CIO November 1 2008 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

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From The Editor-in-Chief

Hold Back the Axes Convince your management to back off, now.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us… — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities The word sentiment, which derives from the Latin sentire (feel) is a strange thing. One moment, India was shining and rising, and the next, caught in the eddies of global economic slowdown, India is on edge. The worst thing to ask anyone, CIOs included, is what the outlook is like. What’s worse is the uncertainty about what the next quarter or two represent. In sectors like retail, realty and infrastructure, the cutbacks have begun. And, nervousness is beginning to infect other verticals which By increasing efficiency otherwise seem intrinsically strong. and revenue, investments Organizations are getting tougher in IT give back far more about justification for expenditure, value than that gained by and some are looking for ways to trim cutting IT spend. spending and boost bottom lines. While I’ve always held that Indian organizations are underinvested in IT and though IT typically accounts for a small fraction of corporate spend, managements predictably look to chop IT budgets while dialing back costs. Given the horizontal impact of IT on the functioning of an enterprise, across the board capex and opex cuts can have a huge detrimental effect on critical functions across departments. You will have to work at convincing business to back off before they bring down the axe. Yet the reality is that investments in IT actually increase organizational efficiency and thereby enhance revenue. In fact, giving back far more value than that gained by cutting IT spend. In this issue’s cover story (Quick Wins, Page 28), seven CIOs from India and the US share their stories of success by rapidly deploying projects that significantly contributed in reducing organizational spending while improving the way their companies went about their business. The projects range from telecommuting to green IT to getting rid of unnecessary assets to negotiating better on pricing with vendors to automation of repetitive tasks and even mechanisms for curbing employee attrition. How are you taking on the challenge of an economy in a flux? Write in and let me know.

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

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content novemBER 1 2008‑ | ‑Vol/3‑ | ‑issue/24

I Photo by Srivatsa Shandilya

2 8 IT Budget

Executive Expectations

COVER STORY Quick Wins | 28

View From The Top | 38 R.K. Vij, CEO, Carzonrent India, says that IT can play a pivotal role in organizing the car rentals sector and put his company on the map.

Seven CIOs checked costs with IT. Take their advice, it can save your company a lot of money.

Cover: design by pc ano op

Feature by Kim Nash, Rahul Neel Mani and Sneha Jha

Interview by Rahul Neel Mani

Web 2.0 Can Mashups Save BI? | 46 Mashups could be the answer to BI’s problems. Here’s how companies are connecting technologies for better business decisions. Feature by Julia King

Green IT ten Power-saving Myths | 50 Is powering a server off and on bad for your system? Do solid-state drives reduce the amount of power that a laptop consumes? We disprove these legend and others. Feature by Logan G. Harbaugh

more » 6

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content

Technology

Essential Technology | 58 Security | Make the Most of SharePoint

Feature by Meridith Levinson Pundit | The Data Imperative

Column by Bruce Schneier

From the Editor-in-Chief | 2 Hold Back the Axes

By Vijay Ramachandran

NOW ONLINE

4 2

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

Case Study Downing Tomorrow’s Data Devils | 42 Fidelity India’s data storage management performed just fine, but leaving it alone could blow a serious hole in the company’s future plans. That’s why Fidelity broke a cardinal IT rule: don’t tinker with something that works.

2 5

Feature by Saurabh Gupta

Strategic Insight Visualize Your Success | 22 In a constantly changing corporate landscape, using guided imagery to create a vision of what you want may help you and your company reach your goals. Column by Diann Daniel

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Advertiser Index

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Saurabh Gupta

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new

hot

unexpected

E-Governance Gets a Passport Director, TCS, explains, “We believe that this mission-mode project of national importance will make delivery of passport services truly world class in nature.” The project will help the government deliver citizen services more efficiently through technology and process improvements by digitizing the passport services. The pilot PSKs at Bangalore and Chandigarh are scheduled to be operational by the beginning of March 2009. The project will lead to a large number of access points for services, availability of a portfolio of online services with real-time status tracking and enquiry. This will help the Central Passport Organization to deal with growing demand for passports, which is expected to cross one crore by 2011.

IllUStratIon by anIl t

Rememeber standing in long queues, running from pillar to post, trying to finish every formality in the book to get a passport? You don't have to do that anymore. Thanks to e-governance. Valued at over Rs 1,000 crore, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has announced the Passport Seva Project. It is the largest mission critical e-governance project in India. Shiv Shankar Menon, India’s foreign secretary says, “The project will result in the issue of passports within three days. The project is expected to

government

be completed by January 2010 and 77 Passport Seva Kendras (PSK) will be opened all over the country under this project.” The project includes setting up of a centralized IT system which includes a datacenter and a disaster recovery centre to which all the PSKs, present passport offices and district police headquarters will be connected. The system is being planned with a 99.5 percent up-time. It will comply with international standards of security like ISO 27001. Personal information and bio-metric information of the applicants will reside in the datacenter and the disaster recovery centre. These will be located in the premises of the ministry with complete security controls. The MEA has joined hands with Tata Consultancy Services to implement the project. S. Ramadorai, CEO & Managing

— By Saurabh Gupta

Quick take

B.L.V. Rao on Desktop Virtualization Infrastructure

Desktop virtualization is increasingly being seen as a strategic technology. Organizations are warming up to the idea of virtualizing their desktops because it delivers cost reduction. Sneha Jha spoke to B.L.V Rao, VP-Technology, Infotech Enterprises, and here’s what he had to say:

Do you think that companies in your sector should virtualize their desktops? And why? Companies should choose desktop virtualization because it reduces the cost of power and cooling thus facilitating a green IT environment. It also improves agility and enhances the ability to scale up faster.

Why did you deploy desktop virtualization in your company? We wanted to consolidate our assets to gain optimal utilization. It also helps in enhancing security, as users don’t have local system with hard drives. Desktop virtualization enables roaming profiles with similar user experience to traditional desktops.

Is desktop virtualization the next logical step after an enterprise has virtualized its servers? I think they go hand-in-hand. Server virtualization has more to do with the IT team, but when it comes to desktop virtualization users are involved, too. But one doesn’t necessarily have to follow the other.

What benefits have you derived from it? Other than security, scalability, DR and improved utilization of computing assets. We estimate Opex reduction by a minimum of 10-12 percent over the next two years. But, we would like to monitor the changing computing environment. At the end of the day, user satisfaction is critical.

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B.L.V Rao

How different is desktop virtualization from managing physical infrastructure? It is very different. Users should get the same experience with the ability to scale up computing performance and still remain compliant with security standards. REAL CIO WORLD | n o v e m B e R 1 , 2 0 0 8

Does RFID Have a Real Business Case Yet? RFID, many feel, has still not established itself as a stable technology even though it is being used by companies in India. While some CIOs are still wary of using it, others feel it has firmly established itself. Saurabh Gupta spoke to some of your peers and here’s what they had to say:

Technology

“RFID certainly has a business case when stock volumes are scaled up to many millions. Its fail-proof traceability is a business driver. ”

trendlines

J. Ramesh CIO, MIRC Electronics (Onida)

“In Indian conditions, if you weigh the business benefits, it is not feasible to implement RFID.”

V. Sundar CIO, T. V. Sundaram Iyengar & Sons

“Maturity of a technology is judged by its flexibility. In that sense, RFID has arrived and is matured in areas like agriculture, pharmaceuticals, defense and retail.”

J. C. Mohanty

Joint Director-IT, Orissa Electricity Regulatory Commission

Lend Your

Voice

Write to editor@cio.in 12

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Security: To each,His own s ECUR I T Y The risks taken by employees with company data can vary by nation and culture, a Cisco study has suggested. The survey, based on interviews conducted with 2,000 employees in ten countries, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, India, Australia, and Brazil, found that employees from all nations exhibited risky behavior. The survey was instrumental in pinpointing which form of behavior attached to which nation. The Chinese and Indians were the most likely to bypass set security settings to access unauthorized websites, with 52 percent saying they would do this because it was "no one's business" which sites they visited. US and Indian employees were the most likely to use unauthorized applications — precisely the form of risky behavior identified by IT staff as causing most data leakages — with, respectively, 74 and 79 percent admitting they would do such a thing with work laptops and PCs. In Germany, by contrast, the biggest issue was simply letting non-employees wander freely around the office without supervision. That an employee in the UK might approach the issue in ways that are subtly different from the same employee in China, the US, or Germany sounds like an obvious point, but according to the survey it has tended to be little discussed. The reasons were often cultural, and sometimes related to the length of time IT had been an established part of a particular society, or simply social norms with a country. "Businesses are enabling employees to become increasingly collaborative and mobile," says Cisco CTO, John Stewart. "Today, data is everywhere. It is in transit, in use within programs, stored on devices, and in places beyond the traditional business environment, such as at home, on the road, in cafes, on airplanes and trains. This trend is here to stay." Companies with a global footprint had to be aware of different cultures and be willing to tailor their security education to fit in with differences in attitude. One size fits all would not work. "Data protection requires teamwork across the company. It's not just an IT job anymore," he said.

—By John E. Dunn

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Storage Market Makes Room for 'Content Depots' The emergence of 'content depots', large repositories of digital content amassed and organized for distribution, is changing how enterprises are consuming disk storage space, given the high volume these depots require. While the traditional trend of migrating from a direct-attached and internal storage system to SAN and NAS has mostly continued, Richard Villars, vice president of storage system research with IDC, said about two years ago "we were finding a large pool of storage being consumed that was running counter to [that]." "All of a sudden there was this huge spike in demand for what was traditionally thought of as older systems architectures," said Villars. Looking a little closer, Villars said organizations like Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, and AOL were spending in that area. And, as a result, a new market for companies building content depots had emerged that didn't exist five years ago. Network-based, starting at a petabyte of capacity and reaching tens, twenties even hundreds of petabytes, content depots are primarily used to store file-

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storage

based data like images, movies and records, rather than transaction-based data produced by credit card systems. But content depots are not solely catered to consumer needs. They are deployed in areas like oil exploration for storing large pools of seismic data, and life sciences for genome data or protein sequencing. Basically, said Villars, any corporation whose business goal is to collect and store huge amounts of data for an extended period of time would use a content depot. And the pool of organizations using content depots is expanding as certain industries adopt an online delivery approach. Media and entertainment, for instance, is increasingly offering digital content delivery, and telecommunications providers are offering video delivery and photo storage, said Villars. "We are seeing traditional companies setting up content depots as well, and transitioning into that same type of model," he said. But besides the obvious adoption driver of explosive data growth and increasing digitization of information, customers are figuring out ways to build

content depots cheaply, said Villars. Disk drive manufacturers, in turn, are responding to the re-emergence of directattached storage. "What you're seeing really in 2008," said Villars, "is all the major players, EMC, Dell, HP, IBM were suddenly realizing there was this huge consumption model" and are attempting to pursue this space. "The IT players running these businesses are really the ones setting the tone for things like power consumption and virtualization and density, because these are people who are pushing the edge of the envelope," said Villars. The IT administrator tasked with building a content depot, said Villars, needs to recognize that this storage environment is architecturally different. And, they should have a good knowledge of cluster file systems and really consider the underlying operations because, he said, "you have to think about what it means to run 40 petabytes of capacity inside the datacenter. You have huge concerns around power consumption, heating, cooling and optimizing system design." â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Kathleen Lau

Underestimating Cybecrime Risks C r i m e Small and midsize business think they are too small to attract cybercriminals, according to McAfee. A survey by the security vendor found that SMBs:

Infograph ics BY bin esh sreedharan

Do not think they could make a cybercriminal any money.

Believe cybercrime is an issue for larger companies.

Are 'not concerned' about being a target for cybercrime.

Source: McAfee

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BY margaret locher

Best Practices

The Wisdom of Cloud Computing a hot technology must weather stability, security and support issues to win over large enterprises.

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cloud loud computing is an emerging technology with a whole lot of buzz. But defining it is as hard as pinning down a cloud. Depending on who you talk to, it is described variously as a form of software as a service, platform as a service or utility computing. What is clear is that we're in the early adopter phase, according to Forrester Research's report, Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise? Forrester offers this definition of the cloud: "a pool of abstracted, highly scalable and managed computer infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption." No matter how it's defined, the cloud has obstacles to overcome before it's ready for enterprise use, writes Forrester Research principal analyst James Staten. So while potential benefits include lower costs, companies are testing the waters only with non-critical projects. Stability and security are two obstacles to enterprise adoption. While there are few wellknown vendors (Salesforce.com, Amazon and Google) offering some variation on clouds, SLAs are rare. And, since cloud computing within organizations often takes place outside IT, vendors cannot always provide references to potential clients. Transparency is one of the security issues surrounding cloud use. Some vendors will not disclose where an application is located geographically, and they don't allow clients to request a location. Lack of support is another problem. Since clouds are unique infrastructures, many commercial operating systems are not certified on these platforms. Staten notes that because the infrastructure is virtualized, this creates licensing issues. However, CIOs shouldn't try to stop business users from experimenting with clouds, he says. Instead, they should get to know the options and then endorse the clouds that fit their organization's processes and strategy. "You don't have to host or provide all of the technology choices yourself," says Staten. "Instead endorse the choices that bring better solutions to the business."

Get to know the cloud. Staten says trying to stop your users from experimenting with clouds will only push their use further under the covers. Instead, look at what they are doing and learn from it. Consider which applications are potential candidates for the cloud.

talk with vendors. once you've tested the waters and shopped around the different offerings, let vendors know what they need to provide to meet your needs. they are looking for your guidance.

insist on transparency. gain an understanding of security and continuity management issues by requesting detailed information from vendors, suggests a recent gartner report on security and cloud computing.

Still Getting Off the Ground With Enterprise IT Clouds Are A Growing Technologyâ&#x20AC;Ś market for cloud computing:

But Few Enterprises Are Using Clouds Today Large companies using the cloud:

$ 160 Billion

5%-15%

(about Rs 15,000 crore)

by 2011

Source: merrill Lynch, Forrester

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s t u d Y Fear not IT and infosecurity personnel: most of your remote workers, mobile users and road warriors toting around laptops and BlackBerrys have the business's best interests in mind when it comes to network security. That's according to results from survey of 300 remote employees who work on company-issued laptops. Seven in ten (70 percent) remote workers said they would rather get their work done on a secure network connection even if it meant their assignment or work would be late. The alternative — connect to an unsafe network to get it done on time — wasn't an option for these workers. In addition, those same remote workers think in-house IT staffers are doing a good job of keeping them connected and mobile. A whopping 96 percent say that their current IT department does a good job of enabling and supporting mobility by supplying devices, providing network access and helping them stay connected when working remotely. More love for IT: almost four in five (78 percent) respondents say their IT department has even provided them with technology that allows them to use their own PC — rather than a company-

issued laptop — while working remotely. That's not to say that remote workers can't get a little sneaky and put their organizations at some risk. Almost one in four have either altered security settings or purposefully delayed security updates. Almost half have downloaded personal pictures and videos (43 percent) or software for their own use (31 percent) on their company-issued laptops. And 25 percent of remote workers admit they've even visited blacklisted or inappropriate websites on their company-issued laptops. Last, just how important has Internet connectivity become to remote workers? The survey found that the majority of mobile workers (74 percent) can't get their jobs done without the Internet. In addition, almost two-thirds (65 percent) believe it would be easier to live without their car for a week than to live without the Internet. —By Thomas Wailgum

Biometrics Uptake Moving at Snail's Pace although biometrics is the most secure form of identification, the corporate world in asia has been slow to adopt it to protect critical information in datacenters and to more efficiently restrict access to enterprise It t systems. this is despite the increasing availability of biometrics security systems including fingerprint, voice pattern recognition, 3D face recognition, vein pattern analysis, and even ear print pattern identification. "Ears are known as the fingerprints of the face, and ear print patterns are quite unique," said Dave Chadwick, senior solutions advisor, identity and biometrics, for Unisys. "there is even vein pattern analysis, which uses infrared light to highlight the veins on the back of the hand — or the back of one finger - which are also nearly as unique as fingerprints." the biometrics Institute has developed voluntary standards for the Id theft

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use of the technology, including regular audits and enforcing information privacy practices. It promotes the technology's responsible and ethical use. the adoption of international standards has helped to advance e-ID protection globally. Chadwick said that in the past five years there has been 'a huge magnitude in improvement' in biometrics technology, but the corporate world was generally still struggling with the cost-benefit analysis. he said that biometrics systems would be perfect to protect datacentres, to restrict access to critical information technology facilities, and to tightly control system administrator identities and their sensitive activities. Chadwick, a former policeman and forensic photographer, said banks — particularly those in asia — had now introduced two factor authentication, with log-ins and digital tokens, but biometrics provided 'three factor authentication'.

Some financial institutions now even used voice pattern recognition to definitely identify clients wanting to withdraw large sums. Chadwick commended Singapore, hong Kong and other developed asian countries, for their advanced adoption of biometrics systems, particularly in enhancing citizen security and border control through e-passports. he highlighted an expensive motorcycle distributor in australia, that installed a biometrics fingerprint identification system to restrict access to a lift, which provided entry to a store of hundreds of valuable machines. "If a motorcycle dealer can use sophisticated biometrics technology to protect expensive machines, it's hard to understand why larger corporations have not yet implemented this most secure form of identification to protect such things as mission critical data and systems."

—by ross o. Storey Vol/3 | ISSUE/24

IllUStratIon by MM Shan I th

remote emote Workers: We Do Care about bout Security

CIOs Demand Clarity on Green TeChnOlOGy Users put vendors on the spot in a green It t panel debate in london, calling for less bloated software, clearer standards and consistent messages. panelists at the Environmental Itleadership eadership forum, debated the environment merits of stretching the It t refresh lifecycle, and investing in virtualization, cloud technology and thin client devices to reduce their carbon footprint. the audience, at the event organized by the environmental charity global action plan, consisted of CIos and It t decision makers. richard Steel, president of Socitm and CIo at newham borough, called for more innovation in technology to tackle climate change issues. "It t is about innovation. We have to recognize the demand for power for these products and concentrate efforts to offset this," he said. Socitm members, said Steel, want benchmarked systems with lowest cost It. t. "but it doesn't matter how efficient t the technology is if it is not used effectively," he said. Catalina Mcgregor, chair of the government's CIo/Cto Council green ICt t Delivery group, advised delegates to "sweat the assets". "Vendors are not bad at pushing hardware. but it's better to sweat the assets than refresh, taking into account that it's hard to dispose of old technology in terms of recycling, landfill, energy of exporting. this is the case, even if the new pCs use less energy." Steve bowden, Cto for sustainability at IbM, said: "hardware is relatively cheap now compared to five years ago. but at the end of the day, it's how you use the technology. traditionally t we've not been optimal in how we use it." on the question of software, users complained to the panel that it is often "bloated, inefficient and packed with features that put a strain on servers". Matt Deacon, DpE chief architect at Microsoft, agreed that bloated software is inefficient software and explained that Microsoft has environmental sustainability in mind when designing code. Commenting after the event, richard Steel said, "I think it's quite encouraging that vendors and system integrators are now responding to the pressures for change but, this is really about competition. how can they use the green agenda to gain competitive advantage?" he added that the real drive has to come from consumers. "I think we have been slow to appreciate the scale of the problem, and many of us are still not taking basic steps like switching-off at night. the imperative to generate efficiencies will certainly help, but we also need to capture hearts and minds. More flexible deployment of software, software reuse, easier to use, more efficient resource utilization â&#x20AC;&#x201D; is certainly a requirement." envIronment

Telecommuting Improves Productivity, Lowers Costs Employees who wish their employers would let them work from home now have more stats to include in their business cases for telecommuting, according to a new survey conducted by CompTIA. The Web-based survey, which sought to explore the business benefits and challenges of telecommuting, found that organizations that give their employees the flexibility to work from home profit from productivity improvements, lower operational costs, and from being able to find and retain talented workers. Of the 212 survey respondents, the majority of whom work in IT, 78 percent said that their companies allow at least some telecommuting. More than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) ranked increased productivity as telecommuting's chief benefit. They say productivity improvements mainly stem from the ability to work during the time employees would otherwise be commuting to the office. Nearly 60 percent of respondents checked off cost savings as another significant benefit of telecommuting. Their answers to how much money their companies have saved by allowing telecommuting varied widely, resulting in an average savings of US $695,752 (about Rs 2,783,00,80 crore). The median and mode amounts saved were $10,000 (about Rs 4 lakh). Other advantages of telecommuting that respondents cited include: The ability to hire the most qualified staff, regardless of where they live (noted by 39 percent of respondents) Higher employee retention rates (37 percent) Decrease in employee stress (25 percent) Ability to reduce auto emissions (17 percent) When asked about the most significant challenges telecommuting presents to organizations, more than half of respondents (53 percent) picked securing corporate information systems. Notably, most of the challenges respondents ranked the highest were technical, not managerial. Limiting the use of unauthorized and unsupported devices was the second most significant challenge, cited by 38 percent of respondents. This was followed by controlling personal use of corporate mobile assets (33 percent) and supervising lower-level workers (32 percent). â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Meridith Levinson

IllUStrat Io n by MM Shan I th

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â&#x20AC;&#x201D;by Computerworld UK staff Vol/3 | ISSUE/24

Martha Heller

Career Strategist

Save-the-Day CIO Interim CIOs on the challenges of diving in and setting things right when a company needs a temporary IT leader.

IOs are calling me. A lot. The country's economic instability has them nervous and thinking about their next job. Most are set on another CIO role and some are ready to move into 'the business.' But a significant number are intrigued by the possibility of an 'interim CIO' or 'CIO for hire' role. They would like to join a firm whose clients are global corporations with messed-up IT organizations in urgent need of a temporary seasoned leader. They would enjoy, they tell me, the diversity of client company engagements and the challenge of parachuting in and setting things right. Who wouldn't want an endless array of exciting new opportunities and a chance to play the hero? Of course, it's worth remembering that an interim role comes with its own special challenges. To paint a complete picture of what such a job encompasses, I spoke with three former CIOs who joined firms that offer interim CIO services as a part of their overall IT and management consulting umbrella. They offer some guidelines for the whys and hows of making the move.

Why Do It? Il lustratio n by MM Shanith

Change is your steady state. Lisa Metcalfe experienced an epiphany of sorts as she reflected on her career as CTO at Avista Advantage, CIO at Washington Gas and VP of IS at National Wildlife Federation. "What I enjoyed most about each role took place during the first six to 12 months on the job," she says. Once she had worked through that initial period of change, work became less interesting. "I wanted to position myself so that the most challenging part of the job would be a regular part of my career." 22

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Martha Heller

Career Strategist

As a new internal executive, you have to spend a lot of up-front time on relationship building because you are there for the long term.The interim role is freeing because you can focus directly on the work right away. After testing the waters by consulting on her own for a few months, she joined Tatum LLC, a large consulting firm that provides interim CIO services to companies in immediate need of an IT leader. At first, Metcalfe worked directly on IT engagements, but she then moved into the role of regional practice leader, responsible for business development and the overall health of the practice. You love the work, not the politics. "As a new internal executive, you have to spend a lot of up-front time on relationship building because you are there for the long term," says Metcalfe. "The interim role is freeing because you can focus directly on the work right away." Metcalfe acknowledges that as an interim CIO, you need to build relationships as well. But you're not there for the long haul. And, in a consulting engagement, "you have to make project work your top priority; if there is a list of projects, you have to start working through it pretty quickly."

What to AskYourself Before Plunging In Can I handle a shorter timeline for success? Steve Faas's experience includes 18 years in IT leadership roles at GE and then four years as CIO at ITT, a $7 billion (about Rs 28,000) industrial manufacturing company. In 2007, he joined AlixPartners, a global restructuring, consulting and financial advisory firm that includes IT leadership engagements as one of its key service offerings. "I spent 25 years in the corporate environment, where we tended to think in terms of years, not weeks or days," he says. "At AlixPartners, we may be helping our client develop a three-year plan, but we are measured on 30 days of delivery." Be sure you are comfortable with the shift before you sign on. Can I be a rainmaker? "When you're an internal CIO, you are constantly selling ideas, projects, a vision or the need for a budget change," says Faas. "But in this role, you are selling to develop more business." As a consultant you will be asked to develop new business over time without the support of a dedicated sales team. Faas has found that inviting his colleagues with more sales experience to new client meetings is a great way to secure the engagement and develop his own business development skills. His advice: "Choose a firm that has a mix of people with consulting and operating backgrounds. You can draw on each other's experience to present the best team to the client." Can I handle the travel? Dennis Conley, formerly CIO of Computer Data Systems, joined Transition Partners, an IT consulting firm to large global companies in 1998, and is now 24

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managing partner. "I knew the opportunity looked right for me and that the only impediment was 85 percent travel," he says. The CIOs I spoke to could not overstate the amount of travel associated with this work. As Faas put it, "When you're not on the road it means you haven't won the business."

What Qualities Are Consulting Firms Looking For? Knowledge of technology. As managing partner, Conley is responsible for recruiting new members to the firm. While a business mind-set and relationship-building skills are critical, he also requires a working knowledge of new technology. "Can you talk about Web 2.0? Can you talk about virtualization?" he asks. "I'm not looking for people who are pure technologists but if you are talking to me about mainframes, that's a red flag. " Big company name. While Conley has hired many successful former CIOs from companies that are not large or well known, bigger is usually better. "If you're coming to us from Ford or Merck, that would be a real plus," he says. "While the big-name background is not essential for success in the firm, it does help us to attract new business." Comfort with an advisory role. Jay Marshall is a managing director of AlixPartners and colead of the Information Technology Transformation Services practice. He, like Conley, bears responsibility for hiring new additions to the firm. "We do like to see people who have had the CIO title in the past," he says, "but we'd also like to see some consulting experience, where they've shown their ability to be in an advisory role. Some CIOs want to say, 'get out of the way and let me do it,' when they have to work hand in hand with the client." Depth and breadth. "The ideal profile is someone who has come from a company larger than $250 million (about Rs 1,000 crore), has had both business and financial responsibility, and can go both deep and broad with technology," says Marshall. "It is great to have a SAP expert, but it is better to have someone who has seen multiple ERP environments. They need to be plug-andplay compatible." Some CIOs transition beautifully into interim CIO work and some flounder and long to return 'home.' If you have any reservations about the travel, the selling and the advisory role, you may want to do a bit more self-assessment before taking the plunge. CIO

Martha Heller is managing director of the IT Leadership Practice at the ZRG, an executive recruiting firm in Boston. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Diann Daniel

sTRATEGIC INSIGHT

Visualize Your Success In a constantly changing corporate landscape, using guided imagery to create a vision of what you want may help you and your company reach your goals.

Il lustratio n by MM Shanit h

isualization, or the art of using all the senses to create a mental movie of what you want to happen, has long been a tool for improving sports performance. Brian Nielsson, an avid kayaker since 13, discovered the tool as one of his first competitions approached. In preparation for his 500-meter K1 race, he relaxed and then pictured how he would execute the race and win. “At the start of the race, I wasn’t even nervous,” he says. “The race played out exactly as I’d seen it in my head.” Now a former world kayak champion, an entrepreneur, and the founder and board chairman of mobile-solution supplier HandStep, Nielsson still counts visualization, known also as mental rehearsal or guided imagery, as one of the most important tools in his success toolkit. Numerous research studies support visualization' enhancement of performance and motivation, according to the online journal of sport psychology, Athletic Insight, and others. For example, research shows that golfers who use imagery techniques practice more, set higher goals, have more realistic expectations and stick to their training programs better. Beyond that, studies also suggest that visualization can increase 'flow', or the positive mental state marked by a lack of self-consciousness and a union with the task at hand. Visualization is increasingly used outside sports, such as medicine. The concept still seems curiously absent from the corporate, despite the need for innovation (which requires vision) and despite the frenetic pace of change (layoffs, mergers and so on) that leaves many an employee feeling adrift and helpless. “For some reason visualization is a concept that many business folks tend to dismiss, perhaps due to the preponderance of leftbrain thinking in business,” says Thomas Koulopoulos, founder 26

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Diann Daniel

sTRATEGIC INSIGHT

of innovation consultancy Delphi Group. Koulopoulos, who leads some clients in visualization exercises, says that the increasing speed of change in business is one factor that will quash the prejudice against the practice. “As uncertainty increases, the time to respond decreases,” he says. In this tumultuous environment you must use visualization “to establish a clear end state that will guide all of the unforeseen decisions that have to be made; so many of the tactical operations involved in achieving that end state will be completely unpredictable.” Or as Mark Twain said, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” “Visualization helps people get clearer about aims and objectives,” says social psychologist and author Stephen Kraus, president of Next Level Sciences, a success consultancy. Visualization fosters people’s ability to develop a clear vision, both in terms of end states and products. “People with clear non-conflicting goals accomplish more and are healthier,” he says. He says vision is a cornerstone of success and points to the words of Harvard marketing guru Ted Levitt, who says, “The future belongs to people who see possibilities before they become obvious.” Nielsson agrees. Staying true to his vision is key to developing new products, he says. He calls on visualization to guide and focus him on his goals, help create the response he wants in those around him and keep faith that his company’s new products will be welcomed.

a long time before they happen,” he says. He’s not talking about some supernatural power, but rather attention. In the rush of daily life, so much can escape our attention. Visualization is a means of allowing yourself the space to capture those impressions in a usable way. Let go of obstacles. To create a positive vision, let go of fear of failing and all the reasons your goal can’t work. Imagining how you might deal with obstacles is a separate exercise. Just as you should keep brainstorming sessions separated from the evaluation of ideas, to create a vision you first need to give room

Visualization and its results are all about focused attention — slowing down long enough to see and create possibility, and tuning to what those around you are feeling and thinking.

Creative Visualization 101 Situations for which you can use visualization include preparing to give a stellar presentation, seeing the steps necessary to completing a successful project and creating a path to innovation. Here’s a quick primer on how to imagine winning in the mental theater for more success in the business arena. Guiding Imagery. Find a quiet spot, and allow yourself to relax. First, concentrate on your breathing. Then imagine your shoulders, neck and other stress points becoming heavy and relaxed. Allow your mind to clear of worries. Visualization works best alone and away from noise, says Kraus. If possible, carve out enough time to do it properly. Create a detailed vision of what you want to achieve. See, hear and feel what you want to happen in detail. “Visualization is an aim you want to achieve,” says Nielsson. That said, it’s important to envision the process and not just the product, says Kraus. A simple example is a salesperson envisioning not just getting a sale, but all the steps it take to get there. Nielsson, for example, imagines with all his senses all of the people he is meeting with and how they will act. He also uses the technique to try to see where the market is developing. “I’m picking up from everywhere what is happening in the market; then I try to visualize what will happen next. Often I’ll see things

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to the positive mental imagery and the feelings it evokes before you move on to less positive imaginings. Koulopoulos asks clients who have difficulty with this to think backwards: “That is, to first visualize the end state in terms of its core characteristics, attributes and achievements.” He says the technique is simple in concept but difficult to apply in practice. This is because many people will come up with all of the obstacles rather than the result. To combat that, create the detailed scenario of the end state without regard to anticipated or unanticipated obstacles, he recommends. This means working backward from the end state to fill in the steps, technologies, behaviors, organizational issues and so on that would need to be in place to achieve the goal.

UsingYour Vision Think win-win. You can’t use visualization to achieve what you want without regard for others, says Nielsson. “You need to know where you want to end up and what your limits are, but it is much better to come to mutual understanding and agreement.” Many people have a goal and just go for it, he says, and sometimes they get what they want but in the process alienate the people around them. Listen and pay attention. In the end, visualization and its results are all about focused attention — slowing down long enough to see and create possibility, as well as becoming more attuned to what those around you are feeling and thinking. In fact, Nielsson considers a natural outgrowth of visualization to be empathy. Empathy itself is the understanding of another’s situation, feelings and motives — a state not possible without attention. Develop this personal tool, and see yourself getting more successful. CIO

Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Cover Story | IT Budget

Seven CIOs show you how to keep costs in check using IT. Take their advice, it can save your company a lot of money. By Kim S. Nash, Rahul Neel Mani and Sneha Jha

Reader ROI:

Projects you can execute quickly Ways to cut costs and improve IT operations at the same time

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ou know how ugly it is out there. The cost of products we buy every day is jumping. It’s only been a few weeks since the Consumer Price Index made the news for days on end as TV channels and newspapers tracked its steady climb. Globally, banks are being bailed out and markets forecast doom as consumers snapped their wallets shut. CEOs in the US expect the economy to grow at a skimpy 1.3 percent this year, according to a survey of 110 chief executives conducted by the Business Roundtable. That's the slowest growth rate predicted by CEOs since the post-9/11 and post-bubble year of 2002. “Companies have to do something now,” says Erik Dorr, senior IT research director at the Hackett Group, a technology management consulting firm. But “it’s better to think it through than make cuts in a reactionary way." We scouted for examples from across the world and India of tactical projects that you can execute in a few months and reap rewards quickly. You have to be smart to keep your job. One way to display your smarts is to seek and destroy all moneysucking waste at your company. Here's how:

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Curb Attrition Savings: Rs 70,000 per recruit

P hoto by Srivatsa Sh an dilya

hey call it the ‘honeymoon period.’ But it wasn't sweet for Intelenet Global Services, whose new recruits joined the company only to leave it in the first 90 days (their training period). For all the training and money the company invested, it got back sleepless nights. Intelenet Global Services is a business process outsourcing company, which recruits a minimum of 500 employees every month and spends between Rs 50,000 and Rs 70,000 to nurture a new hire before he or she is inducted into the business. With a significant attrition rate during this incubation period, a lot of this money was being wasted. “If we spent in the range of Rs 50,000 to Rs 70,000 on one person and there’s 20 percent attrition, you can estimate the direct monetary losses, forget about the loss of manpower for as many days in future,” says Deshpande. But in the BPO industry, attrition comes with the territory. “If we are not hiring people with the right skill set, it causes attrition. Any discomfort in the mind of a new employee can result in attrition. If a person is hired for one capability and he is put into an alien process, it’s quite possible that he will leave,” explains Rajendra Deshpande, CTO, Intelenet Global. With so much being spent on a new recruit, it became crucial for the organization to keep an eye on a new recruit’s lifecycle during the pre-hire and orientation phases to understand why they were leaving. Intelenet couldn't know because there was no realtime data available to gauge that. As each department and business unit managed its own data separately, it resulted in numerous isolated excel sheets. A lack of a centralized data warehouse was beginning to worry the company and its COO, Prabhu Srinivasan, turned to Deshpande. “He looked very bugged with this issue and demanded for a single spreadsheet instead of disjointed islands of information,” says Deshpande. The company desperately needed a system to keep track of its employees’ lifecycle and curb attrition. And it needed it fast. Deshpande and his team came up 30

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with the 'Incubation Tracker': an in-house system developed using .Net technology that could not only help check attrition but also lead employees to a productive stay in the company. “The biggest risk that we faced during the execution of the project was the ability to deliver the project as per business timelines. The management wanted to deploy the solution as a top priority and had an ambitious timeline of three months to roll it out across the organization,” says Deshpande. But Deshpande delivered. It was all done in three months. The internal

team at Intelenet started work on the project in July 2007 and the system was up by October 2007. But instead of calling it a tool to curb attrition, Deshpande has named it ‘Retention Matrix’. The system provides insight on parameters such as right hire quality (finding the right people for specific processes depending on their experience), training yield percentage and trainer yield percentage, among others, that are crucial to control attrition and improve retention. The tool is hosted on a common domain and can be accessed by authorized users. It

Information is available at the click of a button to take proactive measures to check attrition. What you don’t manage, manages you.” — Rajendra Deshpande

CTO, Intelenet Global Services

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Cover Story | IT Budget now gives a single window of information to the executives responsible for hiring at Intelenet. Now, the company can analyze the qualifications and readiness of a set of people to be deployed into any process. “The manual process had a tinge of individualism, which resulted in natural flaws. We lost on standardization and were not able to see the same picture across the organization. At the end, it was a disjointed image,” he says. This affected new recruits in the HR department as it took a lot more time for them to understand the process of gathering data from different locations. But, with the centralized system they can see a single datasheet about any person. All the information now generated by the Incubation Tracker is available to the hiring executives at the click of a button. “Today, this system is designed to enable the simultaneous login of 4,000 users and can capture close to 25,000 records. And it can be scaled to include more users and locations,” says Deshpande. The project cost the company between Rs 7-8 lakh and brought in great benefits. There’s a 85 percent improvement in the turnaround time for MIS requests: if, for example, a manager wanted to know the number of classes a trainee attended or missed, the system can automatically provide an answer. “The system has resulted in increased productivity for trainers too. By entering training scores against a candidate’s history, it is possible to identify issues with training batches, performance and alter training to employee requirements,” says Deshpande. These tweaks have resulted in a 10-15 percent drop in attrition and it is continuing to drop further. “The Incubation Tracker has significantly increased cost consciousness and guided our efforts to arrest attrition across sites and improve our hiring quality,” says Srinivasan, COO of the company. “There’s an absolute end-to-end view for the business from the day a prospective employee registers till the time he or she is allocated to a business unit. And that information is available at the click of a button to take proactive measures to check attrition. What you don’t manage, manages you,” concludes Deshpande.

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Move Out of the Office Savings: 50 percent of infrastructure costs

penny saved is a penny earned. It’s an idea that Bangalore-based Consilium Software, a unified communications software and solutions provider, has embraced as their motto. With true start-up daring, the company that got off its feet in November 2007, decided to use its clean slate to break away from the Opex-heavy model other companies follow. Nothing was radical enough if it cut costs: not even telecommuting. The work-from-home idea, however, was met with skepticism. In India, it’s an approach associated with unknown companies whose back-of-autoriskshaw advertisements egg on housewives to earn a quick buck. But Col. Arvind Saxena, group CIO at Consilium, who honed the idea in December 2007 — a month before he signed up with the organization — was convinced it had promise. And he’s not someone given to whimsical ideas. As the man who gave India’s first-ever lowcost airlines its teeth, Saxena is comfortable with radical business ideas that are driven by IT. When he was the CIO of Air Deccan (he was part of the start-up team), he created the IT system that allowed the airline to slash the price of its tickets by 24 percent. It created a new industry and many me-too’s. But like most good managers, Consilium’s bosses were apprehensive that without tight supervision, productivity among teleworkers would decline sharply. There were also fears that sucking staffers out from the office would “undermine teamwork and organizational cohesion,” says Saxena. However, the thought of saving on real estate and other expenses like security deposits, electricity and air conditioning, says Saxena, kept them from throwing the idea out.

Saxena assuaged their fears by proposing to use technology to increase communication for collaboration. He introduced the idea of daily and weekly conference call meetings to get progress reports. He also supported the idea with technology. "We have a presencebased application which tracks how many hours a telecommuter spends working online and how many hours he or she is offline. Clubbed with customer feedback, we can figure out how many productive hours a telecommuter puts in every day and how efficient their services are," says Saxena. After much deliberation, Consilium’s management realized that this compelling business proposition could reduce cost without compromising efficiency. The next question was whether everyone was eligible. They decided that the program could safely be extended to staffers whose jobs lent themselves to telecommuting, including sales, marketing and IT. Because sales and marketing, for instance, had to be available in various time zones (for clients anywhere between the US and China), working from home not only saved the company infrastructure overheads, it actually increased productivity. “Because we commuted to office everyday, we were not available to our customers across a wide-ranging geography,” says Venkat Raman, AVP Sales (APAC) and a full time telecommuter. “Sometimes, customers called us while we were in transit and wanted us to attend to an urgent need and we wouldn’t be able to take their calls. But now we are available 24 hours a day.” Given the different time zones they need to service, the telecommuting model also allows for more flexibility. “Take for instance, if a task requires a salesperson to be available for a customer at a specific hour. This issue has been addressed by the tele-working model,” says Raman. With salespeople getting familiar with video conferencing, they’re taking kindly to meeting their clients over the Web —

15%

The productivity increase among telecommuters since February 2008

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Cover Story | IT Budget And, as a start-up working in a business landscape characterized by aggressive competition and shrinking margins, every additional benefit helps. But start-up or not, there are lessons here for everyone.

Consolidate Cell Phone Services “The company has saved around 50 percent on real estate, office overheads and travel. This has raised our profit margin.” — Col. Arvind Saxena

Photo by Srivatsa Shandilya

Group CIO, Consilium Software

something CIOs have found hard to convince salespeople to do. Saxena says there’s been a 15 percent uptick in telecommuter productivity and that teleconferencing has reduced travel by 30 percent. But work-from-home isn’t for everyone. Even among the departments that are eligible for the program, Consilium decided that only senior management — those who were proven performers and had a high level of maturity — was chosen. These staffers are provided with dedicated home workstations. Each telecommuter is given a laptop, a broadband connection, a data card and a printer. Saxena says that it costs Rs 50,000 to set up a home workstation. And it costs Rs 2,000 a month to support each person, including Internet, printer and telephone bills. Apart from this, the telecommuting initiative has also reduced Consilium’s infrastructure cost substantially — from the word go. “The company has realized a savings of around 50 percent on real estate, office overheads and travel reimbursement. And this has raised our profit margin,” says Saxena. The program has also reduced the company’s electricity costs by 37 percent. 32

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Telecommuting promises business benefits in the long run, too. It creates happier customers who can now be serviced faster because they have better access to Consilium’s staff. The flexible working arrangement has considerably reduced the stress from commuting. “We’ve reduced traveling to the office by 90 percent,” says Saxena. This has resulted in happier, more in-control employees. “On an average we take on 30 to 40 percent more work every day,” says Raman. “And we have also been able to strike an optimal work-life balance. This has reduced absenteeism and time off besides inducing a high level of motivation.” With that satisfaction, attrition has come down. “Our capacity to retain talent has improved. In the past nine months, there has been no case of attrition among the telecommuters,” says Saxena. Saxena believes that a telecommuting option is the second best recruitment inducement after salary. From experience, he says, it is an appealing option for many potential employees. “I have been flooded with applications. This has made recruitment simpler and more costeffective,” says Saxena.

Savings: 30 percent of monthly charges

lackBerry, iPhone, cell phone, pager — personal devices of every sort were rampant at Title Resource Group, a real estate closing company that's part of the $6 billion (about Rs 24,000 crore) Realogy, which owns Century 21, Coldwell Banker and other franchises. This time last year, Title Resource employees could use any cell phone they wanted for work, even personal devices that they, not the company, owned. Corporate calling plans for managers, sales reps and other employees allowed for a few hundred minutes per month. Some employees used a personal plan, even on a company-owned device. Other employees submitted cell phone charges on monthly expense reports, says Nehal Trivedi, CIO at Title Resource. As a result, the company didn't know exactly how much money it was spending on cell phone bills. But Trivedi had the feeling it was too much. "A thousand dollars a month raises a lot of eyebrows," he says. "If it was your home bill, you would look into it no matter how affluent you are." Trivedi needed data to make a business case for reining in cell phone expenses. So business intelligence specialists in IT worked with corporate finance to collect the data from invoices and expense reports. Armed with specifics, Title Resource then negotiated contracts with two preferred cell providers, AT&T and Verizon, that gave the company better rates. Employees were then categorized as minimal use, voice-only use and voiceand-data use, Trivedi says. Minimal-use employees are capped at $40 (about Rs 1,600) per month in usage. Voice-only people

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Cover Story | IT Budget get plain cell phones, not smart phones. Those allowed voice-and-data plans can get BlackBerrys or other smart phones. Title Resource enforces the limits by sending spending reports to senior managers every month, detailing whose monthly bills were highest. "We started paying attention to the top talkers, and [their bills] are difficult to justify," Trivedi says. The project took a few months, and the company saw savings with the first phone bills, Trivedi says. He declines to specify how much he's saved, but says companies can knock 30 percent to 35 percent off their monthly cell bills this way. Corporate cell phone usage policies are increasing, as the devices themselves pervade companies. Savings from a project like this depend on the level of control the company exerted on cell phone usage at the start, says Erik Dorr, senior IT research director at the Hackett Group. "If the starting point is entirely unmanaged and the new state is tightly controlled," he says, "then 30 percent to 40 percent is entirely reasonable." International roaming charges are especially expensive. Of course, there was pushback. If there's one thing people grow attached to, it's their phone, smartphone, handheld device, PDA — cool devices define the corporate self the way a fancy car might. One recent study showed that while BlackBerrys dominate the enterprise, iPhone users are happiest. Trivedi had to tell people that yes, they must give up ownership of their main work device. But after he showed them examples of how much they'd be saving the company, most bought in, he says. If employees wanted to keep a second device, they could choose to do so at their own expense. And they did get to keep their old phone numbers. Finally, the top-talker report loomed, he says. "No one wants their name on there."

Turn Off Idle PCs Savings: Rs 12 crore

hen the CIO also leads the company’s environmental efforts, the IT group, for better or worse, gets to be front and center 34

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in the green movement. Going green can save greenbacks, which is a welcome notion at Washington Mutual, which suffered heavy losses in the subprime mortgage crash. Washington Mutual (WaMU) laid off 1,200 employees and took the chairman title away from CEO Kerry Killinger in June. Wall Street doesn’t expect the company to post profits again until 2010. The bank has cut its PC-related greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent and will save $3 million (about Rs 12 crore) on electricity costs this year, says Debora Horvath, WaMu's CIO and head of the environmental council. Horvath has set the bank on other green IT initiatives, including getting legal to use less paper. The savings from this bank-wide PC project, though, will come from Verdiem power-management software, which WaMu installed on its 44,000 PCs last year, after a 100-machine pilot last spring. The software monitors activity on the computers, powering them down when they aren't in use. Less electricity used, more money saved. Cost-cutting drives most green IT initiatives, followed by efforts to be more socially responsible, according to our survey of 280 technology executives. At WaMu, Horvath's team set up the system so that during business hours of 8

At Title Resource, there are three categories of phone use: minimal use, voice-only and voiceand-data, each with their own limits. The company enforces the limits by sending reports to senior managers every month detailing whose bills were highest.

am to 6 pm, PCs and monitors in WaMu's retail branches remain on. At WaMu's back-office locations, monitors turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity and PCs go into standby mode after 30 minutes of inactivity. At 6 pm every night, if there is no activity, PCs go into standby and the monitors turn off. Employees working after hours can delay the software from powering down. Laptops were removed from the rollout because ROI wasn't as great as on desktops, a spokesman says, adding that that assessment was based on a study performed by the vendor. The entire project took a few months to roll out.

Nix stuff You Don’t Need Savings: Millions, potentially

he US Department of Defense budgets $20 billion (about Rs 80,000 crore) for information technology in a given year and no one person or spreadsheet or database keeps a running and accurate count of all the pieces of hardware and software in action. That's not unusual for any large organization, which is why the asset management discipline emerged. The first step is figuring out what useful and not so useful computer gear is hanging off your network, then lay to rest those wasting time and money. A project to do that at the US Army has so far produced multimillion-dollar savings and now the DoD itself wants to replicate it, says Joe Paiva, a leader in the DoD responsible for IT portfolio management strategy and policy development. Paiva worked with asset management software from BDNA, a private company in Mountain View, California. In one day, he and his team installed the BDNA Insight ‘agentless discovery’ product on servers in one Army office, to search various servers and PCs at major Army bases and facilities. ‘Agentless discovery’ means the software automatically crawls an IP network to record every

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Cover Story | IT Budget device and piece of software attached to it. Initial scans take about a day, Paiva estimates. BDNA Insight then spits out a report that can be sorted by type of device, server crawled and other variables. The process turned up some surprises and has helped the Army close money leaks. For example, across Army facilities, individual Oracle database and applications licenses were in use, sold to local military purchasing agents by value-added resellers. By moving those to an enterprise license and maintenance contract with Oracle directly, the Army saved "tens of millions" of dollars, he estimates. On the hardware side, the Army found some printers that were underused and others overused. "A big printer that should be doing thousands of pages a month was doing only 100," he says. Paiva was promoted before the Army tackled printer reconciliation, but with a good asset discovery tool, he says, "you can very quickly see this doesn't make any sense." As an ancillary benefit, the asset management program has helped the Army improve security. For example, Paiva's team found versions of the FoxPro database, which Microsoft now owns, that the military stopped using years ago. "We found older versions of the database." he says, "that potentially had vulnerabilities." Another example: at Fort Belvoir, an Army base, the software immediately found 103 copies of Google Earth, according to a presentation Paiva made after BDNA Insight was installed. While individuals can use Google Earth without a license, large organizations aren't allowed to. Also turned up at Fort Belvoir were 54 possibly unsanctioned copies of iTunes and several instances of Google Talk, which could allow unauthorized VoIP and instant messaging. "At installations where we thought we had all of the computers tightly locked down, it showed we had software which had been installed without going through our software approval and installation process," he explains. "This is not just an Army thing. Compliance is always a challenge in any big organization." Managing employees using unsanctioned technology is a growing task.

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"We started paying attention to the top talkers, and [their bills] are difficult to justify.” — Nehal Trivedi CIO , Title Resource

Any large company can get the same benefits as the Army and the DoD, Paiva says. After serving for 10 years in the Army, he was an IT manager at a hospitality company and at a healthcare company. When the Iraq war started in 2002, he took a civilian IT management job with the Army. Jack Heine, an analyst at Gartner, estimates that for organizations with no or very immature technology asset management programs, first-year savings could amount to 20 percent of the IT budget. Then 5 percent per year is possible for the next three years.

Get Help With Contract Negotiations Savings: Over Rs 4 crore

o one wants to overpay vendors, but Lafarge North America was. Patrick Kys, VP of IT and CIO of Lafarge North America, thought he wasn't getting the respect — that is, the pricing leverage — he should get from the company's major suppliers, such as AT&T, HP and Microsoft. Lafarge North America is a private company, owned by Lafarge Group SA in France, that makes concrete, gypsum and other construction materials. With $6

billion (about Rs 24,000 crore) in sales, the company isn't small potatoes. But Kys and other senior managers didn't know what level of discounting they could get and therefore weren't sure they were as bold in negotiating as they could have been, Kys says. It's hard for individual technology managers to get reliable information about what others are paying, he says, even from each other. Vendor contracts often stipulate that customers can't discuss pricing. Maneuvering with vendors around the negotiating table takes practice. To gain perspective, Lafarge North America last year hired NPI Financial, a spend management consulting firm in Atlanta. Within several weeks, NPI had reviewed the company's contract with AT&T. NPI then reviewed other Lafarge North America IT contracts and concluded that it was overpaying several vendors. Right away, the company set to work to get better deals. NPI advises many clients and negotiates for some, collecting benchmarks on vendor pricing across industries while keeping individual client data confidential. Kys says he got the inside knowledge he couldn't get elsewhere. NPI representatives guided Lafarge negotiators, and sometimes stepped in to negotiate, in contract talks with AT&T, getting the vendor to "do better" on pricing, REAL CIO WORLD | n o v e m B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

10/24/2008 8:23:26 PM

"Most IT managers negotiate with vendors sporadically and don't have all the tactics to win.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Patrick Kys VP of IT and CIO of Lafarge North America

says Sepehr Kousha, IT controller at Lafarge North America. For a negotiation with HP, NPI provided benchmarking, she says. "That's very effective." "We took their arguments off the table," Kys adds. Lafarge is a big HP shop, using HP desktops, laptops, servers, printers, SAN products and various utility software. When it was time to renew maintenance and service agreements with HP, NPI spent two weeks assessing Lafarge North America's current contracts against similar terms, conditions and pricing offered by third-party providers and against what HP was offering other customers, Kousha says. "This helped us to not only improve our current-year prices but to also negotiate a multiyear deal, whereby our prices are not locked for the next 24 months," she says. Those negotiations took about six months. That's not unusual, as software pricing is not only costly but complex. In a new networking and data telecommunications deal with AT&T, Lafarge has gained "seven-figure savings," Kousha says. But she also declined to provide specifics. Kys adds that that savings was 20 percent more than he had anticipated. He credits NPI for that. NPI is paid a retainer, 36

Cover Story.indd 36

n o v e m B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

with incentive-based fees as a bonus. Telecom negotiations are usually intense, Kousha adds, but better informed, Lafarge staff persevered. "They try and wear you down and won't come to a final price quickly. They try to make you give up," she says. "We decided tactically to hang in there." Kys advises other IT leaders to add a controller or financial manager to the technology department. Most IT managers negotiate with vendors "sporadically [and] don't have all the tactics to win." Kousha reports to Kys, with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the corporate finance chief. Next up for Kousha and Kys are contracts for storage equipment and Cisco's Smartnet technical support.

Automate Administrative Tasks Savings: Up to Rs 4 crore

ompliance. You can't avoid it and you can't keep failing it. The best you can do is make it cheaper and easier and good enough to pass audits. Anyone trying to comply with PCI and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations knows that passing an audit hangs on demonstrating that you control employee access to sensitive customer and financial data. So it was at Gap Direct, which oversees the e-commerce efforts of Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and shoe outlet Piperlime. But controlling access wasn't simple in a mixed environment of mainly Unix servers, including Linux, and various Microsoft Windows operating systems. Gap Direct uses Microsoft's Active Directory administrative tools. Among other features, Active Directory lets

system administrators grant and control end-user permissions more easily than many Unix tools, says Jeff Arcuri, a senior manager of IT at Gap Direct. Active Directory by itself doesn't support Linux or Unix so Gap's system administrators ended up having to assign employee permissions individually, to access different databases and applications, depending on the work they needed to do. When it came time for PCI and Sox audits, auditors or system administrators had to collect the server logs manually to show who accessed what files when, for hundreds of servers. They could automate bits of the process with custom scripts but still, start to finish, the ordeal required up to 10 people working at least part-time on every audit, he says. To automate more of the process and free up systems administrators for more valuable work, as well as make user access permissions in this mixed operating environment simpler, Arcuri deployed an identity management tool from Likewise Software. The software installation took about three months, early this year, and involved two to five system administrators at various points, Arcuri says. Installing identity management systems can help a company enforce policies for who can see what data. Now the company has set up group profiles for several different kinds of employees, so administrators don't have to configure profiles individually. Likewise also produces reports by user, by date and by server. The number of people working on a given audit has dropped to about five, Arcuri says. "At the end of the day, we have to report on this stuff. The question was whether or not we could better our reporting," he says. "Now we get more data in a faster time and a better return-people-to-work time." The implementation cost $400,000 (about Rs 1.6 crore) but the company expects to see several hundred thousand dollars to $1 million per year in savings, mainly stemming from more efficient use of system administrators' time, Arcuri says. CIO Kim Nash is senior editor. Rahul Neel Mani is resident editor. Sneha Jha is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Test-Driving a

Market

n o v e m B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

View from the Top - Full.indd 38

…And the moral of the story is slow and steady wins the race. There was a time when the world believed that. But not anymore. Not in a world where time is money. Not when you are a player in an industry that is reportedly worth Rs 6,400 crore and growing. The car rental industry stood at Rs 5,700 crore in 2007-08. With a projected growth of about 25 percent in 2008-09, it is developing at a pace unseen and unheard of in the past. But for R.K. Vij, CEO of Carzonrent India, this is no surprise. Setting up shop in 2000 — when the car rental industry belonged to the unorganized sector — Vij knew that the only way he could build a business case for himself was to take risks. And quickly. He entered the market with his sole weapon: technology. He placed his bet on technology at a stage when his competitors were still pondering over what was possible. Today, with revenue of over Rs 100 crore, Vij has proved that there is no room for turtles in a world that believes in the fast and the furious.

CIO: How did you envision a business based on renting cars and how do you see yourself today? R.K. Vij: The car rental industry was facing a challenge because none of its players were looking at it as an organized business. It was treated as a support

business to the hospitality sector. That’s why this industry lacked steam in India. I felt that it was critical to set up an organization which focuses only on ground transportation. I studied how the industry progressed in other parts of the world. In developed markets, you find four kinds of services including self-drive service, radio taxis, limousine

I Imagin g by B INESH SREE DHARAN

View from the top is a series of interviews with CEOs and other C-level executives about the role of IT in their companies and what they expect from their CIOs.

By Rahul Neel Mani & Saurabh Gupta

Photo by DR LOH IA

R.K. Vij, CEO, Carzonrent India, says that IT can play a pivotal role in organizing the car rentals sector and put his company on the map.

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View from the Top

R.K. Vij expects I.T. to: Introduce scalability in his business Push the envelope on revenue Enable the optimal utilization of resources

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10/24/2008 5:22:43 PM

View from the Top

service and corporate fleets, which are on operating lease. A few years ago, India had only metered or non-metered taxis. A non-metered taxi was called ‘rent a car’ but it was not really the same. We decided to focus on giving a new shape to this industry and do everything that was required to build it. And thus, we started Carzonrent in 2000, and acquired the license for Hertz in India. We have not re-invented anything. We just picked up the model that existed in the best cities of the world. Right now, we are installing credit card swipe machines in all our cars to give the customer payment options. Other than radio cabs, we also operate corporate fleets where we provide services to large corporates across the country. We have also got into the limousine business to service high-end customers in India.

How have you, as a CEO, guided IT to help both operators and customers? In India, the car rental industry is fragmented with hundreds and thousands of operators with small fleets. That’s why nobody invested in technology. In 2005, when we first raised our private equity investment in the company, it was raised only for making investments in IT. That’s when we implemented Oracle Financials to automate and streamline all our financial business processes — at a time when the industry was at a nascent stage. We decided to move to an ERP platform. We started building a completely technologydriven operational interface with an Oracle platform at the backend. This gave us the ability to run a fleet of over 2,000 cars. At the same time, we started investing in building a mobile technology platform to reach out to our customers. Today, every time a customer makes a booking, the system automatically generates a confirmation; the customer receives order details including a car number and a 40

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“As far as competitive advantage is concerned, our technologydriven approach keeps us a few steps ahead of the others.” — R.K. Vij driver’s mobile number. The customer can send an SMS to get information about the amount he has been charged for the service. We created this Web-based platform and it has helped us operate in 34 locations.

Was this your vision? How did you create it? I have studied this industry for 15 years. I have seen the systems and technology being used in the largest car rental businesses of the world. Therefore, I insisted on investing on technology because that’s the only way I believe that this business can be built in India.

How do you plan to create a niche for your company by using IT? My objective is not to just build my own organization. It will be good if the industry’s standards also improve simultaneously. As far as competitive advantage is concerned,

our technology-driven approach keeps us a few steps ahead of others. I am excited that we have done almost everything completely on our own. Others, who have followed us, have not been able to achieve what we have in spite of taking help from some of the largest technology companies. Some of our competitors’ platforms, who have developed their software using some of the big names in the IT industry have not been as successful. In terms of functionality and benefits to the customers, our platform is far superior as we took the technology route earlier than other players.

What investments did you make in technology to ensure a robust backend? We have used multiple server farms to host our servers. We have very strong processes in place for backups and business continuity. To ensure connectivity at all locations, we use three parallel service providers. We have one primary service provider and two backups. Similarly, one set of servers is kept in our own premises; a second set somewhere else in India and a third set is a backup in the USA. In terms of our back-office setup, we use some of the processes in our own premises and some processes in a BPO, which is outsourced. If there is a problem, we should be able to shift the processes by just shifting people. This is our approach across multiple cities.

How do you guide the IT to ensure that it stays business-oriented? IT is a great enabler for us. We have a great team headed by Rajesh Munjal. We have about 12 people who are specialists. These people are responsible for different functions that bridge gaps in business. We keep our IT aligned to our business goals. Take for example customers who want a car in half-an-hour and not two hours. That

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View from the Top

is a challenge. Our chauffeurs need to be able to print a duty slip or rental agreement instantly. To meet that requriement, now all the cars are going to be equipped with a thermal printer, where, whenever we want to release a car for a particular duty, the system will generate a message to a car's thermal printer and it will print out the whole agreement. At the end of duty, it will generate an invoice which can be handed over to the customer.

How can you use IT to replicate other successful models in India? We want technology to help us deliver a taxi to a customer within five minutes. It will happen. Right now, we're at about 15-20 minutes. I also believe that the mode of transport for employees of IT companies, like our western counterparts, is going to shift to a radio taxi model. This, over a period of time, will help reduce congestion in busy cities. Also, as of now, our drivers are expected to know various routes. They are expected to reach the destination using the shortest route in shortest time. And for me, getting there before everyone else, as fast as possible, is the differentiator. When a driver needs route advice he should be able to call a help desk and get assistance. With radio taxis coming into the market, the expectation of customers where turnaround time is concerned is growing. The technology function has been able to work that out with some vendors and we are almost there in terms of implementing this.

What are the top priorities in business that can be addressed by IT? Scalability of business comes first. The second, is that in our business the utilization of a fleet is most critical and only technology offers us the opportunity to achieve the highest utilization. The third

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is revenue maximization. We are using technology to figure out the availability of inventory and demand. We have a revenue management platform for the same. These three are the most critical components that we try to address with technology. Without IT there is no way you can manage all this and achieve revenue maximization.

SNAPSHOT

Carzonrent India Headquarters:

New Delhi

Revenue:

< Rs 100 crore Employees:

<430

IT Staff:

talk to vendors and if those technology guys are working in your organization, they understand what the requirements of your business are. You can speak to them in a business tongue and they can convert your message into a language technology understands.

How important is Rajesh Munjal it to focus on Web, voice and SMS at What do you think the same time? is the role of the CIO? CIO:

I think the fact that a CIO is involved in all our businesses, in terms of strategy and long-term plans, he is expected to think and provide solutions so that technology keeps pace with business plans. He has to be a thinker.

What do you consider while selecting a technology vendor for your company? I think there are a few fundamental issues to be kept in mind. First, what are the capabilities of the vendor for implementing the technology we want? We need to be able to know the track record of the vendor in earlier implementations. The relationship has to be that of a partnership and not buyer and seller.

What are your views on outsourcing technology? We outsource all the time, but I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important that we have a core team, which can provide support that is required by the business. This team should develop an understanding of the domain and therefore be an interface to the outsourced technology partner in a structured manner. You do need technology guys to

We require all these three platforms and we do offer all three to our customers. But over a period of time, the customer will have better access to the Web platform and we will keep enhancing our services. I am not sure about the SMS platform as of now. Mobile technologies also play an important role in other applications like getting customer feedback and sending information to a customer.

How are you using technology to change customer perception? Fundamentally, we are focused on bringing all the global ground transportation services to India and making them easily accessible to the customer. We also want to make customer experience user-friendly and hassle-free. We also want technology at our own end to strengthen further and build a model where we can continue to scale up and have a real-time analysis of data. This will help us take business decisions on a dayto-day basis. CIO

Rahul Neel Mani is resident editor. Saurabh Gupta is correspondent. Send feedback on this interview to rahul_mani@idgindia.com and saurabh_gupta@ idgindia.com

REAL CIO WORLD | n o v e m B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

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Case File

Fidelity India’s data storage management performed just fine, but leaving it would blow a serious hole in the company’s future plans. That’s why Fidelity broke a cardinal IT rule: don’t tinker with something that works. By SauraBh Gupta

Reader ROI:

How to reduce storage cost Why tweaking existing systems can be beneficial How to introduce a system without downtime

Case Study.indd 42

hey say: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Wrong. At least Fidelity Business Services India thinks so. Every 60 seconds, a Fidelity analyst somewhere in the world makes contact with a company to manage its funds. To support the organization’s incredible need for data, IT created a data management system that met every challenge business threw its way. Fidelity could have decided not to mess with it, but that would have been the old Fidelity. “Typically, IT initiated a project when something failed. That’s being reactive. So, we thought to ourselves: this is where we’re today, we know the business projections, what do we need

n o v e m B e R 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

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10/24/2008 8:32:56 PM

Il lUStrat Ion by b In ESH S rEEDHaran

downing Tomorrow’s to do today to make IT work tomorrow?” Amit Gupta, VP-IT Services, Fidelity Business Services India, remembers asking his team. The problem was the logic behind his line of questioning clashed with a golden rule in IT that is also based firmly in logic: do not tinker with a system that works. Gupta was worried that Fidelity’s perfectly functioning data management system wouldn’t be able to meet the needs of the future. He knew that it was only a matter of time before the company’s storage system gave way. “When we reviewed our storage, we realized that while it worked today, it may not tomorrow,” recalls Gupta. It was a good thought. And Gupta was prepared to do the shovel work required to re-structure an existing system. But whether he could persuade the business to get behind him was another issue. “The way it works here is that all IT infrastructure is owned by IT. If business needs something they come to us, we translate that requirement into an IT business case and they pay for it. We implement and support,” says Gupta. This structure meant that Gupta would need to get multiple departments to be as visionary and convince them to invest the necessary time and Rs 6 crore.

Vol/3 | ISSUE/24

Today’s sainT is Tomorrow’s saTan Fidelity is as big as it is old. Started about 40 years ago, the company operates in many markets around the world. The company and its subsidiaries — one of which is Fidelity Business Services India — managed around $300 billion (about Rs 1,200,000 crore) in 2007 for investors. But it was only in 2005 that Fidelity got a foothold in the Indian market. But within 24 months, Fidelity India introduced 10 funds and bumped up its client base many times over. Soon the company needed 7,000 employees across Bangalore, Gurgaon and Chennai to run its business. All that new business brought plenty of reasons not to procrastinate. Till early 2007, data generated by Fidelity India’s business units was stored and managed using discrete technologies and traditional Wintel servers. As expensive as this approach to storage was, it was the right thing to do for the start-up, says Gupta. But not so much in the long run. “It is easy to add more boxes but this has its own complications and costs. Our total cost of ownership was significant due to the high spend on datacentre space, administration and maintenance,” he says.

With growth, Fidelity had the volumes to take advantage of a large storage area network and centralized storage. The data its 7,000 staffers created meant Fidelity had scale to use technologies that would afford them a 40 percent cost reduction on every MB of data they created. “Can this be achieved for a 50-person company? The answer is no. In that case, we would have stayed with the traditional servers because for that scale that’s the right solution,” says Gupta. Centralizing the company’s storage also had other benefits. It would make the organization more efficient by improving the amount of time it took to locate data by 60 percent and archived e-mail searches by 30 percent. And by implementing rolebased access and creating audit trails, it would make them a “100 percent compliant” with the needs of regulators like SEC. Importantly, it would create a more secure environment for the company’s data. “The security group had no interest in the cost of the project,” says Gupta. “What they were interested in was ensuring that data is not compromised. In the same way the business’ number one priority was the availability of data and its integrity. They had no direct interest in the cost but they were sensitive about it.” As interested as Gupta was in these objectives, he had his own wants. He needed REAL CIO WORLD | n o v e m B e R 1 , 2 0 0 8

Case File was no tolerance for data loss the project to reduce the cost or inconsistency. Business of storage, ensure adequate critical data needed to be capacity for the future and available at all times, which left better the company’s recovery the project with no significant capability. “We wanted to SNAPSHOT change window,” rues Gupta. deliver quickly with fewer Fidelity resources,” he says. Business Th e s e differences, Services however, didn’t stop him from India leveraging the interest in the Fortunately, says Gupta, the REvENuE: rs 1,000 crore project to get buy-in. “It was a IT department at Fidelity is win-win situation for all of us well respected “unlike some EmPLOyEES: 7,000 — for different stakeholders, other companies where it is a SENIOR vP: for our customers, for beaten down group. For us, IT Caron Mcdonald the auditors and for the is an enabler and partners in vP-IT SERvICES: information security group. making things happen for the amit Gupta From day one, this project business. We are considered satisfied everybody’s wish list and that is key for business success. We are seen as how it got created,” says Gupta. enablers and catalysts, not just suppliers,” But in that collective agreement lay the says Gupta. rub. While everyone promised their support, Given that the no downtime imperative nobody wanted downtime: that responsibility must have seemed impossible, Gupta remained solely with the IT department. could have made a promise he knew “The expectation was that the transition to he could not keep and barter on his the new platform would be transparent to credibility. What was important after all business with no impact whatsoever. There was to achieve the benefits of the project.

InfoGrapHICS by b InESH S rEEDHa ra n

devil’s advocaTe

But Gupta wasn’t willing to trade on the trust he had built. He needed a more concrete plan to get new structure to liftoff without taking down business. He used the organization’s reporting structure to his benefit. Once an obstacle, the multiple number of business users IT had to convince, became a crutch. Since they had to come to him, he whetted their appetite and created a groundswell of support. “It was not as if IT was trying to do something,” says Gupta. To do that, he met with individual business leaders, following his CEO’s advice. Getting their buy-in before presenting the solution to a larger group also ensured that stakeholders were “very collaborative” and that they offered to make presentations themselves to their teams. “People had skin in the game and that ensured project success,” says Gupta. Their participation also shared risk, “Normally I have seen business has no idea of IT’s plans which lead to failures. In our case the project was as transparent as any other business case. It was a ‘much-

Hitting Bull’s Eye On Benefits Fidelity India centralized its storage management and profited.

50% 40%

cost reduction on every MB of storage

35%

improvement in mail delivery on Blackberry devices

99.999 %

reliability of data availability

saving in datacenter space

100%

compliance to regulatory retention needs

25%

savings in power consumption

25%

improvement in IT infrastructure efficiency

30%

improvement in archived mail search

Case Study.indd 44

n o v e m B e R 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

60%

improvement in data search time

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Case File

Angels in Disguise The planning, the insistence on business participation and the documentation all paid off. Today, Fidelity has a state-of-the-art data management system. Data centralization reduced the cost of storage. Not only that, it also improved data handling and security. Disaster recovery too has improved by a factor of four and — data reliability has increased to 99.999 percent. Business efficiency has also gone up. The turnaround time for a ‘data restore’ request is now four hours — from five days. And mail

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Case Study.indd 45

“Normally business has no idea of IT’s plans. This leads to failures. In our case the project was as transparent. People had skin in the game and that ensured project success.” — Amit Gupta VP-IT Services,Fidelity Business Services India

delivery on a Blackberry, for instance, has improved by about 50 percent. The implementation has led to unlimited mailbox storage capacity for end users. The automated and simplified archival of mails means that all local PST’s have been eliminated. De-duplication and compressions features have been used to optimize storage and efficiently utilize available space. The creation of fully redundant cluster of exchange servers with optimum load-balancing has led to a highly efficient infrastructure. Features like site level DR-enabled NAS have added more value to the implementation. The project has also introduced robotics-based automated backup over a dedicated FC-based network. Importantly, the project has also ensured that the company has adequate capacity for the future. “We have created the core foundation that can support updates for the next five to seven years,” says Gupta.

Not surprisingly, Fidelity also met its green commitments thanks to the project. By consolidating data and servers in one place instead of having it scattered, savings in the datacenter have begun to appear. IT infrastructure efficiency has improved by 25 percent. Fidelity’s datacenter now consumes 25 percent less power and uses up to 35 percent less space. “Focusing on green is a culture here. One of the directives to our vendors was to ensure that we were greener at the end of the project,” says Gupta. Another satisfied group in addition to business users, auditors and the finance department. This enterprise-wide satisfaction could be reason enough for other CIOs to tackle their existing systems. But be warned it’s a lot of work persuading people to take on a devil they can’t see. Just ask Gupta. CIO

Photo by Srivatsa Shandilya

partnered’ project so any failure would mean that business had equal share in it.” Groups from other business divisions were quickly formulated to play a role in the project. But soon there were as many as eight groups working on the project. “We had participation and the only complication was that because we had so many groups we had to spend a lot of time in meetings and documentation but I think it was worth it,” says Gupta. In the meanwhile, the IT team bent over backwards to come up with a plan to ensure zero downtime and data consistency. In the end, the only way was to use the very short late-night windows when business wasn’t taking place. They would have to convince their vendors to work throughout the night. The no-downtime mandate required a lot of planning and testing offline with sample data. Gupta’s plan ensured that there was equal involvement from business groups where testing was concerned. Their demand for participation bore results: the IT department witnessed 100 percent commitment from business groups — rather than completing the project on their own and facing complaints after the fact. On their part, business made sure that IT did not have access to business data. They were given access to data only at a raw data level instead of an application level. “There was no reason for anyone to complain as everyone was aware of the plan and was part of the approval process,” says Gupta. “This was an interesting thing to do from a business perspective,” he adds. “There was an upfront agreement with business that there would not be a single minute disruption in business. We also assured them that data accuracy, confidentiality, integrity and availability would not be compromised.”

Saurabh Gupta is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to saurabh_gupta@idgindia.com

REAL CIO WORLD | n o v e m B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

10/24/2008 8:33:08 PM

Web 2.0

Can Mashups

By Julia King

Reader ROI:

How mashing up two different technologies can add value to BI How mashups reduce BI problems How mashups can ensure relevant and timely data

Feature -01.indd 46

hief Jon Greiner recently expanded his staff of crime analysts from one to 11 without hiring a single new officer at the Ogden Police Department in Utah. Instead, Greiner equipped his existing force of eight lieutenants and two assistant chiefs with new, easy-to-use, Web-based business intelligence tools that enable them to combine and manipulate data from arrest records, court documents, probation logs, jurisdictional maps and other sources to identify patterns and pinpoint hot spots so they can stop crimes before they happen. "My police officers â&#x20AC;&#x201D; who are 30 years younger â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are gamers, and I thought that if I could put something user-friendly in their hands, they could do great things as crime analysts," explains Greiner. Today, the officers are using the BI tools to perform geographic profiling of crimes and analysis of police data "in seconds," he says. Before, it could take days for the department's single crime analyst to fulfill a report request. An added bonus is that experienced police officers with extensive

n o v e m B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

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10/24/2008 5:27:07 PM

Web 2.0

save BI ? Mashups could be the answer to Bi's problems. Here's how organizations are connecting technologies to make better business decisions. Housing Finance agency gave 300 oF iTs worKers access To geograpHical Tools — a luxuRy RestRIcted untIl tHen to 12 supeRuseRs. It dId tHIs By IncoRpoRatIng

The Ogden Police Department expanded its staff of crime analysts without hiring more by providing its force with Web-based BI tools that could profile crimes geographically.

By merging the company's salesforce.com application with data about its product offerings, Thomson financial cut the time from a product trial to a customer conversion from

d ay s

THe MassacHuseTTs

geogRapHIcal mappIng capaBIlItIes to Its BI dasHBoaRd.

yET, OnLy 20 PERCEnT Of usERs In mOsT ORgAnIzATIOns use reporting, ad hoc query and online analytical processing tools on a regular basis.

street experience are now able to apply their firsthand knowledge to crime analysis. "You have practitioners asking the what-if questions, which has changed the way we police," Greiner says. Welcome to Business Intelligence 2.0, a world in which one of BI's original big promises is finally being met, and a broader class of everyday business users — as opposed to statisticians or data analysts — are tapping into innovative technologies and Web-based BI capabilities. Police officers, physicians, accountants and salespeople are mashing up and analyzing structured and unstructured data from far-flung sources in ways that make the most contextual sense to them. "All of these new technologies are about making it easier to build and consume analytical applications," says Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel. Today, he notes, companies frequently cite a

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lack of both end-user and developer skills as a major barrier when deploying traditional BI applications. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that no more than 20 percent of users in most organizations use reporting, ad hoc query and online analytical processing tools on a regular basis. Instead, most companies rely on already overburdened IT departments or in-house teams of BI experts to fulfill users' requests for reports, analyses and forecasts. It is a process that can take weeks or longer. Then, when decision-makers finally receive a report, they often discount or distrust it because the data is no longer relevant or timely. However, that's beginning to radically change, thanks to highly intuitive Web-based user interfaces and better data management and access schemes, such as service-oriented data REAL CIO WORLD | n o v e m B e R 1 , 2 0 0 8

Web 2.0 architectures, which enable users to mash up data in increasingly standardized formats from a variety of sources. "We're seeing mashups with GIS mapping technology as well as on-demand BI solutions that let users combine and display their own data with data from external sources," says IDC analyst Dan Vesset. "The goal is to get IT out of development [of user interfaces and reports] and get them more involved in data quality and data integrations. That's their highest value-add." "Another very big change is an awareness of BI's potential at the business management layer in companies," Vesset notes. "Business is seeing real value in analytics. Many organizations are starting information management groups and BI competency centers that sit on the business side."

A New Way of Thinking One example is the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency. The BI team there has incorporated geographical mapping capabilities, including location intelligence features from Pitney Bowes MapInfo software, into its Cognos BI dashboard as a way to make information accessible in geographical form to users across the entire agency. Before, only 12 superusers had access to geographical tools. Now, all

For now, mapping tools are probably the most popular kind of BI mashups, but experts say the possibilities are almost endless. 300 of the agency's workers can access and manipulate BI data in geographical form, says Carl Richardson, BI project manager. "We anticipate that more people will do analysis," says Richardson. "It will allow the average user to think geographically when it comes to data. They could create both thematic and point maps on data, which is important to them in their individual reporting groups." One example would be to combine data on housing units, loans and public transportation so that it could then be analyzed and displayed in a map format to show how many of the agency's housing units are located close to public transportation. "Being able to work with that data in graphic form as opposed to putting that data in a database would allow us to react a lot quicker," Richardson says. For now, mapping tools are probably the most popular kind of BI mashups, also known as 'bashups,' but experts say the possibilities are almost endless. Technologies such as integrated search and in-memory analytics will make it easier to index large amounts of structured data and build high-performance analytical applications against increasingly large data sets. They also promise to empower users to explore data and discover new insights in new ways. At Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, a health insurer in New 48

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York, enterprise architect Mike Axelrod is using JustSystems' XFY software and experimenting with linking claims data and wellness program data. This will help employers can analyze the cost effectiveness of different programs and benefits. Looking ahead, Axelrod says he foresees a scenario in which people who work out at a gym could have the exercise equipment they use to upload data to a Web-based health log. Users could then combine that data with other information to analyze their overall health and progress toward their personal goals. Mashups, Axelrod says, "solve the old-school problem of data isolation." Using Excellus' existing service- oriented architecture interface, JustSystems software can retrieve information from a claims application and present that information to a customerservice rep through a browser. If the agent also needs data from a policy application, it would retrieve and display that as well, but the claims information would still be on the screen.

Tracking and Accountability New York-based Thomson Financial is using Serena Software's MashUp Composer to combine information from the company's Salesforce.com application and information about its various product offerings. This helps salespeople in producing customized sales proposals for specific customers in about three minutes. Managers can then track the proposals, including the authorization and extension of product trials that salespeople offer customers. "From an integration perspective, it's not overly complicated, but it added a ton of value," says John Hastings-Kimball, the former vice president of workflow solutions who recently left Thomson to work for Serena. "Before, there was very little accountability to senior management, and a salesperson could easily extend product trials to customers," he says. "In some cases, we had customers that were on a trial for more than a year. Now, if a trial gets extended beyond a certain point in time, it sets off a trigger and the salesperson ends up in the VP's office to explain." The upshot of the BI mashup is that Thomson cut the time from a product trial to a customer conversion from 75 days to between 36 and 40 days. While the business benefits of user-friendly BI and BI mashups can be great, they aren't without challenges. As is the case with traditional BI and data integration as a whole, data quality is paramount, experts say. "The most important aspect is data quality," says IDC's Vesset. "That includes data governance, master data management and all of the related infrastructure that needs to be in place to make sure you have the right data. "A lot of this has nothing to do with technology. It's about agreeing on common data definitions and agreeing on exactly what each performance indicator means so you can manage on analytics rather than having lots of one-off products and [BI] projects." In larger enterprises, IT itself can be a big roadblock, says HastingsKimball. "What I ran into at Thomson is that if it didn't carry the name Siebel, Salesforce.com or SAP, IT didn't want to hear about it," he says. "IT wants these big sprawling enterprise applications. If it's not that, it scares the IT folks." CIO Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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Green IT

10 Myths Power Saving

Debunked Is powering a server off and on bad for your system? Do solid-state drives reduce the amount of power that a laptop consumes? We disprove these legend and others. By Logan g. HarBaugH

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Green IT

ompanies are finding themselves embroiled in a power crisis as they struggle to find ways to rein in soaring energy costs — as well as do their part to address global climate change. However, how can you be certain that the power-saving strategies your company has adopted are, in fact, the best ones? After all, there are plenty of myths out there about saving energy that are patently false. We examine 10 such myths and bring the truth to light.

Powering a PC or server up and down limits its life because the extreme temperature and current swings of power cycling can stress electronic components.

Fact: Power cycling healthy electronics is not a source of stress. The same electrical components that are used in IT equipment are used in complex devices that are routinely subjected to power cycles and temperature extremes, such as factory-floor automation, medical devices, and your car. There is a kernel of truth in this myth, however: cycling power on a sick system is going to bring attention to latent component weaknesses that go unnoticed in operation. Power-on diagnostics are brief yet rigorous and can be performed remotely on servers with dedicated management controllers. Power cycling doesn't just save energy. It's a zero-cost aid to maximizing server availability.

It takes too long to cold-start servers to react to spikes in demand in a hot market. If customers are made to wait, they'll go elsewhere.

Fact:

The power rating (in watts) of a CPU is a simple measurement of the system's efficiency. The higher the number of watts the better.

Fact:

Efficiency is measured in percentage of power converted, which can range from 50 to 90 percent or more. The AC power not converted to DC is lost as heat, which increases cooling needs, adding even more to the overall energy loss. Unfortunately, it's often difficult to tell the efficiency of a power supply, and many manufacturers don't publish the number. You can measure the actual power draw of various systems at idle and full load to make your decision.

It's better to pack one big server with all the RAM, CPUs, and peripherals it can hold rather than to use multiple smaller servers.

Fact:

This is only true if the big server is fully utilized, which can be dangerous with critical applications. Multiple smaller servers can be powered off or put in suspend mode when not in use, and they are safer from a redundancy point of view. Also, stuffing as many CPU cores and RAM as a system will hold will result in a system that uses substantially more power than a base configuration of one dual-core CPU and a modest amount of RAM. Tailoring the server configuration to the software you'll be running can save energy without resorting to extreme measures.

LCD monitors use a trivial amount of power, so you might as well leave them on. Also, their colors and backlight brightness improve with warm-up time.

Idling servers at zero workload as hot spares is an egregious waste of energy and an administrative burden. If customers need to The average 17-inch LCD monitor consumes 35 watts of wait while you spin up cold spares to handle rising workload, brag electricity. Adding together the hundreds of LCDs in an enterprise, about it. For a Web site, put up a static page asking users to wait while the power used may not be that trivial. Energy Star LCD monitors will additional resources are brought online. As for the wait, people will power down to sleep mode if the PCs' power management software is stay on hold if they know their call will be answered. Build power set up to tell them to. This saves energy and cash — between US$10 management into your services architecture and make it part of the (about Rs 400) and $40 (about Rs 1,600) per year, according to message that you send to users and customers. Energy Star — though not as much as simply turning the monitor off You can also select systems that cold-boot rapidly. Model to when it isn't in use. Even with the monitor turned off, an LCD's power model and brand to brand, servers exhibit wide variances in supply will use between 1 and 3 watts of power. The only way to get power-up delay. This metric isn't usually measured, but it becomes it to zero is to unplug the power supply. As for warm-up times, they relevant when you control power consumption by switching off are much shorter than they used to be: LCDs with LED backlighting system power. It needn't take long. Servers or blades that boot rather than fluorescent don't need any warm-up time at all. from a snapshot, a copy of RAM loaded from disk or a SAN can go from power-down mode to work-ready in less than A notebook doesn't use any power when it's a minute. The most efficient members of a reserve/ suspended or sleeping. USB devices charge Reader ROI: disaster farm can quiesce in a suspend-to-RAM state from the notebook's AC adapter. How you can save rather than be powered down fully so that wake-up power and money does not require BIOS self-test or device querying and Sleep (in Vista) or Hibernate mode in What advice not to follow cataloging, two major sources of boot delay. XP saves the state of the system to RAM and then

Fact:

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Green IT maintains the RAM image even when the rest of the system is shut down. Suspend saves the state of the system to hard disk, which reduces boot time greatly and allows the system to shut down. Sleeping continues to draw a small amount of power, between 1 and 3 watts, even if the system seems inactive. By comparison, Suspend draws less than 1 watt. Even over the course of a year, this difference is probably negligible. Powering a laptop off doesn't necessarily reduce power usage to zero. This is easily confirmed by touching the power supply of a laptop that has been powered off for a while; it'll still be warm. Unless you unplug the power supply, it still burns energy.

Notebook batteries just wear out. There's not much you can do to make them last longer. And it does not matter what type of battery you use.

Fact:

Many laptops with nickel-cadmium batteries come with a battery-reconditioning utility that drains the battery fully, then brings it back to a full charge. Laptops with lithium-ion batteries aren't afflicted with the same memory problem as those powered by NiCad batteries. However, unlike NiCad batteries, lithium batteries prefer to be only partially discharged: running them all the way down will shorten their life span. The calibration utility for lithium batteries actually just recalibrates the capacity measurement to reflect the loss of capacity over time; it doesn't affect actual battery life. Battery life for either type of battery can be prolonged greatly by

Datacenter

Power-Cutting Ideas

Don't overlook the obvious. Seal holes in the raised floor left by equipment that's been moved. Install blanking plates in empty portions of racks where equipment would normally go. Relocate perforated floor tiles from hot to cool aisles. Energy-spec your servers. The type of IT equipment you buy can make a 50 percent difference in power. Focus on x86-based industry-standard servers; they consume 33 percent of the datacenter’s power budget. Ensure your vendors are not ‘over-spec-ing’ power supplies or using highwattage fans unnecessarily. Look at systems that have at least 90-percent-efficient power supplies. Consolidate and virtualize. Tyler Kilian, supervisor of network systems for UniSource Energy says that he has been able to maintain at 80 percent utilization of his power infrastructure through virtualization over several years – despite increasing their server resources dramatically. Modify cooling and power systems. Re-engineering the chilling system means installing chillers with variable-speed fans, running chillers at higher-than-normal temperatures and using free cooling where available. — Deni Connor

removing the battery when the unit is plugged into AC power. This approach is recommended if your laptop supports it and power outages are infrequent in your area.

Flash SSDs (solid-state drives) reduce the amount of power consumed by a laptop because they not have spinning drives.

Fact:

You may or may not experience a reduction in power consumption if your system is equipped with an SSD. It will vary greatly depending on the application. Typical office applications that don't constantly access the hard drive will show very little additional battery life with an SSD installed. Software that streams data from the drive constantly, such as video applications, will show greatly increased battery life. Other power savers such as LED backlighting can save more energy in typical applications.

Going to DC route to supply electricity to your servers will inevitably save energy. This is because no power is wasted in the conversion.

Fact:

Going to DC power entails removing the power supplies from a rack of servers or all the servers in a datacenter and consolidating the AC-DC power supply into a single unit for all the systems. Doing this may not actually be more efficient since you lose a lot of power over the even relatively small distances between the consolidated unit and the machines. New servers have 95 percent efficient power supplies, so any power savings you might have gotten by going DC is lost in the transmission process. Your savings will really depend on the relative efficiency of the power supplies in the servers you're buying as well as the one in the consolidated unit.

You're bound to save money by rushing out and buying the most energy-efficient equipment you can get as soon as possible.

Fact: Savings realized by more efficient equipment have to be balanced against the cost of running existing equipment. Replacing $5,000 (about Rs 2 lakh) servers before their end of life to save $30 (about Rs 1,200) per year in power is not going to save money. Instead, look for ways to implement energy-saving strategies that don't require new equipment or user buy-in. For example, applying a policy through Active Directory to shut down systems that aren't in use after business hours doesn't require buying new equipment and will save a lot of money. If you can get user buyin, other actions such as powering off monitors, PCs, printers, and the like will save lots of power without buying anything. CIO

Mario Apicella, Brian Chee, and Tom Yager contributed to this article. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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EVENT REPORT

Presenting Partner

Partners

ToWard HyperconnecTIvITy Entangled, mismanaged and crowded networks are increasingly taking a toll on business processes. But there is a way out.

“ The Web has evolved from being a source of information to social interaction. This is an incredible opportunity to make a transformation. Phil Eldholm, Chief Technologist & VP, Network Architecture, Nortel

“In the Web 2.0 paradigm, power has shifted to customers, they prefer self-service and online research to gather information." Ravi Chauhan, GM, Multimedia Applications Business, Nortel

The InTerneT, broadband access, smartphones, VoIP, IMs, social networking, video uploading – all make obvious the increasing importance of communications and connectivity in organizations. But what does all of this connectedness, this addiction to sharing information every moment of every day, mean for businesses and organizations? What decisions will companies have to make to ensure that connectedness is leveraged into a competitive advantage? Where are the opportunities and challenges? What are the implications for employees, senior management and CIOs? These questions were answered at the Nortel Networks’ India Hyperconnected Summit, which was powered by CIO and WindowsWorld. Joel Hackney, president, enterprise solutions, Nortel, gave the session direction with a presentation on ‘Driving Enterprise Speed and Simplicity Through Communications Integration’. He spoke

EVENT REPORT

about the key points for successful technology implementation and the ways it can fail. He said, “An implementation can fail for a very simple reason: if the pace of change externally exceeds the pace of change i n t e r n a l ly , then the competitive advantage of speed that the company was striving for is lost. IT has become more strategic to every single business because of its opportunity to apply the biggest competitive differentiator: speed.” joEl haCknEy He added, “The President, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel acceleration of network connection per user globally has started to hit the exponential stage; it’s touching an inflection point. How can CIOs bring speed and simplicity to their networks in an overtly complex environment? The technology and connections are creating diminishing returns. And business deals are facing delays because the right people are not connected with each other. With the abundance of communication opportunities, it’s important to make sure solutions are applied to the right person, at right time, in right context to get the right results.” He also explained how Nortel solutions help in addressing the problems hyperconnectivity has brought with it. Phil Eldholm, chief technologist and VP network architecture, Nortel, continued the session by talking of hyperconnectivity, collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies, and the impact that unified communications (UC) will have. “The Web has evolved — from being centered around information to social interaction. This is an incredible opportunity to make a transformation. In this age, business can exist anywhere and can interact with customers through virtual sites. Major changes can be seen in how technology impacts business. By integrating communications with IT we make it a part of business process,” he said. He explained how Nortel goes about implementing UC in an organization and the levels of convergence it has to go through. “What’s happening today is that collaboration is being enforced by bringing communication together with personal business processes. Business process transformation with communication is the next big opportunity," he said. "So, we are focused on not just the technology

“IT has become more strategic because it can apply the biggest competitive differentiator: speed.”

“It is possible to achieve zero downtime in an enterprise; you don't need special architecture for this." Sajan Paul, Leader, Core Sales Engineering Team Asia, Nortel

“our solutions help you solve roI issues and justify all the investments in real-time collaboration tools." natRaj akElla, Leader Advanced Collaboration and SaaS, IBM India/SA

“These days people expect more out of their infrastructure." RangaRajan k.n., Head – Marketing and Product Presales, TVSNet

“Initially, IT was a costfocused model, but its now delivering value to the business, it's become a profit center now." amlan BhattaChaRya, Head – Voice Solutions Practice, Wipro, India

EVENT REPORT

The benefITs of a converged neTwork Today, networks must evolve into robust, services-oriented platforms that enrich emerging, innovative, composite applications and still manage to balance technology and business processes. cIos from different industries shared their experieces on how their enterprises benefited through converged networks. When asked what prompted them to adopt converged network architectures, Alok Kumar, VP and head internal IT, TCS, said that having different infrastructures for voice, video and data was proving very costly. By converging, the administrative costs have become common for different mediums and benefits are tangible, he said. For Satish Pendse, CIO, Hindustan Construction Company, convergence was not an option but the only solution to their problem, as their employees work in remote areas where connectivity is limited. So to connect them to

world and keep tabs of the progress of projects they found converging of networks a good option. Tarun Pandey, CTO, ING Investment Management, said that being in the mutual funds industry requires keeping track of the current NAV and staying in touch with agents in the field. Losing a single minute data would mean large revenue losses for customers and for the company. This nature of the business, he said, makes it adopt converged networks. Manish Choksi, Chief Corporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints, pointed out that rip-andreplace is no longer needed to adopt

“IT accounts for only 2 percent of an organization's power use. Green initiatives should go beyond IT." jEthin ChandRan, GM-IT Architecture, Wipro

“converging the networks was not a matter of choice, but the only solution to stay in touch with our employees." SatiSh PEndSE, CIO, Hindustan Construction Company

converged networks. The evolution of technology, he said, has made it possible replace and upgrade bits, instead of ripping out entire systems. According to Phil Eldholm chief technologist and VP network architecture, Nortel, the challenge that companies are facing as they make the transition to tomorrow's world is moving local area networks to wider networks. Choksi of Asian Paints said collaboration still has some constraints, “In India, you need to maintain both PSTN and converged IP networks, separately. If legislation allows their integration, it would become much easier to manage the network.”

of the network, but on how we can extend these technologies in a transformational world so that we can actually change the way people communicate and more importantly the way people do business.” Jethin Chandran, GM-IT Architecture, Wipro, approached the dais to talk about green IT initiatives and how it can transform the way the world does business, thus meeting the customers' need for ecologically sustainable products and solutions. Rewinding a bit, he talked about energy problems and how it started impacting businesses, leading them to think seriously about green IT. “IT accounts for only 2 percent of an organization's overall power consumption," he said. "So, controlling rest of the 98 percent is an opportunity for businesses. How do you efficiently use resources and save energy is key.” He suggested some measures like using smart grids, green accounting and virtualization. He also introduced some ways — like water usage reduction, electricity consumption reduction, green buildings, green portals, its Ecoeye program — through which Wipro is contributing to the green initiative. Taking a cue from the discussion, Sajan Paul, leader, core sales engineering team Asia, Nortel, looked at the technolgy that could help ensure zero downtime. His session's agenda which was on recovery, failover and replication architectures showed how Nortel's solutions could mitigate the risks associated with networks.

EVENT REPORT

Pointing to some of the common reasons for failovers, he said, “65 percent of network downtime is because of interacting software/ protocols and geographical redundancy of a system. Another, 5 percent can be traced to software features without any interaction with other switches. A further 5 percent is due to low level drivers like gigabit Ethernet drivers. Interestingly, only 5 percent is attributed to hardware failures. All this should be kept in mind when you intend to reduce downtime.” He said, “Zero downtime in organizations is possible. We can manage failovers of switches in 0.8 seconds. This does not depend on topology or the size of a network. It’s plug-and-play.” He explained how Ethernet BEU, virtual chassis, horizontal stacking - 2nd Gen ToR, dual chassis DC solution- GIG, etcetera can give real quantifiable benefits to an enterprise.

SmarT SoluTIonS for a SmarT aGe Ravi Chauhan, GM, multimedia applications business, Nortel, talked about how using smart apps on a Web 2.0 platform can provide exemplary customer service. He talked about how customers build customer contact solutions for their own businesses and what things need to be accounted for. “In the paradigm of Web 2.0, the power has shifted to customers," he said. "They prefer self-service and online research to gather information. So, you need to know how to cater to them. Transactions at contact centers should be handled in much more professional way. They should be attractive and efficient. All these aspects affect customers — and eventually business.” Addressing the issue of smart infrastructures and the importance of IT in driving business, Rangarajan K.N., head, marketing and pProduct presales, TVSNet, explained the concept of intelligent buildings. These days, he observed, people expect more out of their infrastructure. "People are catering to export markets and they need to have stateof-the-art-buildings in order to do so. These buildings will also find relevance in the emerging markets of SEZs in India.” He gave some some examples of smart infrastructure projects that were created by TVS and Nortel. These included the Dubai Silicon Oasis, Far Eastern Plaza in Taipei and and the Mumbai International Airport. Presenting on various engagement methodologies that vendors or system integrators typically have with customers, Amlan Bhattacharya, head, voice solutions practice, Wipro India, explained how they have evolved over a period of time. He also talked about various business models that are available to cater to them. According to him, "Initially IT was a cost-focused model, but it's now delivering value to the business. It has become a profitcenter now." He also put across a number of drivers that force a change in the traditional model of engagement between vendors and customers, thus making them more effective. Unified communications and the collaboration aspect of communication networks was the agenda of the presentation given

“uc helps bring down expenses because administrative cost is common for different mediums. The benefits are tangible." alok kumaR, VP and Head Internal IT, TCS

“If legislation allows the integration of pSTn and Ip networks, it would become much easier to manage resources." maniSh ChokSi, Chief Corporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints

“losing a single piece of information would mean a great loss to us and our customers. So, we need to stay connected." t Run PandEy, CTO, ta ING Investment Management

by Natraj Akella, leader of the advanced collaboration and SaaS businesses for IBM India/SA. “Concerns may initially revolve around the convergence of networks, but what do you do after you have converged? You need to determine a way and reason to associate with a person. We look at this space from a collaboration perspective. We foster innovation and business agility. Our UC2 solutions can help justify all the investments in real-time collaboration tools,” he said.

Essential

technology Microsoft SharePoint's complexity still puzzles many IT pros. Here’s how one company uses it to keep a project involving a large cast of players and documents on time and on budget.

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From Inception to Implementation — I.T. That Matters

Make the Most of SharePoint By Meridith Levinson Project Management | Matt Fahrenkrug and Bill Culhane get paid to handle the nuts and

bolts of complicated construction projects. As the owners of Culhane & Fahrenkrug Consulting, they facilitate every aspect of commercial construction efforts, such as the second phase of a three-year, $170 million (about Rs 680 crore) building expansion for the Van Andel Institute, a cancer research facility based in Grand Rapids, Mich. Culhane and Fahrenkrug are overseeing every detail of this project for the Van Andel Institute. As the Institute's ‘owner representatives’, Culhane and Fahrenkrug write the contracts for all of the architects, engineers, construction managers and subcontractors involved in the building expansion. They get building permits and approvals from the city of Grand Rapids. They make sure the Van Andel Institute is adequately insured, and that all of the consultants, contractors and subcontractors follow federal and state safety standards. It's a big job with lots of stakeholders and moving parts. It generates reams of paper, including contracts, drawings, specs, maps, requests for data, and meeting minutes. To manage the project's documentation, logistics and participants, Culhane and Fahrenkrug are using SharePoint.

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essential technology

SharePoint has grown to incorporate so many features that some IT shops still have a hard time understanding exactly what it does. But the product's capability around the storage of unstructured data is one of its strengths, says Rob Koplowitz, a principal analyst with Forrester Research "Organizations see SharePoint as a backbone for getting more control over large amounts of unstructured data," he says. "All of the things that would have previously been put on a file server or e-mailed around are great candidates for moving into a more structured environment [like SharePoint]."

Why SharePoint When design of the Van Andel Institute's new building began, Fahrenkrug and Culhane met with Bryon Campbell, CIO of the Institute, to find out if there was a technology that store all of the documents the construction project would create. Fahrenkrug figured they'd use an FTP site, having used them for

and post meeting minutes. Anyone the two granted a username and password could access the site with. To date, SharePoint has proven to be an effective solution for project. It's provided more than just document storage. Culhane and Fahrenkrug have used SharePoint's calendaring function to track contractors' vacations. They've set up alerts so that people know when documents are ready for approval. They've used discussion boards for brainstorming, and also to share specs. Fahrenkrug says one goal of SharePoint was to eliminate paper to reduce printing and shipping costs and support the Van Andel Institute's environmental sustainability efforts. "We wanted to be as environmentally friendly as we could," he says. The collaborative workspace certainly helped: Culhane and Fahrenkrug saved about $250,000 (about Rs 1 crore) by reducing the amount of paper they had to print and ship to the various architects and contractors

SharePoint has grown to incorporate so many features that some IT departments have a hard time understanding exactly what it does. previous construction projects. Campbell recommended SharePoint, having used SharePoint Team Services before. Campbell told Fahrenkrug and Culhane that his IT department could use SharePoint to create a secure, private website that the architecture, engineering and construction teams could use to store and share documents, create threaded discussions

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by 50 to 60 percent, says Fahrenkrug. Campbell also says the construction process has been expedited because architects and engineers don't have to wait 24 hours or more for the documentation they need to do their jobs. "Turning documents around faster translates to building faster and that translates into cost savings on labor," says Campbell.

41% The number of

IT pros who plan to implement or upgrade to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) by the end of 2008. Source: Forrester

"SharePoint has worked pretty well, adds Fahrenkrug. "It saved a ton of time, money and trees, but it hasn't been flawless." Specifically, SharePoint took some getting used to, and its workflow didn't support the project's needs out of the box, he says. Provisioning proper access for users was also tricky using SharePoint TeamServices. But the consultants and the Van Andel IT staffer who developed the site worked around those difficulties and crafted a solution that has largely met everyone's needs. Here's how.

Building a SharePoint Site Kim Jeffries, an application analyst at the Van Andel Institute, began developing the SharePoint site in February 2006. She first met with Culhane and Fahrenkrug's administrative assistant, who explained

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essential technology

which stakeholders were involved in the design phase of the construction process and the associated workflows. The admin told Jeffries that the project was going to have different teams focused on areas such as brainstorming, parking, construction and sustainability, and that these teams would need different levels of access. Culhane and Fahrenkrug also wanted an area of the site that only they could use. "We drew it all out and we ended up with a home page that everybody hits, with about five sub-sites off the home page, a couple of document libraries, main contacts, discussions and at least one private site for our owner rep team [Culhane and Fahrenkrug]," says Jeffries.

Jeffries says. When it was complete in March, she turned the design and the content administration over to Fahrenkrug and Culhane's administrative assistant. Jeffries continued to create accounts for new teams and individuals as they came on board, because that process was complicated and it needed to be done on Van Andel's local SharePoint server. Fahrenkrug says it took users two to three weeks to get accustomed to SharePoint. Jeffries hired a local training center to teach the owner representatives and a few employees to use Sharepoint. But, Fahrenkrug says, most users learned the system on the fly. Though the SharePoint site took getting used to, Fahrenkrug says, the user interface

All of the things that would have previously been put on a file server or e-mailed around are great candidates for moving into a more structured environment like SharePoint. Because the Van Andel Institute was already using SharePoint Team Services internally, Jeffries had to build accounts for each participant locally on the existing SharePoint server. Then she had to bring in each participant page by page, library by library, and meeting workspace by meeting workspace. She says provisioning access for users in Team Services was "tedious" and "the most difficult part" of building the site. It took about 40 hours over the course of a month to get the site up and running,

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is more intuitive than an FTP site, which looks more like a computer file and never offers enough storage. As such, SharePoint makes storage and retrieval of documents easier, he says. Jeffries adds that users receive alerts via e-mail whenever a new document is added to the site. When users need to find a spec, they can simply type its name into the search engine on the home page, which takes them right to it, as opposed to drilling through folders to find it, he notes. Troubleshooting

problems is also easier on SharePoint than on an FTP site, says Fahrenkrug. "If people couldn't get into an FTP site, it was pretty hard to figure out why," he says. "With SharePoint, my admin can go in, figure out why they can't get access, and if there is a glitch on our end, we can easily fix it." When the Van Andel Institute migrated to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) in January, 2007, Jeffries had to update external users' security levels because they could no longer access their specific site with the local accounts she had originally set up. Drawing on research she had done about the best way to set up user access on MOSS, she worked with the Van Andel Institute's server administrator, Russell VanderMey, to create Active Directory accounts which she could then bring into SharePoint. VanderMey created an external Active Directory domain that's not on the Van Andel Institute's network, yet provides Jeffries with a domain that she can use to create and maintain security for SharePoint users who are not Van Andel employees. "With MOSS, the maintenance is much easier because I created security groups for every level on each page and sub-site and I created security groups within SharePoint," says Jeffries. "Now, when someone new joins, I go out to the external active directory site, I get their name and plug them into whatever site they need to belong to." It now takes less than five minutes to provision access for users.

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essential technology

SharePoint Key to New Submittals Process In June, 2007, Fahrenkrug came to Jeffries with a new request. A new phase of the project had started — the submittal phase — and he needed technology to support it. During this phase, architects and engineers create drawings which they release to subcontractors, who bid on the projects and create more detailed drawings. These documents are then sent back to the architects and engineers for review and approval. "I thought this was a huge undertaking," says Jeffries. "If we could get a solution for them using SharePoint, it would be huge." Her first effort to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to automate the submittal process ran into complications. SharePoint's workflow didn't support the architects' and engineers' needs. They wanted to use a certain naming convention for .PDF files, and they didn't want users re-naming files. The problem, says Jeffries: SharePoint wants users to rename .PDF files after they've checked them out of a library and are ready to return them. To fix this problem, re-coding SharePoint would take too much work and would complicate software updates. So Jeffries wound up creating three separate sites: — one called submittals out, where all specs are uploaded for review; a coordination site, where the architects can review the contractors' changes and suggestions; and a third called submittals in, where the architects submit specs. She says creating three

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Get the Most From SharePoint Train users. "If you can't get people to use SharePoint, putting a site together is not worth the effort," says Kim Jeffries, an application analyst with the Van Andel Institute. Give novice users targeted tips. "When I created an account for a new SharePoint users, I sent them an e-mail with their user name and password and some quick tips on how to access the account, what level of security they had, and what that meant in terms of what they could and couldn't do, how to use the calendar, and how to use a document library," says Jeffries. Follow the three-click rule. Within the SharePoint site, says Jeffries, keep content as close to the surface as possible. "You should be able to get done what you need to get done in three clicks," she says. Make sure you have enough storage. By the end of the Van Andel Institute's building expansion, the SharePoint sites might take up one terabyte of storage, says Bryon Campbell, CIO of the Institute. Understand SharePoint's capabilities and limitations. "SharePoint is not the end all be all of software, but it works if you understand what it can and can't do," says Matt Fahrenkrug, owner of Culhane & Fahrenkrug Consulting. "By understanding that, you can manipulate the software and get to the result that you want." —M.L.

separate sites was much easier than customizing the software. The beauty of SharePoint is that it makes creating these sites a cinch, she says. Setting up three sites also ensured that all of the versioning that needed to take place during each phase of the submittal process happened in the right site, and ensured that versioning was complete at each phase of the submittal process, says Jeffries. Today, the Van Andel Institute has four SharePoint sites supporting the construction project, with 18 document libraries for each of the three submittal sites and 25 document libraries on the original SharePoint site used for the design phase of the project, says Jeffries.

Each folder within each of the document libraries on the submittal sites can about 100 documents. "The paperwork alone being maintained is amazing," she adds. The sites support 108 users and 200 or more gigabytes of storage according to Fahrenkrug. Fahrenkrug estimates that the new building, which is expected to be complete late next year, is about 40 to 45 percent complete today. "It's right on schedule. It's on budget," he says. And that's due in no small part to SharePoint. Says Campbell, "The fact that we used SharePoint for the submittal process will definitely keep us on track." CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

10/24/2008 6:20:48 PM

Pundit

essential technology

The Data Imperative It is difficult to calculate the cost of data loss due to unforeseen and expensive events. But what are the odds? By Bruce Schneier

| As I was explaining here last time, the need for numerous data makes it more difficult to calculate ROI — it is considerably harder for cybersecurity, because there just isn't enough good data. There aren't great crime rates for cyberspace, and we have a lot less data about how individual security counter-measures — or specific configurations of counter-measures — mitigate those risks. We don't even have data on incident costs. One problem is that the threat moves too quickly. By the time we get some data, there's a new threat model for which we don't have enough data. So we can't create ALE (annualized loss expectancy) models. But there's another problem, and it's that security

since we're just estimating. But he just cut your security budget in half. A vendor trying to sell you a product finds a Web analysis claiming that the odds of this happening are actually 1 in 1,000. Accept this new number, and suddenly a product costing 10 times as much is still a good investment. It gets worse when you deal with even more rare and expensive events. Imagine you're in charge of terrorism mitigation at a chlorine plant. What's the cost to your company, in money and reputation, of a large and very deadly explosion? $100 million (about Rs 400 crore)? $1 billion (about Rs 4,000 crore)? $10 billion (about Rs 40,000 crore)? And the odds: 1 in a hundred thousand, 1 in a million, 1 in 10 million? Depending on how

life expectancy, and the increased waiting time has ‘killed’ 620 people per year — 930 if you calculate the numbers based on 16 hours of awake time per day. So the question is: if we did away with increased airport security, would the result be more people dead from terrorism or fewer? This kind of thing is why most ROI models you get from security vendors are nonsense. Their model demonstrates that their product or service makes financial sense: they've jiggered the numbers so that they do. This doesn't mean that ALE is useless, but it does mean you should: 1) mistrust any analyses that come from people with an agenda and 2) use any results as a general guideline only. So, when you get an ROI

When you get an ROI model from your vendor, take its framework and plug in your own numbers. the math quickly falls apart when it comes to rare and expensive events. Imagine you calculate the cost — reputational costs, loss of customers, etcetera, of having your company's name in the newspaper after an embarrassing cybersecurity event to be $20 million (about Rs 80 crore). Also assume that the odds are 1 in 10,000 of that happening in any one year. ALE says you should spend no more than $2,000 (about Rs 80,000) mitigating that risk. So far, so good. But maybe your CFO thinks an incident would cost only $10 million (about Rs 40 crore). You can't argue, 62

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n o v e m B ER 1 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

you answer those two questions — and any answer is really just a guess — you can justify spending anywhere from $10 (about Rs 400) to $100,000 (about Rs 40 lakh) annually to mitigate that risk. Or take another example: airport security. Assume that all the new airport security measures increase the waiting time at airports by — and I'm making this up — 30 minutes per passenger. There were 760 million passenger boardings in the United States in 2007. This means that the extra waiting time at airports has cost us a collective 43,000 years of extra waiting time. Assume a 70-year

model from your vendor, take its framework and plug in your own numbers. Don't even show the vendor your improvements; it won't consider any changes that make its product or service less cost-effective to be an ‘improvement.’ And use those results as a general guide, along with risk management and compliance analyses, when you're deciding what security products and services to buy. (Concluded) CIO Bruce Schneier is a noted security expert and founder and CTO of BT Counterpane. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

Vol/3 | ISSUE/24

10/24/2008 5:26:14 PM