HP and SAP a train wreck? 4 | EMC’s database appliance 8 | VMware virtual data centers 11 | Tracking social network sentiment 12 | Three approaches to IT staffing 34
THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY
OCT. 18, 2010
A SPECIAL ALLDIGITAL, GREEN ISSUE
Jonathan Feldman charts the how and why p.14
[PLUS] How HTML 5 Changes Web Apps p.28 Table Of Contents p.2
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CONTENTS THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY
Oct. 18, 2010 Issue 1,283
This all-digital issue of InformationWeek is part of our 10-year strategy to reduce the publication’s carbon footprint
14
3 Research And Connect COVER STORY
Reports, events, video, and more
The New Project Management
4 Global CIO
Make sure your approach to project management fits your company’s culture
HP’s hiring of Léo Apotheker doesn’t make much sense
6 CIO Profiles The feds should make tech infrastructure a priority, says First Horizon’s CIO
28 The Web Is The OS 8 QuickTakes EMC’s Database Appliance It goes up against Oracle, Teradata, and Netezza
Browser-based apps rival desktop performance
12 Social Network Monitoring Brands look for ways to make social networks work better for customer service
10 Windows Phone 7
34 Practical Analysis When it comes to staffing, IT has three options
36 38
Microsoft’s OS has some good integration, but lacks a few key features
Editorial Contacts Business Contacts
11 VMware’s Cloud Ambitions New release centers on “virtual data centers”
2 Oct. 18, 2010
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Links
Resources to Research, Connect, Comment
Never Miss A Report >> How Security Technology Is Failing Just released >> Oracle Redefines IT Strategy Just released >> Deduplication For Disaster Recovery Just released >> Microsoft Hyper-V Vs. VMware ESX Just released >> Location-Based Services Coming Nov. 1
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Enterprise 2.0 See the latest collaboration technologies at Enterprise 2.0, Interop Nov. 8-11 in Santa Clara, Calif. IT and business leaders attend Interop to learn about cloud com- e2conf.com/santaclara puting, virtualization, networking, and other innovations that drive Talent At Risk productivity. It’s going on in New Jobs are scarce, but your employYork this week, Oct. 18-22. ees may still be ready to bolt. Get interop.com/ny tips to head off the problem in the latest Boardroom Journal. informationweek.com/brj Blades: The Future Is Now Blade servers are coming into their own, especially as part of Let The News Find You virtualization projects. Download Get the news topics you follow our new all-digital supplement. delivered to your in-box. informationweek.com/blades informationweek.com/getalerts
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Oct. 18, 2010 3
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global CIO B O B E VA N S
HP And SAP: Perfect Match Or Train Wreck?
Unless HP intends to become a software powerhouse, its hiring of ex-SAP CEO Léo Apotheker makes zero sense
4 Oct. 18, 2010
You folks are among the most intelligent audiences in the world, so help me out with this one, because I can’t quite see the logic: 1. Hewlett-Packard could have hired just about any CEO in the world, but it chose Léo Apotheker, an executive who had, at best, mixed results in his one brief stint as CEO of SAP. 2. HP realizes that its two main competitors—IBM and Oracle—have extensive strengths in enterprise software, and that it needs to close the yawning gaps between it and those better-balanced competitors. 3. The only possible explanation for HP’s decision to hire Apotheker is that it wants to leverage his extensive knowledge of the enterprise software market, particularly enterprise applications. 4. Apotheker’s arrival at HP has ripped open the almosthealed wounds in the company’s long relationship with Oracle. 5. In that context, HP must view SAP—with its vast and highly regarded fleet of enterprise software products, its 107,000 global customers, and its market momentum—as a godsend. 6. SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott said Apotheker’s arrival at HP will let the two companies extend and deepen their relationship. 7. Did the HP board really bring on Apotheker just to expand HP’s relationship with SAP? Shoot, HP could have hired Barney Fife as CEO and still achieved that no-brainer outcome. 8. Or do HP’s board and Apotheker think SAP will just sit by as HP begins muscling its way into SAP’s primary markets through acquisitions?
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9. Is it possible that HP’s board doesn’t realize that SAP is a profoundly different company from the one it was eight months ago, when it fired Apotheker? And that SAP’s new development methods, product strategies, value propositions, and customer-centric outlooks are all in large part repudiations of Apotheker and his legacy? 10. Or is it simply that HP wants to acquire SAP? With SAP’s current market cap of about $61 billion and a premium of another $20 billion, HP could conceivably afford such a purchase. But consider a few points: >> If that’s HP’s play, why bring in as CEO a guy with a track record of failure? >> SAP is growing again and has fresh momentum. Is this really the time to cash in? >> That deal would immediately transform Oracle from longtime partner into relentless competitor. >> It would at least complicate some of the areas of longtime partnership between SAP and IBM by virtue of HP’s widespread head-tohead competition with IBM. >> It would totally undercut SAP’s anti-Oracle positioning, whereby SAP reassures customers that it won’t ever pursue the lock-in approach that SAP says is behind all of Oracle’s moves. >> And it would put Apotheker in charge of a sprawling global colossus when his history as a CEO shows no reason whatsoever to believe he’s up to the challenge. I just don’t get it. I keep thinking of the chicken and the pig who open a diner but, not long into the partnership, the rapidly shrinking pig realizes that the benefits and costs aren’t equitably distributed. That’s a tale that both HP and SAP should be thinking about IN THIS ISSUE very carefully. Because there’s much more going on here than EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 meets the eye. Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek’s Global CIO unit. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out informationweek.com/blog/globalcio, or write to Bob at bevans@techweb.com.
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Project Management p. 14 The Web Is The OS p. 28 Three Ways To Staff p. 34 Table Of Contents p. 2
Oct. 18, 2010 5
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CIOprofiles Career Track How long at the financial services company: Two years Career accomplishment I’m most proud of: Leading a small group of people to start a new software product, a loan origination system called LoanXchange, and seeing the product and people grow into a successful software company. It was ultimately acquired by Alltel Information Services.
BRUCE LIVESAY Executive VP and CIO, First Horizon National Colleges/degrees: Tennessee Technological University, BS in math, minor in computer science Leisure activities: Spending time with my family, playing guitar, and reading Tech vendor I respect most: Hewlett-Packard founder David Packard Best book read recently: The Big Short, by Michael Lewis If I weren’t a CIO, I’d be ... running a personal business
Ranked No. 20 in the 2010
6 Oct. 18, 2010
Most important career influencer: My father taught me two important lessons: Work hard and enjoy what you do, and make a positive contribution for people in whatever you do.
On The Job IT budget: $77 million Size of IT team: 350 employees Top initiatives: >> Core systems transformation: Replacements, upgrades, and renewals of nearly every core application system, branch delivery system, and channel direct system at First Horizon. >> IT infrastructure renewal: In anticipation of the new application systems, the
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Read other CIO Profiles at informationweek.com/topexecs
IT infrastructure at First Horizon is being totally refreshed with new, state-of-the-art equipment. >> Data center insourcing: Positioning the data center for growth by consolidating from multiple vendor hosting sites to two internally managed centers. How I measure IT effectiveness: I use a monthly scorecard containing quantitative and qualitative metrics for three items: IT operational service delivery quality, business value delivery (via project execution and resource management), and IT risk management.
Vision Advice for future CIOs: Stay close to business leaders and their priorities to bring value to the company beyond quality IT operations. To do that, understand how to apply technology to help grow core product lines, and remember that the customer is the boss and strategies must result in winning customers. The federal government’s top technology priority should be ... to improve the technology infrastructure within the U.S. to keep pace with innovation around the globe. We’re currently lagging other countries in broadband coverage and adoption. Kids and technology careers: My kids are still a little young—Lauren is 13 and Matt is 10—for a chosen career direction. I haven’t really steered them one way or the other yet, but IN THIS ISSUE I definitely wouldn’t discourage them from a technology EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 career. There’s so much potential within IT. Whether it’s Project Management p. 14 the convergence of social networking and mobile The Web Is The OS p. 28 devices or the use of technology in microbiology, there Three Ways To Staff p. 34 will be a lot of exciting career options that blend exciting new technology innovations with future trends. Table Of Contents p. 2 informationweek.com
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[QUICKTAKES] A STORAGE ADVANTAGE?
EMC Joins Database Appliance Fray Just 75 days after acquiring Greenplum, EMC announced an appliance based on Greenplum’s massively parallel processing database. The product is touted as offering lower prices and faster data loading than competing appliances, as well as unique backup and recovery options. The EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance combines the Greenplum 4.0 database, Dell servers, Brocade switches, and EMC’s directattached disk storage. Half-rack and full-rack versions of the appliance will be assembled, preinstalled with software, and shipped from EMC’s factories in the United States and Cork, Ireland. Prices start at $1 million for a half-rack appliance with 18 TB of useravailable storage. By applying compression, EMC says, customers can actually store up to 72 TB, which brings the price to just under $14,000 per terabyte. In comparison, competitor Netezza last year said that its product cost less than $20,000 per terabyte. IBM is in the process of acquiring Netezza. This isn’t the first time that Greenplum’s database has been offered as part of a data warehousing appliance. It was previously packaged with Sun Microsystems’ server and storage technologies, but Oracle’s acquisition of Sun earlier this year put the kibosh on that partnership. Oracle competes with Greenplum, and now EMC, with its Exadata appliances. Built-In Integration EMC’s new appliance excels at data loading, which it does at a rate of 10 TB per hour. That’s twice as fast as Oracle Exadata systems and five times faster than Teradata and Netezza offerings, according to EMC. For most purposes, other vendors’ load speeds are fast enough, though some network monitoring and logging use cases demand the highest load speeds possible, according to analyst Curt Monash. The appliance offers two EMC-contributed storage options, the likes of which rivals don’t match. The first is integration with EMC DataDomain,
8 Oct. 18, 2010
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BIG DATA APPLIANCE >> EMC Greenplum Appliance bundles database, computing, storage, networking
a secondary storage and backup and recovery appliance that can deduplicate data, back up at designated times, pro>> Stores up to 72 TB vide point-in-time copies, and reduce reof compressed data covery times. The second feature is built>> Loads data at 10 TB in integration with EMC RecoveryPoint, per hour which gives users of that software the op>> Starts at $1 million, or tion of replicating appliance data onto $13,900 per terabyte EMC or third-party SANs for disaster recovery purposes. The EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance is the first offering from EMC’s recently formed Data Computing Products Division. EMC will continue to offer the Greenplum database separately, with certified configurations on Dell and Hewlett-Packard hardware. In a recent report on EMC, Wells Fargo senior analyst Jason Maynard looked beyond simple appliances to the promise of optimized systems that incorporate more software. “As software and hardware technologies are increasingly delivered as integrated appliance-like solutions, many of the software-centric firms have an advantage given their intellectual property is much more difficult to replace than the commoditizing compute functions,” Maynard wrote. Oracle already has appliances in the transactional arena, and IBM, HP, SAP, and Microsoft have signaled their IN THIS ISSUE interest in offering broader optimized systems in the HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 near term. (For more on that trend, see “Global CIO: Larry First Horizon’s CIO p. 6 Ellison And IBM Lead Surge In Optimized Systems.”) Project Management p. 14 EMC said it might look beyond the data warehousing Three Ways To Staff p. 34 market, but for now it’s concentrating on analytic data warehousing, as are Teradata, SAP-Sybase, SAS Institute, Table Of Contents p. 2 Vertica, and others. —Doug Henschen (dhenschen@techweb.com)
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Oct. 18, 2010 9
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[QUICKTAKES] WINDOWS PHONE 7
Integrated With Microsoft Apps, But Still A Work In Progress Microsoft’s promising Windows Phone 7 operating system will at last go on sale next month for businesses, but the initial release of the software will lack a few key features in its initial release. To boot, two major carriers— Sprint and Verizon—won’t offer phones based on the OS until next year. Most notably, Windows Phone 7, which is built for a touch-screen interface, lacks a copy-and-paste function to let people carry text across documents and applications. That could be a significant shortcoming in the eyes of power users, given that Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android offer copy-and-paste. Microsoft promises a software update early next year to add that functionality. Microsoft’s biggest challenge will be to energize the development community to build on Windows Phone 7, to get sufficient third-party applications to compete with the iPhone and Android platforms. Working in its favor, the OS appears to be tightly integrated with Microsoft’s enterprise software, a likely draw for businesses. The OS uses so-called Hubs for organization, with categories such as People, Office, Pictures, and Music & Video. On each Hub screen are associated applications, settings, and other related content. The Office Hub, for example, provides access to mobile versions of Microsoft Office, SharePoint, OneNote, and Outlook. Windows Phone 7 devices are due to hit stores next month. AT&T will offer models from HTC, Samsung, and LG, while T-Mobile will stock units from HTC and Dell. Dell’s presence is a bit of a surprise, since Dell is new to the mobile phone market, but its Venue Pro phone stands out for having both a touch screen and slideDell’s in the phone game out keyboard. —Paul McDougall (pmcdougall@techweb.com) and Eric Zeman
[
10 Oct. 18, 2010
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VIRTUAL DATA CENTERS
VMware’s Expanding Cloud Ambitions VMware keeps expanding its claim to be the manager of the private cloud—which could include just about any part of the data center that’s been virtualized, if it can be run as a self-contained unit. Its latest release of virtualization management software focuses on what VMware calls “virtual data centers.” Those are groupings of virtualized servers and the associated network bandwidth and storage. For example, one group might be oriented toward supporting Web servers, another Microsoft Exchange, another Oracle databases. Managing those resources will take some particular data center capabilities that VMware is working to beef up in its software. One such capability is letting employees self-provision virtual servers. The latest release of VMware’s vCloud management software adds workflows and approvals through Request Manager that automatically give approvals, check for licenses, and check the employee’s access privileges. Another feature checks storage resources, previously a blind spot of VMware’s management console. Its CapacityIQ tool can now look at the disk space available, develop a trend line on how fast it’s being used up, and suggest ways to optimize the storage. VMware thinks companies will use these tools to bill business units for the IT services they use—much more than they do today. The idea is that if IT organizations can group the types of virtual machines and the resources they access, they can more easily tailor portions of the data center to a business unit’s performance and cost needs. VMware is also working with IT services company CSC IN THIS ISSUE to integrate two VMware tools: its application-building HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 platform, vFabric, and its application-monitoring tool, HyFirst Horizon’s CIO p. 6 peric. The goal is to make it easier to build virtualized Project Management p. 14 apps and see how well they’re working. Three Ways To Staff p. 34 Not everybody may be ready for the virtual data center, but VMware keeps filling holes in its product line as if Table Of Contents p. 2 one day they will be. —Charles Babcock (cbabcock@techweb.com)
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[QUICKTAKES] TEXT ANALYSIS
Social Networks Meet Customer Service For better or worse, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks have become legitimate channels for customer feedback and support. That has forced businesses to look for ways to incorporate social network comments about their brands, products, and service experiences into the existing customer service workflows. Text-analysis technology, particularly sentiment analysis, monitors tweets, Facebook posts, blogs, and other forms of social network feedback. It lets marketers and brand managers quickly detect broad trends and respond to specific comments and complaints. To date, most sentiment-analysis tools are standalone apps, but the trend is toward integrating them with enterprise applications and workflows. Attensity, for example, has its new Respond for Social Media application. Attensity already had a powerful app called Respond that analyzes incoming e-mail, faxes, text messages, phone call notes and transcripts, and transcribed mail using Attensity’s text-mining algorithms. It can sort comments by topic category and routes them to appropriate queues for contact center agents and specialists. Attensity Respond for Social Media does much the same for comments via Twitter, Facebook posts, LinkedIn forums, blogs, online discussions, and online video metadata. The application looks like and is used like a social media app. Using API-access or scraping routines, tweets and other social network comments can be automatically and continually copied to the application and then viewed through a TweetDeck/ CoTweet-like interface. From there, administrators set up customer-care queues and train the system to sort messages. They drag and drop tweets and posts into categories such as “Wishes and Wants” for product development or service teams, “Intent to Purchase” for the sales team, and “Needs Help” for the support crew. Attensity’s sorting feature spots intersections of topics, categories, keywords, and content types. The more messages you drag and drop into a queue, the more accurate the automatic sorting gets.
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How Does Your Company Monitor Social Networks? Respond for Social Media can be Search alerts (Google, Bing, etc.) integrated with Rapleaf, a service 56% that tracks the names people use Outside vendor 16% on Twitter, Facebook, and the like, Specialty applications (Radian6, ScoutLabs, etc.) and associates them with known 15% e-mail addresses. Customer service Other agents can then call up customers’ 4% accounts based on their e-mail, see Don’t know 40% service records associated with Data: InformationWeek Analytics Social Networking in the Enterprise tweets or posts, and respond to Survey of 237 business technology professionals, August 2010 them using a tweet, post, or e-mail. Attensity also plans to integrate the new app with leading CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com and SAP. It’s not too hard to imagine other powerful capabilities. For example, Attensity says it’s working on ways to prioritize comments based on social media influencer status. Comments from people with thousands of followers could get immediate attention while those with few online friends might go to the back of the queue. Call-center software maker Verint recently added text-mining capabilities from Clarabridge to its analytic app portfolio. Clarabridge mines customer interactions across e-mail, Web chat sessions, blogs, review sites, social media, and other text-based channels. Classification and reporting features let employees alert managers to let them know if customers are grumbling about their products online. IN THIS ISSUE Text Analytics rounds out Impact 360’s app lineup. It HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 already includes Impact 360 Speech Analytics, for anaFirst Horizon’s CIO p. 6 lyzing recorded voice calls to spot complaints, emotional Project Management p. 14 calls, and customer-retention issues; and Impact 360 Three Ways To Staff p. 34 Data Analytics, which reports on call attributes, as well as call-center productivity, quality, and customer experiTable Of Contents p. 2 ence metrics. —Doug Henschen (dhenschen@techweb.com)
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Project management is getting more respect. Make sure your approach fits your company’s culture.
T
By Jonathan Feldman
he practice of enterprise project management is finally getting broad respect, not just lip service. Seven out of 10 companies use formal project management methodologies, our new InformationWeek Analytics survey finds. Pay for project managers was on the rise last year, even as pay for most IT pros was flat. Sixty-one percent of the managers we surveyed see the Project Management Institute’s project management professional—PMP—certification as important to their companies. These numbers matter, but more important is the recognition of the
14 Oct. 18, 2010
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[COVER STORY] project management office’s broad role—well beyond being the keeper of the almighty Gantt chart and a budget bludgeon. The PMO is most valued, our research finds, for helping companies prioritize good projects over bad, getting the right people on the job, airing out progress and problems, and executing consistently using the company’s standard practices. “Project management is finally evolving to become more focused on being collaborative, leading and inspiring teams, and ensuring the people angle is taken into account to ensure quicker adoption of changes,” says Lynn Batara, director of the enterprise project and portfolio office at Franklin Templeton Investments. However, Batara does see a need for more emphasis on the strategic side of project management, like portfolio management to prioritize projects, and doing a better job of aligning projects with company strategy, minimizing risk, and measuring the benefits. Asked for the top reasons to create a PMO, 64% of survey respondents say to prioritize projects and 55% say to standardize on an approach—by far the most cited reasons. The next biggest PMO priority is to provide project visibility to leadership teams (34%). Less than a fourth of respondents see tracking project status and project costs as a top reason. Most companies have some project management methodology in place, and that’s part of the problem—if you’re not actively questioning your approach, looking for weak spots, and comparing it with other options, it’ll creep along in whatever direction it’s already headed. Whether or not you have a formally defined PMO—a single point of responsibility within the scope of business governance—you owe it to yourself to consider how to structure or restructure PMO activities. Each company should consider a number of factors when doing this, including: How do you track small projects? Companies tend to have a decent handle on large, expensive projects, but IN THIS ISSUE they fall short on the smaller ones. Yet those add up to a HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 significant chunk of resources and can put a big dent in EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 IT’s reputation and credibility. Complexity and cost, not Windows Phone 7 p. 10 risk or regulatory compliance, tend to drive whether a The Web Is The OS p. 28 PMO is involved in a project, our survey finds. What tools do you need for project management? Table Of Contents p. 2 Excel dominates, with 82% of companies using it to man-
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age projects. But almost two-thirds use project-specific software as well. Do you need one PMO office for the whole company? It might seem like the easy answer, but 53% of companies have multiple PMOs. Culture and organizational structure play a big part in what’s right for your company. Get This And Does your PMO set priorities or just All Our Reports drive projects home? This is the crossover Become an InformationWeek between portfolio management and proj- Analytics subscriber: $99 per per month, multiseat ect management. You need to apply good person discounts available. project management principles to individSubscribe and get our full report ual projects whether or not you’re doing on project management at overall portfolio management. It doesn’t informationweek.com/analytics/pmo2010 have to be the same team, but the groups This report includes 32 pages of action-oriented analysis, plus 16 must talk early and often. charts from our survey of 684 Does your PMO process fit your indus- tech pros. What you’ll find: try? A lot of project management best > Data on which employees get trained in project management practices were born in defense, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and construction. > Data on which certifications are most important to companies Companies in other industries may need > Analysis on whether to inteto modify some of those mature discigrate project management with financial applications plines to get buy-in. Are you communicating the project management office’s value? Colleagues shouldn’t be left to wonder “What’s in it for me?” when it comes to working with the PMO, so keep executives in the loop with project status IN THIS ISSUE dashboards and share best practices across project HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 teams. EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 Rich Carney, who implemented a PMO for a large reWindows Phone 7 p. 10 tailer, warns against adding too much bureaucracy. He’s The Web Is The OS p. 28 convinced that better processes improve the bottom line, but IT leaders must convince individuals and departTable Of Contents p. 2 ments of the upside.
16 Oct. 18, 2010
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Why Implement A Project Management Office? Prioritize projects on an organization-wide basis
64% Standardize approach to projects
55% Provide project visibility to the leadership team
34% Manage project staffing
26% Track and report on task completion
23% Track and report on project finances
22% Manage risk
22% Assign and/or clarify roles and responsibilities
18% Standardize templates and reporting
18% Earned Value Management
3% Track and report on customer satisfaction
2% Data: InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise Project Management Survey of 475 business technology professionals at companies with a PMO, June 2010
“You always start off with, ‘Here’s how I can make your life easier, here’s how I can reduce your effort or risk,’” Carney says. Because PMO customers aren’t forced to “buy services” from the PMO, getting participation is based on that kind of person-to-person marketing campaign. Something to note: Most companies rate people issues well down on the list of benefits they expect from a PMO. Of the 10 PMO benefits we listed in our survey, managing staffing and tracking customer satisfaction came in eighth and ninth. But centralized project management can’t succeed unless project managers have good relationships with end users and project teams have the right leaders and skills.
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Ask Eric Choi, who heads e-commerce at credit report company Experian. Choi recently led a $1.2 million project to convert the company’s more than 100 independently run, country-specific Web sites into one global Web content platform. That effort took the cooperation of 40 offices worldwide, since Experian wanted the countries to keep their unique, local-language content but to transfer it to the centralized content management system. The decision to centralize the Web branding and content management was backed by the board of directors. “We had the stick behind us, but we all know the stick goes only so far,” Choi says. Success hinged on getting country managers to move their content and buy into a centralized process. (Read more on Experian’s project on p. 24.) One PMO—Or Many? Project management purists might like the neat-and-orderly nature of a single, unified project management office, but let’s face reality: More than half of companies have multiple offices, and there’s no reason to think that’ll change. There’s no reason it has to. PMOs can reasonably be run just for IT operations, by divisions, or across all capital projects. This is all about governance—who’s paying for what, and who controls the activities and resources at a business unit. So for those who think setting up a PMO just for IT is useless, I say prove its worth on the IT level and others will want to learn from you. Carney, who set up the retailer’s PMO, started out by creating one for the IT organization specifically to improve its processes. Another business unit then created a PMO, but it had different objectives—it needed to kill weak projects to free up money and staff for stronger ones. The focus of each PMO aligned with the IN THIS ISSUE overall needs of the retailer. HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 In our survey, which is skewed toward managers in IT orEMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 ganizations, most respondents (57%) say their PMOs report Windows Phone 7 p. 10 to the CIO, followed by the COO (16%) and CEO (11%). The Web Is The OS p. 28 There can be value in a company-wide PMO, of course. When Randy Mott became CIO at Hewlett-Packard in Table Of Contents p. 2 2005, he used a centralized project management office
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Think Small How do you manage small projects that aren’t part of formal PMI methodologies?
Other
4% Task management software
We manage all projects the same way
Staff chooses how to manage these projects
30%
14%
25% 27% Manual or spreadsheet-based system
Data: InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise Project Management Survey of 684 business technology professionals, June 2010
and process to help transform the company’s IT operations. Every IT project required a cost-benefit analysis from a business unit, including a priority ranking against the unit’s other projects. That structure let Mott change the conversation from being mostly about IT’s cost to also being about the benefits IT delivers—what Mott calls the “revenue of IT.” But Mott’s the first to note that such an approach will lead to showdowns with business-unit leaders who refuse to do a cost-benefit analysis. His advice: “Don’t blink.” (Oh, and make sure the CEO has your back when you take that stand.) As Mott’s experience suggests, such centralized project and portfolio management requires executive time and commitment. So no matter where your PMO sits, providing executive information, during annual reviews as well as regular project updates, is critical. More than a third of the business technology pros we surveyed cite executive insight into projects as a key reason even to have a PMO. “Project and program management is most valuable when executives can get reporting in a manageable and understandable way,” says Steve Haughsworth, who heads up the program office for Plastics Tech-
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nology. “Without that, they become uninvolved in the project, because they perceive no value, and the project goes sideways.” Give them information they find useful, which might mean breaking from strict project management methodologies. The Right Methodology For The Right Task While 70% of our survey respondents use formal project methodologies, even advocates can get impatient with the rigidity. Jim Beinlich, associate CIO at University of Pennsylvania Health System, says most project management principles come from engineering and construction, disciplines where there are a lot of known variables. Given temperature, humidity, and a few other factors, you can predict with a fair amount of certainty how long it’ll take concrete to dry. “When you try to apply that to IT, you are now dealing with a very small set of known variables, and all of a sudden the construction model doesn’t work,” Beinlich says. Yet IT project managers are trained in the construction model. Beinlich’s project managers make it a priority to spend time with project sponsors to understand what they think the outcome should be. That focus on outcomes borrows from agile software development, where the exact path to the end result stays flexible, and the emphasis is on getting pieces of the project done and back to end users, then reacting to feedback in many iterative bursts. Web projects, in particular, call for this kind of iterative approach, says Experian’s Choi. It’s not like an accounting IT system, where perfection may be needed at each step. “On the Web, if we make a mistake, we fix it and republish it,” he says. Because tracking progress is critical to a PMO, project IN THIS ISSUE leaders do need to regularly answer the question “How’s HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 it going?” The problem is when all that effort is built EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 around a “fantasy deadline.” Much of the PMP paradigm Windows Phone 7 p. 10 focuses on predicting what resources will be needed The Web Is The OS p. 28 and the possible risks, and setting a forecast—“the predictive model,” says Richard Cheung, a principal with Table Of Contents p. 2 Excella Consulting who’s certified in both PMP and the
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agile-inspired scrum project approach. His experience is that projects benefit from the “adaptive” model—quick and simple estimates, which he says tend to be equally accurate. Plus, with less invested in project milestones, people are more likely to rework plans as requirements change, as new information becomes available, and new roadblocks become apparent. Small Projects, Big Management Problem Small projects are the piranhas of IT. Individually, not so bad, but in packs they will eat you alive. HP CIO Mott says most IT teams closely manage only their top 10 or 20 projects—and probably capture only about half the IT spending in the process. The deployment of 25 new networked printer/scanner/copiers may well be seen as beneath the notice of a PMO, since the risk and cost aren’t high. But drop the ball on enough copier installations and you’re losing real money—and credibility. If IT can't even get the printers working, how can it reengineer my e-commerce process and Web site?
What Determines If A Project Is Managed By A Project Management Office? Project complexity
49% Project cost
38% Number of business units or divisions involved
26% Project risk
20% Compliance factors (HIPAA, GLB, PCI, etc.)
8% Other
6% All projects are managed by PMO
25% Data: InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise Project Management Survey of 475 business technology professionals at companies with a PMO, June 2010
22 Oct. 18, 2010
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Nevertheless, it’s still surprising that 25% of our survey respondents say they manage all projects the same. Are they really that disciplined— or are they overstaffed or just fooling themselves? Our survey also finds that 25% manage all projects from the PMO, regardless of size or scope. Maybe it’s the same 25%. That approach might work for you, but beware the kill-the-fly-withthe-sledgehammer syndrome. Here are two main strategies for handling small projects. First, lump them together. Here, portfolio management systems promise to help us classify resources, while making portfolio management practical on a small scale. Classify sets of activities and abstract them into a larger project. So, for instance, don’t classify “patch the servers” as a project, but rather track patching as part of staff time spent on “server maintenance.” Second, train business-unit people in enough project management skills to drive small, localized projects. Think of it as similar to having a few “super users” of SharePoint scattered around to help the less techsavvy colleagues and drive adoption. What’s a small project? There’s no real consensus. Less than 40 hours of work is one common breakpoint. Complexity (49%) and cost (38%) are the two most-cited reasons in our survey for when a project gets managed by the PMO. The Right Tools And People It’s not surprising that spreadsheets are the most common project management tool, used by more than 80% of companies we surveyed. “If you’re only managing 15 critical tasks, you can do it easier in Excel,” says Beinlich of the University of IN THIS ISSUE Pennsylvania Health System. HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 PMP heresy? Blame project management software EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 vendors for the alternative: using massively complex sysWindows Phone 7 p. 10 tems. Besides using Excel, 48% of survey respondents The Web Is The OS p. 28 use help desk, work order, or task-tracking systems, and an equal percentage use word processing. Sixty-four Table Of Contents p. 2 percent do use commercial project management soft-
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ware. Of those, 86% use Microsoft Project; just over 10% use Oracle, HP, and CA software. Clearly, project tracking is happening in many different systems. When it comes to training, only 29% of our survey respondents say their companies don’t consider certification important. The PMP cert is twice as likely to be important to a company as any other. IT pros can’t go wrong acquiring the PMP, but degree programs, certificates, and vendor certs also carry credibility. The more important issue isn’t what specific sheepskin’s on the walls, but rather, is everybody using the same approaches, terms, and strategy? Carney says one big problem in getting his retailer PMO up and running was that not everybody followed LEAP OF FAITH
Global Project, But No Big Plan As I talked with Eric Choi about a project he led for Experian, one of the big three companies in credit reports, the words “leap of faith” kept coming up. Mind you, that’s a lot different than a “wing and a prayer.” Choi, the company’s e-commerce director, thinks an agile, relationship-focused style is the least risky way to do a global Web development project. But it took faith that this ap proach—with minimalist executive dashboards, ever-shifting priorities, and iterative learn-as-yougo development—would deliver. The project: Get more than 100 Web sites, run by 40 different Experian offices worldwide, onto one Interwoven content management system. The deadline: April 2010, one year from the initial planning. The top reason for doing the project was to get
24 Oct. 18, 2010
Experian to show up higher on Google searches. Rather than looking like a global online enterprise, it looked like dozens of smaller operations, since each country had its own site. Each country also put its own brand variations on their sites and duplicated the costs of maintaining a site. When Choi communicated with top executives about the project status, he didn’t show a lot of data on interim milestones. He showed them a simple heat map, with a black box representing each country that was done, a gray box for those in progress, and a white one for those not started. There was no step-by-step waterfall plan, of this country by X date and the next by Y date. Those things change once teams start work and learn the real problems, Choi says. “Project plans and a waterfall approach scare everybody, but everyone expects it,” Choi says.
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the same rulebook. Understand the framework and interIN THIS ISSUE nal organizational challenges and needs, and then create HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 your own processes using the framework. EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 Also, be ready to pay project managers their worth. Project Windows Phone 7 p. 10 managers this year cracked the six-figure mark—$105,000 The Web Is The OS p. 28 in median pay, including cash bonuses—for the first time in InformationWeek’s annual U.S. Salary Survey. That’s 24% Table Of Contents p. 2 more than the typical IT staffer in our survey earns. One last thing about people:Yes, you do need to track the time spent on projects. “If people aren’t reporting their time, you’re just guessing,” Beinlich says. Just as it would be unthinkable to run a project without
“One of the risks is the project plan manages you.” Experian wanted a central Web platform but still wanted local managers to create the content, taking advantage of their understanding of the language and market. In the changeover, the local teams—aided by Choi’s project team—had to load content into that central system. The project team lived with a lot of ambiguity. As the team started migrating content in Japan, for example, it became clear that country would be one of the more difficult ones. So the team switched to focus on other countries, while keeping just a small team to crack Japan’s problems. Choi calls it “leading with our successes.” It let the team knock off easy countries—and color some boxes black on that heat map the executives saw. It finished 25 countries in the first four months. But how did Choi know he wasn’t papering over a deadline-busting problem, just to look good on a heat map? “As we iterated with the smaller coun-
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tries, we were learning what to do and not do,” Choi says. Plus, success can help bulldoze some problems that seem intractable in the early project stages. Everyone sees that heat map, and no one wants to be the last country still in white. It created some useful internal competition. Choi’s team needed to built relationships in every country—with the country managers, and also with the IT teams, since every one was run differently.The teams had to convince country managers “we’re going to take away their Web sites, only to give it back to you to control. That’s a tough message,” he says. Each country had clear milestones, such as loading the content and training people on creating new content. Choi and his team relied heavily on face-to-face meetings—over teleconferences— to build those ties and work through problems. Choi says the team made the April deadline, and even came in $200,000 under the $1.4 million project budget. —Chris Murphy (cjmurphy@techweb.com)
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knowing specific expenditures and revTotal cash compensation enues, it’s crazy to try to wrap your arms (median in thousands) around the resource management part of project management without timekeeping. $ Architect Everybody doesn’t need to record their time in six-minute increments, like a lawyer does, $ Systems architect but having a rational basis for allocating $ staff time to projects is critical. This informaProject leader tion is probably more readily available than $ you think: Help desk systems record time Software engineer spent on operations; calendars capture Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2010 U.S. IT Salary Survey of 10,524 IT staff, February 2010 meetings. The point is, you have to make some effort at tracking how time is spent. Another piece of advice from HP’s Mott is to record what people actually work on, and not what they’re scheduled for. Often, people get pulled onto maintenance work and stopgaps when something breaks. That’s precious data for determining the real cost of keeping an application—data Mott used in deciding which systems to kill as he slashed HP’s app portfolio. Think long term. We spoke to plenty of people who developed rigorous project management processes while a strong CIO or PMO proponent was in place, only for them to run out of steam once those folks left. Clearly, the company hadn’t bought into the approach, and such buy-in is much more critical than individual certifications or any project management philosophy. So if the predominant feedback about a project management process is that it’s way too bureaucratic, listen. And revisit. Is now the time for that key showdown, or a compromise? Circle IN THIS ISSUE back to long-standing processes every once in a while HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 and see if they still apply. Show that your PMO can give EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 and take, and you may get broader acceptance that lasts Windows Phone 7 p. 10 longer than any one project leader’s tenure. Highest-Paying Titles
120 110 105 99
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26 Oct. 18, 2010
Jonathan Feldman serves as IT director for a city in North Carolina. Write to us at iweekletters@techweb.com.
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The Web Is The Operating System We can now build browser-based applications that rival desktop software in capabilities. Ready, set, innovate. By Jim Rapoza
W
e’re on the verge of another explosion in Web application technology. The emerging HTML 5 specification, along with several other new standards, means companies can build even more powerful and interactive Web apps with nearly all the characteristics of desktop applications—including the ability to run offline. Many of us have been headed in this direction for a while. In our July 2010 InformationWeek Analytics Web Application Development Survey, 74% of 341 business technology pros responsible for the use or purchase of Web application development platforms say they already use the Internet to deliver core internal applications to employees, and 65% say Web apps are core to their businesses. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen a boom in software-as-a-service offerings and exponential growth of social networks in tandem with improved standards support in Web browsers. Things are pretty good, and they’re about to get better. HTML 5 will let us deliver more powerful applications to browsers, not only on PCs
28 Oct. 18, 2010
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How Does Your Company Use Web Applications? Currently use
Planned within 24 months
Not in use/no plans
As useful tools and modules for visitors or customers
75%
20%
5%
20%
6%
To deliver core internal business applications for our employees
74% To provide core business applications
65%
21%
14%
Data: InformationWeek Analytics Web Application Development Survey of 341 business technology professionals involved with the use or purchase of Web application development platforms and systems, July 2010
but on many of the modern mobile platforms so beloved by end users, including the iPhone and Android devices. And since these applications are delivered over the Web, developers can cut out the middlemen— controlled application stores and markets—and go directly to customers and clients. As standards-based technologies advance, vendor application platforms are also evolving. It’s a matter of survival. Adobe (with Flash and Air) and Microsoft (with Silverlight) are laser focused on staying at least a step ahead of the standards-based options in features and capabilities. Businesses need to manage this transition just right—don’t slip off the bleeding edge, but also don’t fall too far behind in terms of your applications’ capabilities. Standing still isn’t an option. For an increasing number of customers and business partners, if an application doesn’t run on the Web, it might as well not exist. IN THIS ISSUE And the design and interface expectations for these Web HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 applications are a lot higher than they used to be. The State (And Future State) Of Web Applications Some businesses are already taking advantage of technologies such as HTML 5, Adobe Air, and Microsoft Silverlight. From interactive dashboards in enterprise SaaS
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First Horizon’s CIO p. 6 Project Management p. 14 Three Ways To Staff p. 34 Table Of Contents p. 2
Oct. 18, 2010 29
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applications like Salesforce.com to innovative HTML 5 applications like Google Voice that can run on mobile devices, including the iPhone, examples of cutting-edge Web development are easy to find. But if you’re not at that point, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re behind: In our survey, we asked respondents how focused their businesses are on HTML 5. Only 22% say they’re very interested and following developments closely; 35% are interested, and 38% are Get This And somewhat interested. Just 3% say they’re not at all inAll Our Reports terested in HTML 5. That’s a hearty endorsement Become an InformationWeek given that the standard isn’t even formalized yet, and Analytics subscriber for $99 per likely won’t be for at least a year. person per month, multiseat discounts available, and get our Similarly, when it comes to tool usage, respondents’ full report on the Web as OS at businesses are sticking to what they know, but also informationweek.com/analytics/webasos looking ahead and hedging their bets by choosing This report includes 30 pages of action-oriented analysis, packed tools that have the ability to work with the next genwith 17 charts. eration of technologies. In our survey, the overwhelmWhat you’ll find: ing top choice for development environment was Mi> Respondent rankings and our crosoft’s Visual Studio (69% adoption), followed by in-depth analysis of Web appliEclipse and standard text editors such as Notepad cation development platforms and Vi (40% each). Rounding out the top four was > The budget reality for Web apps vs. desktop development Adobe Creative Studio (33%). > Why RIA technology shouldn’t One respondent says his retail company still writes be lagging behind HTML 5 all its own code, including its shopping cart, in text editors to run on Linux Web servers. “We know precisely what happens with every single line of code, and with security becoming an ever-greater problem, we like being completely in charge of our code,” he says. “But the future is changing, and I have absolutely no idea where we are going. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is running out of time.” Of course, if you’re a developer or you work with Web developers, you know that in most cases the real-world development environment is some combination of tools, perhaps Eclipse for code editing and Creative Studio for design and media work. Or maybe Visual Studio is used
30 Oct. 18, 2010
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What’s Your Level Of Interest In HTML 5? Haven’t heard of it
2%
Not interested
3% Very interested and following closely
22%
Somewhat interested
35%
38% Interested Data: InformationWeek Analytics Web Application Development Survey of 341 business technology professionals involved with the use or purchase of Web application development platforms and systems, July 2010
in conjunction with Microsoft’s Expression suite. What this tells us is that, as is the case in many other areas of technology adoption, most businesses are taking a go-slow approach, sticking with the Web application technologies that they know and understand while preparing for the next generation. But we also think that businesses are prepared to move much more quickly to the cutting edge in Web application development than they might in other technology areas. What To Keep In Mind First, now that the browser wars are back and fiercer than ever, fidelity to Web standards has become a very big deal. From e-mail to word processing to sales management to HR to business intelligence to analytics and reporting, you name it, you can generally find a highly capable Web-based option. But any business that takes this full-on Web application approach must ensure
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IN THIS ISSUE HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 First Horizon’s CIO p. 6 Project Management p. 14 Three Ways To Staff p. 34 Table Of Contents p. 2
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Standards Matter When looking at Web application development systems, how important is standards support?
Not important
3%
Somewhat important
32%
65%
Very important
Data: InformationWeek Analytics Web Application Development Survey of 341 business technology professionals involved with the use or purchase of Web application development platforms and systems, July 2010
their applications adhere to standards. Among our survey respondents, the most desired feature, by far, in a Web application development system is that applications work on multiple browsers. For a long time, this preference worked in the favor of vendors of rich Internet applications. If you needed a rich, desktop-like Web application to work across systems and browsers, your best bet was to build it in something like Flash, which has high penetration among Web users. But the growth of standards-based options like HTML 5 and Ajax has made it possible to, if not write once and run everywhere, at least come close. Second, many tasks still either require a desktop OS or work better there. Even most of the open Web proponents agree on this—a major feature of HTML 5 and RIAs is the ability to run a Web application as a full desktop app separate from the browser. Another argument against the Web as über OS is the mobile environment. At least for now, the trend on mobile devices is away from a browser-, and even a Web-centric, model.
32 Oct. 18, 2010
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Near term, all sides will co-exist. We’ll see some examples of fully Webbased operating systems like Google’s Chrome OS, but for the most part, businesses will rely on a mix of Web and desktop applications. In many cases, the lines will blur, with desktop applications that often access the Web and browser-based applications that can tie more directly to system-based data and resources. Finally, security is a major concern. And, as is typical with new technologies, it’s not usually the first thing people are talking about. The reach of many of these new technologies goes well beyond that of conventional Web applications—as if that amount of reach wasn’t dangerous enough. With older Web apps, developers and users had to be concerned about where an application touched sensitive data on the Web and if the underlying platform (browser, runtime, operating system) was susceptible to bugs or attacks through bad code. But new technologies like HTML 5 and the latest RIAs go beyond this. They can actually reach right into a user’s system and store and access data. So far, most of the players seem to be going in the right direction in terms of making sure these technologies stay sandboxed so they can’t affect other areas, but everyone will need to stay vigilant. Still, there’s a lot to be excited about for the future of Web applications—whole new areas of opportunity and growth could open up. In conjunction with the emergence of underlying technologies such as the semantic Web, next-generation Web applications will be able to sift through data and information as if the entire Web were a structured database. And innovative developers will be able to create new types of applications that combine the best features of desktop and Web. Given the ability for many of these technologies to work equally well on mobile devices, applications could break IN THIS ISSUE the boundaries that have traditionally left products and HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 services stuck in device prisons and enable them to serve First Horizon’s CIO p. 6 clients and customers no matter where they are. Maybe Project Management p. 14 it won’t be a Web operating system. But it may end up Three Ways To Staff p. 34 being something even better. Table Of Contents p. 2
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practicalAnalysis ART WITTMANN
Three Approaches To IT Staffing
Bottom line: There is no one right answer, so IT leaders should enter into some healthy dialogue with business partners
34 Oct. 18, 2010
This issue’s dive into project management got me thinking about the unique needs of certain departments and how to staff for those needs. I’m not talking about desktop support, where it’s fairly common to allocate IT end-user support staff on a departmentby-department basis. I’m thinking instead about groups and departments with needs that are significantly different from those of others in the organization. Some common examples are R&D and engineering teams and even specialized product teams. On a larger scale, companies often debate just how much of IT to centralize when the company consists of major divisions developed through acquisitions. When economies of scale are discussed as acquisition benefits, IT consolidation is often one of the targets. It’s also much easier to claim that you’ll consolidate the IT teams than it is to do it. On large scales, and particularly when it’s a true merger of similarly sized companies, fully combining IT operations is a multiyear process—the sort of thing that has consultants drooling on their pinstriped suits and paisley ties with the wide knots. But what about those unique needs of smaller groups, sometimes startup efforts within a company? Basically, IT has three options: 1. Let the group do whatever it wants—run its own IT resources as it sees fit, including hiring the people who support its unique needs. This approach has the benefit of not disturbing IT’s status quo, and if the mission of the group is truly cross-
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ways with the usual IT operations, it might make sense. In particular, if the group is savvy about its needs, letting it manage its own IT staff may cause the least friction. 2. Learn the needs of the group, and staff from within the central IT organization to meet them. The advantage of this approach is that IT employs the team, and so even if what those people do is different from everything else IT does, you can at least make them aware of policies and procedures, and when appropriate use existing IT resources rather than create new ones. One good example is backup and archiving, which rarely needs to be done in unique ways. 3. Use a hybrid approach, where central IT works with the department, jointly hiring and managing the staff. As much of a Kumbaya moment as this would seem to be, it’s never easy to serve two masters, and making this arrangement work can have just as many pitfalls as any other approach. On the upside, IT has a chance to help the group not duplicate functions that aren’t truly unique to its mission, while the group can get the expertise it needs to serve its mission. The bottom line here is that there is no “right” answer. Any of these approaches may be right, and without some healthy dialog with business partners, IT leaders shouldn’t put themselves in a position of dictating what easily could be the wrong answer. This discussion needs to be an honest one with respect to the group’s ability to manage its own computing systems, and IT needs to realize that business needs will probably trump its own procedures in these unique instances. Conversely, if someone walks into the room and thinks he knows the right solution before hearing the problem, well, at least you know who you’re dealing with. IN THIS ISSUE Art Wittmann is director of InformationWeek Analytics, a portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports. You can write to him at awittmann@techweb.com. More than 100 major reports will be released this year. Sign up or upgrade your membership at analytics.informationweek.com/join.
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HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 EMC Enters Database Fray p. 8 Windows Phone 7 p. 10 The Web Is The OS p. 28 Table Of Contents p. 2
Oct. 18, 2010 35
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Dave Bent Senior VP and CIO United Stationers
Jeffrey Neville Former CIO Eastern Mountain Sports
Robert Carter Executive VP and CIO FedEx
Denis O’Leary Former Executive VP Chase.comn
Michael Cuddy VP and CIO Toromont Industries
Mykolas Rambus CEO Wealth-X
Laurie Douglas Senior CIO Publix Super Markets
M.R. Rangaswami Founder Sand Hill Group
Dan Drawbaugh CIO University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Manjit Singh CIO Las Vegas Sands
Kent Kushar VP and CIO E.&J. Gallo Winery
David Smoley CIO Flextronics
Carolyn Lawson Director, E-Services California Office of the CIO
Ralph J. Szygenda Former Group VP and CIO General Motors
Jason Maynard Managing Director Wells Fargo Securities
Peter Whatnell CIO Sunoco
Randall Mott Sr. Executive VP and CIO Hewlett-Packard
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IN THIS ISSUE HP And SAP: Train Wreck? p. 4 First Horizon’s CIO p. 6 Project Management p. 14 Three Ways To Staff p. 34 Table Of Contents p. 2
38 Oct. 18, 2009
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