GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE FOR THEwww.i-cio.com
CIO
I
SPECIAL REPORT
Dealing with “Big Data”:
The challenge of turning vast
volumes into business value
This Way Up: The starred
career of Jet Propulsion Lab’s
CIO Jim Rinaldi
Debate: Has cloud come
close to living up to the hype?
Strategic Focus: Why CIOs need
to be forceful advocates of CSR
ISSUE EIGHT
“We needto
ignite an
energy tech
revolution”
The radical agenda of eco-maverick Bjørn Lomborg
I
Contents
42
35
12
50
45
07
22
38
STRATEGIC FOCUS
Beware the politically motivated
cyber attack. Plus: The
transformational role of cloud
computing, book reviews, and
the latest global CIO moves.
Global warming
reality check
This Way Up
Corporate social
responsibility
How many CIOs can say their
work supports the “robotic
exploration of the solar system”?
Jim Rinaldi of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory can.
The Quarter
12
SPECIAL REPORT
The rise of
“Big Data”
l Analysis: As volumes
grow exponentially, how are
organizations ensuring they get
maximum value from their data?
l Case Study: Why access to
new data resources is increasing
customer satisfaction at Volvo.
l Boardroom View: Putting
data at the core of the business.
l Data Feed: Prepare for the
yottabyte: the big numbers
behind Big Data.
l Barometer: Four IT leaders
on confronting the data
challenge. Plus: the results of
our exclusive CIO poll.
INTERVIEW
Renowned author, business
school professor and think-tank
founder Bjørn Lomborg sets
out an alternative plan for
tackling climate change.
27
Innovation
Establishing trust in public
clouds; Mark Zuckerberg’s
enterprise vision; and should
you give everyone an iPad?
35
Legal I
Ensuring location-aware
apps don’t land you with a
breach-of-privacy lawsuit.
36
Top of my Agenda
The CIO of drinks giant Diageo on
how mobile apps are creating a
huge splash across the business.
The business case for aligning
CSR with corporate strategy is
clear — and IT has a critical role to
play in ensuring organizations win
trust by remaining transparent
and fully accountable.
Plus: Why green IT still has a
long way to go.
42
STRATEGIC FOCUS
No place to hide
Don Tapscott, one of the
world’s leading thinkers on the
impact of social technologies,
argues that “doing well by doing
bad” is no longer an option in
this age of Web 2.0-driven
corporate transparency.
48
Interface
The cloud: hype or reality?
Two outspoken IT leaders go
head-to-head on whether the
technology is delivering on its
early promise.
50
Active High
Edward Marx, CIO of Texas
Health Resources, believes in
walking the walk. When his team
figured they had a “mountain to
climb” at work, he set out to
tackle that challenge for real…
I
GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE FOR THE CIO
Editor’s letter
Welcome
to the latest edition of I: Global Intelligence for the CIO, the exclusive
publication for group CIOs, brought to you by Fujitsu.
As every global CIO knows, the role has grown dramatically in scope
over the past decade. CIOs are contributing to the organization’s activities
in areas far beyond traditional IT; they have become pivotal in initiatives
that stretch across and beyond organizational boundaries. And this issue
of I tries to capture some of the atmosphere surrounding those wider contributions.
Our Cover Story interview with self-styled “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg
is a case in point. It’s an article designed to provoke debate about alternative responses
to global warming that look beyond a sole focus on CO2 reductions. In Lomborg’s view,
technology needs to take centre stage, and many readers — even if they object to his thesis
— will find Lomborg’s business case grounded in familiar arguments about cost-benefit
analysis and benefits realization.
Related to that green response, our Strategic Focus on corporate social responsibility
(CSR) examines how, in an era of Web 2.0-inspired transparency, many organizations have
come to see that behaving with genuine social commitment can be good for business. The
call is for a strategic approach to CSR, where the CIO plays a big role in ensuring that the
company “does well by doing good.”
A more traditional — though no less challenging — call to action for CIOs is evident in
our Special Report on “Big Data.” The wider-ranging input from CIOs and business leaders
shows how they are striving — sometimes struggling — to maximize the value of the
terabytes, and increasingly petabytes, of data that flow through their organizations from
transaction systems, tags, sensors, social networks and an ever-expanding set of internal
and external sources.
What is very clear throughout, is that for I readers all of those challenges are truly
international in nature. And that was a perspective recognized late last year when the
magazine was honoured as Best International Publication for 2010 at the International
Customer Publishing Awards.
As that hopefully acknowledges, we constantly aim to reflect the broadening scope of the
CIO’s role, both in this publication and at www.i-cio.com, where you’ll find lots of related
content, including videos, events and archives. As several CIOs highlight in this issue: any
notion that this is only a technology job is a thing of the past.
Editor
kenny.maciver@redwoodgroup.net
International Customer Publishing Awards 2010
Best International Publication
Fujitsu I Publication is published on behalf of Fujitsu by Redwood, 7 St Martin’s Place, London, WC2N 4HA. Tel +44 (0)20 7747 0700, Fax +44 (0)20 7747 0701.
Copyright Redwood Publishing Ltd 2011. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited without prior permission of the editor.
Email: fujitsu.contactus@redwoodgroup.net. Fujitsu and Redwood Publishing Ltd accept no responsibility for the views expressed by contributors to the publication.
Fujitsu I Publication cannot take responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or illustrations, or for errors in articles or advertisements in the publication.
Editor: Kenny MacIver. Deputy editor: James Lawrence. Art director: Finnie Finn. Account director: Sharon May. Editorial director: Sara Cremer. Creative director: Paul Kurzeja
04 issue eight I
Don Tapscott
Author of Wikinomics & chairman
of think tank nGenera Insight
Rich Strader
CIO,
Volvo Car Corporation
Mike Schroepfer
VP of engineering,
Facebook
“My job is all about preparing
for the future,” says Jim Rinaldi,
who, arguably, has one of the
world’s most thrilling CIO roles.
His mission is to support “the
robotic exploration of the solar
system,” and among the endusers supported by his team
are the engineers responsible
for two space rovers on the
surface of Mars. Futuristic
thinking is evident, too, in
Rinaldi’s use of cloud computing
to back the mission.
He displays a confidence
born of 25 years’ experience
with information systems in
government and industry. He
was previously CIO at the US
Food and Drug Administration.
Before that, he was chief of
IT services at the US Internal
Revenue Service and,
earlier still, he spent 16 years
at Marriott, where he was
responsible for the design and
operation of the hotel chain’s
entire IT infrastructure.
For more than 20 years, Don
Tapscott has been analyzing —
and successfully predicting —
the impact of technology on
business and society. He is
the author or co-author of 13
business books, among them
the highly influential Wikinomics
and Grown Up Digital. His latest,
Macrowikinomics, sets out a
compelling blueprint for how
the world’s many pressing
problems can be solved by the
intelligent application of Web 2.0
technologies. It was described
by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google,
as “pointing the way forward
for all of us.”
As an insightful addendum
to this issue’s Strategic Focus,
which tackles ICT’s role in
corporate responsibility, he
argues that, due to unavoidable
transparency created by social
technologies, organizations
have no choice but to act with
maximum integrity at all times.
There are few people in the
world who understand better
than Rich Strader how ICT is
transforming vehicles. When
I interviewed him for this
issue’s Case Study, he was on
temporary assignment from
Ford (Volvo’s parent company
until mid-2010), and brimming
with enthusiasm about how
“the whole car is becoming a
sophisticated IT environment.”
The data this generates, he
believes, can go a long way to
improving customers’
experience — and safety.
In his previous role at Ford,
he was manager of in-vehicle
systems. Among his many
responsibilities was the
Detroit manufacturer’s
groundbreaking Sync system,
which allows users to control
a wide range of in-car functions,
such as the media player and
phone, using voice commands
and a touch screen. His
inspiration? Apple’s iPhone.
Having responsibility for the
world’s biggest application —
with nigh on 600 million regular,
highly demanding users — is a
huge challenge, but not one that
daunts Mike Schroepfer. Right
from his first job, writing
software for the special effects
team on Star Wars: Episode 1,
he has always loved the buzz
of creating software that is used
and appreciated by millions
of people.
Prior to joining Facebook in
2008, he spent three years as
VP of engineering at Mozilla,
where he led the open product
development process behind
the web browser Firefox. Before
that, he was a distinguished
engineer and divisional CTO at
Sun Microsystems, which had
acquired his start-up, CenterRun,
a developer of application
provisioning software.
In this issue, he explains
how Facebook manages to
handle 30 billion pieces of new
content, in real time, every day.
s
Jim Rinaldi
CIO,
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
p45 This Way Up
p42 Strategic Focus
s
s
Illustrations: Masao Yamazaki
Contributors
p16 Case Study
s
p20 Barometer
I issue eight 05
I
JOSH BERNOFF In an exclusive interview, the co-author of
Groundswell and Empowered discusses the latest business
challenges and opportunities presented by social media.
MASS MARKET MOBILITY Our Special Report examines
how leading organizations are responding to the gamechanging opportunities of the mobile apps revolution.
fOr
CIOs
Only
Go to www.i-cio.com for more
insight and analysis on the issues
currently topping the CIO agenda,
plus our comprehensive archive
of articles from this publication.
You can also register for the
Members’ Area — reserved
exclusively for the world’s leading
CIOs — and gain access to
insider information, including
our quarterly Barometer poll,
special reports, video and
presentation-ready data.
You can also follow us on
Twitter at: @GlobalCIO
CIO APPOINTMENTS A regular monthly round-up of all the
major movers and shakers from around the world.
reviews. events. researcH. PeoPle.
Quarter
The
reSearch
Threat level: Severe
It’s no longer only government agencies who
need to be alert to politically motivated attacks…
State-sponsored cyber attacks and cyber terrorism were, until the second half of last year, thought by most
commentators to be purely the concern of national governments, while CIOs in the private sector needed only to
focus their security concerns on threats from criminal gangs and independent hackers. But that view is now changing rapidly.
Recent events such as the attack on the Iranian nuclear program by the Stuxnet worm (the first malware to specifically target
control systems used in power stations and other large-scale installations) have made it clear that critical infrastructure is now a
prime target. Meanwhile, attacks on financial services companies — and others — who severed links with the WikiLeaks website,
by groups of self-organized protesters creating “voluntary botnets,” show the speed and ferocity this kind of action can take.
CIOs in a wide range of sectors, such as utilities, logistics, finance and healthcare, are now facing up to the prospect that their IT
estates can quickly become targets. In a recent survey by technology security specialists Symantec, it emerged that 53% of
enterprise IT managers worldwide suspected or were “pretty sure” that they had experienced an attack waged with a political
goal in mind. These attacks included attempts to steal electronic information, shut down networks and manipulate physical
equipment by taking control of networks. Chillingly, three out of five attacks were considered to be effective.
The new face of warfare
With Gartner forecasting that, by 2015, “a G20 nation’s critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage”
(although the analyst firm declines to predict which country is the most likely victim) governments are responding by stepping up
their cyber security measures and augmenting cooperation with the private sector. The UK government, in its National Security
Strategy, published in October, declared “hostile attacks upon UK cyberspace by other states” to be one of the
main threats the nation faces. In November, the European Union conducted a major exercise to test its readiness
to defend against a full-scale cyber attack. At the same time, the US Department of Defense made
cyber security a top priority, establishing Cyber Command, a unit dedicated to digital warfare.
Meanwhile, in full realization of how critical infrastructure is now at risk, US government
agencies are planning to cooperate with the financial services industry to
“identify and fight cyber security vulnerabilities” and “develop more efficient
and effective cyber security processes that can be used in the
financial services sector as well as by other organizations.”
The cyber security stakes have never been higher.
I issue eight 07
VISIT 2010: fujITSu forum europe
Cloud dynamics
The transformational role of cloud computing was the
dominant theme at Fujitsu’s major European conference.
Organizations are looking for radical
new ways to consume information
technology, and the centerpiece of that
— cloud computing — will be top of their
agendas for most of the next decade.
That was the unifying message from
keynote speakers at VISIT 2010, Fujitsu
Forum Europe in late November.
Richard Christou, who heads the ICT
giant’s business globally (outside of
Japan), outlined how the core advantage
of cloud is versatility. “It’s a dynamic
infrastructure that flexes and changes
as the requirements of the information
you’re processing change. The promise
is that we can do new things that have
never been done before.”
One of those is Fujitsu’s blueprint for
a human-centric intelligent society.
This aims to address many of the most
pressing problems in society by gathering
and processing vast amounts of data
drawn from ubiquitous, connected
sensors. Sectors such as farming, traffic
management and healthcare are
especially suitable for such applications.
However, only companies with broad
international reach and scale will be able
to deliver cloud services to larger
customers, argued Christou. “We need
data centers, networks and physical
infrastructure spanning the globe to
deliver this properly. We need experts
in applications, consulting, and so on in
08 issue eight I
local regions. And we also need deep
technological knowledge.”
Also taking the stage at the Munich
event, Rolf Schwirz, recently appointed
CEO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions,
explained the importance he places on
understanding what customers expect
from cloud computing. His first priority
after taking on his new role was to seek
input from customers on their strategic
goals. “When I talked to them, I found they
are looking for new ways to consume IT,”
he said. Top requirements, he stated, are
pay-per-use pricing, scalability, 24/7
reliability, quality and guaranteed data
protection. He explained how Fujitsu has
invested heavily in data centers around
the world, and has defined a global cloud
standard to connect these to each other
in order to meet scalability demands.
Dr. Joseph Reger, CTO of Fujitsu
Technology Solutions, who chaired a panel
discussion at the event, predicted that the
next decade will be the “years of cloud
computing.” However, he acknowledged
the fact that the excitement around cloud
— and the huge business opportunities it
can create — will ultimately stifle the voice
of the skeptics. “Data privacy is a big issue
for most people,” he said, pointing to the
results of a recent Fujitsu global survey of
people’s attitudes towards the cloud. “And
Fujitsu is taking this very seriously. But
even though a lot of debates are raging,
“there is
no doubt
anymore
that cloud
computing
will playan
important
part in
our lives.”
there is no doubt anymore that cloud
computing will play an important part
in our lives.”
In the same discussion, Sean Doherty,
CTO Enterprise Security Group at
software security specialist Symantec,
also highlighted the data protection issue.
“A top concern is: How can I trust that my
data in the cloud is safe?” he said. “We’ve
got to establish a continuous chain of
trust, from the user all the way back to
their data and the processors that are
working on that data.” He argued that the
world has yet to see a large public cloud
provider suffer a catastrophic event like
going bust or having a disaster at a major
data center; but when this does happen,
and some customers come out of it well
because they have planned contingencies,
trust will grow.
He also suggested technologies that
create new kinds of business models will
be required. “You could imagine, within the
next decade, storage and compute being
bought in real time by brokerage services
so that your data center’s overflow will go
out into the public cloud,” he said.
On the same panel, David Smith, CIO
and CTO at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, called
for technology and services that could
provide an end-to-end view of business
processes in the cloud. “I’d like to have
something that allows me to manage [all
of that], with all of the IT that is part of it
Photographs: © www.tmc-gmbh.de
reVIewS. eVenTS. reSearcH. people.
— whether that’s public cloud, private
cloud, or whatever. I want to see the
end-to-end process.”
Smith stressed there was no need for
a Big Bang approach to cloud computing.
In his opinion, it makes sense to start with
steps such as infrastructure-as-a-service
(IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS),
before putting the largest parts of your IT
into the cloud. “And you’ll need to be open
and pragmatic around questions like, ‘If
this doesn’t work, what do I do next? How
can I back out?’ A level of flexibility will
always be required,” he added.
Responding to the public-versusprivate cloud debate raised by his fellow
panel members, Fujitsu’s global CTO
Marc Silvester stated his belief that
the future will consist of a plethora of
interlinked clouds. “I think we’re going
to see clouds that are brand-led, clouds
that are industry-specific, and clouds
that are centralized around a community
like healthcare or government,” he said.
“It’s our job as an industry to provide the
technology to enable them all to join up,
and for the regulatory considerations to
be managed and traced.”
l More on cloud computing and Fujitsu’s
survey on data privacy in the cloud:
Innovation, page 29.
l More on “Big Data” and human-centric
computing: Special Report, page 12.
Key speakers at Munich’s VISIT
2010. Clockwise from top left:
Richard Christou, Corporate Senior
Executive Vice President and President,
Global Business Group, Fujitsu:
“The promise is, we can do new things
that have never been done before.”
Dr. Joseph Reger, CTO, Fujitsu
Technology Solutions: “Data privacy
is a big issue, and Fujitsu is taking this
very seriously.”
Rolf Schwirz, CEO, Fujitsu Technology
Solutions: “Customers are looking for
new ways to consume IT.”
Marc Silvester, Fujitsu’s global CTO:
“We’re going to see clouds that
are brand-led, clouds that are
industry-specific, clouds that are
centralized around a community.”
Below left: the CTO panel onstage
in the main auditorium.
f uj I TSu fo ru m
To kyo 20 1 1
l Mark your calendar now for Fujitsu’s
biggest global event of the year, to be
held at Tokyo International Forum on
May 18-20, and open to all Fujitsu
customers. The main theme will be
the “human-centric intelligent society”
(see left for more on this).
m o r e c oV e r ag e o f V I S I T 2 0 1 0
ts.fujitsu.com/visit
more cIo eVenTS
www.i-cio.com/events
I issue eight 09
books
essential reading
Turning great ideas into great results... and finding the CIO’s “soft” center.
THE OTHER SIDE
OF INNOVATION
Solving the execution challenge
Vijay Govindarajan
& Chris Trimble
The easiest aspect of innovation, believe the authors, is
finding the ideas; the really tough part lies in the execution
of the ideas that get the go-ahead. Yet, they argue, far too
many organizations place far too much emphasis on the
former and not nearly enough on the latter. And when they
do move into execution mode, they fail to understand the
most effective means of managing the innovation process.
This book aims to redress the balance. Written by two
innovation heavyweights (Govindarajan is a professor of
international business at the Tuck School of Business as
well as GE’s first ever “professor-in-residence” and chief
innovation consultant; Trimble is an adjunct professor at
Tuck), it focuses entirely on the execution challenge. And
the basic premise is simple: Successful organizations are
designed for efficiency and not innovation. To avoid
destructive conflict with the main business functions,
most innovation initiatives therefore have to be treated
very differently. In particular, they should be run as a
“disciplined experiment.” That means, most importantly,
not measuring a project’s success in regular P&L terms,
but rather as a continuous learning process. The more
rigorous this process, and the faster the learning, the more
successful the innovation is likely to be.
Govindarajan and Trimble distill vast amounts of
complex information on the subject — they claim to have
“the most extensive library of innovation case studies in
the world” — into some beautifully simple theories. The
challenge comes, as they say, in executing them.
10 issue eight I
THE CIO EDGE
7 leadership skills you
need to drive results
Graham Waller, George
Hallenbeck & Karen Rubenstrunk
What makes a superior CIO? And why are so few CIOs
held in high regard by their fellow-CXOs?
Those are the questions that have obsessed the authors
of The CIO Edge for years. As senior figures in executive
recruitment firm Korn/Ferry and at analyst group Gartner,
they certainly have enough collective experience — not to
mention CIO performance histories — to guide them
towards some answers. And to confirm their hypotheses
they also interviewed a wide range of high achievers,
including CIOs at Ford, Fedex, Axa, P&G and more.
What they found was that in order to deliver great
results, CIOs need to be expert managers of IT processes,
but they also have to be consummate diplomats. In most
instances that means developing the kind of “soft skills”
that allow them to lead, communicate and collaborate
effectively and so build working relationship with everyone
involved in projects, programs and business initiatives, from
sponsors and vendors to colleagues organization-wide.
In each case that the authors track, the CIOs who had a
refined set of soft skills were the real stars: “Focusing on
leadership and people skills — things many CIOs minimize
in their quest to keep up with [the] day-to -day of managing
IT — is the biggest determinate of success or failure.”
That won’t be news to most CIOs. What will be, though, is
a clear outline of those winning soft skills and guidance on
how to cultivate them. As P&G’s CIO, Filippo Passerini, says:
“If your mission is to make a real difference as CIO… IT
becomes more of a people business than a technology one.”
“Focusing
on leadership
and people
skills is
the biggest
determinate
of CIO success
or failure.”
reviews. events. researcH. PeoPle.
aPPointments
Who’s moving where. . .
New roles and opportunities for CIOs around the globe.
Movers and shakers
“Over 90% of CIOs
will raise or sustain
existing IT salary
levels in 2011.”
(US Society for Information
Management survey)
Photos: Pixelate. Illustrations: Shutterstock
Public sector
CIO shuffle
l Australia’s Department of Health
has named Paul Madden as its first CIO.
l The US Department of the Navy has
appointed Terry Halvorsen as its new
CIO, taking over from Robert Carey, who
has now become Department of
Defense deputy CIO. Halvorsen will also
serve as the DoD’s cyber/IT workforce
community leader, critical infrastructure
assurance advisor, and senior military
component official for privacy.
l Following the departure of UK
Government CIO John Suffolk, Ian
Watmore, COO of the Cabinet Office’s
Efficiency and Reform Group, will chair
the CIO Council “until further notice.”
l The US Energy Department has
made Mike Locatis its new CIO.
F o r m o r e G l o ba l
cio aPPointments:
www.i-cio.com/blog
➤ AUSTRALIA
Former Qantas CIO
Jamila Gordon has
become CIO at mining
and construction giant
Leighton Holdings •
Telco Telstra has
appointed former
Standard Chartered
Bank technology
executive Patrick
Eltridge as CIO.
➤ BELGIUM
CIO Jacques Godet has
been promoted to chief of
operations and IT at bank
BNP Paribas Fortis •
The former head of
service operations at
telco Vodafone UK, Peter
Billiau, has become CIO at
the Dexia banking group.
➤ FRANCE
Insurance group Aviva
has appointed François
Xavier Quilici chief IT
officer for Aviva France
and core IT applications
director for Aviva Europe
• Gil Guibert has been
promoted to CIO at
supermarket group Auchan.
➤ GERMANY
International retailer
Metro Group has made
Silvester Macho CIO.
➤ HOLLAND
Dick Dijkstra is now CIO
at retail chain C1000.
➤ INDIA
Air India has made
Kamaljit Rattan its CIO.
➤ SWEDEN
Klas Bendrik, previously
CIO at doors maker Assa
Abloy, has taken on the
top IT role at the Volvo
Car Corporation. He
replaces Rich Strader,
who was on temporary
assignment from Ford.
➤ SWITZERLAND
Stein Tumert is now VP
and CIO at Gategroup
airline services.
➤ UK
AXA Equitable Life
Insurance has made
Michael Healy its new
global CIO; Kevin
Murray, the group’s
former CIO, is now CIO
and COO at AXA UK •
Mark Dearnley is the
new CIO at telco
Vodafone UK • Airline
EasyJet has appointed
Trevor Didcock as CIO •
Ex-Wachovia Bank IT
boss Ian Alderton is
now CIO at Royal Bank
of Scotland.
➤ US
American Express has
named Toby Redshaw,
former global CIO for
UK-based insurance
company Aviva, its new
EVP and CIO • Burger King
has made Heitor Goncalves
EVP and chief information
and performance officer •
The Securities and
Exchange Commission
has appointed Thomas
Bayer as CIO • Greg
Kalinsky is now SVP and
CIO at insurance company
GEICO • JP Rangaswami,
former chief scientist at
UK telco BT, has moved
to cloud software giant
Salesforce.com, where
he has the same job title.
I issue eight 11
S p E c I A l
R E p O R T
THE RISE
OF
“BIG DATA”
Data volumes are about to go through an unprecedented growth
spurt. And that will put even more pressure on CIOs to ensure they
can maximize the business value of that burgeoning resource.
Words: Jessica Twentyman Illustration: Leandro Castelao
12 issue eight I
In this 10-page report:
12 Analysis: The size of the Big Data challenge and how organizations are facing up to it
16 Case Study: Leveraging data to increase customer satisfaction at carmaker Volvo
17 Boardroom View: How one police chief puts data at the core of “the business”
18 Data Feed: From terabytes to yottabytes: the big numbers behind Big Data
20 Barometer: IT leaders on how they are maximizing the value of their data
Brace yourself: the data downpour you may have learned to live with is about to turn into a torrent. That
storm warning is issued by analysts at market research company IDC who, earlier this year, set out on
their annual mission to measure the size of the “digital universe,” the amount of digital information
created and replicated in the world. Their findings point to data volumes almost incomprehensible
in size: in 2009, the digital universe grew 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes. “A petabyte is a million
gigabytes,” write IDC analysts John Gantz and David Reinsel. In case that’s not helpful in coming to grips
with the concept at hand, they suggest that readers “picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to
the moon and back.” (For more on this, see Data Feed, page 18.)
This year, the digital universe will grow almost as fast, to reach 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes
— “a word we haven’t had to use until now,” Gantz and Reinsel observe. But let’s make that relative: by
2020, the digital universe will be 44 times bigger than it was in 2009. Of course, only a small fraction of
that data will ever fall under the purview of an individual CIO — but many are already struggling to keep
up with their company’s share of the structured and unstructured universe.
It’s long been a problem, but it’s only getting worse. In June 1996, The Data Warehousing Institute
(TDWI) set up a “Terabyte Club” for the handful of businesses worldwide with data warehouses of at
least that size. Fourteen years later, that sounds ridiculously quaint. Today, a number of vendors
— among them, EMC and Teradata — run Petabyte Clubs, with members including telco AT&T and
online auction site eBay. According to a recent blog posting by an EMC CTO, Chuck Hollis, over 1,000
organizations worldwide belong to the EMC Petabyte Club. Can an Exabyte Club be far behind?
And this is just the beginning…
Storing data is, of course, only the start of the challenge: in the pursuit of competitive advantage,
cost-cutting, operational efficiency, customer acquisition and retention and any number of other
business goals, organizations are mining ever larger repositories to
uncover trends, while increasingly using live data to deliver actionable
information in near-real time. Several analysts have dubbed these huge
data sets, together with the associated tools, platforms and analytics
needed to extract meaningful information from them, “Big Data.”
But Big Data isn’t just “big,” it’s also different, according to Chris Eason,
technical architect at UK retail giant the John Lewis Partnership, where
demand for storage is already growing at an “unrelenting” 60% a year.
“In the past, the data that the business needed to perform analysis was
far more structured — sales data, point-of-sale data, customer data,” he
says. “Now, we’re looking at mixing and matching it with new kinds of
data, incorporating the information we could collect from social media,
blog chatter and so on, which simply doesn’t follow the same patterns.”
Like others in business intelligence, Eason also expects to see far
more data generated by intelligent devices, from sensors on shopping
carts to geo-location applications on customers’ mobile phones.
That points to the greatest emerging drivers of Big Data: radio
frequency identification (RFID) readers; temperature, pressure and
other sensors; GPS devices; telemetric units in vehicles; and sensors
embedded in smartphones. These, and many other networked devices,
are starting to play a significant part in the ongoing data explosion.
As the cost of these technologies falls, and organizations continue to
invest in smart networks, the ability to assimilate data about the physical
location and current state of an object or person — whether an item on a
container ship or an elderly person living alone — creates vast potential
for solving problems in areas where IT has not been previously applied.
This is what companies such as Fujitsu are calling a “human-centric
intelligent society.” “There is an enormous amount of information in the
real world that is not fully utilized by IT today,” says Dr. Kazuo Murano,
chairman of Fujitsu Laboratories, the R&D arm of the global technology
company. “The human-centric approach will open up a new realm of
possibilities in areas such as agriculture, healthcare and education.”
The growing network of IP-based machine to IP-based machine
communications is frequently referred to as “the Internet of Things.”
By the end of 2009, according to analysts at research company Berg
Insight, machine-to-machine (M2M) accounted for 1.4% of all mobile
network communications worldwide, although the share was higher
in territories such as the US (4.3% of all mobile connections) and the
European Union (2.4%). By 2014, Berg Insight’s analysts reckon, the
worldwide percentage will almost treble.
In fact, say IDC analysts Gantz and Reinsel, “the number of ‘things’ to
be managed is growing twice as fast as the total number of gigabytes.
Good luck, all you CIOs out there.”
The early evidence of how CIOs are responding to that challenge,
14 issue eight I
in this
feature
Chris Eason,
technical architect,
John Lewis
Partnership
John Gantz,
analyst, IDC
Chuck Hollis, VP,
global marketing
CTO, EMC
Bryan Kinsella,
CIO, Rentokil Initial
Michelle Michelini,
head of data mining,
GM OnStar
Dr. Kazuo Murano,
Chairman, Fujitsu
Laboratories
David Reinsel,
analyst, IDC
Philip Russom,
analyst, The Data
Warehousing
Institute
David Smith, CIO,
Fujitsu UK & Ireland
Hal Varian, chief
economist, Google
however, is already there. At Rentokil Initial
— a global company whose business
services range from pest control and
package delivery to the maintenance of the
flowers and plants in business receptions —
CIO Bryan Kinsella sees little limitation on the
business potential of exploiting such data.
“By creating a mash-up of Google Maps with
our core databases, we can already map and
see the position of all of our vehicles; and we
can get the best value out of any journey by
optimizing routes and schedules,” he says.
That has huge customer benefits: “If
you’re waiting for a service, it’s important to
you to have a micro-view of when it will be
delivered.” That includes linking the schedule
and mapping to an automatic calling service,
so the customer can be advised of the actual
service delivery time. “There are customer
service benefits, cost benefits, carbon
reduction benefits, staff morale benefits.
Extracting and adding value to that data is
win-win-win,” says Kinsella.
Objects in motion
Collecting and analyzing data from physical
objects in motion is also a day-to-day reality
— and an even more sophisticated one —
at OnStar, the subsidiary of General Motors
that provides in-vehicle safety and security
services in automobiles equipped with its
on-board computers. These systems collect
a wide range of data about an individual car,
from its physical location to diagnostics
relating to tire pressure and oil levels, using
built-in sensors. All that data ends up at
OnStar’s Detroit headquarters, where it’s
supplemented by internal data feeds from
GM factories — including demographic
information about OnStar’s almost 6 million
North American subscribers, and call center
data relating to service transactions.
It’s a huge undertaking, says Michelle
Michelini, who manages data mining at the
s p e c Ii a l
company. “I’d imagine we have one of the largest data repositories in the
world, but the richness of that environment is vital to providing
customers with the levels of service they expect,” she explains.
She adds that a major effort in data partnership and integration is also
needed. In recent years, OnStar has been sharing data about road traffic
accidents, gathered by sensors in OnStar-equipped cars, with US
government health and safety agency the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC). Gathered over the long term, and combined with
external data about weather and traffic conditions, it establishes the
foundation for deep analysis into the context in which accidents occur.
Such programs also rely on OnStar having an array of business
intelligence tools and expertise at its disposal. “About 60% of our activity
is around routine reporting; 20% around ad-hoc reports provided by a
‘helpdesk’ of data analysts; and 20% around hardcore, ‘Black-Belt’ types
of deep analysis, performed by professional statisticians,” says Michelini.
“We work really hard to organize data in a way that allows us to get
answers, and we don’t keep data for data’s sake,” she adds. “We’re
constantly working with the wider business to decide what data we
need, how it will be used and what tools we need to interrogate it.”
Re-tooling for Big Data
By contrast, most organizations are ill-prepared to deal with the coming
data deluge, according to management consultancy McKinsey & Co.
“Using experimentation and Big Data as essential components of
management decision-making requires new capabilities, as well as
organizational and cultural change,” says the firm.
This sense that CIOs need to hone their business intelligence
environments is shared by David Smith, CIO of Fujitsu in the UK and
Ireland. “Fully leveraging the value from data resources — at scale — will
only happen if great data management disciplines, powerful analytic tools
and flexible presentation layers are already in place,” he says. “And I doubt
that many CIOs would be able to claim perfection in this area today.”
As that underscores, it’s not just a technical issue: more commonly,
firms don’t have the right talent and processes to design “data
experiments” (as McKinsey puts it) and extract business value from
Big Data. That requires changes in the way many executives now make
decisions, which is too often based more on trusted instincts and
experience than experimentation and rigorous analysis, says McKinsey.
These shortcomings seem likely to spark a new round of investment
in business intelligence in coming years. For a start, traditional BI
systems may not scale to meet the new requirements — and they
certainly weren’t designed to cope with the types of data that companies
will increasingly want to analyze. A recent TDWI survey found that 75%
of companies plan to replace their current data warehouse platform
“The
number
of ‘Things’
To be
managed
is growing
Twice as
fasT as
The ToTal
number of
gigabyTes.
good luck,
all you
cios ouT
There.”
idc analysTs
John ganTz and
david reinsel
r e p o r t
within three years. “There are many reasons
for these replacements, such as migrating
off a legacy platform, modernizing the
warehouse architecture or remodeling
warehouse data structures,” says TDWI
analyst Philip Russom. But the most popular
reason, cited by 92% of respondents, is the
need to add real-time functionality to the
mix, he adds.
Another key issue is that huge torrents of
unstructured data relating to clickstreams,
web searches and online interactions, for
example, don’t lend themselves to the
tried-and-tested methods designed to
organize the contents of enterprise data
warehouses for optimum performance, such
as star schemas and dimension tables.
In order to address such problems, some
organizations are experimenting with a whole
new approach, sidestepping the traditional
data warehouse set-up and instead
embracing one based on cloud computing
concepts. This is a tactic that’s being used
at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA),
the US’s largest public power provider. The
federally owned corporation collects phasor
measurement unit (PMU) data from devices
placed in substations around the eastern US,
which sample power grid measurements
several thousand times a second. By the end
of 2010, the TVA fully expected to be holding
around 40 terabytes of PMU data. Five years’
worth of such information will grow to as
much as half a petabyte, its experts estimate.
And such experts will be much sought
after. As Hal Varian, chief economist at
Google, recently commented: “I keep saying
that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be
[the one done by] statisticians. People think
I’m joking... but the ability to take data — to
be able to understand it, to process it, to
extract value from it, to visualize it, to
communicate it — is going to be a hugely
important skill in the next decades.”
I issue eight 15
c A S E
S T U D Y
How access to vast, new data resources is driving manufacturing
excellence, customer satisfaction and vehicle safety at Volvo.
“We’re now capturing massive
amounts of data from our vehicles,”
says Volvo Car Corporation’s Rich
Strader. “And there is a compelling
opportunity to turn that resource
into something that not only helps
us build better cars, but also helps the
customer have a better experience.”
Strader, who has just completed
a 12-month stint in the CIO’s chair
at Volvo, is convinced that, in a world
where many consumers now value
smart tech as much as automotive
engineering, manufacturers need
to create vehicles that are, in
effect, highly connected, data-rich
IT environments. With hundreds
of sensors and CPUs embedded
throughout the car — from the
brakes to the central locking system
— data is now being captured for
use within the vehicle itself, and also,
increasingly, for transmission via the
cloud back to the manufacturer.
At Volvo, those huge volumes are
streamed into a centralized analysis
hub, the Volvo Data Warehouse,
alongside data from customer
relationship systems, dealership
systems, and product development
and design systems. And Volvo’s
ability to draw insight from this
multi-terabyte resource is creating
clear business advantage, says
Strader, who has now returned to
a senior IT post at Ford, where he
was formerly manager of in-vehicle
systems*. Above all, it is being used
16 issue eight I
“we can
extract
huge
amounts
of data
from a
vehicle to
see how it
responded
in an
accident.”
to optimize manufacturing processes, enhance customer
interaction and boost safety.
“By splicing that data together, we are pre-warned about
potential issues such as mechanical problems that might have
shown up later in the field,” he says. So, very early in a car’s
lifecycle, Volvo can spot patterns that may indicate a potential
flaw in a particular part — frequently before a customer is
exposed to the issue. By applying a set of well-honed lean
processes, Volvo is immediately able to resolve the problem
by adjusting its manufacturing process or going back to its
suppliers to request improvements. “Before it gets out into,
perhaps, 500,000 units, we can stop an issue when spotted in
the first 1,000 units. And that’s a much less expensive thing
to do. Plus, few — if any — customers are impacted and their
positive experience of the brand remains intact,” says Strader.
Another area where large-scale data capture and analysis is
driving improvements is in safety. At its state-of-the-art Safety
Center, the Swedish company performs detailed, forensic
examinations of Volvos that have been involved in different
kinds of accident. “We’re now able to extract huge amounts of
digital information from a vehicle and see how well it responded,”
says Strader. This enables Volvo to further enhance its marketleading safety record. “We can ask, for example, ‘Are our airbags
timed to deploy at exactly the right moment for a particular set of
circumstances?’ And we can tune that in the field: the next time a
customer is in for a service, they can get a software upgrade that
ensures the car is going to perform even better in an accident.”
Strader believes the sheer volume of data being amassed can
be the basis for improvements right across the value chain, as
long as the resources are applied to turn it into valuable knowledge.
“The information that is now at our disposal is just waiting for the
analytical work to be done on it,” he says. “The real challenge for
most companies is to find a way to fund that work, because that’s
where you’ll get the true breakthrough ideas.”
l How Volvo’s IT is enhancing its CSR initiatives: see page 38.
* Ford was Volvo Car’s parent company until August 2010, when the Swedish
manufacturer was sold to China’s Geely. Strader was on temporary assignment at
Volvo as CIO to oversee the de-merger of the two companies’ IT and related processes.
B o a r d r o o m
v
I
e w
Against a backdrop of UK public sector cuts, Surrey Police is tackling
an intriguing blend of commonplace and unique data challenges.
Illustration: Masao Yamazaki
mark rowley
is Chief Constable
of Surrey Police,
responsible for
setting the UK force’s
vision and direction.
After a broad
uniformed and
detective career, he
moved to the National
Criminal Intelligence
Service, leading the
country’s deployment
of covert techniques
to combat organized
crime and taking a key
role in the creation of
the UK’s National
Intelligence Model.
There can be few areas where the
analysis of data is more mission-critical
than policing. In dealing with crime,
identifying suspects, responding to
incidents, spotting offense trends and
any number of other issues, police
forces around the world strive to turn
vast amounts of data into actionable
information and insight.
“It’s the core of our business,” says
Mark Rowley, Chief Constable of Surrey
Police, which serves the southern
English county’s 1.1 million citizens.
“Since the mid-1990s, we’ve pursued
intelligence-led policing, where we’ve
used data in increasingly sophisticated
ways.” That has allowed Surrey to be
proactive in its approach, identifying
complex patterns of crime and then
moving to prevent incidents.
But some data issues haven’t gotten
any easier — or less costly. Among the
challenges Surrey Police faces are the
sheer volume of data being processed;
the requirement for greater data sharing
between different police forces; and the
regulatory environment governing the
way data is treated.
Quantity does not necessarily equate
to better results. “There are volume
issues that can make it hard to sift out
specific data; we are doing a decent job
of extracting the value from data, but
the cost of that is heavy,” Rowley says. “In
any investigation, there will be thousands
or millions of pieces of information that
are significant, so that sifting problem
will always be an issue. Often, it is not so
much finding a needle in a haystack as
finding the right piece of hay.”
Although, over the past two decades,
policing has been enhanced enormously
by the application of ever more powerful
IT, the main data challenge in recent
years has been one that will be familiar
to any organization — integration.
Notwithstanding the centralized
resources of the UK’s Police National
Computer and Police National Database,
says Rowley, “there is a long way to go” in terms of data integration. “As
criminality changes to become more regional, national and even global,
the interoperability of systems is a big challenge. The ability to share
data across the UK or internationally is not as great as it could be.”
That is particularly key for the Surrey force. Surrey borders Greater
London, and has a large section of Europe’s busiest motorway — the
M25 London Orbital — running through it. “That means we have
major cross-border crime issues,” says Rowley. “About half of our risk
comes from outside of the county, and that is a fairly difficult policing
challenge compared to some parts of England, where a fraction of the
policing risk comes from outside.
“We are often dealing with offenders who are less well known to us,
so data sharing [with other police forces] is essential. All forces face
that to a varying extent, but we are an extreme case.”
There are national IT programs moving that information-sharing in
the right direction — but several previous initiatives have produced
patchy results. “There is still a lot to do,” says Rowley.
Regulations over how data is handled and which data can — and
should — be made public constitute another big challenge. The
governance over police data has become much more demanding, in
Rowley’s view. Various public inquiries into serious incidents have
concluded that a broader or deeper analysis of available data might
have led to a more satisfactory outcome. As a result, police forces
face ever-higher “specs” for data management procedures — with all
the cost implications of that. At the same time, public agencies such
as Surrey Police have been willingly responding to the call to open
up much of their trends data by publishing on its web site high-level
metrics on crime and policing in the county.
But as Rowley points out, in the UK’s current financial climate,
these factors don’t always sit well with the pressure to rein in costs.
“Once you hit a financial crisis, [data costs] are something we have
to deal with differently,” he says. “We’ve learned to make better use
“All police forces fAce dAtA
shAring issues, but we Are An
extreme cAse.”
[of data] and get better value from it. And the challenge in the current
environment is also to do with making more pragmatic choices on
things like data quality: In certain areas, need it be 100% on every
piece of data?
“We are working with the private sector to try to find clever ways
to automate and streamline how we manage data to reduce the cost.
We need a step change in our underpinning expense for technology,
processing, resourcing, data [management]… We want to maintain
or improve the value we get from that, but to do so at a significantly
better cost. And we need to find a way to do this in the very high-risk
environment that is policing.”
I issue eight 17
D A T A
F E E D
The big numbers behind Big Data
a growIng challenge
l The “digital universe,” the amount of digital information created and
replicated in the world, is growing at about 50% a year; but the subset of
information that needs to be secured is growing at almost twice that rate.
l Demand for storage capacity worldwide will grow at a compound annual
growth rate of 49.8% over the years 2009-2014.
l By the year 2012, the digital universe will be five times the size it was
in 2008 when it was around 500 billion gigabytes or 500 exabytes.
l In 2010, there were 177 gigabytes of data for every person on the planet,
or 1.2 exabytes in total. However, the total amount of digital information
will balloon to 35 exabytes by 2020.
“Every day I wake up and
ask: How can I flow data
better, manage data better,
analyze data better? You
have to pay more attention
to the analytics and the data than you
ever have before. Business intelligence
is becoming a bigger and bigger driver.”
Wal-Mart Stores’ CIO Rollin Ford, whose waking
hours are focused on a transaction data warehouse
that already held 2.5 petabytes when its size was last
disclosed in 2008. (Source: The Economist/Supermarket News)
(All figures: IDC)
20
The Move To clouD
l As much as 15% of the information in the “digital universe” in 2020
could be part of a cloud service — created in the cloud, delivered to the
cloud, stored or manipulated in the cloud — predict analysts at IDC.
%
l Enterprise enthusiasm for storing data in the cloud is lagging behind
cloud adoption in other areas, according to a survey of over 1,200 IT
decision makers in businesses across Europe and North America. The
research, conducted by analyst group Forrester in early 2010, found
that only 3% of the respondent companies used cloud storage,
although 46% said they were interested in the prospect of putting
at least some of their data in the cloud.
l There are some specific applications that organizations
consider ripe for cloud data storage, according to a 2010 survey
by specialist Zetta. Backup data was cited by 38% of the 400
IT professionals questioned, followed by online archive (37%),
data warehousing (28%) and primary file storage (25%).
However, 26% said they considered none of their data
suitable for cloud.
l The barriers to cloud storage
are clear, according to
respondents to Zetta’s
poll. Areas of concern are
topped by security/
privacy (named by
47% of the survey
group), corporate policy
(31%), data integrity/
protection (24%),
reliability (23%), and
hidden/unpredictable
costs (21%).
5%
The amount of data held
in structured databases
(alphanumeric data). The rest
is semi-structured (e.g. tagged
images) and unstructured
(e.g. raw text and voice data).
of digital content is generated
by enterprises, while users create
the rest; yet enterprises are liable
for 80% of that data. (IDC)
8
petabytes
The amount of data that eBay holds
on “spinning disks” — with plans
to more than double that in 2011.
(Monash Research)
s P E C I A L
R E P O R T
667
exabytes
The estimated amount of
annual traffic flowing over
the Internet in 2013.
(Cisco)
The cosT of DaTa
l The volume of terabytes shipped is increasing at around 60% year-on-year
(measured in Q3 of 2010), while the price paid per terabyte is showing an
annual decrease of 28%. (Gartner)
l In 2009 $4 trillion was spent on hardware, software services, networks
and IT staff to manage the “digital universe.” (IDC)
l Worldwide revenue banked by vendors of external disk storage systems
was growing at 16% year-on-year during the third quarter of 2100; that
follows a market decline in 2009. (Gartner)
25%
of all data held is
unique, the remaining
75% is copied data. (IDC)
l The hottest demand for data storage products is in: Latin America,
where the market grew 43% in the third quarter; Asia/Pacific (up 22%);
Japan (up 18%); and North America (up 17%). (Gartner)
l 82% of respondents to an SAP/Forbes Insights survey agreed that bad
data leads to costly mistakes by business managers. Nearly one in five (18%)
estimated the annual cost of data quality problems was more than $20
million and over half said such issues cost them over $5 million.
Measure for Measure
Unit
Size
Kilobyte (KB)
1,000 bytes
Half a typewritten page
Megabyte (MB)
1,000KB
A short novel
Gigabyte (GB)
1,000MB
Beethoven’s 5th Symphony
Terabyte (TB)
1,000GB
All the X-rays in a large hospital
MosT acTIve users
Petabyte (PB)
1,000TB
Half the contents of all US
academic research libraries
1. Power users/analysts (61%)
2. Managers (33%)
3. Executives (25%)
4. Operations staff (24%)
5. Customers/suppliers (5%)
Exabyte (EB)
1,000PB
A fifth of all words ever spoken by man
Zettabyte (ZB)
1,000EB
As much information as there are
grains of sand on all the world’s beaches
Yottabyte (YB)
1,000ZB
As much information as there are
atoms in 7,000 human beings.
(The Data Warehouse Institute survey)
D O W N L O A D A L L T H I s D ATA AT
Equivalent
(Roy Williams, Center for Advanced Computing Research, California Institute of Technology)
www.i-cio.com/datafeed
I issue eight 19
B a R O m e T e R
Exclusive: Global IT leaders on the issues that matter
How do you maximize the value of the vast
amounts of data available to your organization?
MiKE sChroEpfEr
Vice president of engineering, Facebook
Operator of the world’s largest social network, currently with close to 600 million users
It’s hard to pick the biggest challenge [with an
application] that has gone from 100 million to nearly
600 million active users in the two-and-a-half years
since I joined. But if I had to pick one challenge in
scaling that up, it would be data. It’s really all about
data, and processing that data in real time.
People are generating about 30 billion pieces of
content every day on Facebook and sending 4 billion
messages. So the core infrastructure issue around
scaling is that it’s a global, integrated network where
everyone’s talking to everyone; it’s not a naturally
partitioned product. When I post a status update, any
of the 850 people in my newsfeed could expect to
see it on their home page within 10 seconds.
With Facebook we have quite a big offline
processing system, but it’s dwarfed by the real-time
computation. I need to process a tremendous
amount of data in order to decide what to show you.
Look at some of the most popular Facebook Fan
pages, like Starbucks — a page that has around
25 million fans. Starbucks will write a post and say
something like, “New Caramel Latte now back for
T H e
Poll of 20 CIOs and IT directors worldwide conducted
by I, December 2010
T O TA k E PA R T I N O u R N E x T P O L L , g O T O
www.i-cio.com/_cio-Barometer
20 issue eight I
“we’re doing a very fast,
real-time intersection
of very large data sets.”
V e R d I C T
Are you maximizing
the value of your data?
Cios think organizations
need to make much
more of their data.
I
the holidays.” You’ll see 60,000 people comment on
it. But if I go to the Starbucks page I’ll see maybe four
or five of those posts on the screen. By the time I hit
refresh and load that page, we determine if any one
of my 850 friends is one of the 60,000 people that
have commented on Caramel Latte, and whether
they are also one of the 25 million Fans of Starbucks.
So what you’re effectively doing is a very fast and
real-time intersection of very large data sets in order
to provide a very personalized experience at run time.
This is doing very creative computation. You
can’t cache it, you can’t recompute it because you
can’t predict what the user is going to load, and
the data set is just way too big to store in a kind
of preconfigured form, so we have to do all of
this computation in real time.
5%YEs
95%NO
s P E C I A L
R E P O R T
ChristiAN güNthEr
Global head of IT Infrastructure, Lanxess Specialty chemicals company with 2009 revenues of €5.1bn
When we separated from Bayer AG [the healthcare,
nutrition and high-tech materials group] as part of a
spin-off, one of our strategic pillars was to show strict
capital discipline: so we had to shrink our IT costs.
As part of that ongoing focus on costs, in January 2010
we transferred our data storage operations to Fujitsu,
which now furnishes us with 65 terabytes of online
storage capacity at our Leverkusen HQ near Cologne.
Through that managed storage arrangement, we now
have highly transparent cost structures thanks to pay-asyou-go prices: Lanxess pays a predetermined price per
“managed” gigabyte only for the storage capacity that it
actually uses, and invoicing can be broken right down to
the departmental level. That makes my internal service
management processes a lot, lot easier to handle.
Lanxess has been expanding fast internationally and
making multiple acquisitions in recent years, so data
volumes have been growing at about 20% a year. But
our use of a utility model for data storage means no
one-time investment and no fixed assets, even though
the storage is on-site in Lanxess data centers.
Personally, I think too much data is not necessarily
positive for business. Analysts suggest that 80% of all
data stored is a waste. But it’s difficult to determine the
useful or wasteful part, and to take responsibility for the
deletion of data because of the risk of not being able to
reverse that action.
Here we support our business users with data analysis,
backup and archiving solutions to help them handle
this data challenge.
BrYAN KiNsEllA
Illustrations: Masao Yamazaki. Additional reporting by Brian McKenna, CIO Editor, The Corporate IT Forum
CIO, Rentokil Initial International business services giant with over 68,000 employees
Data management/data governance is one of the
biggest issues we have in our business and one of six
major topics we’re driving hard on. Of course, you’ve got
to start not from the word “data” but from “information.”
That’s what people make decisions on, and they need
the best possible information to support those decisions.
In the past, IT used to own the data — but now that
has spread across to the organization. Never mind the
quantity of it, very often it is the quality that’s the biggest
problem. To be valuable and add understanding, data
needs to be timely and accurate.
Going forward, data will play an increasingly important
role in the way we view and run the business — it’s a
critical attribute. We’ve got to get better at data
governance, better at managing it and better at owning
it. The more we become system-driven, the bigger an
obstacle this becomes. It’s absolutely pointless bringing
in something like route optimization for our service
vehicles if that is being fed by incorrect data.
One of the things we’re doing to maximize value is to
enrich existing data with detail like map coordinates
and mobile data. For example, customer addresses and
post codes don’t always match. But adding coordinates
creates a new, more accurate world for us.
Some of our data hassles are going the other way,
though. For example, we’ve moved the huge data area of
email to Google, so we don’t store that any more. But the
general growth of data continues ad infinitum.
Clifford Burroughs
CIO, United Biscuits £1.3bn international biscuit maker
United Biscuits is a hugely data-driven organization. Is
that a blessing or a curse? From a business perspective,
it’s a blessing, but only if you genuinely understand how
to process the data in a way that delivers insight, solves
problems, transforms the business. The curse is getting
people to understand the exponential growth has serious
consequences: that generating reports designed to take
the pulse of the business becomes more problematic.
We have traditional data warehousing with good
connectivity to our transactional backbone, but there’s a
way to go to make the user experience with that data as
interactive as it could be. And we still have the challenge
of satisfying the degree of customization required by
different parties. We do a lot of data crunching to get it
into the right format for people to make decisions on.
With unstructured data, we’ve recently seen an
explosion in audio, video and images. Social media, in
particular, has gone bananas, which poses security and
searchability challenges. New media has become a big
part of our promotional push, and we monitor the user
communities of snacking specialists closely.
There are two other aspects of pressing significance
to me: email and “hot failover.” As we all know, in terms of
volume, email has gone crazy in recent years. And for a
business like ours, hot failover is ever more complex the
bigger the data is. l
l Clifford Burroughs is on the advisory board of The
Corporate IT Forum.
I issue eight 21
Ii n t e r v i e w
Global
warming
reality
check
No stranger to controversy, Bjørn Lomborg
says the headlong rush to cut CO2 emissions is
a “hysterical response” to global warming. The
renowned author, business school professor
and think-tank founder explains why the world
needs to attack the problem on multiple fronts.
A
Words: Kenny MacIver Photography: Per Morten
▲
l l Gore issues his strict, clear instructions when he
finds himself speaking at the same climate-change conference as Bjørn Lomborg:
along the lines of, “Make sure I don’t share the stage or speakers’ room with that
guy.” The disquiet of the former US vice president-turned environment activist is
perhaps understandable. Lomborg — a Copenhagen Business School professor,
head of think-tank Copenhagen Consensus Center, and author of two highly
contentious books, Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist — has mounted
a series of seemingly heretical challenges both to the picture of global warminginduced catastrophe painted by Gore and to the primary remedy he (and the
22 issue eight I
Cost-benefit analysis
Successive climate-change summits — from Rio and Kyoto to
Copenhagen and Cancún — have taken as their centerpiece
ambitious programs for CO2 reduction, but with very patchy
buy-in from participating countries.
In fact, in the 19 years since the Rio Earth Summit,
carbon-reduction negotiations have done nothing to reduce
temperature rises, says Lomborg. “We’ve had lots and lots of
beautiful promises of how much we’re going to cut carbon
emissions while the carbon emissions have just kept going
up and up and up. The fundamental point is that the current
approach is broken, it doesn’t work. It is time to get back to a
rational point of view rather than one based on emotional panic
and the symbolic gestures that we’ve had for the last 20 years.”
And what he finds particularly objectionable is the blind
24 issue eight I
assumption that CO2-cutting is the optimal — and only — way forward. That
manifests itself in the near absence of any cost-benefit analysis of the vast
commitments that are being proposed and being made.
According to research by climate economist Richard Tol, just keeping
temperature rises under the 2°C that most global warming models take as a
climate-change baseline will cost about $40,000 billion a year (or 13% of global
GDP) by 2100 — without delivering a great deal. Tol reckons that for every dollar
spent we will avoid less than 2 cents of climate damage.
“That is an incredibly poor way to try to help the world,” says Lomborg.
“Which, of course, is why it’s not going to happen.” And also one reason why
so many countries are so reluctant to make significant commitments.
He submits the European Union’s 20/20/20 policy — “the only significant
climate change legislation anywhere in the world” — as the primary exhibit.
The EU has committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990
levels by 2020 using 20% renewable energy. However, examining this policy
for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Tol estimated that the policy would
cost $250 billion a year by 2020. And with what end in sight? Standard climate
models show that by the end of this century the EU’s approach will have the
effect of reducing temperature rises globally by approximately 0.05°C, he says.
Looked at another way, that 20% reduction, assuming it can be enforced across
the EU for the next 90 years, will merely postpone global warming by two years.
“The net effect will be virtually nothing — so small we won’t be able to
measure it,” says Lomborg.
I
n Europe, different governments are spending a lot of
money in ways that are perhaps not demonstrably cost-effective. And for
Lomborg there is no better example than solar energy.
“Solar panels obviously are a beautiful way to show that you care,” he says.
“They’re also unfortunately incredibly expensive and of course only produce
electricity when the sun shines. CIOs will be the first to appreciate that we can’t
just run computers when the sun is shining. The problem is, if you buy a lot of
incredibly costly solar panels, it doesn’t do anything to help global warming. It
simply means you’re burning a big hole in your budget.”
Germany, for instance, produces more solar power per person than any other
country — something the country is very proud of. “But that only works because
the government hands out incredibly large subsidies, probably in the order of 10
times as much as the cost of producing the electricity by conventional means.
The total cost for Germans is going to be about $75 billion and the net effect of
all that money [at today’s solar technology prices] is going to be that Germany,
by itself, will postpone global warming by the end of the century by seven hours.
“So while I recognize the moral desire to do good, I simply would like to see
that transferred into something that would actually do good,” he adds.
But why would any rational government sanction such a waste, if that is what
it is? Firstly, he says, we tend to applaud politicians for making grand promises
about future solutions — even when they will be long gone by the time someone
else has to deliver on their commitments.
“Politics is not about doing smart things, politics is about being liked by a
majority of people, and so as long as we applaud unrealistic projects, politicians
are going to keep proposing them. There’s a lot of symbolism in the whole
climate debate. Promise grand stuff and then don’t do it: that’s a much better
Grooming: Pernille Holm
vast majority of climate-change experts) advocates: the
dramatic and rapid reduction of CO2 emissions.
For Lomborg and a growing number of academics,
economists and environmentalists, all the evidence suggests
that this approach will achieve very little in terms of tackling
global warming other than the squandering of trillions of dollars
— money that could be used to both find a more effective and
permanent set of solutions to the fossil fuel energy problem
and to address a whole series of other global issues, from
food shortages and malaria to drinking water and sanitation.
Of course, by even calling for a dialogue on an agenda beyond
CO2 reduction, Lomborg has been branded (completely falsely,
it should be noted) a climate-change “denier.” The truth is, he is
anything but. “Global warming is both real and man-made, and
as this century progresses it will have a serious impact on
humans and the environment,” he states unambiguously.
What he dares to argue, though, is that the programs adopted
or proposed to date are going to be almost pointless in tackling
the problem of climate change. What is needed, he says, is a
different kind of debate that is not simply about how much
CO2 should be cut, over what timescale and whose economy
is going to take the greatest pain, but about where action needs
to be taken across multiple, and perhaps more effective, fronts.
“For the past 20 years, the climate debate has been stuck
in this unproductive dichotomy: of people who claim global
warming is simply not happening and people who claim it
means the end of the world. Neither stance is helpful as they
force us into situations where we’re not talking about the real
issues: we’re essentially proposing either to do nothing or go
down an incredibly reactive and inefficient course along the
lines of, ‘We’ve got to do something quick before the world
ends.’ Making decisions in that panicked state just doesn’t
lead to good outcomes,” says Lomborg.
He not only questions whether the “hysterical and headlong
spending” on extravagant CO2-cutting programs is the only
suitable response, but is skeptical about that approach
achieving anything like the desired result. “Even large and
very expensive CO2 cuts made now will only make a small
and insignificant impact far into the future,” he says. That’s
assuming cuts can even be agreed.
“It is time to get
back to a rational
point of view on
global warming,
rather than one
based on panic.”
Ii n t e r v i e w
strategy from a politician’s point of view. The issue is, though,
that we are actually supposed to try to fix this rather than just
making it into a spin issue.”
He says CIOs should try not to fall into that trap: “There is
the sense in which you just want to have something that makes
you look greener and makes you look like you really take this
issue seriously. Yet my concern is that our goal is to actually fix
global warming. I doubt that our kids and grandkids are going
to look back on us and say, ‘Wow, they really spoke beautifully
about this problem.’
“The fact is that most of us don’t actually burn fossil fuels
simply to annoy Al Gore; we burn them because they power
pretty much everything we like about civilization. They make it
possible for us to heat ourselves, to feed ourselves, to transport
ourselves and to have amazing things like telecommunications
and computers and information and entertainment. And so
asking people if they could please do with less of that is just
not going to work.”
And that is going to be even more difficult to demand of
rising nations such as China or India. “‘Can you please not
get rich?’ is not going to work either,” he says. “So we need
to find another way.”
L
ast year, the Copenhagen
Consensus Center, the collective of some of the world’s top
economists that Lomborg heads, and which includes five
Nobel laureates, embarked on a wide-ranging investigation
into all the possible strategies that could be used to tackle
the problem of global warming.
The climate economists concluded that by far the best
hope for a long-term solution lay in a dramatic ramp-up of
investment in green research and development.
One of the contributors, Professor Chris Green of Canada’s
McGill University, calculated that an investment of around
0.2% of global GDP — amounting to about $100 billion —
would be the kind of sum needed to make the necessary
technology breakthroughs. That is about 50 times more than
the sum spent globally today on R&D into green energy.
“Igniting an energy tech revolution is simply a much better
policy, and one that would actually be implementable, that
would be much more effective and would actually tackle global
warming in the medium term,” suggests Lomborg. “We will
never succeed in making fossil fuels so expensive that no one
wants them. The reason it costs so much to reduce emissions
is that the green alternatives are not close to being ready to
replace oil and other fossil fuels. Instead, we should make
green energy so cheap that everyone — including China and
India — wants it, so long-term emissions drop dramatically.”
For instance, instead of subsidizing ineffective and expensive
solar panels today, the opportunity is there to invest in research
26 issue eight I
that would ensure that in 20 to 30 years, energy from solar panels is irresistibly
cheaper than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, a chunk of the $250 billion Tol identifies — say $50 billion a year
— could be spent on adapting to some of the negative effects of global warming,
Lomborg suggests. “Of course, just a few years ago, adapting to climate change
was seen as tantamount to admitting defeat. But it is common sense to take
simple steps such as creating green spaces and reducing asphalt in cities to
make them cooler, or working to safeguard low-lying lands from flooding.
“We could also spend about a billion on research into geo-engineering [for
example, tree-planting, carbon sequestration, ocean iron fertilization] which is
essentially an artificial way to turn down the heat on the planet. That could both
buy us some decades if we turn out to need them, and also buy us an insurance
policy if things were to happen really suddenly with global warming.”
He suggests spending the remaining $100 billion fixing many of the world’s
other chronic problems — effectively providing clean drinking water, sanitation,
basic healthcare, education and food to everyone on the planet. “My point is,
simply: Isn’t that a better idea than spending $250 billion [in the EU alone] on
CO2 reduction that will have the net effect of virtually nothing.”
So what are the most promising areas of this latent energy tech revolution?
“It would be wonderful to be able to say where we should be spending the
money, but that’s exactly the wrong way to go about this. This is not about
picking winners, but about looking at a vast swath of different possible
technologies — solar, wind, geothermal and all the other green renewables,
next-generation nuclear fusion and nuclear fission, carbon capture, secondgeneration biofuels, even growing oilfields with algae.
“Most of them will not work, but that’s OK. If we are investing $100 billion a
year, we just need a few of them to work for those to become the technologies
that will power the rest of the 21st century.” He is not the only one coming to that
conclusion. From the London School of Economics and Oxford University to
think tanks (on both the right and left of politics) in the US, such as The
Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy
Research, groups of academics are arguing that we need to vastly inflate the
amounts spent on the research and development of green energy.
“It is very encouraging to see such a diverse group of institutions agreeing
that there might be a much smarter, much cheaper and ultimately much more
effective way forward. Is this going to translate into political action? I hope so.”
Certainly politicians like former UK prime minister Tony Blair have long
recognized that an alternative to CO2 reduction is needed. Speaking at the
Clinton Global Initiative five years ago, he said: “The truth is, no country is going
to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term
environmental problem. What countries are prepared to do is to try to work
together cooperatively to deal with this problem in a way that allows us to
develop the science and technology in a beneficial way.”
The choice is pretty stark, says Lomborg: “Spend a lot of money to cut one
ton of CO2 now or spend less money to cut many more tons of CO2 in the longer
run. Yet the first of those ideas seems to be almost universally what we’re doing
right now. We’re so focused on saying, ‘Look, I cut a ton of CO2,’ but we need to
really talk about how you could have achieved a much better result by investing
this money differently.”
Lomborg sees his role as provoking a rational debate. “As long as we applaud
politicians who make symbolic and ineffectual but very nice-sounding, photo-op
decisions, they’ll keep doing that. But if we start asking them to make smart
decisions instead, then they’re going to realize they can save money and do
great good for the climate. That sounds like a good deal to me.” l
l Cool It, the movie of Bjørn Lomborg’s book, is out now (see coolit-themovie.com).
10 things you need to know about now
Innovation
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
pu b l i c c lo u d fo r h i r e
i t as a m ot i vato r
the ceo’s 2011 agenda
t u r bo - c h a rg i n g t h e n e t
b e at i n g m o b i l e m a lwa r e
t h e d ev e lo p i n g wo r l d a r i s es
p o rta b l e v i rt ua l d es kto p
h ow g r e e n i s yo u r v e n d o r ?
us e r sat i s fact i o n
facebook’s enterprise vision
I issue eight 27
1
Public cloud for the enterPrise
Early services lacked the SLAs demanded by large
organizations; now, that’s all about to change.
Like many current trends in enterprise IT, the
adoption of cloud computing first started to gain
momentum in the consumer space, with giant
businesses who had spare data-center capacity
such as Amazon and Google offering public cloud
services to customers.
Private individuals — and, increasingly, SMEs
— have flocked to the flexible, low-cost services
offered by these consumer-focused brands. But
large organizations, with a few notable exceptions,
have been slow to make the same move. Despite
the attractive pricing models of the public cloud,
and the appealing capex-to-opex opportunities, two
significant barriers to adoption have been standing
in the way for many CIOs: reliability and security.
Putting mission-critical ICT operations into the
public cloud, where satisfactory SLAs can be
vague or even non-existent, is still often seen as
a risky maneuver that only the most pioneering —
or, some would say, foolhardy — CIO would dare to
undertake. Underpinning it all is the fact that levels
of service and trust with many cloud providers,
which are not primarily geared up as specialist
ICT service providers, are simply not high enough.
Now, however, some global ICT companies, such
as Fujitsu, are starting to launch their own public
cloud services, which could help make cloud
adoption more attractive to larger organizations.
The long history and “trusted partner” status of
28 issue eight I
many of these companies, coupled with the fact
that they take issues such as privacy extremely
seriously (see Data Feed, right), may just be the
tipping point for a wide-scale move into the cloud.
Fujitsu’s On-Demand Virtual System Service —
a pay-as-you-go infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
public cloud — offers, for example, bundled
virtualized ICT infrastructure, including server
and storage functionality as well as network
and security features. Already launched in Japan
and due to roll out to Australia, Singapore, the US,
the UK and continental Europe by early 2011, it
leverages the company’s global IT presence,
coupled with its deep technical expertise and
recent extensive investment in data centers, to
provide a trusted and flexible service to customers.
Commenting on this, Dr. Joseph Reger, CTO
of Fujitsu Technology Solutions, argues that it’s
important for CIOs to realize not all clouds are the
same. “If you don’t read the fine print of the SLAs,
it’s very difficult to say what the difference between
two clouds is,” he warns. Customers should, he
believes, be asking tough questions: “What
happens at the end of the contract? Do you get
your data back? Or if the company shuts its service
down, what then? You could be in for a big surprise.”
Key questions — but once they’ve been
satisfactorily addressed, says Reger, cloud usage
is all set to become widespread in the enterprise.
data
f e e d
Attitudes to personal data in the cloud
vary markedly around the world,
according to a recent survey by Fujitsu
of 6,000 people across 12 countries:
l 89% of consumers questioned
said they are concerned about who
has access to their data.
l People are more willing to trust their
bank to keep their data secure than
their government.
l Consumers in Germany, China and
Japan all have comparatively high
levels of trust in companies and rely
on them to act on data privacy issues.
l Consumers who are advocates of
cloud computing are 41% less likely
than the average consumer to worry
about the loss of personal data.
l India, China and Brazil have almost
twice as many cloud advocates
among their Internet users and four
times fewer objectors than North
America and Western Europe.
l To see the full Fujitsu report, go to:
tinyurl.com/263xguz
i n n o vat i o n
2
smarter
motivation
Incentivizing employees
with cool technology.
Photos: Shutterstock, Pixelate
A debate that currently rages in many
organizations is whether to prevent the use
of technologies like smartphones and social
networks in the workplace, or embrace them
in a bid to boost mobility and productivity.
However, the proponents of lockdown have
been fighting a losing battle in the face of
these consumer technologies. Indeed, most
forward-thinking CIOs now see them as an
inevitable next step in IT’s evolution — not
to mention one that offers considerable
innovation and productivity benefits.
But one of the most interesting side benefits
is the extent to which these technologies can
actually help motivate employees — which is
not to be underestimated in an era of reduced
bonuses and pay freezes. A recent survey of
1,000 UK office workers by Reed Exhibitions
discovered that 61% would be incentivized
by being given a new consumer device like a
smartphone, iPad or laptop. Another survey
from Forrester Research, which quizzed
employees in the US, UK, France and Germany,
found that people given smartphones and
social network tools were more likely to act
as “brand advocates” for their organizations.
Expect a call soon from marketing and HR
about equipping the entire company with iPads.
l For Fujitsu’s perspective on the smartphone
revolution — and 11 other ICT predictions —
go to: www.technology-perspectives.com
3
the ceo agenda for 2011…
…and what the CIO needs to do about it.
“With the increased reliance on IT from business leaders, it’s important for
CIOs to understand the concerns of CEOs and the implications they may have on
IT,” says research group Gartner. Its analysts have pinpointed seven key CEO issues
that CIOs should address in the forthcoming year:
l Fading confidence Investment is likely to remain low if confidence continues
to decline. Most CIOs should assume they will be given “very limited increases in
resources” by their CEOs.
l Maintaining internal cash generation CEOs are faced with the need to
invest in growth at the same time as maintaining healthy cash surpluses to
defend against bouts of high business volatility. CIOs should ensure that among
the projects they are pursuing the contribution to cash-generation and cash flow
acceleration is visible.
l Investing in new cost efficiencies CEOs know they will need to develop
systemic efficiencies by re-engineering rather than simple cutting. CIOs who
target at least one major business process to revolutionize or obliterate in 2011-12
are likely to receive strong CEO approval.
l Applying innovation for growth Most businesses have continued with R&D
investment despite the recession, although new product and service launches
may have been held back. CEOs will now be looking to monetize the innovation
bets they have been making. IT’s help is required here, particularly in adding
ecommerce, eservice, social marketing, smartphone and location-based
innovations to bolster new launches.
l Engaging the politicized economy As political leaders rewrite the rules on
how economies operate, CEOs will need to engage in serious debate with them.
They will need strategic information to win political battles and rapid compliance
to avoid penalties. CIOs should ensure they are able to help with complex data
analysis and information inquiries.
l Long-term sustainability CEOs are learning to work with a sustainability
mindset and gain business benefits from it. Although reducing the power
consumed in IT operations remains important, for most organizations, the more
important issue is how IT can help the business to operate more sustainably.
(See Strategic Focus on CSR, page 38.)
l Legacy and succession Gartner predicts an increase in CEO turnover in the
next 18 months, and their replacements are likely to come from current CIOs’ peer
groups. CIOs should identify these people now, and take time to ensure they have
a positive attitude towards — and good understanding of — IT.
I issue eight 29
5
mALWARE
gOEs mObiLE
The biggest emerging
security threat.
4
FAstER, chEApER, gREENER:
FibER FOR thE hD iNtERNEt
Connection speeds of 100Gbps or more
to become a commercial reality by 2015.
30 issue eight I
data
f e e d
l Another
development,
“flow control,” has
recently been
demonstrated by
MIT researchers.
By preventing the
need for routers
to convert optical
signals into
electronic ones
for processing, this
could make the
Internet 100-1,000
times faster, while
reducing the
amount of energy
it consumes.
See: tinyurl.
com/3xgxq9t
l In July 2010, 29%
of broadband lines
in Europe ran at
10Mbps or faster,
compared to 15%
in 2009, according
to EU figures.
l The EU expects
more than half of
European households
to have 100Mbps
broadband by 2020.
Photos: Shutterstock
Imagine a world where users routinely demand high-definition streaming
video to the desktop and the home. Already, many of the world’s Internet
providers are offering consumers fiber broadband connections of up to
100Mbps, which can support this kind of activity, with South Korea and
Japan benefiting from the fastest speeds.
For business, the opportunities are potentially huge — and not just in
terms of content provision. Among other things, a superfast fiber Internet
could give organizations much more flexibility to use cloud-based storage
and processing services, or tie together remote data centers and private
clouds without affecting data transfer speeds. It could also usher in
universal “telepresence”-style videoconferencing, which could drastically
cut the need for corporate travel and facilitate mobile and remote working.
But there’s a problem. While much of the coverage has focused on
the need to implement the “last mile” fiber connections to homes and
businesses, it’s the Internet’s backbone that’s really holding things up.
The 10Gbps lines most commonly used to link together trunk lines and
major data centers would present a huge bottleneck if the volume of data
being carried across them grows as predicted. Yet replacing them with 10
times faster 100Gbps lines has been a thorny issue, since signals carrying
data at speeds of 100+ Gbps over very long distances suffer from what’s
known as “nonlinear waveform distortion.” It was thought the vast,
complex “nonlinear compensation” circuits required to get around this
would not become feasible for mass production until about 2020.
Fortunately, research scientists now look like they’re solving this
problem ahead of schedule. Fujitsu, for example, recently announced it
had developed a digital signal-processing algorithm that compensates for
the distortion, reducing the size of the required circuitry by approximately
70%. The company says this will make long-haul fiber-optic transmission
at 100+ Gbps (at a lower cost than conventional 10Gbps systems) a
commercial reality by 2015. In addition, it has developed a high-speed
optical switch based on silicon-germanium (rather than traditional silicon)
that can operate across a wide range of wavelengths, while requiring less
power than ever before. So it seems previously unimaginable speeds may
be here sooner than we thought — and it won’t only be faster, but greener.
Mobile devices are being increasingly
targeted by cybercriminals — and now
represent the biggest threat to IT
security. Kaspersky Lab, a Moscowbased cybersecurity vendor, identified
more than 1,550 mobile malware
signatures in September 2010 alone.
The various platforms all carry
different threat profiles. Tightly
controlled systems like RIM’s
BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone/iPad
iOS are seen as more secure than
devices based on Windows, Symbian
or Android, but all have vulnerabilities.
And, since many devices are userowned, they are largely beyond the
control of corporate IT — and, if not
properly managed, represent a weak
link in the enterprise’s security armor.
Researchers have identified mobile
worms, viruses and botnets targeting
all common platforms. There is also big
potential for data interception when
using devices on insecure networks,
or if devices are lost or stolen.
The solution? Smart organizations
now manage devices remotely so they
can be locked or wiped, and monitor
wireless networks for rogue devices
and attacks. Many are also developing
strategies to safeguard sensitive data,
through clear access policies agreed
with employees, and appropriate
mobile security technologies.
i n n o vat i o n
6
A NEW WORLD ORDER
The developing world’s continued rise will have an even bigger
impact on your business than you think, argues Rohit Talwar.
Rohit Talwar is a
globally acclaimed
futurist and the
founder of Fast
Future Research.
He advises clients
such as Amadeus,
GlaxoSmithKline,
Halliburton, ING,
Intel, Novartis,
Orange and
Shell on futures
research, scenario
planning and
strategic
innovation.
We’re heading into what could
be the most turbulent decade most
organizations have experienced.
Against this backdrop, there are
some fundamental mega-trends and
change-drivers business leaders must
be aware of when developing future
strategies. One of the most important
is the challenge of emerging markets.
The first point to note is that global
political power is shifting towards
developing markets — China in
particular. The developing world is no
longer prepared to work to the West’s
agenda. This is having a huge impact
in virtually every global political and
economic institution, such as the IMF,
and many corporations are questioning
where to position themselves
geographically to be closest to the seat
of real power. Increasing numbers are
moving directly to Beijing, Singapore
and locations in the Middle East,
depending on where the real decisions
are being made in their industries.
There has also been a phenomenal
flow of assets from the developed
world into the developing world, which
will continue apace or accelerate. We’ve
not seen the full impact yet, but as well
as creating new competitors, new
opportunities and new markets, it is
also going to mean new thinking. We
are likely to see a set of potential new
empires emerge. Alongside the BRICs
(Brazil, Russia, India and China),
countries to watch in the next 10 years
include Mexico, Indonesia, Korea,
Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and the
Philippines. Others like Nigeria,
Pakistan and Bangladesh should
already be top 10 economies based on
their populations, and are creating the
physical and economic infrastructure
for potential fast-track growth.
But perhaps the most important
trend is the uneven distribution of
hope. In the West, governments are
largely still talking about the problems
and issues they need to address. In
the developing world, however, no
one wants to discuss the recession,
principally because most didn’t have
one — China and India certainly didn’t
— and many emerging economies are
now posting growth figures of up to
12%. The focus in these locations is far
more on what they’re moving towards:
new developments in education, social
and physical infrastructure, and the
business environment.
Naturally, that has a major
impact on decisions being made by
corporations, who are looking to find
which countries can make things
happen quickest. As a business leader,
you should be asking: Where are the
best opportunities for us in the next
few years? Which countries provide
the most support to foreign entrants?
What will it take to succeed? How long
will it take to achieve profitability?
Where does top talent want to work?
The global landscape we’re
operating in will be significantly
different, with different rates of growth
and different opportunities. To operate
effectively in these very different
environments, it is essential for
businesses to establish a portfolio
of strategies to deliver the agility they
need to succeed, and to recognize that
a single approach won’t work across
all emerging markets.
I issue eight 31
7
desktop
on a stick
Secure, portable
device aids mobility.
The concept of the virtual desktop
was first pioneered back in the 1990s,
but never got off the ground at the
time. The main reason was sluggish
Internet connections. However, in
today’s era of widespread broadband
and cloud computing, the idea is
proving ever more attractive from
both a cost and mobility perspective.
Now, though, the main concern
isn’t speed but security, which is why
Fujitsu’s new Portable Zero Client
MZ900 device could be a compelling
proposition. Essentially, it’s a USB
stick that provides secure access
to a user’s virtual desktop from
any machine — even those running
malware that might log keystrokes
or connection details. Software on a
read-only partition of the unit permits
sensitive data (on an encrypted part
of the device) to be accessed only
when the unit is connected and
authenticated. Then, once unplugged,
it leaves no trace on the host machine.
The device is likely to make a
major contribution to productivity
in enterprises that have large mobile
workforces, or are looking to create
more flexible working practices
among their employees.
32 issue eight I
8
How green is your it vendor?
six essential questions to ask
Global report ranks suppliers’ eco-credentials.
Less talk, more action: that’s what companies want to see
from their IT providers on the journey to a low-carbon future
— yet they are still finding it difficult to have confidence in the
green IT benefits claimed by many suppliers. With that in mind,
the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Gartner have performed the
most detailed independent assessment of green IT credentials
to date, in which researchers examined the efforts of 19 of the
world’s leading technology providers to reduce the greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions created by ICT. So what questions should
customers be asking their current and prospective IT suppliers?
1) How can your portfolio of products and services help us
to boost energy efficiency and reduce GHG emissions?
2) How will the results of your product development
strategy and roadmap help our environmental initiatives?
3) How can you help us tackle e-waste, through the reuse
and recycling of redundant IT equipment?
4) How are you addressing the environmental impact of
your own internal operations, including your supply chain?
5) How will your industry partnership strategy help us to
achieve our green IT goals?
6) How does your company work to influence international/
industry standards and policies on low-carbon development?
“The Gartner/WWF research provides greater transparency into
how far the ICT industry has come with regard to addressing
sustainability and the transition to a low-carbon economy,” says
Alison O’Flynn Rowe, global executive director of sustainability
at Fujitsu — which was ranked highest of the 19 participating
vendors in two of the five main categories: “Transformation
of IT” and “Internal environmental performance.”
Among the various initiatives that mark Fujitsu out as a
leader with a long-term commitment to sustainability is its
Green Policy Innovation (GPI), a commitment to reduce its
customer greenhouse gas emissions by 15 million metric tons
between 2009 and 2012.
l For a full analysis of the results, go to tinyurl.com/3xweoqo
data
f ee d
l Greenhouse gas
emissions from
internal operations
from a single ICT
provider: 0.1 million
metric tons (Mt)
to 2Mt per year.
l Emissions
associated with
collective ICT
product use:
600Mt per year.
l Global GHG
emissions across
all sectors of the
economy are
around 30,000Mt.
(Source: Gartner
ID G00205702)
l For more on green
IT, see page 41.
i n n o vat i o n
9
tHe quest for genuinely Happy users
If organizations are serious about ensuring their IT services truly meet user needs, a whole new approach
to measuring IT performance is required. Research suggests that, even where service-level agreements (SLAs)
are green, it is common for users to be dissatisfied with the service they are receiving. SLAs are almost always
based around technology measurements — availability, response times and so on — and since what users
actually feel is rarely taken into consideration, they are often still left seeing red.
Organizations must therefore find a way to understand user experience, measure it with statistical rigor and
apply that understanding to improving how IT is deployed and used.
But how do you turn “user experience” from something that’s woolly and hard to define into something you
can measure and improve? One approach, known as Net Promoter, measures customer sentiment based on
recommendation. In recent years, this has been adopted by many customer-focused organizations as a better
measure than customer satisfaction; it can also measure user experience. It seeks to understand — and score
— when a service gets so good (or so bad) that people will tell others about it, unprompted.
Although Net Promoter is a useful way to measure user experience, it needs to be complemented with
a clear understanding of what contributes to the ratings achieved. To do this, a user experience model of 30 to
50 different elements needs to be created. These elements can then be analyzed to understand exactly what
is critical in driving Net Promoter scores, and what really doesn’t matter.
Boxing clever
The next challenge is moving from analysis to action. One very powerful way to visualize the data is to use a
Boston Matrix where service teams can plot the level of importance of a particular element against its level
of performance (see diagram, below). The matrix is divided into four boxes — Focus, Maintenance, Watch
and Opportunity — that show clearly where a user experience element stands at any one time.
MAinTenAnce
LeveL oF iMporTAnce
Focus
WATcH
opporTuniTy
Photos: Shutterstock, Pixelate
LeveL oF perForMAnce
The Focus box shows the key user
experience elements that currently aren’t
performing well — these are the areas you
should concentrate on improving. The
Maintenance box also contains key
elements, but ones that are already
performing well. These are elements to
keep an eye on, but which don’t need
pressing attention. The bottom-right box,
Opportunity, displays elements currently
performing well that are nevertheless
slightly less important; this may be a
place to make savings and refocus
resources elsewhere. The Watch box
contains elements performing badly
which aren’t currently important
(although they may be in the future.)
The reason this method is so powerful
is that it allows you to track how the
importance of particular user experience
elements changes month to month, and
how your actions can alter their position
in the matrix. You can see elements
moving from one box to another, giving
you the opportunity to fix problems
before they become serious. Indeed, it’s
possible to observe complete lifecycles
for different user experience elements.
At the moment, this approach is
new to the IT services industry, but
forward-thinking customers are already
demanding it because the service
improvements, productivity gains and
ease of management it offers are so
compelling. And companies who stick to
the old-style SLAs may well find it’s not
just their users who are seeing red when
the SLAs are green — that color may
also become a prominent feature of
their CIO’s performance review.
l Mark Nicholls is head of customer
experience at Fujitsu UK & Ireland.
For a longer version of this article,
go to: tinyurl.com/23pckps
USER EXPERIENCE
Organizations need to adopt a more rigorous approach to
measuring user experience, argues Fujitsu’s Mark Nicholls.
excellent
good
average
poor
very poor
I issue eight 33
10
Social applicationS
“Look five years
out and almost every
industry is going to be
rethought in a social
way. This stuff is
so powerful; get
on the bus.”
mark Zuckerberg, ceo, facebook
He may have been justly affronted by the way the film The Social Network portrayed him as a ruthless megalomaniac, but
Mark Zuckerberg’s interest in extending Facebook’s realm from the consumer world to the enterprise is certainly running high. Briefing
journalists recently, he predicted that applications of all kinds — from ecommerce and entertainment to enterprise apps — will start to
be built with specific social dynamics in mind. “You can integrate a person’s friends into almost anything, and make the app instantly more
engaging and viral,” he said. “It’s hard-wired into humans that you need to focus on what the people around you are doing. That is the
structural thing that is going to make all these industries change.”
Zuckerberg went on to suggest that large ecommerce companies will start to offer customers incentives (think loyalty points or microdiscounts) if they use the social recommendation functionality and expose their purchase information to others. “If I share this [information]
that makes more money for Amazon or whoever is allowing the share, then it should actually give some incentive to share stuff,” he said.
To create that layer, companies will increasingly integrate the Facebook functionality into their apps and websites. And he encouraged CIOs
to be fearless. “In the enterprise space… no one is going to get fired for focusing on social networking; no one is
going to get fired for having a social strategy.”
further information:
l Zuckerberg on Facebook’s recent move into unified messaging: tinyurl.com/2c5zqem
l Facebook’s head of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, on scaling the world’s largest application: see page 20
34 issue eight I
L E G A L I
Triangulating geo-data, privacy and profit
Location-aware apps allow organizations to track the whereabouts
of customers and employees. How do they ensure privacy is built in?
The use of location information
Illustration: Shutterstock
William Malcolm
is a senior associate
at international
law firm Pinsent
Masons. He
specializes in
privacy, data
protection and
freedom of
information issues.
to provide services is hardly
new. Services that send you
text message details of the
restaurant closest to you,
based on your mobile
phone’s location, or help
you pick your route using
GPS car navigation, are
commonplace. However,
the expansion of mobile
devices, apps and services in
2010 has brought the privacy
issues associated with use of
location data to the top of
political and corporate agendas.
In August 2010 Facebook, which has
almost 600 million registered users, launched a
service that can tell a user’s online contacts where
that person is. Facebook Places allows those who use
the site on mobile devices to “check in” wherever they
are, broadcasting their location to online contacts. Such
companies believe that this will enable greater real-life
interaction with friends. Many mobile app developers
have also caught on to the benefits of using location
data to create innovative new products and services.
(Indeed, marketwatcher Skyhook Wireless last year
identified over 6,000 location-based apps for the iPhone
alone.) And in the workplace, more and more services
exist to locate employees.
Permission granted
These developments have caused some privacy activists
to question what privacy protections for users are built
in to these new services. Others fear that the boundary
between private and working life is breaking down, while
the law is failing to keep pace with technology.
Different countries and regions are wrestling with the
question of whether their existing laws provide adequate
protection to citizens. In the European Union, for
example, the current rules on use of location data are
set out in the Data Protection Directive of 1995 and the
Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications of
2002. These provide, generally, that location data can
only be processed if the user or subscriber of a service
relying on it has consented to that processing.
While legal standards vary around the world, most
countries either already have
or are working towards laws
that place at their center
transparency and user
choice around use of
location data.
But there remain some
legal basics that all those
involved in location-aware
product development and
the use of captured data
should follow. As most
national laws focus on user
expectations, organizations that
are open and transparent about
what data they collect from those
users and how they intend to process the
data are likely to stay on the right side of the
law. This means companies gathering location data
should always ensure users are aware of what has been
collected and are given a practical way of controlling
how the information is used and stored.
Companies receiving geo-data from service providers,
perhaps for marketing purposes or through smartphone
applications, will also be keen to satisfy themselves that
the data has been obtained fairly and lawfully, and they’ll
also want to understand the processes and controls around
data capture. Advertisers spending big money on locationbased campaigns, for example, will need assurance about
the integrity of these processes.
In the US, Congress members have publicly raised
concerns about Apple’s privacy policy on the use of
location data, while the recently published European
Commission communication to the European
Parliament on the Data Protection Directive Review
stated clearly that “the growing use of procedures
allowing automatic data collection, such as electronic
transport ticketing, road toll collecting or geo-location
devices, makes it easier to determine the location of
individuals simply because they use a mobile device.”
It seems that lawmakers and regulators are set to focus
on this area. Therefore, the best defense for developers
and service providers, and the intermediaries that use
their services, is to identify effective privacy standards
and then to self-regulate. They have little time to lose.
l Download the Location Aware App Report at
tinyurl.com/yefy5jw
I issue eight 35
W
Seizing the mobile
Internet opportunity
As smart mobile devices become ubiquitous, drinks
giant Diageo is crafting functionally rich apps for both
employees and consumers.
NAME: Brian Franz
POSITION: CIO of Diageo, the world’s
leading premium drinks business.
CHALLENGE: Creating compelling apps
for mobile customer engagement.
The world’s foremost premium
drinks company — famed for
brands such as Smirnoff,
Johnnie Walker, Jose Cuervo
and Guinness — is responding
to the explosive growth in
mobile technology with
applications and services
that allow its employees to
be more productive, and its
customers to relate more
closely to Diageo brands.
CIO Brian Franz sees great
opportunities for firms that
figure out compelling ways
to capitalize on the dynamics
that mobile devices introduce.
The £13 billion ($20bn) group
is already generating a
stream of mobile apps that
spans sales, marketing and
promotions, but also reaches
right down to its supply chain.
36 issue eight I
What factors are informing
Diageo’s thinking on mobile
apps and devices — for both
internal users and consumers?
In the past few years we’ve seen
rapid changes in consumer
behavior, driven by technology.
Within Diageo, we are working
to better understand our
employees’ use of IT, recognizing
that as consumers they are
already accessing advanced
technologies — netbooks,
laptops, smartphones, digital
cameras, MP3 players, iPads,
eBook readers and so on —
and are seeking those same
standards in the workplace.
This consumerization of IT
has led us to focus on a more
user-driven approach, which is
not “one size fits all.” With mobile
devices, for example, we already
Illustration: Masao Yamazaki
take a technology-agnostic
approach, working across
multiple devices, including
BlackBerrys, iPhones, iPads,
Android and Windows Mobile.
From a workforce standpoint,
it is critical that we provide our
employees with the flexibility
they need to sell and market our
products, and to perform core
tasks through secure mobile
devices. Providing employees
with access to information when
they want and need it is vital
if we want to compete in the
marketplace, and data integrity
and confidentiality must come
hand-in-hand with that availability.
For example, we are currently
piloting the iPad to research how
we can use this technology to
increase workforce flexibility and
productivity, and to understand
which roles — perhaps those
who work with rich digital media
or directly with customers and
third parties — might benefit
most. We are creating use cases
and policies that clearly identify
business benefits, with the clear
goal of making our people better
at their jobs.
How are patterns of mobile
usage changing within Diageo?
Over 20% of our workforce
currently use mobile technology,
[mostly] BlackBerrys within our
executive teams, sales and
marketing. But 70% of our
employee population use
laptops, and we are looking to
enhance the relationship that
our employees have with mobile
technology by extending our
services through to their
personal mobiles and other
devices — enabling them to
access [key applications]
more easily and more flexibly.
Right now, we are looking to
introduce core productivity
applications, including SAP
applications across multiple
mobile devices.
In addition, we have [already]
implemented handhelds to
enable our salesforce in some of
our emerging markets, including
Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand
and South Africa, to automate
some front-end sales processes.
And we’re looking into mobile
CRM tools for our field
salesforces in the near future.
How do you see mobile apps
and services evolving as a
consumer channel?
From a consumer standpoint,
we know that mobile devices
are reaching more consumers
than ever, and they are
interacting on mobile more than
ever before. We can use mobile
technology to get closer to
our consumer — to develop
campaigns and create a
seamless consumer experience.
We already use smartphone
GPS capabilities to find pubs
and at Diageo-sponsored
events; we have cocktail apps
for iPhones, downloadable
discount coupons, on-premise
promotions, and a mobile
version of thebar.com where
consumers can access
information about Diageo
brands and recipes — all
designed to drive interaction
into purchase.
We’ve recently introduced a
new digital marketing platform
to support our mobile strategy.
This channel-agnostic platform
gives our global brand teams
the flexibility to engage with
the digital agencies of their
choice to reach consumers
in new ways.
We also see a rapid rise in
mobile technology use in our
emerging markets — across
Asia Pac, Latin America and
Africa — where mobile is
becoming the dominant
channel, and is cheap and
reliable. For example, there are
over 710 million mobile Internet
users in China, with over 60% of
Internet users using their mobile
to surf the Net.
In Africa, where the mobile
phone is the main device for
Internet access, we’ve run SMS
messaging-based promotions
on mobile phones. Through
these dynamic touchpoints, we
are able to learn quickly about
our consumers and their habits
to drive our campaigns.
When it comes to mobile
app development and
deployment, how do you
manage the boundary
between IT and marketing?
We maintain a roster of
partner agencies who have
been approved to develop
mobile applications for our
brands. Adherence to bestpractice application
development and testing is
required to remain on this
roster. Our procurement,
information systems and
marketing teams collaborate
to make this model work.
But, above all, Diageo is a
marketing-driven company.
Our business can leverage
mobile to drive operational
growth and to market and sell
our products in a secure way.
Through mobile and digital
interactions, we have the ability
to reach our consumers better
and to learn more about them,
creating a consumer-centric
approach that informs our
campaigns and supports our
responsible-drinking agenda. l
“WE HAvE COCkTAIL
APPS FOr iPHONES,
DOWNLOADABLE
DISCOuNT COuPONS
— ALL DESIGNED TO
DrIvE INTErACTION
INTO PurCHASE.”
I issue eight 37
SuStainability

HOnESty

tRanSPaREnCy

aCCOuntability

COmPEtitivE EDgE
s T R AT E G I C
W
F O C U s
In a new age of
corporate responsibility,
smart organizations
understand that creating
sustainable business
models and giving back to
the societies they operate
in is an essential pillar
of corporate strategy.
And IT has a key
role to play in this by
supporting greener,
more open and more
accountable operations.
hy do young
help create. “Our customers wanted
adults find
us to enable change, not just slap our
it so hard to
brand on a charity initiative,” says Bill
communicate
Eyres, head of sustainability at O2 and
with their
responsible for the company’s broad
elders? And why do they think there’s
CSR activities. “And the one issue they
such a big generation gap between
told us they were really concerned
themselves and adults — a perception
about was young people becoming
that often leads to mistrust, alienation
disconnected from their communities.”
and anti-social behavior?
Of course, it’s clear that for a mobile
Such questions may be as difficult
network operator like O2, linking
Words: James Lawrence
to answer as, “How do I increase
its brand in a positive way with
productivity while cutting my budget
communities of young people is
by 20%?” But if you want to put these
a smart business move. And Eyres,
points directly to youngsters, and take
whose résumé includes CSR
in their views, you can do so, courtesy
leadership roles at ethically driven
of O2, the trading company of mobile
enterprises such as The Body Shop
comms giant Telefónica Europe, which has created an online
and Co-Operative Bank, is proud to acknowledge the win-win
platform (hosted on Facebook, naturally) with the express aim
nature of the policy. He fully buys into the business case for
of “helping adults to understand young people a bit better.”
“strategic CSR” first made four years ago by world-renowned
The project, called “Why Do,” was not the idea of anyone at
competitiveness guru and Harvard professor Michael Porter,
O2; neither was it cooked up by a marketing agency partner
when he argued: “CSR can be much more than a cost, a
looking for an easy PR win. Rather it was the brainchild of
constraint or a charitable deed — it can be a source of
Sabian Muhammad, a 22-year-old youth worker from a
opportunity, innovation and competitive advantage.”
deprived area of London. It is just one example of O2’s “Think
Eyres has been instrumental in O2’s adoption of this kind of
Big” initiative, which helps young people to develop ideas and
thinking, trying to ensure that any truly valuable CSR initiative
programs that benefit the communities they live in. O2
the company undertakes is closely aligned with business goals.
supplies funding, employee expertise, training and practical
Again echoing Porter’s views, he makes a fundamental point:
support to get these projects off the ground, with all of the
“The most successful businesses will be ones that truly
ideas crowdsourced through a dedicated website.
incorporate social and environmental responsibility into their
The project is just one of 02’s series of corporate social
strategy. In a period of social disruption and growing
responsibility (CSR) initiatives, revolving around community
unemployment [in many economies], we must recognize that
projects and environmental responsibility; and they’re
a business can’t be an island cut off from the communities in
happening not because the company has suddenly been
which it operates. There is a huge range of skills that everyone
infused with a passion for Bill Gates-style philanthropy, but
has in business that we can offer to local communities.”
because this move makes sound business sense.
It is essential to embed this kind of responsible thinking in
Think Big, for example, was instigated in response to a
everything the organization does, from the boardroom to the
survey of O2 customers, which indicated that they expect the
shop floor, argues Eyres. And the CIO has a major role to play
company to make a positive difference to society by using the
not only in setting the tone in the IT organization, but in
power of its brand — and the profits those same customers
identifying and championing technologies and practices that
I issue eight 39
94%
underpin, drive and support CSR initiatives in the
behaving in a way that doesn’t live up to ethical
of CSR executives say support
organization — and in wider society.
scrutiny, then sooner or later it’s going to catch
from senior managers is the
PR guru Lord Tim Bell, chairman of global
up with you,” he argues.
most important ingredient in
a successful CSR program.
marketing and reputation management
“Suppose everyone can see everything that
(Weber Shandwick Social Impact Survey, 2010)
conglomerate Chime Communications (and
you can see now, and they saw a particular
renowned as “Margaret Thatcher’s PR man” when
decision that you made: would you still feel good
she was UK prime minister) concurs — with the
about it? That’s the way corporations need to
proviso that profitable business is a prerequisite to
act. I’m not suggesting that companies should
CSR. “You need to be seen to be a force for good,” he
reveal everything, but they do need to behave in
says. “But you need to be a financial success first — it’s not just
such a way that, if everything were revealed, they could
about good intentions, it’s about being able to do something.”
defend the position they’ve taken.”
However, there is plenty of evidence that the converse can
When, in 2006, Siemens was caught up in a bribery
also be true: that CSR can lead to financial success, and that
scandal, it actively embraced transparency to restore its
many smart businesses have realized this. Bell points to where
tarnished reputation. The German engineering technology
the priorities now lie in times of scarcity: “During the recession,
giant quickly realized that to create a sustainable business for
as companies stopped spending on advertising, public
the future it had to implement — and be seen to implement
relations and marketing, they didn’t stop spending on CSR.
— a set of world-class corporate compliance processes to
In fact, CSR budgets went up.” The CSR business he co-directs,
create watertight accountability and ensure such a scandal
Corporate Citizenship, a global consultancy on strategic
could never rock the company again.
corporate responsibility, doubled its profits last year, he says.
“Siemens is very proud of its technology and history,” says
Mark Gough, deputy head of compliance investigations at
ut just as there is an attractive upside to having
Siemens AG. “And the allegations relating to that corruption
a successful CSR strategy, there is a huge
scandal, of course, harmed its image.” So the compliance
downside to not having one, or failing to implement
program was quickly established as part of a process of
one successfully. “External stakeholders are
internal change, he explains, “to get our reputation back.”
seeking to hold companies accountable for social
A key part of this involves, as Gough puts it, “adding the
issues,” warned Michael Porter back in 2006. “[There are]
integrity component to an employee’s responsibilities.” This
potentially large financial risks for any firm whose conduct is
means ensuring every single person in the company, from
deemed unacceptable.” This is, of course, a painful lesson that
the board down, is imbued with the company’s new mantra:
many organizations in recent years — from the oil industry to
Clean Business Only. “We want people of the highest
the banking sector — have learned through bitter experience.
standards of integrity, who believe in our values,” says Gough.
What’s more, in an age where social networking, blogs and
“[If they do,] there will be much less of a problem about
wikis are ubiquitous, like it or not, organizations are having
misconduct. To get people to fully buy into the values is a
to deal with the expectation of much greater transparency
difficult job, but if we continue to promote the tone from the
being set by both internal and external stakeholders. (For
top, the message will sink in.”
more on this, see page 42.) Advocacy groups increasingly
But there is also a bottom-up approach: any of the company’s
gather and monitor intelligence on the activities of large
400,000 employees has the freedom to ring alarm bells
organizations, so if companies fail to implement processes
with compliance officers, in the certainty that they will not
to capture, analyze and communicate information about
suffer negative consequences. “If you want a transparent
their own impact on society — positive or negative —
organization, you’ve got to have the ability for staff to feel
someone, somewhere is likely to do it for them, and
free to report wrongdoing and know their career will not
broadcast it to the world.
be harmed in any way,” says Gough.
Josh Bernoff, a senior vice president at analyst firm
Forrester Research and co-author of the highly influential
Call to action for CIOs
Web 2.0 business books Groundswell and Empowered,
As demonstrated by the example of O2, a successful CSR
believes 100% responsible behavior is now the only way
strategy can go much further than just requiring employees to
to deal with the kind of pressure this generates. “If you are
act responsibly — and IT has a crucial role to play in this. For
B
40 issue eight I
S t R a t e g Ii C
f o C u S
Green IT:
Could do better
Green IT policies in the enterprise still have a long way to
go to achieve maximum impact, according to a survey by
Fujitsu. The research, conducted in the US, UK, India and
Australia, set out to determine the maturity of green IT in
large organizations. Key findings include:
example, automotive manufacturers
to reduce global emissions by
like Volvo and Ford (Volvo’s parent
25% by 2020 through technology
company until August 2010) are
solutions,” she says. “The CIO has
l Green IT practices and technologies in most organizations
leveraging their in-car technology
an exciting leadership role to play in
to enhance “active safety” — or, in
are often “quite rudimentary.” However, it is possible to
this. He or she is the key to designing,
improve them substantially with comparatively little effort.
other words, accident prevention.
managing and integrating ICT into
Because vast amounts of data,
l There is consistently low performance in the metrics that
every aspect of the business and
containing information about what
enable green IT to be properly measured and monitored.
the wider business — that is,
l Environmentally unsound IT procurement and e-waste
a car is doing, are now being
suppliers, partners and customers
practices remain widespread, although performance is
transmitted in real time from
— to reduce emissions and improve
strongest where regulation exists.
vehicles to manufacturers via the
overall efficiency” (see box.)
cloud (for more on this, see Case
l There are significant differences by industry sector.
However, ICT’s role in CSR goes
Study on Volvo, page 16), it will soon
The best performing is ICT; the wholesale, retail and logistics
way beyond the green agenda,
be possible to warn public authorities
sector ranks lowest. The same industries tend to perform
argues O2’s Eyres, a prime
similarly across all four countries.
about potential hazards on roads.
exponent of the role it can play
l The use of IT to reduce the carbon footprint in other
“If we have a server that’s looking
in how companies give back to
through that data and it sees there’s
functions in the organization rates very low.
society. “We know that in a lot of
a specific location in a city where
different ways social media, and ICT
our customers’ anti-lock brakes are
Commenting on the survey, Alison O’Flynn Rowe, global
generally, can help to bring societies
going off right now, we can send the
executive director of sustainability at Fujitsu, says CIOs need
and communities together,” he says.
to ensure they set their houses in order: The first three key
information to public agencies to
Added to this, he claims,
activities for the IT department are
technology-driven ingenuity and
warn that there’s probably something
wrong on the road,” explains Rich
1. Give visibility to your energy costs
innovation are vital, too. “It’s about
Strader, who was on temporary
2. Determine how the energy is consumed
looking at social and environmental
assignment from Ford to Volvo as
3. Set reduction targets with KPIs for the leadership team.
issues and asking, ‘How can we bring
CIO until the end of 2010. “And the
Without undergoing these steps, the approach to
our technology to bear on this?’”
key thing there is that it isn’t giving
sustainability will be limited to tactical efficiency initiatives,
But he raises a caveat for CIOs:
and the green IT business case is incomplete.
“It’s not just about technology —
back just to Volvo or Ford owners.
It’s giving back to everybody.”
O’Flynn Rowe also points to the leadership role required to
it’s technology plus people. The
Reducing carbon emissions is
create a “whole-of-business” approach to green IT. “IT has a
big question is: How do we develop
another area of CSR that figures
fundamental part to play in enabling change, and must step
solutions that will engage people and
big for IT — and not just emissions
up to face this significant global challenge,” she says.
motivate them to make a difference?”
from vehicles in the automotive
And the prospect of ICT making
a difference, and creating added
industry. “We can help reduce
emissions from everything in the
value for every aspect of the
entire supply chain that we use to
enterprise, including its CSR
manufacture a vehicle,” says
initiatives — which are becoming
Strader. And of course, that can also lead to greater
increasingly deeply embedded — is exactly what gets
efficiency, creating business benefits not only in terms of
ambitious CIOs out of bed in the morning.
public reputation, but also cost reduction. “The aim is to
FURTHER INFORMATION:
make our operations as smooth as possible. When you
do that you eliminate a lot of [redundant] activity, and all
l Exclusive interview with Josh Bernoff: www.i-cio.com/blog
activity results in emissions and cost.”
l For a podcast on the Siemens compliance program,
Environmental sustainability is core to virtually every
produced by the Cambridge Judge Business School, go to:
organization’s CSR policy — and ICT is mission-critical to
tinyurl.com/248vv9u
that, says Alison O’Flynn Rowe, global executive director of
l To see highlights of keynote speeches on CSR by Bill Eyres
sustainability at Fujitsu. “The ICT industry has the potential
and Lord Bell, go to: www.i-cio.com/video
I issue eight 41
s T R AT E G I C
F O C U s
No place To HIDe
Hard-wiring integrity into your business is essential for maintaining competitive
Main illustration: Jun-gu Noh
T
en years ago, advocates of
so-called corporate social
responsibility (CSR) coined an
expression: You do well by doing
good. They were wrong. At the
time, it was possible for organizations to do
well by behaving badly — for example, by
having terrible labor practices, employing
“creative accounting”, being a monopoly,
externalizing their costs onto society, having
shady environmental behaviors, having lousy
products, abandoning customers, and so on.
But increasingly, because of the new, open
world driven by mass online collaboration, that
expression for CSR is finally becoming true.
It is certainly clear that, these days, you are
highly likely to do badly by being bad. If you
cut back investments in safety — on an oil rig,
for example — your business will suffer as a
result. If you are a car company and have
failed to invest in fuel-efficient technologies or
hybrid vehicles, you will do badly; just as, if you
fail to maintain your investment in producing
quality vehicles, you will do badly.
The overwhelming reason for this step
change in recent years is transparency. There
is strong evidence that companies and other
organizations are being forced to act with
integrity, not just by regulators and institutional
shareholders, but also because of the
transparency of this networked age. Thanks to
a broad range of online technologies — such
as blogs, social media and wikis — the public
can very quickly and very easily find out
what’s really going on. They can inform others,
and they can organize collective responses.
Consequently, if your organization fails to
invest in socially responsible measures, or even
if anything about your business — such as a
faked viral marketing campaign — is perceived
to be phony, you will be found out. You will be
tweeted about, and a Facebook Causes group
42 issue eight I
Don Tapscott is a leading
authority on the business
and social consequences
of mass online
collaboration, and is
chairman of the think tank
nGenera Insight. He is also
the author of several
best-selling books,
including Grown Up Digital
and (with Anthony
Williams) Wikinomics.
Tapscott and Williams’
acclaimed new book,
Macrowikinomics:
Rebooting Business and
the World, is out now.
will be created against you. As many corporate
casualties have discovered, the result of such
a campaign can be catastrophic to your firm’s
reputation and ultimately to its bottom line.
Therefore, to avoid a public relations or
financial disaster, integrity needs to be part of
the DNA of every organization — not just to
secure a healthy business environment, but
for the organization’s own sustainability and
competitive advantage.
It’s worth noting here that I believe the word
“integrity” is preferable to the expression
“corporate social responsibility,” as the latter
puts too much emphasis on the notion
that corporations should do “good” in the
world and be “good” citizens out of some
moral or ethical imperative. Of course, that
is absolutely true. But what’s new — and
what organizations need to focus on — is the
idea of integrity, as driven by transparency.
Without it you cannot build trust, and trust
is essential for competitiveness in this new
environment. To put it bluntly, regardless
of the moral arguments, there are now
some hard, bottom-line business reasons
for baking integrity into every company.
Four key aspects combine to create
corporate integrity:
l Honesty In everything from motivating
employees to negotiating with partners,
disclosing financial information or explaining
the environmental impact of their actions,
organizations must tell the truth
l Consideration The interests of others
must always be taken into account; you
cannot externalize costs — for example, the
true environmental costs of your entire supply
chain must be acknowledged, as people are
starting to become aware of such factors
l Accountability Quite simply, you need to
abide by your commitments, and to be able to
prove that you have done so
l Transparency This is created when the
previous three are combined — and is the
foundation of trust. Companies need to move
away from being closed about information or
hoarding their intellectual property. They need
to share some — but not all — intellectual
property; not to be “good,” but as a matter
of competitive advantage.
The financial services industry is a great
example of what can go wrong here. Leading
up to the global financial crisis, there were
huge integrity violations: many organizations
in the sector weren’t honest, considerate,
edge, says Don Tapscott.
accountable or open. And they almost
brought down capitalism. But the faults are
not just limited to bankers. Every organization
in every sector now needs to embrace these
values and these principles if they’re going to
build and maintain a successful business.
Portrait illustration: Masao Yamazaki
W
hen acting on these
values, the first thing
corporate leaders,
including CIOs, need to
do is address their own
behavior. It’s important you don’t just talk the
talk, you must walk the walk. You set corporate
culture by your own behavior, and should act
according to these values at all times.
Second, you must ensure that these values
are passed to the rest of your business. You
need it in your IT so you can measure progress.
You need it in your business processes. You
need it in your compensation systems —
people do what you pay them to do, so you
need to incentivize them to act responsibly.
Once organizations have built a foundation
of trust based on integrity, then their networks
— customers, employees, stakeholders —
will reciprocate with cooperative behavior.
Customers, for example, decide to give
companies their money. A lack of trust, on the
other hand, generates conflict, friction and
inefficiencies, while consuming management
time and resources with defensive activities.
Keeping up with society’s evolving
expectations can be tough, but integrity
shouldn’t be seen as a millstone. Get it right,
and the promise is that you will build a
business that is better equipped to develop
solutions for enhancing the common good
— and your own bottom line. l
l Don Tapscott blogs at dontapscott.com/
blog; follow his tweets at @dtapscott
I issue eight 43
Coming soon in
I
Special RepoRt: Open innovation
From open networks and open source to open data initiatives, enterprises
and public sector organizations are adopting practices that extend
collaboration well beyond their traditional boundaries. What are the benefits
— and the pitfalls — of this open revolution? And what role should the CIO
play in tearing down the walls?
StRategic FocuS: The new rules of customer engagement
Some of the most powerful sales and marketing techniques available today
revolve around social technologies, which places ICT right at the heart of
customer interaction. We examine how successful CIOs are building highly
collaborative relationships with CMOs, based on a shared vision for the
potential of Web 2.0 technologies and services.
pluS: More in-depth interviews, reports, analysis and case studies
covering the key agenda items for the world’s leading CIOs.
I
i n t h e m e a n t i m e … F o R d o w n l o a d a b l e d ata , v i d e o S , e v e n t S
a n d m o R e e S S e n t i a l i n F o R m at i o n F o R c i o s , g o t o :
www.i-cio.com
This
way up
Jim Rinaldi’s passion for exploring new frontiers has taken him to
a unique place, as CIO of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His
mission? To support “the robotic exploration of the solar system.”
Words: Jessica Twentyman Portrait: Masao Yamazaki
S
In a career that has
taken him from organic
chemicals and hotels
to some of the US’s
largest government
agencies, Jim Rinaldi
now provides a
distinctive set of IT
capabilities to a
community of
space explorers.
▲
ince 2004, two robotic space rovers — Spirit and
Opportunity — have been exploring the surface
of Mars, collecting information on rocks and soils
that hold clues about past water activity on the
planet. Spirit has been silent since March 2010
and is believed to be in “lower-power hibernation mode”
for the Martian winter. Opportunity, however, is still hard at
work, its daily tasks conveyed to it by a team of engineers at
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
In November, that project team announced it is to be the
first NASA space mission to use cloud computing for its
daily work. It’s all part of JPL CIO Jim Rinaldi’s vision of a
brave new world where the complex software and data that
the space scientists require can be delivered by a vast pool
of rented computing capacity, available on demand.
“My job is all about preparing for the future; about seeing
what’s coming down the line and balancing the needs of the
Laboratory with the funds available,” says Rinaldi. That focus
on cost is essential: JPL is a federally funded facility – with
around 5,000 sophisticated users, all with demanding
requirements – run by the California Institute of Technology
I issue eight 45
1982–85
1977–82
Manager of systems
programming
Paradyne
(Computer networking)
Systems programmer
SCM Organic Chemicals
(Chemicals industry)
1985–2001
SVP operations & services
Marriott International
(Hospitality industry)
on behalf of NASA. In the case of the Mars
Rover Exploration Project, cloud computing
makes a lot of sense, since what started as a
three-month mission back in 2004 has now
been kept running for six years by “bonus”
add-on projects. With the volume of data
generated outgrowing the systems originally
implemented to host it, the virtually limitless
capacity of the cloud, and the cost efficiencies
it promises, have become irresistible to JPL.
It’s a bold use of cloud computing, and the
team at JPL has collaborated closely with
the cloud team at Amazon to migrate the
rover project’s activity-planning software,
Maestro, to Amazon’s cloud platform.
But exploring new worlds is nothing
new for Rinaldi. In fact, it’s been a recurring
theme throughout his career. “I’ve never
worked in the same industry twice,” he
says. When he arrived at JPL in 2005, he’d
already worked for a chemicals company,
a computer networking supplier, a hotel
chain, and two of the largest US government
agencies: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
and the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA). “I like to think I’ve got as much as I
possibly could out of every opportunity I’ve
been offered and then thought to myself,
‘What do I want to explore next?’,” he says.
JPL, however, offers opportunities and
challenges that he believes he wouldn’t find in
any other organization in the world. “What I do
here is so entirely unique and, although JPL is
quite small compared to other organizations
I’ve worked for, that was the real draw for me
when I joined in 2005,” he says. “How many
46 issue eight I
other CIOs support end-users who are looking for life on other planets and
putting robots on Mars? It’s a wonderful, exciting place to be a part of.”
On a day-to-day level, Rinaldi has direct management responsibility over
JPL’s Institutional Computing and Information Services Office and works
closely with information technology management, supporting engineers
and space scientists as well as employees in the organization’s finance
and business operations. That, he says, can mean anything from the routine
(ensuring the Laboratory’s email and voice-over-IP systems are running well,
for example) to the highly complex (such as designing storage infrastructures
for images captured in deep space).
Multimedia technology also demands a significant amount of his
attention. JPL is pioneering in its use of video, for example, to receive, store
and share information, and early on in his time at the organization, Rinaldi
was involved in the development of JPL-TV, a YouTube-like service for JPL
staff who want to share videos relating to their research with colleagues.
At the same time, the Laboratory also has its own channel on YouTube itself,
which allows it to share regular updates on its work with the wider public
(see youtube.com/user/JPLnews).
But hammering out the requirements of engineers and scientists working
on groundbreaking research is what Rinaldi really relishes about his role. “My
team doesn’t write the code that powers robots on Mars, but we provide all
the infrastructure that the people who do write such sophisticated software
programs need,” he says. Every new mission has its own set of complex
requirements. Most of them, for example, have sophisticated project
lifecycle management (PLM) needs that simply can’t be delivered with the
kind of out-of-the-box PLM applications available on the open market. As a
result, customized code often needs to be written in-house.
“I work with really smart people and that’s always stimulating,” he says.
“But one thing I’ve observed is that most people — even the really smart
ones — don’t always know how to ask for the IT they require. So in many
ways, I see my role as a translator and, luckily, it’s a task I really enjoy.”
First love
Prior to JPL, Rinaldi was CIO at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
in Washington, DC, where he was no less instrumental in groundbreaking
projects. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, for example, the agency was
t H I s w ay u p
2002–05
2001–02
CIO
US Food and Drug
Administration
(Government agency)
Chief of IT services
US Internal
Revenue Service
(Government agency)
“How many otHer
CIos support
end-users wHo
are puttIng
robots on mars?”
mandated by the Bioterrorism Act 2002
to develop new protections for the nation’s
food and drug supplies. That meant
developing a user-friendly electronic
registration system that enabled food
manufacturers and processors, packers
and storage operations in the US and
overseas to register their facilities and
notify the agency quickly in the event of any
deliberate or accidental food contamination.
Rinaldi also oversaw an ambitious
implementation of new workflow technology,
integrating multiple legacy systems to give
scientists faster and more reliable access to
the clinical trial data and other information
they needed in the lengthy drug-approval
process. “What I really liked about the FDA
was the pedigree of people it employed,” he
says. “They were, in many cases, working
there for really noble reasons and I was
proud to be supporting them.”
Rinaldi has always been fascinated by
science and, at an early age, computing
became his first love. A native of Alabama,
he graduated in computer science from the
University of North Florida in 1977 and went
on to work at SCM Organic Chemicals.
2005–present
CIO
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(Aviation & aerospace)
“It was intriguing for someone straight out of school to be helping scientists
get answers to complex projects,” he recalls. “I quickly developed a fascination
with using Fortran for scientific programming and found it a lot of fun. Using
Cobol for business programming just wasn’t for me.”
That said, the 16 years he spent in more commercial roles at the Marriott
International hotel group were extremely useful in terms of the wide scope
of experience they gave him. There, he worked on projects ranging from
the design, build and management of a new data center, to the creation of
business intelligence systems for the deep analysis of customer data. He
was also directly involved in developing Marriott’s ecommerce strategy, at
a time when other major hotel chains had barely dipped a toe into the water
of online reservations.
Cloud convert
Today, while other organizations worldwide are still wavering over the
pros and cons of cloud computing, JPL is forging ahead.
In support of the federal Open Government Initiative, designed to
increase public access to data collected by the US government, JPL
collaborated with the cloud team at Microsoft to launch the “Be a Martian”
website in 2009 (beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov). This crowdsourcing initiative
enables the public to become “citizen scientists” and analyze data generated
by Mars research work. To date, more than 54,000 people have signed up
to become “Martians.”
And JPL has also worked with Google on a cloud-based project involving
computer scientists at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) to
develop an educational application for elementary school pupils where they
can tag labels onto images from the Mars spacecraft.
The extended missions of Spirit and Opportunity have provided a valuable
resource for testing out cloud computing’s potential for future missions.
Looking forward, the Laboratory is currently building and testing NASA’s
next Mars rover, Curiosity, which is scheduled to land on the red planet in
August 2012. The data it needs will inevitably use cloud computing resources,
while the rover will receive a diet of software uploads designed to execute
tasks autonomously.
Driven by Rinaldi’s passion for exploring new horizons, it seems that JPL’s
mission to embrace the cloud IT model is only just beginning. l
I issue eight 47
Q
“Can the
promise
of cloud
live up to
the hype?” I
“it’s not a paradigm
shift. it’s not a
whole new world.
it’s just change.”
Two IT leaders assess
how much of the cloud
model is realizable
today and how much is
illusion and wordplay.
48 issue eight I
IAN COHEN
is CIO at Jardine
Lloyd Thompson,
one of the world’s
largest risk specialists
and employee benefits
consultants.
get somewhat disturbed by the
term “cloud.” All the marketing
and vendor hype surrounding it is
confusing what should be a very
important debate about the underpinning
technologies and what they can do for
your business. All good CIOs know that
they have to be, first and foremost,
business leaders. But we are business
leaders who have an area of expertise,
and we must be able to apply that
expertise — which is in how technology
enables our businesses. That blend of
business and technology acumen is now
more important than ever.
The technology that underpins what
vendors are calling “cloud computing”
is rapidly maturing and does offer some
interesting new opportunities, but I
believe it’s important not to get carried
away here. It’s not a paradigm shift. It’s
not a whole new world. It’s just change.
It’s the same kind of change as when we
went from the abacus to the mainframe,
from mainframe to client/server, and so
on. We live in a change industry. Change
is what we’re all about, so there’s nothing
out of the ordinary in that respect.
I am, however — as we all should be
in these tough times — interested in
the capex/opex shift that comes from
utilizing these technologies, because
I think it represents the possibility for
I N t E R f A C E
a fundamental change to some of our
business models. I am also interested in
the potential it has for removing some
of the entry barriers to new markets
that might otherwise have had a high
capital-intensive set-up. And I am very
interested in how the technologies
will allow us to blend parts of our own
infrastructure with the infrastructures
of specific partners and public services.
But rather than talking about types
of “cloud” — public, private, hybrid,
whatever — we should be asking: Do
these new models fit with our current
sourcing decisions, be they hosting or
hosted? And the answer is, in many
cases: they absolutely do.
As CIOs — and increasingly this is
a truly hybrid role — we need to focus
the debate around the economics of
our businesses and the appropriateness
of the technologies to meet the
strategic intent of our companies.
But we must not get wrapped up in
the marketing spin and hype. We must
focus on the practical aspects. CIOs
and the rest of the technology profession
have had a hard enough time acquiring
sufficient language to engage in business
discussions with business customers. And
now our profession — particularly the
supply side — comes along and creates
some nonsense term for what is actually,
underneath, a very valuable and very
business-critical technology.
I am worried that the reality of cloud
can’t match the hype because it has
been hyped out of all proportion. Also,
just because it’s “the cloud” does not
mean the basic disciplines of technology
operations or sourcing can be ignored
— they can’t. So let’s focus on what
the technology can do. And, like all new
technologies — although in this case
the concept is not that new — you need
to dip your toe in the water and try it.
l Follow Ian Cohen on Twitter: @coe62
“the debate has
now gone from ‘why
the cloud?’ to ‘why
not the cloud?’”
JP RANGASWAMI
is the newly-appointed
chief scientist at
cloud software giant
Salesforce.com, and
a former CIO and IT
trailblazer at telco
BT and investment
bank DrKW.
W
e’re at a global inflection
point in cloud computing,
and a number of things —
the economic environment,
a new generation in the workforce, the
maturing of the technology, and new
collaborative networks — have all come
together to say the tipping point is now.
People are looking for smart ways of
delivering business services that question
the need for capital expenditure. The
Millennial Generation [those who were
in their teens in 2000 and only know a
post-Internet world] is now solidly in the
workforce, and they seriously understand
the value of “rent rather than buy.” Add
to that the fact that cloud technology
has now reached a level of maturity — in
terms of mobility, connectivity, security
— as well as the whole phenomenon of
collaboration and sharing, and you see
things have actually changed.
You have to make a call as to when
the market is reaching that turning
point. And the conversations I’ve been
having with my peers certainly show
we’re there. Of course, they know cloud
is not completely new: it has been an
evolution from time-sharing in the ’80s
to grid computing and server farms in
the ’90s to SOA more recently. But today
we understand the implications of being
able to scale services to meet demand
and delivering them at a subscription
price — services that work independently
of location, device and operating system.
The over-hyping has come from people
trying to stall cloud adoption — market
incumbents, who naturally are trying to
hold on to their prior profit margins or
monopolies. But there are lessons they
could learn elsewhere. Take the impact
of Skype, which completely shattered the
international calling market. That was
a classic “innovator’s dilemma.” First,
telcos said to themselves, “Don’t worry
about it,” and denied its existence. Then
they screamed and pointed to its inability
to meet performance guidelines, even as
Skype was innovating and fast improving
quality. It radically improved “codecs”
[the means of encoding a signal for
transmission], when telcos the world
over had been using the same codecs for
70 years. Now who was more supportive
of the customer there?
And that is what is going to happen
in the world of technology infrastructure
as the cloud takes over. The enormous
waste of having to buy locked-up silos of
overcapacity is going to disappear. You
can’t turn back the waves.
I am hardly the only person that has
a real sense of a tipping point; in many
areas, the debate has now gone from
“Why the cloud?” for new IT to “Why not
the cloud?”, so that a justification has
to be made if you don’t choose a cloud
service. I reckon we are five to seven
years away from seeing cloud as the
dominant model for 80% of IT services.
Something is happening and it
certainly isn’t hype to me. At some point
you have to say, if it walks like a duck,
quacks like a duck and swims like a
duck, it must be a duck.
l JP Rangaswami blogs at:
confusedofcalcutta.com
I issue eight 49
A C T I V E
Edward Marx
SVP and CIO, Texas Health Resources
Healthcare provider with revenue of $2.9bn
Mountain climber
I’ve tried to never ask a subordinate to do something
I would not do myself, or haven’t done. Those leaders who
pontificate on theories they don’t practice get zero respect
from me. If you say, “Go to where the puck is going,” do you
really understand the precise nuance of that statement?
Have you played enough ice hockey to know? Or, “Pace
yourself. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Can you actually relate
to the effort it takes to run 26.2 miles or sprint for 200 meters?
I do my best to speak from direct experience. The difference
between telling your own story and using a cliché determines
the credibility of the message and the messenger.
At Texas Health Resources, our 10-year Strategic Plan
is centered on “climbing a mountain,” and that includes a
series of base camps and ultimately reaching the summit.
At first, I thought I understood the immensity of what it
meant to conquer a mountain, though I struggled to
articulate the concept. I’d never done it. Sure, I’d walked a
H I G H
trail or two in my youth, but never climbed a serious mountain. I asked my
fellow leaders if any of them had executed a technical climb. None had. So
we planned one — a big one. During our nine months of preparation, 60% of
our team had to drop out; we invested, we studied, we sacrificed, we trained.
Boy, did we train. And on July 17, 2010, five tired but exhilarated executive
officers of Texas Health summited Longs Peak, Colorado (all 14,259 feet of it).
“Climb a mountain” took on an entirely new meaning. We realized the sweat
it takes to reach base camp, we faced the risks involved and saw the value of
the teamwork required. When we speak with our respective employees now,
we can genuinely convey the energy it takes to reach a summit.
By definition, leaders guide by example; leaders explore. Just like in
mountain climbing, leadership is risky, which is why so many stop actively
showing the way. CIOs need to be practicing visionaries. They cannot rely
on how they operated 20 years ago or even one year ago. They cannot just
talk about initiatives like social media, mobile working or the paperless
office; they need to live it. Clichés might make communication easier, but
my advice is to develop your own experience-based story that will increase
your credibility. Pick the peak and elevate your authenticity.
l View the Texas Health climb at tinyurl.com/3x4nce5
l Ed Marx plans to scale Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro in May. He blogs at
histalk2.com/category/ed-marx and tweets at @marxists
Longs Peak (14,259ft); the highest point
in the Rocky Mountain National Park.
50 issue eight I
Photo: Getty Images
“The cliché ‘climb
a mountain’ took on
an entirely new meaning.
Now, we can genuinely
convey the energy it takes
to reach a summit.”
I