiki helps to remove this unknown accumulation of stress thereby cleansing the body and the mind,” he says. If that doesn’t work, there’s always Khanna’s favorite hobby: cooking. “I enjoy making vegetable and chicken salads and garlic cheese breads. My favorite is making vegetable cheese omelettes which I learnt while observing a chef in Shanghai,” he says. —By Kanika Goswami REAL EAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8

all systems on go: Simulating shortterm, artificial crises or 'fight or flight' situations, can help release stress.

Animesh Singh VP-IT Operations Brickred Technologies What's your take on stress? Often, stress is small problem that is blown out of proportion, either by our imagination or by people who have a habit of thinking about the worst-case scenario out loud. Does your stress level depend on whom you are reporting to? Yes. In my previous organization I was reporting to a CFO. Everyone in the fraternity knows what reporting to a CFO means. It is the most stressful job.

takE thE SIlent MOnSter racInG

Photo by dr lo hIa IM aGIn G by anIl t

leep wasn’t peaceful anymore. For Animesh Singh, VP-IT Operations at Brickred, there was no mercy, work pressure kept mounting, he was getting crushed under it and there was no escape. "I was becoming very temperamental, irritated and irrational — and I knew it. My mood swings were becoming common. I felt tired and low a lot of the time," he remembers. Slowly and steadily, stress gnawed its way into his life and became an intruder even in his household. "Other than my 42

behavior, stress gradually started affecting my personal life. I began spending less and less time with my family," he says. But what set the alarms off was when he started was losing interest in work. It was a gradual realization. "I realized that I was no more doing what I actually enjoyed doing,” says Singh. “It was then that I decided to create some balance between my work and my life, so that I could enjoy both." But just as stress took its toll slowly and chipped away at his life, it was important for Singh

j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

to understand that the road to recovery would also be slow. He started by segmenting everyday issues into different compartments, attributing a separate thought to each. "This helps me analyze a situation rationally and prevents me from over-reacting and also helps me identify an apt solution," he says. Recently, for example, Brickred had to move its entire datacenter. And, of course, it had to be done with minimum downtime. Singh says that it was terribly stressful for everyone in the team. But

they did it in exactly two days. "All that was required was strategic planning," he recalls. He also says that stress lies in the unpredictability that life has to offer. "It is not possible to foresee each and every upcoming issue. But, more often than not, it is a small problem blown out of proportion, solely by our imagination," he says. And if logical reasoning fails to impress as his stress levels, Singh takes to car rallying. He says nothing detoxs him more than racing up the steep slopes of Leh and Ladakh. Today, if a stressful situation makes its presence felt, Singh looks at it in the eye and says, "You have happened. Now what?" —Shardha Subramanian

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tICked Off

PhotoS by Sr IVatSa ShandIlya IM aGIn G by anI l t

lan your work and work your plan, the saying goes. Here's another one: easier said than done. But it's worth doing says K.T. Rajan, Director-Operations IS & Projects Allergan India. That’s because working his plan allows him to move down to the next item on his to-do list. “When I have a list of things to do and I can't tick off some items, I get stressed. But I don’t waste time mulling over it, instead I move on to the next task on my list,” he says. This style of work gives him a chance to catch a break. So that when he restarts, it is with renewed vigor. In most cases he says, “things work out.” But when things don’t and stress takes over, Rajan finds comfort in surfing news sites — especially the offbeat ones. “Once you read something about the not-so-fortunate, you tend to have a positive flow of adrenalin,” he says.

Another stress buster for Rajan is spending time with his family. He learnt the importance of this after he heard this story: “A busy dad comes home from work and his kid asks him how much money he makes. When the father says he gets paid 30 dollars an hour, the child breaks his piggy bank, gives his dad 10 hard-earned dollars, and asks for 20 minutes,” Rajan recounts. “If one wants to get worked up, one can get worked up over the smallest thing. Similarly, if you can keep your calm, you can wade through any chaotic situation,” he says. —By Balaji Narasimhan

K.T. Rajan Director-Operations IS & Projects, Allergan India Is there a unique way in which you deal with stress? I just pick up a cup of tea, walk around the office and talk about cricket or bollywood and then return to my desk with a new frame of mind. How do you look at worklife balance? One shouldn’t stop living in the process of making a living. The balance is vital. At the end of the day, all the material benefits cannot compensate the time spent with a loved one.

pushing stress down: By creating a list of things to do, CIOs can beat stress by moving down their list instead of "mulling over" problems.

help yourselF: F “With stress, F: half the battle is won if one accepts that there is stress."

S. Hariharan

StEP 1:

Sr. VP-Infrastructure Services, iFlex Solutions

adMIt It

am a CIO and I am stressed. The solution to many of life’s issues lies in first acknowledging that there is a problem, says S. Hariharan, Sr. VP-Infrastructure Services at iFlex Industries. “With stress, half the battle is won if one accepts that there is stress and you are willing to address the issue,” he says. Personally, admitting that he was stressed took serious introspection on his part. “In 1995, when we were implementing our product for our first few customers, we had about 50 resignations in five weeks. People who had sculpted the product, who knew product in and out, left the organization. I was left to manage multiple implementations with a set of completely new people. That's when I decided to seriously look into ways of coping with stress,” he says. When he had accepted that he was stressed, he quickly decided he had to do something. So, at the age of 45, he started learning Carnatic music. “The power of classical music combined with yoga brought about a dramatic change in my

Which part of your job is most stressful? Every aspect of the job can bring in stress if not handled correctly. Handling compliance, legal issues and spurts in attritions bring in a lot of stress. How does your company ensure stress-free staff? We offer training sessions on stress management, working couples and women. We also offer yoga sessions to all employees. There is a formal arrangement with professional counselors for those who need help.

capacity to handle stress,” he says. Hariharan’s also spends time with children with special needs. As part of its CSR initiative, iFlex Solutions identified challenged children it would like to help and spending time with these children gives Hariharan that rare insight into the magic of human nature, and helps him stay grounded, he says. “Beating stress is not a one-time activity, it has to be continuous and conscious. One has to indulge in what one enjoys most, then the impact is best,” he says. —By Kanika Goswami

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put on your running shoes: It is a scientific fact that physical exertion can help relieve stress.

playInG dOdGe-Ball WIth StrESS by abnaSh SInGh

y idea of managing stress is pretty straightfor ward: avoid. I try to avoid getting into stressful situations through a strong positive attitude. I think, agreeing to disagree is a good philosophy when your managing the stress created by opposing positions between people. As managers, we need to keep an open mind if we are to accept different points of view and perspectives. We also need 44

to use an objective decisionmaking process to take fair decisions. When participants of a discussion see there are no sides or positions to take, stress levels automatically decrease. At office, we approach work in a collaborative fashion. We encourage people to follow processes and plan their work accordingly. Mutually-agreed deadlines and organized work help reduce stress levels phenomenally. I believe that if

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Abnash Singh President, IT-Operations Center of Excellence UCB Pharma What's your take on stress? Once you recognise that different facets of your life require prioritisation, balance emerges. It is important to consciously pursue this balance. How do you handle stressful situations at work? Agreeing to disagree is a good philosophy when your managing the stress created by opposing positions between people. As managers, we need to keep an open mind if we are to accept different points of view and perspectives.

you plan for the completion of a job through design rather than chance or destiny, stress will not really affect your life. On a personal front, I strongly believe that it is important to consciously pursue a work-life balance. I believe that once you recognize that different facets of your life require prioritization, work-life balance naturally emerges. However, it is not like I had this outlook towards maintaining work-life balance right from the beginning. About 15 years ago, I was chugging along in the typically associated with the IT industry. Obviously, with work pressures the stress started to arise from project deadline pressures, meeting senior management’s requirements and expectations, hectic travel schedules and long hours or meetings. When you go through this kind of phase continually, your health and way of living are impacted the most. Soon, I realized that I had developed high blood pressure. The health problem coupled with long working hours did not help my family either. This is when I had decided to take back control and enrolled into a gym. I soon discovered that this was a way to de-stress and maintain work-life balance. In just about three months, I not only shed about 15 kilos but also developed into a long distance runner. It still works for me. To d ay, my daily 10-kilometer jog is among my most powerful energy re-vitalizers and removes stress. I strongly believe that everyone should have one such ‘white-hot’ passion to enable stress relief. — Gunjan Trivedi

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Cover Story | CIO Career

rEMEMbEr, thIS too Shall paSS

othing in life is permanent, right? That means it isn’t only the good stuff that comes with an expiry date – so do the bad times. Unfortunately, it takes maturity to understand that. An important part of dealing with stress at the workplace is knowing that it will end, says Hilal Khan, Head-IT at Honda SIEL Cars. “The older you become in your profession, the more your outlook to situations changes. When I look back, I feel that I was too stressed when I was young. Today, despite many more responsibilities, my ability to handle them with a

'different' outlook has changed the stress scenario,” he says. Khan takes this ability to put things in perspective a step further. “Imagine a situation where you don’t have to prove ROI, where project schedules are open-ended and you have no teamrelated issues. You’d be frustrated because you'd have nothing to do. There's a specific junction in your career when technology takes the back seat. The challenge is all about people management, expectation management, change management and conflict management. We must enjoy every bit of it rather then considering it stressful,” he says.

Focusing on the Future: Reminding yourself that your problems will end — and that you aren't stuck with them forever — helps decrease stress.

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But the mental shield does not always work and when that happens Khan has a reliable fix. At the beginning of his career, Khan says he put all his savings into a good music system. Every evening, he listened to pop or jazz at full volume. Today, he still enjoys listening to music, although to the more uplifting call of ghazals, and at lower volumes. He also indulges in other activities that effectively take his mind away from the painful decisions that he has to sometimes take. His pastimes include palmistry, and, collecting pens and watches. “It started as a hobby, but now I have a pretty good collection,” he says. But these are just props to help him stay the cheerful, positiveminded person that he is. At then end of the day, when Khan looks at

the negative parts of his life, he takes a breath and blows optimism into his open palm because he knows that this too shall pass. —By Kanika Goswami

Hilal Khan Head-IT Honda SIEL Cars India How do you cope with stress at work? Respect for the individual, listening to people and an effective two-way communication can help deal with stressful situations. Which part of your job is most stressful? At a specific junction in your career, the challenge is all about people management, expectation management, change management and conflict management. We must enjoy every bit of it rather than considering it as stress.

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Cover Story | CIO Career

talk toME

ommunication. It goes beyond boundaries, it bridges differences and it helps beat stress. For Tamal Chakravorty, CIO of Ericsson India, communication is a weapon that can conquer stress. This is a lesson he learnt early in his career, while he worked with Cargill India. One of the group’s companies, Cargill Seeds, he recalls, was being sold to Monsanto, a biotechnology company. “With the exchanges between the CEO and I over the sale of assets, it was an extremely stressful time. I felt I had done a fantastic job evaluating the company’s assets and negotiating with Monsanto for a sell-off. But the CEO felt that we may have over-absorbed costs. That’s when

Falgun Shukla Sr GM-IT, Hikal How do you take on with stress? I do two things: I keep smiling and I play Tabla on my table at work. Sometimes I also keep repeating positive thoughts in my mind. Does your stress level depend on whom you are reporting to? My stress level depends on my comfort level with seniors. I don’t get stressed if I can explain my problems to my seniors without hesitation.

don't take it home: Carrying work over the weekend and beyond your normal working hours, can have a long-term cost on your family.

I realized that communication, and more communication is the only way to beat stress that may hit you later,” he recalls. That gave birth to his methodology of handling stress: a four-step self-communication mechanism. “Whenever a stressful situation presents itself, I ask myself four questions: What is the task that is creating this stress? how long will this task last? do I have enough ammunition to handle this stressful task? how important is this task in my career building process? “This methodology usually works for me,” he says. Armed with answers, he proceeds with the task at hand.

talk is not cheap: Bringing up problems today, "is the only way to beat stress that may hit you later."

Tamal Chakravorty CIO, Ericsson India Is there a unique way in which you deal with stress? I have a principle: I rarely go to work on holidays and weekends. That takes away a lot of stress. It also gives me time to think about the stressful week that has went and the coming one. How do you view stress? Make-or-break tasks, and tasks those that will get me recognition with management get a special place on my agenda. For these, stress is more of a challenge, which I savor.

But what takes Chakravorty’s battle with stress out of the ordinary is his love for football. He started the 'Delhi Merchant's Cup' a football tournament for corporates in Delhi. He has initiated soccer and cricket tournaments at every corporate he has worked for. It doesn’t end there — he also takes to the field. After all, they don’t just say ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. —By Kanika Goswami

hOMe wOrk doESn’t Pay

roblem: There’s work and then there is more work. And some more. It never seems to end. Solution: take it home. Between the problem and the solution, work has thrown the family out of business. What is missing is a sense of balance and the need to restore it. That is something that Falgun Shukla, senior GM-IT of Hikal, has mastered over time. “Generally, I do

not extend my working hours too much. I prefer to spend time with my family visiting a temple or the market with them,” he says. His family is quite tuned to his moods. When they find him sitting alone and uncommunicative, it is a sign that he is stressed. But that’s an infrequent scene in the Shukla household, thanks to his strong belief in maintaining work-life balance. So how does he ensure that he keeps work at work. “Planning and scheduling are prime factors in reducing stress,” says Shukla. He adds that he always includes extra time for contingencies when he makes a commitment. However, the turning point came for Shukla before he joined Hikal. In his previous job, where he had spent around 18

years, Shukla felt his seniors ignored him. “I was so keen on quitting that I was willing to take up any job just to get away from the company,” he says. That’s when he realized that he needed some equilibrium. He looked for a work environment that was friendly because that builds understanding, he says. “My stress level depends more on my comfort level with my seniors. I do not get stressed when I am comfortable because I can explain my problems to my seniors,” says Shukla. And that’s what he practices with his juniors. “I tell them to talk to me whenever they have an issue, and this helps them beat stress,” he says. But when stress does get to him, he plays the tabla — on his table at work. His fingers set a rhythm on his table making way for soulful introspection in the solitude of his cabin — in harmony with work and life. CIO —By Balaji Narasimhan

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virtualization

Users are working hard to figure out how far they can push virtual servers without sacrificing application service levels, according to CiOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first survey On virtualizatiOn.

Reader ROI:

How virtual servers and desktops stack up Deployment challenges

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By Laurianne McLaughLin

y you're knee-deep in virtualization, and you love the ROI that you've seen so far. But you're also grappling with tough technical and political challenges posed by today's hottest technology, according to CIO's first survey on virtualization. The top challenges? First, figuring out just how far you can push your physical servers by piling on more and more virtual machines (VMs) without slowing down application service levels, and next, getting experts from across IT silos to plan and manage the virtualized environment together. "Nobody likes change, even when there is often a better way of doing things," says Stephen Elliot, a research manager with IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher). "It takes work and a mindset to reinvent IT and ourselves." The good news is that the payback on virtualization really pops. Server virtualization, in particular, is spreading a lot of love. But so far, happiness seems REAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8

virtualization to be is harder to come by on the desktop. Here's what nearly 300 CIOs who responded to the survey said about their experiences with the virtualization mega-trend. They also share advice to help you make the most of your virtualization efforts. (Some numbers in the story and on the graphs may not add up to 100 percent because of rounding).

new technology such as virtualization. However, the politics pain many of you. Forty-two percent of CIOs say they find political and organizational challenges 64% hard to deal with compared Balancing server workloads and maintaining application service levels to technical challenges 37% (58 percent). Remember, IT organization politics virtualization not only asks people to cede some control 30% Measuring ROI over their physical server kingdoms, but also asks 24% Governance IT experts from different realms to work more closely 20% together. "Virtualization Masters Of Pushback from business leaders success depends on tight virtual 20% c o o p e r at i o n b e t we e n Disaster Revamping chargeback systems for the business server, storage, network and reCOvery security teams," says Burton While many enterprises 11% None of the above/not applicable Group senior analyst Chris started their virtualization SoURCE: (Respondents chose up to three) Wolf. "Getting divisions that efforts with test and CIo Research CI operate as independent silos development servers, today's to work together presents a pioneers are virtualizing very difficult challenge." desktop PCs, running them Strong executive support, says Wolf, from a VM on a server in the back room or is crucial. running VMs on top of a guest operating And efficiency wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t save IT from a system on the local machine. Eighty-five big black eye if you've put too many VMs percent of CIOs are using virtualization on one physical server and key business for servers or the datacenter, 37 percent apps run too slowly. CIOs understand for storage, 34 percent for desktops (CIOs Reduce administration and this danger full well: nearly two-thirds chose all that applied) support costs of you call balancing server workloads In addition to the obvious cost-cutting 62% or maintaining application service levels benefits, a desire for better disaster one of your three biggest challenges to recovery plans drives many CIOs to Provision systems to the end success. But those nasty political issues adopt virtualized servers (63 percent). IT users more quickly loom large, as does the difficulty of leaders like Vincent Biddlecombe, CTO of 53% measuring ROI on your efforts. logistics provider Transplace, use VMs to Another problem is that although copy their production servers to disaster Simplify maintenance almost half of you are shelling out for new recovery facilities. As for flexibility and 45% tools to ensure that application service speed, Biddlecombe can provision a new Reduce hardware costs levels stay strong, you're not paying server in 30 minutes instead of a week. 36% enough mind to integrating the teams When a Transplace business executive that run your virtual environments. needs a new customer demonstration Improve data security Chris Wolf, senior analyst with Burton environment, IT can do in half an hour. 31% Group, says it's a problem that so few IT Other reasons to virtualize include: groups have created 'center of excellence' cost cutting (81 percent); provisioning Improve network security teams that bring together experts from more quickly (55 percent); offering more 18% across the IT silos. "Some organizations flexibility (53 percent) and providing still have the misconception that server competitive advantage (13 percent). other virtualization is a server team issue, he 13% says, when in fact server virtualization nOw, play niCely (Respondents chose all up to three) SoURCE: CIo Research relies heavily on network and storage Technical woes rank higher â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to integration. Experience helps. be expected when CIOs deploy a

top Challenges to Virtualization success

Why Deploy Virtual Desktops?

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virtualization "Organizations that have been running virtualization in production for one or more years understand the need for a center of excellence," says Wolf. But where are CIOs getting that experience from?

Virtual Desktops a harD sell 25%

Currently using virtual desktops

37%

No plans to use virtualized desktops

13%

21%

Will deploy within one year

Will deploy within one to three years

5% Will deploy within three to five years

SoURCE: CIo Research

are You happY With Virtualized servers?

37%

Very satisfied

48%

Satisfied

6% Not very satisfied 2% Not at all satisfied 8% Not sure SoURCE: CIo Research

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COnsultants Out, please Virtualization expertise represents a precious commodity today: most CIOs struggle to find enough of it. But you're not using consultants as widely as you did with the last wave of technology change â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the ERP makeovers and CRM implementations. In fact, 73 percent of CIOs say they hire or develop in-house talent, compared to 23 percent who hire consultants. The same trend is visible among CIOs who are still looking for virtualization gurus with 17 percent planning to hire or develop in-house talent and 8 percent planning to hire consultants. (Respondents could choose more than one option) But why? "One CIO recently told me that he loves virtualization because 'It just works,'" says IDC's Elliot. That means less work for consultants. But it's hard to learn as you go with virtualization, adds Burton Group senior analyst Chris Wolf: a consultant can help you avoid blunders like security mistakes, he says.

taking DesktOp virtualizatiOn slOwly There are almost as many of you who have virtualized desktops or plan to have them within a year as there are those who have no intention of deploying this technology. Why is desktop virtualization such a polarizing idea? Desktop virtualization proves complex to optimize, analysts say, and planning for it requires more time. "These technologies are not a one size fits all. It takes time to figure out your users' needs and plan the implementation," says Forrester Research Senior Analyst Natalie Lambert. "I don't think CIOs are afraid of user backlash. One of the benefits to hosted desktop virtualization is it looks and feels just like a desktop computer. That's in IT's favor."

virtual desktops. Long term, security advantages will also prove important, analysts say, even though they're not top of mind right now. "Companies that build their business case around security and manageability are most advanced in their adoption of desktop virtualization," says Forrester Research Senior Analyst Natalie Lambert. Still think desktop virtualization is an idea you can dismiss outright? Citrix made a Rs 2,000 crore bet in 2007 that you're wrong, when it purchased XenSource to marry Citrix's experience in thin clients and Xen's experience in virtualization.

happy Days are here again Few ROI calculations please 85 percent of CIOs. The ROI on server virtualization does, even though you're struggling to measure it precisely. Today, virtualization helps many CIOs reduce costs on a massive scale while improving flexibility to the business. That's been the experience of Credit Suisse CIO Tom Sanzone. CIOs in enterprises large and small tell the same story: it is easy to wow the business side with the returns. No wonder you're smiling.

DesktOp paybaCk lOnger tO Measure

it's the tiMe anD MOney, hOney

Sixty percent of you are pleased with the payback on virtual desktops, but a notable 27 percent say you're just not sure. Perhaps that's not surprising, as Forrester Senior Research Analyst Natalie Lambert notes, given that desktop virtualization is more complex to optimize than server or storage virtualization. Also, analysts say, calculating the ROI of virtual desktops accurately depends on having good figures on pre-virtualization PC costs. Meanwhile, desktop virtualization is also the newest effort of the three at most enterprises, which means it may be too early to measure returns accurately. CIO

It still takes too much money and time to manage desktop PCs, so it's no surprise that cutting IT administrative and support costs tops the reasons for choosing

Send feedback to this feature on editor@cio.in

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Me, M e,

Myself, M My yself, I ys Even as they become corporate leaders, some women remain averse to promoting themselves to advance their careers. Five women leaders share advice for getting recognition— tips that work for everyone. By EsthEr Esth schindlEr

Career advancement requires IT professionals to Reader ROI:

Why marketing yourself is important for your career Ideas for networking beyond IT Ways to get personal recognition by promoting your team

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engage in a little marketing. You want the interest and attention of others and, over time, you want to earn their respect and trust. Reputation is everything for any IT executive, and its important to get it right. However, some women must overcome aversions to self-promotion, conflict and voicing their opinion. "This has been difficult for me," admits Denise Stephens, the director of IT and CIO at Washington Savannah River Company. "I must consciously conquer my natural tendency to hold back when interacting in conflict situations." Women can worry — occasionally with reason — that they'll be negatively labeled if they are assertive and speak out. "I keep this in mind but do not let it hold me back," says Stephens, "as I have rarely seen women penalized by these labels if they get the job done."

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Career Your career is in your power. "Some women hold back because they don't think they can network or communicate on the same level as their male peers or management. Get over it," says Janis O'Bryan, CIO and senior vice president of IT at Hudson Advisors. "If you are good at what you do, and a professional, you can compete for the next level. Don't self-impose a glass ceiling."

Volunteer for Visible Assignments

ou want to be appreciated and acknowledged for making a difference. That means you have to do something that has a visible effect — and also gives you the opportunity to shine. Take charge of something visible, that people need, advises Magalene PowellMeeks, Deputy CIO at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Put yourself in the position of solving a problem, and solve it for them," she says, "Even if it's a crappy job." Be the leader in that position, even if it's a small one, she says, and apply your unique technology or process to help those people. Become the go-to person in your discipline. The momentum you build is more important than a fancy title, says PowellMeeks. By helping your customer (whether that customer is internal to the company or an outside user), you build trust with your customer base — a big key to advancement. "Your reputation and your character are what sell you for the next big job," PowellMeeks says. Sometimes that means you have to stretch yourself and take on a role that scares you. It's worth it. Elizabeth Austin, vice president of IT Operations and Infrastructure at Family Dollar, believes her openness to new challenges offered her interesting opportunities to work in a variety of roles with each employer. "Many of the roles have been non-traditional for women. For example, I've worked in construction and manufacturing business applications implementation and support roles. In my current role, I have operations and infrastructure responsibilities for a discount retailer, which have provided many opportunities

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for learning new technologies and the retail business environment." Don't wait for opportunities to come to you. If there's no obvious way to gain recognition in your day-to-day work, find someplace where you can contribute. Cindy Hughes, CIO of Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund, has volunteered for corporate presentations, speaking to outside groups about the company or about what is going on in her department. Stephens says, "Work can be like sports. As people are picking their teams, they want the known players who deliver. Become known as a player who delivers, and your opportunities will grow."

Reach Outside IT

hat touches on another success factor shared by these woman CIOs: don't huddle inside the IT department. As IT staff everywhere know far too well, when IT is working, it's invisible. To be noticed personally, you have to walk outside the data center. Stephens urges ambitious women to volunteer for assignments that provide opportunities outside the usual working relationships. "This could be working on an enterprisewide initiative or working on something focused in another discipline," she explains. When Stephens was an IT manager, she took the opportunity to develop a section of her corporation's application to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. "Although my assigned section had an information systems theme, working on this enterprise team exposed me to diverse functions and people throughout the corporation," she says. Doing so helps you do your job effectively — and also builds your reputation as someone who gets things

done. And it sets you apart from typical IT professionals, who merely focus on their specific assignment and technical discipline. Case in point: early in Stephens's career, she took the opportunity to work outside her immediate organization, the marketing and sales arm of the company. "Through specific initiatives, I became known within that circle as someone who did whatever was necessary to support the customer and their marketing efforts. The relationships I formed led to more opportunities." "If your management and peers trust your judgment and you deliver on your promises, you are 80 percent there," says O'Bryan. "The rest is relationships. Make time to get out of your office, use the phone or travel to network with the other people in the company. It is important to build relationships with all levels. Be the person with the answer."

Show Progress

t's one thing to achieve or exceed your goals — but you won't move ahead unless others notice the accomplishment. Personal ambition aside, it's important to communicate what you and your team have done, especially given IT's tendencies toward invisibility to the rest of the enterprise. Nor is the challenge to find effective communication methods unique to gender, points out O'Bryan. "[At] a financial company, the key was 'speaking the language of the business.' This is the current buzz phrase in our industry, but it worked long before it became popular to say." And that provides a major advantage to women (and men) trying to move ahead personally. While it may be — or at least feel — rude to toot one's own horn, publicizing

“Your reputation and your character are what sell you for the next big job.” —Magalene Powell-Meeks, Deputy CIO, Jet Propulsio Laboratory

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Career the accomplishments of your department supports your team and helps the business learn what you're doing for the enterprise. One not-so-subtle result is that the 'powers that be' notice who's leading such successful teams and give its manager more opportunities. Think of it this way: you gain visibility by giving it to others. Powell-Meeks has made specific efforts in this regard and has created her own 'branding.' She regularly distributes products to communicate to her customers, such as an annual report to key stakeholders to show what the IT department accomplished — with tangible milestones, not just pie-in-the-sky stuff — and to summarize and remind people about the benefits IT can provide. "IT can be underground," she says, "like a utility or telephone."

aware of this," says Mojgan LeFebvre, CIO of bioMerieux. "Communication is key and it should never come across as bragging." However, good communication goes a long way in establishing your brand. "Don't be shy about communicating widely on results you have achieved and accomplishments," says LeFebvre. While it's important to connect with people who can directly influence your career and who can help you — in marketer's terms, 'build your brand' — some women have gained the most by taking care of the people who work for them. Hughes was once a midlevel manager who had recently been appointed to head a unit that was underperforming — and one that no one really wanted. She got to know each of the 32 people in the section. "I acquired a sense of their technical skill

“I' ve missed some opportunities in the past when I hesitated to reach beyond my comfort zone or waited for others to provide them for me.” — Elizabeth Austin, VP of IT Operations and Infrastructure, Family Dollar

The reports may need to be distributed more often, depending on your job. O'Bryan's department provides quarterly IT financial reports for the CFOs of each office worldwide, as well as quarterly peer comparison spending reports, an annual IT report and quarterly newsletters to promote the benefit of IT to the business. These summaries promote the work, Powell-Meeks says. "Not me as a person, but the team." Yet savvy women know this is also a self-promotion and leadership opportunity. Says O'Bryan, "I have an opening statement in both publications that includes my picture. As our company grows, not everyone may know who I am — and I think it is important that they do." "Nothing speaks louder than results, so you want to show that you can make a difference very early on and create the media to make sure many people are 52

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levels — as I'm sure their prior managers had done, as well. But I also got to know them as individuals," she says. Within three days, Hughes knew each team member by name, and throughout that project's tenure, spoke with them daily. "There were lots of interesting stories in the group, and I tried to hear as many of them as possible. I guess it had a pretty positive impact, because the group's productivity increased measurably, and senior level management noticed! My work with this particular group provided me a springboard into upper management promotions."

Be Assertive — But Not Pushy

ome women, anxious to get credit for their work, tilt too far in the wrong direction. They can become so aggressive that people tune them out. In doing so, points out Powell-

Meeks, they forget that 'we' is more powerful than 'I.' One woman of Powell-Meeks's acquaintance is a very talented person who wants to get ahead and probably is CIO material. But, Powell-Meeks says, "She's always promoting herself, and she puts down her management for not recognizing her: 'everybody else values me and my management doesn't.'" The result, unfortunately, is that everyone just wants the woman to go away. "She's complaining about her own team, so she won't get promoted there," says Powell-Meeks, but bad-mouthing her management ensures that nobody else wants her, either. So, how do you strike a balance between assertiveness and a perception that's far less savory? It depends on where you work, cautions Powell-Meeks. "Learn the corporate culture. Let that guide how you express yourself." Still, be yourself. Some women, says Powell-Meeks, need to be told, "'Don't minimize your role.' They have a lot to say after the meeting is over." Hughes adds, "I speak up in meetings, offering my ideas and opinions. I guess the secret there is to be straightforward and direct. A long time ago, I used to think it was important to 'follow the company line,' no matter what. I learned over time, however, that it's better — and I get attention — if I just relax and be who I am and say what I think." Know your strengths, and use them to your advantage. "Through understanding my own strengths and weaknesses, I have been able to optimize them in seeking opportunities," says Austin. Don't limit yourself. "I've missed some opportunities in the past when I hesitated to reach beyond my comfort zone or waited for others to provide them for me," says Austin. "You have to believe in yourself, define what your goals are, then develop the relationships and opportunities for realizing them." CIO

esther Schindler is senior online editor for cio.com. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in.

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Customer Service

r u Yo ers m o t s g u n i C k l a t e u r o a Y t u o ab bY J

dw hn e

ard

When your company's customers talk, do you listen closely and quickly enough? More CIOs are deploying text analytics technology to examine customer comments on websites, surveys and the like. If you're in the hotel business,

customer satisfaction isn't just a key metric, it's one that can make or break the company. But until recently, addressing sources of customer dissatisfaction was taking too long for Gaylord Hotels. The hotel chain, which operates four resort hotels, needed a quick, clear view of how customers and meeting planners viewed its properties and services, as well as alerts to budding problems. "Our survey vendor would do manual categorization, essentially reading [customer] comments and getting back to us," says Tony Bodoh, Gaylord's operations analysis manager. To speed things up, Gaylord turned to text analytics from Clarabridge. It began a pilot in 2007 and deployed in 2008. Text analytics, often referred to as 'voice of the customer technology', is designed to squeeze sentiment out of customer communications rather than simply retrieve isolated nuggets of information, as traditional text mining does. "One of the key benefits the tool provides is essentially overnight categorization and clustering of all the comments," Bodoh says, "which previously took us several weeks to a month." 54

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Reader ROI:

How text analytics can speed up customer insights How it can improve your business

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Customer Service

Bodoh says the technology is already beginning to help the company pinpoint specific sources of guest dissatisfaction. "One property may use a different vendor for purchasing a particular product," Bodoh says. Viewing guest comments on topics such as bathroom cleanliness or restaurant service helps Gaylord managers spot weak performers, he says. "We are also using the software to understand best practices across our hotels, and how to bring those best practices from one hotel to another hotel, or from one department to another department," he adds. Clarabridge, along with Attensity, Business Objects, SAS and several other vendors, offers software designed to help enterprises understand and learn from what customers are saying about products and services. Along with surveys, e-mail and phone calls, the technology can monitor blogs, text messages, online chats, phone calls (through speech-to-text conversion) and social network profiles. While text analytics today is far from an out-of-the-box solution, CIOs say the technology could lend insights into customer thinking â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that's hard to put a price on.

In SEARCh Of TROubLE If your company allows customers to talk about products and services on your website, for example, text analytics tools can help you analyze what those comments and chats say, to improve business decisions and strategy. "Just about anything that's in text or can be converted into text," can be analyzed, says Matthew Brown, principal analyst for information and knowledge management at Forrester Research. Businesses in diverse fields including transportation, hospitality, business and consumer products, retail, entertainment and even law are beginning to embrace text analytics, Brown notes. Text analytics tools also enable an enterprise to scour the digital grapevine to pinpoint budding problems that could tarnish a brand's luster, says Fern Halper, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates, a

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consulting and research firm. "The software helps companies understand what customers are saying about their brands, so they can actually get a head start in finding problems before they occur and make course corrections in midstream," Halper says. For Internet travel giant Travelocity, that desire is keen, says Ginny Mahl, Travelocity's VP of customer care and sales. Every day, customers send the company plenty of content, Mahl says. From North America alone, Travelocity each month receives some 25,000 to 30,000 customer satisfaction survey responses, 35,000 to 50,000 e-mails and 400,000 calls, she says. To help sort through this digital haystack for insight needles, Travelocity turned to Attensity's text analytics tools. Travelocity is preparing to deploy a production version of the software. "We are using it primarily to read verbatim feedback from our customers to gain insight into likes and dislikes about Travelocity, and their suggestions to improve our products and services," Mahl says. "The app will let us do a much deeper dive into the root causes/drivers of the satisfaction scores we receive," she adds. Mahl expects that the software will enable Travelocity to detect consumer sentiment trends that may impact customer satisfaction. Mahl offers an example: "Through a very simple query, we're able to 'read' our customer comments and find out if the amenity offerings at a particular hotel have changed, allowing us to update our website content more rapidly," she says. "This capability is one of those very simple things that can have a big impact on our customers' experience." Text analytics also promises to help Travelocity bolster its partner relationships, Mahl says. "We [receive] supplier-specific feedback, which we can feed to our partners so they also have a better understanding of our mutual customers' opinions," she says. "Sharing valuable customer information is in both of our best interests." Travelocity, which first learned about text analytics from vendors who approached the

company, evaluated several products, Mahl says. Two factors drove Travelocity toward Attensity, she says. "Attensity's solution lets us acquire an enterprise license for the software, which we can scale much more economically as we grow our application of text analytics to additional data or new data sets," Mahl says. "They were also able to provide a travel industry taxonomy to jump-start analysis."

ROLL up yOuR SLEEvES At Gaylord Hotels, the Clarabridge tools are helping the company address a variety of emerging problems quickly, Bodoh says. For example, the software recently confirmed for Gaylord managers a problem synchronizing its door locks, preventing key holders from opening their rooms. "For a few days, we were seeing a spike in the number of complaints around these key problems," Bodoh says. As it turned out, the annual changeover from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time was the culprit. "We identified that it was related to the changing of the time in the software that runs the locking system," he says. "That's an example of something that we normally wouldn't have seen, but all of a sudden it popped up to the top." "Before text analytics arrived, enterprises were limited to manually analyzing a small percentage of the unstructured customer information they received," says Sid Banerjee, Calrabridge's CEO and chairman. But while text analytics can rapidly generate vast amounts of deep customer insight, it is still far away from becoming an out-of-the-box solution, IT leaders say. "I'd consider it complex," Mahl says. "For our purposes, to get full value from the app, we will have to train analysts to use the software, invest in tuning the taxonomy to produce more granular analyses and integrate the output...with our enterprise data warehouse so we can use the combined data for even greater customer insight." REAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8

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Your Customer serviCe stinks An Accenture survey finds that while consumers' customer service expectations continue to rise, the majority of companies aren't keeping pace, sending customers to competitors. And it's only getting easier for them to leave. There is a 'new normal' when it comes customer loyalty: Namely, that there isn't any. According to a new report by Accenture, companies in all types of industries are experiencing a "steady erosion of customer loyalty due to fair-to-poor customer service." "We saw higher customer attrition numbers this year than in any previous survey year," Accenture found. In fact, 59 percent of consumers switched due to poor customer service. The report, Customer Satisfaction in the Multi-Polar World: Accenture 2007 Global Customer Service Satisfaction Survey Report, is the third-annual study which aims to examine consumer attitudes toward organizations' customer service. (The Web-based survey of 3,552 consumers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, the United Kingdom and United States was fielded in July and August 2007.) Here are some of the key findings: Expectations for customers are rising â&#x20AC;&#x201D; fast. The survey found that 52 percent say they have higher expectations for service quality today than five years ago. What's noteworthy is that 33 percent say they have higher expectations for customer service quality today than just one year ago. Serve me or I'm outta here! According to the respondents, customer service is the leading reason why they choose a new provider or company. The survey found that 77 percent are much more inclined to "continue doing business with a company that provides a positive service experience." Why can't you just help me? In all, 47 percent of consumers say companies meet their expectations only sometimes, rarely or never, and 41 percent describe the quality of service they receive as just fair, poor or terrible. That's a total of 88 percent who have suboptimal experiences. on the flipside, just 5 percent describe service as excellent, and only 3 percent say their expectations are always met. What I want and what you actually offer. During the past year, 59 percent of respondents have switched service providers because of a bad service experience. The problem is that service is not improving: "In countries we have surveyed previously," the report stated, "the percentage of consumers switching due to bad service is increasing." one of the interesting conclusions (which seems surprising in this day and age of instantaneous online shopping trends) is that companies have a "false sense of security." Meaning, companies refuse to recognize the expanding divide between what customers want and how companies actually meet (or don't meet) their customers' needs. "Internal satisfaction metrics don't convey the gravity of these declines in satisfaction, as expressed directly by consumers responding to this survey," stated the report. "Companies will need to ensure their reporting and metrics provide a reliable view into this issue and how their responses are affecting it." â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Thomas Wailgum 56

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Mahl would also like to see Attensity extend its software to include real-time access to additional data sources, such as websites and blogs, both of which would allow Travelocity to monitor even more customer views. Gaylord's Bodoh notes that many of the text analytics applications that he's examined support only a limited range of analytic topics. "Some would only be able to categorize 40 or 50 problems," he says. "With the categorization model that we have in place, we have over 300 categories." IT leaders examining these tools should also consider the number of 'sentiment' words that an application can recognize, Bodoh warns. "Clarabridge has the capability to really comprehend what the sentiment is for about 25,000 to 30,000 words, and you can tweak that for your industry," Bodoh notes.

nEW fROnTIERS As a growing number or enterprises adopt text analytics, the technology is likely to migrate into other business apps that brush up against users' thoughts and opinions. For content management products, Halper notes, text analytics can be a complementary technology; for example, text analytics can help categorize or enrich content, analyze content in a data repository, or improve workflow. Also, vertical industries, such as the legal industry, are becoming increasingly intrigued by text analytics' ability to add insight to an array of routine tasks, she says. Today, many text analytics users believe that the technology provides a useful bridge to help non-technical staff members get a handle on complex problems without running high-level searches. "You can have business users who are not analysts really understand 'What are my top 10 problems?' or 'How is this issue trending over time?'" Bodoh says. The software makes it easier for just about any business to maintain customer service standards while operating at maximum efficiency, Bodoh believes. "Managers don't have to worry about having to do a ton of analytics," he says. "It's very easy for them to understand." Mahl, meanwhile, says she's satisfied with the results she's seen so far. "Although we are just getting started with the production implementation, we have seen nothing that changes our opinion," she says. One warning: do understand that these are often young and complex software packages. If your enterprise plans to evaluate the technology, test it with real consumer data, Mahl advises. "Go through a thorough analysis of the software and, if possible, a live pilot focused on real business use cases in your company to demonstrate that the software is suitable for the intended use in your environment," Mahl says CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Essential

technology Most companies waste one percent to three percent of revenue on imaging. Here's how to change that, while improving business process and cut energy consumption.

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From Inception to Implementation â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I.T. That Matters

Fit to Print By Meridith Levinson Document Handling | Two years ago, in a bid to reduce costs and enable new technologies, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) merged its print shop with its technology print center. While, the print shop handled bound materials like flip charts and insurance booklets, its technology print center produced paychecks, W-2 forms and clinical handbooks. In the process, UPMC began looking at the amount of money that the Rs 28,000-crore healthcare provider spent on printing, and the number of printers, fax machines, scanners and copiers deployed across its 20 facilities in western Pennsylvania. The figures were staggering, says Jeff Szymanski, UPMC's director of IT. The organization was spending approximately Rs 40 crore on imaging devices, supplies and maintenance every year. It had 13,000 printers, copiers, fax machines and scanners for 43,000 employees. There was one device for every 2.5 employees, 10,000 print queues, and a tangle of IP addresses for the networked devices. "When you look at the number of devices [in your enterprise], it's overwhelming and embarrassing," says Szymanski. Most companies don't pay much attention to the amount they shell out for printing, not to mention the cost to procure, supply and maintain their REAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8

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essential technology

fleet of imaging devices. "It tends to get overlooked because it's not sexy or up front," says Don Dixon, Gartner's research director for printing markets. What's more, printing and imaging usually isn't controlled centrally in organizations. IT departments will be in charge of buying and installing printers because they run on the corporate network, while supply chain organizations or facilities departments will control purchasing supplies for those printers as well as other imaging devices. Consequently, enterprises waste anywhere from one percent to three percent of their revenue on imaging, according to Gartner's estimates. And in some paper-intensive industries like insurance and legal, that number is even higher, says Dixon. At UPMC, Szymanski began a printing and imaging assessment in October 2007 with the help of Xerox. During the 12- to 18-month project, he expects to reduce his 13,000 devices to 3,000 multifunction devices (MFDs). During the next seven years, he expects to save 30 percent to 35 percent in printing costs. Additionally, the revamp will help UPMC move from approximately 2,700 dedicated phone lines to 1,300, saving about Rs 4.4 lakh per month â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and reduce its 12,000 IP addresses for networked devices to 3,000.

scanning and faxing functionalities. Not only can that save their companies money â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Gartner estimates as much as 30 percent annually â&#x20AC;&#x201D; but the MFDs and document management systems help automate and streamline business processes such as traditional manual workflows and, in some cases, improve compliance with certain federal regulations through security features. By taking control of imaging, CIOs can also reduce their company's impact on the environment. Those benefits should help you make a business case for upgrading your company's imaging devices and for convincing opposing users to give up their pet printers and change their attitudes toward hard copy, which ranks among the biggest challenges associated with these projects.

Assess the Printscape Sy Esfahani, executive vice president and CIO of GES, the events company that produces the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, says identifying potential cost-savings from consolidating and upgrading imaging devices is the first and most important step of the process. "Take your time with that," says Esfahani, who began analyzing his company's printing and imaging costs in 2005. "This is a major undertaking." If it wasn't going to save his company money, he was not going

CIOs would benefit from taking control of printing and document management within their organizations.They can also reduce their company's impact on the environment. In this time of increased focus on cost cutting, CIOs would benefit from taking control of printing and document management within their organizations and investigating opportunities to consolidate and upgrade their fleets to MFDs that combine printing, copying, 58

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to replace every device. Esfahani worked with one of his long-time printer vendors, HP, to inventory the total number of devices throughout GES's Las Vegas headquarters and 20 regional offices. The company had 754 printers, copiers and fax machines for 1,500 employees.

30% the amount

enterprises can save annually by moving to MFDs. Source: Gartner

HP then took a closer look at the devices at three locations that GES chose as representative of all of the company's offices. HP determined how many people were using each device at those offices and the total cost of ownership for each device. GES was spending more than Rs 4 crore per year on printing and imaging. "The cost was outrageous," says Esfahani. If GES put an MFD at each location, HP told the company, it could anticipate savings of 28 percent per year by paying a base monthly price for leasing devices as well as per page per device, which includes the cost of maintenance and ink and toner cartridges, instead of purchasing devices, ink and toner on an as-needed basis, says Esfahani. With the estimated cost-savings in hand, HP went to each of GES's offices and drew up floor layouts pinpointing where each device was located. The blueprints allowed GES to determine which devices could be dumped and where to put the new MFDs, taking into consideration the distance between MFD and employee and the number of steps required to get to the MFD. GES also took requirements from its offices for color devices. (Most printer and copier manufacturers like HP, Xerox, Canon and Ricoh will perform this kind of assessment for their customers.)

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essential technology

GES wound up reducing its fleet by 64 percent. It now has just 268 MFDs and is saving close to 32 percent in printing costs every year.

Calm Users' Nerves Esfahani says his number-one concern was angering employees who didn't want the personal printers and faxes that they had earned by rank, taken away. "As a symbolic gesture, the CEO and executive team were the first to give up their printers to set an example for the rest of the organization," he says. That example

this project decreases our costs, improves efficiency and reduces waste and power consumption," he says. Some users are harder to convince than others when it's time to relinquish old printing habits. Mike Clayback, director of IT at Sealing Devices, a privately-held manufacturer of o-rings, gaskets, EMI shielding and adhesives, had to qualify the system he implemented in 2007 to ensure it operated as expected. Instead of passing paper invoices, shop work orders and purchase orders from sales to manufacturing to accounts payable, Sealing

If your users don't care about how much money the new approach to print management is going to save the company,you might want to appeal to their inner tree-hugger. also demonstrated the executive team's commitment to the new print management paradigm inside the company. UPMC took the same approach: Szymanski, his technology group and UPMC's executive team gave up their individual printers. Szymanski says he went to lengths to communicate the reasons why UPMC was consolidating devices and the benefits that users would experience from the move, using e-mails, meetings and UPMC's internal company newsletter. He also made sure that printers were close to the clinical and lab workers who needed them handy. If your users don't care about how much money the new approach to print management is going to save the company (after all, it's not that savings are going to show up in their paychecks), you might want to appeal to their inner tree-hugger. Szymanski says even though going green wasn't UPMC's initial objective, all the employees are proud of the fact that the move to fewer MFDs reduces the amount of energy wasted. "We're pleased that

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Devices now uses Perceptive Software's ImageNow document management system to route and store electronic versions of those documents. Employees in the quality department and in the rest of the company wanted to know that all of the documents being scanned into the new system were properly indexed and that the system wouldn't lose their data. Clayback audited the system to show users that it was, in fact, working properly and to assure them that they didn't need to save hard copies of the documents they were scanning for backup, which was precisely why ImageNow was implemented. He recommends auditing the software soon after the implementation to prove to users that the system is working and installing a shredder right next to the scanner to wean staff off paper and curb their pack-rat instincts.

even more benefits on an ongoing basis, companies need to take advantage of the full capacity of their MFDs and document management systems to automate and streamline business processes, says Gartner's Dixon. For example, GES employees now scan their paper time cards into the MFDs, which automatically route the electronic files to a centralized electronic mailbox. Previously, they FedExed the cards to headquarters. The new, automated process has cut GES's shipping costs. GES also uses the MFDs in tandem with a document management system to electronically route contracts with vendors around the office. Another efficiency improvement comes from the MFD's ability to automatically alert HP when ink or toner gets low. HP then sends replacements to GES. Similarly, if the devices need to be serviced, they automatically alert HP. "That's a huge operational efficiency for us. It fully automates the whole [servicing] process," says Esfahani. At Sealing Devices, Clayback says, the company has reduced its cycle times for document handling, with improvements ranging from minutes to hours, depending on the location of paper files. Its accounts payable department can process 20 percent more invoices per day now than previously because Sealing Devices established new workflows at the same time that it implemented ImageNow. The document management system serves as a one-stop shop for invoices, purchase orders, and manufacturing and shipping documents. When customers or suppliers call Sealing Devices with questions or payment discrepancies, the company can address those issues on the first call. A final benefit of replacing old machines with new MFDs: it gets IT out of another 'plumbing' business, Esfahani says. CIO

Establish New Processes The cost savings associated with fewer machines and supplies is just the start of a printing and imaging revamp. To reap

Meridith Levinson is senior editor. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | j u n e 1 , 2 0 0 8

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Pundit

essential technology

The Social Networking Dilemma Do social networking sites really deliver? Can they be bettered — or made less restricitve? By Bernard Golden Internet|If you're like me, you get a ton of invitations to join social networks. If you're not like me (and I hope you're not, in this respect), you know what to do with these invitations. Therein lies my dilemma. I've never really figured out what to do with social networking. Whenever I talk to someone about LinkedIn, I ask 'how do you use it?' because I would love to leverage a new tool to make my business life more efficient. The answer, invariably, is, 'I've heard that you can use it to...', with some variation on reaching out to people you don't know. The key to those statements is the 'I've heard' part; in other words, they aren't using

to that I didn't get how I could leverage. And then last week I got three invitations to join NotchUp, which promised to help me manage my career. According to an article in the paper, NotchUp is a new site for 'passive job seekers' that lets you post your experience and set a fee for being willing to take a job interview. The article note that, at the time, NotchUp only had 10,000 members; my three contacts is a pretty high percentage of total membership, perhaps my colleagues were gently hinting that I should go get a job? This time, however, I drew the line. Despite my desire to be gracious to people I

a place for that kind of information; they are focused on having people input where they work, what technologies they've used in their jobs, and so on. The social networking paradigm is too restrictive. I want to network with people on a whole range of topics, most of which I don't even know I'm interested in before I'm interested in them. Trying to squeeze my social networking into pre-defined categories, or to use them as the site where I store relevant data that I'd like to share with the world, just seems wrong-headed. Why should I be forced to allow some company to own my information? I think social

Trying to squeeze my social networking into pre-defined categories just seems wrong-headed. it to do anything, but they think someone else might be. The dilemma comes in with each invitation. I don't necessarily see how I can use social networking, but when a friend or acquaintence invites me to link to them ... well, I don't want to be ungracious, so I accept the invitation, all the while feeling that there's some part of the story I just don't get. It's even worse with the proliferation of these networks. Last year, I started to get invitations to link to people on Facebook. But again, I didn't want to offend anyone by not accepting their invitation, so now I had a second social network I belonged 60

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know, I didn't want to go through yet another signup, another invitation to fill out a bunch of information. Which leads me to the biggest part of my dilemma. These sites all want me to do a bunch of work and provide them with value, all so I can putatively gain some benefit. Even worse, they pretty much target the information people provide — but that information may not be (even probably isn't) the information I'd like to get from my network. As an example, over the holidays I wanted to purchase a digital camera. Now, I would be very interested in finding out what people I respect have bought and what experience they've had with different digital cameras, but most of these sites don't have

networking needs a different approach, one where I choose where to put my information — whether my own blog, a product review site, a forum that is focused on an interest of mine — that allows my network access to the information, in a way that is controlled by me. A better approach would be to tie together all these sites via openid, which could serve as the glue to bind together all the information. That way, I could get the benefit of social networking without all the folderol of signing up to multiple sites, don't want to have to, and allowing them to 'own' my data. CIO Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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