by John Mark V. Tuazon

At a time when automation of business processes was the biggest fad among large enterprises, it was natural for CIOs to report to CFOs because such transformations occurred mostly in the areas of finance, such as in deploying accounting packages.

As businesses expanded— and as technological innovation became more fast-paced—IT deployments have gone out from the old setup and spilled over to influence the way entire organizations carry out their work.

A recent Gartner survey, however, reveals that more and more IT organizations are finding themselves easing back into the old setup, especially due to the recent financial crisis and the fact that higher-ups are still stuck in the IT-as-a-cost-center conundrum.

In the survey of over 480 senior finance managers, 42% of IT organizations are already reporting to the CFO, while a staggering 53% prefer to move to this setup.

Gartner’s survey talked with finance controllers across the globe. Computerworld Philippines ran its own survey, asking local CIOs about reporting setups in their own companies. Of those surveyed, only 25% said they report to the CFO, while 65% report to their respective CEOs.

Of those CIOs who report to their CFOs, 80% said the setup has been beneficial to their company, while the remaining 20% said otherwise.

Surprisingly, all of those who responded that they are not currently reporting to the CFO said their IT organizations are better off under the CFO.

“Where the CIO should report is a question as old as the CIO role itself,” said John Van Decker, research vice president at Gartner. “CFO reporting can lead to success if the CFO has a deep understanding of IT’s value.”

CULTIVATING CFO-CIO RELATIONSHIP

Therein lays the effectiveness of this setup: CFOs who appreciate the work of IT understand the intricacies of the department’s cost requirements, and would generally vote in favor of IT investment.

This, however, is hardly the case in reality, according to Mayi Valdes, director of operations at Encash, an independent deployer of ATM machines. “CFOs tend to look at the cost of IT projects–and will advocate evaluations looking for the most ‘cost-effective’ (or cheapest) solutions,” he relates, adding that this strategy has been proven, time and again, to be ineffective.

In the Gartner report, analysts said CIOs should invest on a CFO-CIO relationship, and that they “must understand the impact their CFOs have on technology decisions in their organizations and ensure that they are providing the CFO with the appropriate understanding of technology.”

On the flipside, Valdes— who reports directly to the company’s President—says CFOs should function primarily to mitigate enthusiasm on IT projects, and not to adversely control budgets, which could potentially cripple the entire organization. “[Their role is] to remind the IT Head, as well as the project champions, that the real objective of any business strategy is to remain competitive and profitable— and not to be the first to use new technologies,” he explains.

STREAMLINING BUREAUCRACY

The CFO-CIO reporting structure is an ongoing raging debate among most organizations around the world, with CIOs pining for long-overdue recognition of their department’s vital importance to the enterprise.

Aside from the fact that it is in the finance department where IT’s role was first appreciated, CFOs offer a buffer for the CEO who often do not understand the way CIOs talk about their technology implementations, according to a CIO.com article by Thomas Wallgum.

“There was also, perhaps not coincidentally, always a little breathing room between CEOs and the expanding and bewildering IT departments,” he writes. “Of course, the CFOs spoke in 1’s and 0’s too—but the gulf between the two departments always seemed vast. Over the years, CEOs wanted constant control over ballooning IT spend. And who better to do that than the Chief Bean Counter?”

Randy Sac, IT infrastructure and services head at marine terminal operator Asian Terminals, argues that since IT has earned itself a C-level position over the years of efficient implementation, CIOs should be at the same level as the CFOs or the COOs, especially when it comes to decision making for their own departments. “[They] should [all] be in the same level, reporting directly to CEO simply because IT deployments are aligned to whatever the business mission and vision is, as set by the management committee, headed by the CEO,” he retorts.

Valdes, meanwhile, believes that adding another layer in the decision-making process is at the least counter-intuitive, and at the most counter-productive. “Putting another layer in the decision-making process provides delays in the implementation of IT strategies. In fact, the IT strategy may even be killed at the level of the CFO, should the CFO decide against an IT initiative,” he posits, adding that going against this tide means deviating from recent views of IT as a strategic enabler for any company.

This view is shared by Lito Estacio, chief information officer at Cypress Semiconductors Philippines. “Today’s time calls for speed, accuracy, and competitiveness. IT provides these attributes. Why create an organizational bureaucracy if the shortest path is a straight line?” he asks.

THE DOWNTURN EFFECT

The answer could be evident based on the signs of the times. According to the recent State of the CIO report, a global survey of IT leaders conducted by CIO.com, 43% of CIOs are currently reporting to the CEO, down three percentage points from 2009 data. A rise of three percentage points to 19%, on the other hand, was seen in CIOs reporting to the CFO.

CIO.com’s Wallgum provides an analysis: “The dip from 2009 to 2010 is evidence of the downstream effect of the global meltdown and the New Normal in IT: CEOs clamped down on spending and, in some instances, shifted CIO reporting relations to CFO,” he pointed out.

Considering that IT project implementations don’t come cheap, it is highly plausible that the economic downturn had to do with the shift in reporting structures. Valdes, however, downplays this claim, saying that “the more IT savvy a CEO, the more chances the CIO will be a direct report,” and that management views of IT—more than economic factors—play the bigger role in such circumstances.

CFOS AS IT DECISION-MAKERS

The debate is apparent, and all the more relevant given the recent economic conditions, but the discourse begs the question: how effective, really, is the CFO in making decisions for IT?

Not so much, if Cypress’s Estacio is to be asked. “Nothingpersonal, but when CFO’s make IT decisions, the beneficial impact is most likely to be shortlived,” he candidly suggests.

Estacio says the management depends on information— or good data—to make decisions, so the burden to influence the management lies in the hands of the CIO. Additionally, he says, CIOs and CFOs often do not meet eye-to-eye with expenditures. “IT strategic expenditures are planned way ahead of time, and CFOs don’t have a vision of the IT infrastructure requirements,” he adds.

Valdes provides a humorous quip, if businesses still opt for a CIO-CFO reporting structure: “The biggest contribution of a CIO is providing relevant management information at the right time,” he reasons. “If the CIO reported to the CFO, then the senior/upper management of the company will have to content themselves with financial information and statistics as of month-end.”

STRIKING THE BALANCE

IT spending and budgeting is a tricky territory, one mired by constant tugs and pulls between the IT head and the financial controller. Granted, IT projects are strategic enablers of the company, but the reality is the organization simply cannot grant every IT head’s wish.

The challenge, therefore, lies in justifying the effects of IT implementation, whether on the process aspect or on the bottom line view. “The fine line that draws the balance between IT Investment and minimizing costs is the returnon- investment (ROI),” Estacio suggests. “Generating ROI analysis and being able to sort a major decision out of it should be process-driven, and not based on personality or position.”

Valdes, meanwhile, says that CIOs should look further away from saying that IT saves the company money, and into throwing arguments based on how much revenue IT can bring to the firm. “The myth that automating processes leads to savings in costs has been shattered many times over. CIOs need to see the impact in revenue increases to justify IT initiatives,” he claims.

Not all implementations carry income-generating facets, however. So for CIOs cramped between the unfortunate place of managing costs while looking for IT solutions, the choice is to continuously hunt for alternatives, as in the case of Jonas San Luis, assistant vice president for management information system, Insular Life Health Care. “As a CIO, I look for solutions that are reasonable and relatively affordable. If I find the solution to be too expensive, I simply look for an alternative. That way, there’s a bigger chance of getting the IT investment approved.”

A CURIOUS CASE

Lorraine Belo, chief information officer, Wilcon Builders Supply, is one of very rare circumstances— fortunate ones at that—where CFOs and CIOs work hand in hand, especially because Belo wears the two hats at once. “We do not have an official CFO as both CIO and CEO share CFO responsibilities,” she shares.

Belo says this setup has thus far been beneficial to her company, especially in realizing her visions for IT. “It makes the process of updating our IT infrastructure more efficient,” she explains.

Having insight from two departments of the company gives new power to the IT department, according to Belo. “Being a CFO with knowledge in any other field related to a company is certainly a plus as he can better understand the situation,” she posits.

In the end, Belo echoes the view that at the end of the day, achieving the goals of the organization is of utmost importance. “I believe that the CIO should consult with both the CFO and CEO. They must make sure that they are all on the same page when it comes to achieving goals set by the company.”

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By Maxwell Cooter
Techworld.com
July 8, 2010

LONDON - Nearly a quarter of all British companies would find it possible to assess how frequently an application is being used within an organisation. That’s according to a survey from Centrix Software, which also found that only a quarter of respondents would find it easy to obtain this information.

But Lisa Hammond, Centrix’s CEO said that the true position could be even worse. “I think that’s a slight over-estimation. In our dealings with customers, I’d say the figure was lower than that. It’s something that companies do find hard to do.”

She said that there were differing results depending on the size of organisation. “When you have 100s of PCs to look at it’s easier than dealing with 1000s - then it can become very difficult. For example,” she said, ” we had one customer who had 180 million rows of data to look at. The other way to make it easier is to just look at one application. If that’s all your interested in, it becomes much more manageable.”

It’s not only usage that organisations find hard to measure, companies find it hard to get a handle on costs too. Nearly a third (31 percent) said it would be impossible, or very difficult, to obtain information on how much those applications were costing the company - again, only about a quarter of companies could measure this accurately.

This lack of measurement could cause difficulties for companies looking to move to virtualisation, said Hammond.

When companies plan a move to virtualisation, said Hammond, they need to know three things: which applications are being used; the usage pattern (ie where are they being used and when) and what devices they’re being run on. The big mistake people make when moving to virtualisation - is look at the device only. You need to look at everything on that device and the usage pattern as well.”

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
May 5, 2010

BOSTON - In one way, the global recession “felt like more of the same” for Microsoft CIO Tony Scott. “The boss comes in and says, ‘We want to cut costs.’”

But now, as the economy shows signs that a recovery is under way, “How many of us know how to grow?” Scott said during an event held in Boston on Tuesday by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council.

“The economy has flushed out the weak players. The strong have survived and picked up market share,” he said. “We’re talking big growth — right around the corner.”

Scott already has an ample IT environment to maintain for Microsoft’s roughly 93,000 employees. The company has 7,000 production servers and 11 production data centers, according to a slide Scott showed the crowd.

Save for a single instance of SAP, Microsoft has few packaged applications, Scott said. “What we prefer to do is act as a place where we can run our tier-one apps with Microsoft technology.” Microsoft is also famous for serving as a beta tester on its own products before making them generally available.

These days, “We’re taking all of our tier-one apps and moving them all to the cloud,” he added.

Cloud-style deployment allows applications to be provisioned dynamically in accordance with demand, versus dedicating a set of servers to a particular application all the time. Therefore, it is also distinct from traditional application hosting.

Microsoft is still shaking off that traditional style of IT and its inefficiencies, he said.

“We in the software industry have trained you to buy from us at the end of a quarter or at the end of the year,” Scott said.

That means Microsoft’s sales systems often sit idle only to explode into “mayhem” at quarter- or year-end, he said. Virtualization has helped, but only so much, he said.

In a brief interview following his talk, Scott said he is also interested in moving Microsoft’s SAP instance to a cloud-based delivery system. “Right now I’m hard-provisioning app servers and scaling that for peak demand.” But there is nothing to announce as of yet, he added.

Scott spends about 30 percent of his time on the road, talking to customers, and the topic of cloud computing comes up frequently, he said. Cloud-based services, especially for basic applications like e-mail, will be widely adopted not long from now, Scott predicted.

“In five years, I’m not sure there’ll be anyone saying that it’s really important that they run their own e-mail system,” he said. “It’s going to be like someone saying I want to run my own electric plant because I want reliable electricity.”

CIOs have three other broad transitions to make as the economy rebounds, said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business, during a panel discussion later at the event.

First, organizations are becoming more “scientific,” driven by insights into hard data, said McAfee, who is known for his association with the Enterprise 2.0 movement. “That’s in contrast to the way decisions get made now, which is basically, ‘Trust me, I’m a smart guy.’”

Companies should also use technology to more effectively orchestrate how they do business, McAfee said. But at the same time, company leaders “need to get out of the way,” to let their employees “self-organize” using social-networking tools and related technologies, he added.

CIOs who don’t acknowledge the rise of cloud computing are in jeopardy, McAfee said. “The cloud is about as inevitable as the electrification of factories. It took a long time, but it was just flat-out the answer. If the CIO sees their role as maintaining some kind of physical plant, that will be more and more peripheral.”

For his part, Scott warned that “the enemy of the future is creeping incrementalism, laying a little more glue on top of what we already have.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
March 26, 2010

A group of line agency CIOs on Thursday urged the administration to appoint a government CIO, who will oversee the deployment of inter-agency IT projects and push ICT industry agenda at the cabinet level.

The call to appoint a central public-sector CIO stemmed from the long-running inefficiency in IT implementations across government, with projects not having a clear strategic direction per agency, the CIO Forum (CIOF) chairperson explained.

“The framework for IT implementations in government is not clear,” said Maria Esperanza Espino, forum president and current CIO of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority. “Similarly, there is no leadership who is capable enough to carry out that framework.”

The appointment of a government CIO will solidify the role of ICT as an economic tool for nation-building. “Now, ICT is seen as just a tool—not even a strategic one—to automate the process in government agencies,” remarked Daniel Pabellon, chairman, CIO Forum Foundation (CIOFF), an organization of past agency CIOs.

While automation of processes is good, Espino said IT should not be relegated only to such. “IT should be part of the management strategy, so somebody ‘up there’ needs to call the shots and set policies and standards,” she said.

The government has in recent years been setting aside an e-Government fund worth P4 billiion a year to finance technology implementations in government. The CICT (Commission on Information and Communications Technology) administers this fund, spreading it across the agencies.

The problem, however, is there is no central management that prioritizes projects across all agencies, despite a standing criteria with CICT for fund requests that puts “inter-agency projects” at the top of the list. This creates a waste of resources, according to Espino, because some projects are either redundant with other agencies or are too inefficient to last the long haul.

“That is why one of CIOF’s advocacies is to update the GISP (Government Information Systems Plan),” Espino said. “Right now, there is no timetable, no priority list, and no business case for projects in the GISP.”

The GISP is a menu of systems to be developed in government drafted in 1997, a clear 13-year disparity that no longer addresses current ICT woes in government.

This is one of the reasons why the CIOF and CIOFF both strongly advocated the establishment of a DICT (Department of ICT), which was eventually shelved when Senate closed its session in January. “We need to put some teeth in government IT,” Espino said. “DICT is a more mature version of the CICT, which has the power to make policy and regulate the entire ICT sector.”

Right now, the CICT, created pursuant to an executive order, acts merely as an overseer of other connected agencies relating to ICT. “It is not even clothed by legal authority,” Pabellon remarked, adding that this often is the cause for fund requests to be questioned during budget hearings in Congress.

With a DICT in place, an all-encompassing body will be able to traffic and promote integrated IT projects in government by drafting a common plan for the architecture in the public sector. “The chairman [of DICT], subsequently, can be the CIO,” Espino clarified.

As regards to the skills criteria for the government CIO, Espino said the candidate should at least have competent “technical and management skills.” “Management skills are needed so he can make a business case for IT in government, while technical skills will enable him to communicate the IT strategy,” she explained.

The appointment of a government CIO likewise hopes to address common pain points for IT implementations in government, such as the difficulty of procurement of IT solutions and equipment.

As of writing, IT procurement in the public sector is governed by RA 9184 otherwise known as the General Procurement Reform Act. Under the Act, procurement is divided into four categories: goods, services, consultancy and infrastructure.

According to Espino, the mere definition of terms within the act poses a problem for IT projects, because almost always, IT products and services “fall under everything or nothing of the categories.” “CIOs now have a problem in packaging their project proposals, and would sometimes end up not getting what they initially needed,” she shared.

One of CIOFF’s advocacies, Pabellon said, is to make the procurement process compatible with IT. “CICT commissioned a study before that revealed that failure in procurement as the top cause of failed IT projects in government,” he said.

Similarly, vendors are shying away from bidding for public contracts because the process takes too long and they invest too much to get very little in the end. “There really is a need to streamline the procurement process,” Pabellon added.

In the same vein, government should also look into outsourcing some of their processes, according to visiting IBM executive Kevin North, who remarked that he is “surprised” the government is so backward in terms of ICT. “Why would government want to do everything themselves?,” he lamented, adding that the government is using so much resource just to manage everyday operations, leaving little to no investment on new services for citizens.

“Outsourcing can free up some of the CAPEX funds for government, which can be diverted to public services,” North added. IBM is on a global crusade to make “smarter governments” that leverage IT in order to deliver more efficient services to citizens.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon

During the early days of technological development, IT was traditionally seen as a nice embellishment to any company’s operations, providing any firm with the right push in being competitively advantageous against other companies.

But recent changes in economic conditions, the rapid pace of technological innovation, and the mounting demand to meet customer expectations have changed the way business is done, subsequently shifting the tides for IT’s role in the company.

“IT acting as a cost center meant not viewing technology as a strategic partner of the company,” notes Jaime D.L. Caro, department chair of the computer science program at the University of the Philippines, during his keynote speech at Computerworld Philippines’ yearend CIO Forum held last December, with the theme “Revolutionizing the IT Department: from Cost Center to Profit Center.”

In driving organizational efficiency, Caro states that aligning the workforce with the company’s strategic initiatives is key to driving growth and earnings. “The role of the CIO, therefore, lies in aligning IT with overall business goals,” he explains, “thereby getting the best from its people, processes and information.”
But in the progressively competitive business environment, the CIO’s task quickly becomes a two-fold balancing act, according to Caro. “CIOs must be able to foster technological innovation and workforce productivity, while optimizing operational costs and delivering ROI quickly,” he notes.

The IT department, therefore, moves away from its utilitarian function and eases into becoming a critical element in driving profit for the organization. “The CIO now needs to understand the business carefully, and articulate a clear vision for IT governance,” Caro points out. “IT, therefore, becomes both the enabler and the driver, by providing tools for delivering business change that increase the company’s bottom line.”

The Cloud Agenda

This “balancing act” scenario for most CIOs is echoed by Winston Damarillo, CEO of G2iX (Global Gateway Innovation Exchange), a software development firm with Morph Labs, a cloud computing design provider, under its helm. “For CIOs, the year 2010 means balancing [the company’s] focus on cost, risk, and growth,” he says.

The recent financial crisis, Damarillo says, has forced companies to take a second look at utilizing its dormant IT resources. “There has been a lot of innovation last year, so we’re seeing 2010 as the year for reinvesting in IT again,” he explains.

One key technology that continued to gain momentum is cloud computing, which Damarillo illustrates as “taking the entire stack of a company’s infrastructure, and making all of it deployable by software.”

Cloud computing, according to Damarillo, enables convergence and optimization of the IT infrastructure. “Right now, only 9% of actual physical infrastructure for every firm is utilized. Think of it as having a generator for every home; you buy the whole thing even if you don’t really use it all the time,” he says.
This costly method of using infrastructure is costing companies revenue, while enabling other firms to get ahead of the competition. Cloud computing, Damarillo narrates, is easily deployable, scalable, flexible, and, most importantly, very cost-effective. “The technology gives you 30% to 50% of immediate cost savings due to less hardware purchases. So you are bound to save no matter what,” he explains.

This potential cost benefit from cloud computing is continuously driving the market to prime, Damarillo shares, with analysts predicting a $160 billion reach by 2011. “The market is transitioning rapidly, and the technology is creating new markets especially in developing countries,” he notes. “What makes it so powerful is enabling companies to consume resources on demand.”

During Computerworld Philippines’ bi-annual meeting with CIOs, Damarillo demonstrated the power of cloud computing by pooling together servers, databases and applications using their own Morph application. In just about 20 minutes, all network protocols and addresses are already in place, solidly verifying Damarillo’s claim of quick and easy deployment. “It’s a lot like drawing a map of your infrastructure,” he quips.

The Cloud’s Nebulous Future

Yet despite all the bells and whistles cloud computing providers have continuously harped on, adoption remained at a dismal rate. According to an independent survey by CIO.com in June 2009, at least 51% of surveyed CIOs have security concerns with the cloud, while 37% fear losing control of their data.

The cloud’s reliability and uptime guarantee also poses real concern for IT executives. Just this year, Gmail’s downtime sometime in February and the number of outages that followed months after raised particular concern over the consistency of cloud services. The relatively infantile stage of the technology is hindering companies from quickly jumping into the bandwagon.

Damarillo attributes this trend to a general apprehension about new technologies, comparing the new technology to previous innovation such as mobile phones and the Internet, which eventually became mainstream. “It’s important for CIOs to gain complete knowledge and understanding of how cloud computing works,” he suggests. “It actually has mechanisms in place to provide security, so there’s no need to worry.”
The challenge, hence, for CIOs next year, Damarillo says, is to “get to know the cloud” in order to fully experience its benefits. “Eventually, the competition will force them to move their data center into the cloud, as more adopters reap the multitude of benefits,” he predicts.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
January 8, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Will 2010 be the year Facebook and Twitter take over the business world? The social networks are growing in popularity by the day, both for personal and business use, yet many IT and business executives remain wary of the risks posed by the online services and skeptical about potential benefits.

A number of Web-savvy CIOs are using Twitter to spread their views, engage with colleagues and discuss technology, yet a survey shows that more than half of CIOs in the United States do not allow employees to log onto social networking sites “for any reason” while they’re at work. Another survey conducted in the United Kingdom found that nearly three-quarters of the top brands had no official presence on Twitter, despite the service’s potential for reaching customers. (See related story, 12 CIOs who Tweet.)

Business users are logging onto public social networking sites far more often than social networks sponsored by their employers, but attempts to block such activity simply will not work, says IDC analyst Caroline Dangson, who researches enterprise collaboration and social technologies.

As workforces become more distributed, and even office workers spend time working at home, people will use personal devices for business use and it will be difficult for IT to make blanket proclamations banning tools as widely used as Facebook and Twitter.

“This concept of trying to control or block [social media usage], it is not going to work,” Dangson says. “There’s going to be a divide, with some companies that shun public social networks and are fearful of using them, and some who embrace it and take the risk.”

An IDC survey of 4,710 U.S. workers in October found that 34% use consumer social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, and 9% use microblogging sites like Twitter for business purposes.

Yet many of their employers are trying to stop them from doing so.

A Robert Half Technology survey of 1,400 CIOs from U.S. companies with at least 100 employees found that 54% completely prohibit use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work. Nineteen percent allow social networking sites for business purposes only, while another 16% allow “limited personal use.” Just 10% permit use of social networking sites “for any type of personal use.”

Some brands have begun using Facebook and Twitter to reach consumers, both to promote themselves and communicate about company failures. Rackspace, for example, has used Twitter extensively to communicate with users after several power outages knocked customer services offline.

But large companies are also avoiding social networking sites in droves. New Media Age, a United Kingdom publication, analyzed the top 500 U.K. brands and found that 74% have no presence at all on Twitter, and just 10% use the site daily.

Dangson believes Facebook is a good setting for businesses to reach consumers, but that there is a greater business opportunity in Twitter, particularly in business-to-business markets, because “everything is public and open.”

Twitter “is a fantastic direct marketing tool,” she says. “People have opted in to follow you and follow your messages.”

Others tout the potential of LinkedIn, another major social network that is business-oriented, and often used to build business relationships and find new jobs.

Users of Facebook and Twitter likely care only about the sites’ usefulness, but many financial analysts have wondered how these social networks can create a compelling business model. Out of all of them, LinkedIn may have the greatest financial future, and potential to be acquired by a larger company, says Robert Armstrong, a financial analyst and senior columnist at Dow Jones Investment Banker.

Major Web properties like Google and eBay have been successful because their business model is based upon transactions, he notes. Facebook and Twitter seem to lack that advantage, but LinkedIn is centered around a pretty major type of transaction – the hiring of a new employee.

Even if you’re not seeking a new job, LinkedIn may be the best place for IT folks looking to exchange information with colleagues. An IDC survey of 204 IT decision-makers found that LinkedIn is the best social network for finding information to support IT purchases. Twitter was ranked second, followed by Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

Clearly, use of social networks will continue to increase in 2010. Company executives need to accept this reality – they don’t have to take a hands-off, anything-goes approach, but they do need policies governing employee use and a strategy for corporate use, analysts say.

In the next year, CIOs will get more involved, and “we’ll see companies writing policies and guidelines,” partly to protect workers, Dangson says. Businesses will also increase use of Facebook and Twitter for CRM, she predicts, saying CRM is “the most compelling business case for public social media sites where customers frequently voice their opinions on matters of everyday life, including the brands in which they interact.”

Forrester analyst Augie Ray, who studies social marketing, says companies like Best Buy and Comcast are have done a good job interacting with customers on social sites. This is necessary in part because consumers’ attention has been distracted from traditional forms of advertising.

“They’re embracing it because they have to,” Ray says. “Brands that do get it, understand that they can engage with and have a two-way dialogue with consumers.”

Companies need a strategy that takes into account who their audience is and how they prefer to be reached, Ray says. Social media efforts can’t be half-baked. Starting a company Facebook page, putting a lot of effort into it up-front and then never updating it again is not effective marketing.

Businesses should also have a plan for how to use social media in times of crisis, because Facebook and Twitter are often the most direct ways of reaching customers. The moment a public relations crisis happens is not the time you want to be asking the question “how will we respond?” Ray says.

Companies looking to improve brand image via social marketing also need to be wary of the legitimate privacy concerns their customers may have. Marketers need to be transparent about what data they collect and how they are using it, Ray says.

“As individuals become more concerned about information they’re giving up and how they’re using it, that’s going to have a big impact on companies,” he says. “There’s certainly some concern in the marketplace and government entities about use of marketing data. … Marketers just want to be fully transparent, which they haven’t always been.”

Privacy and security concerns also have businesses wondering how they can use social networking to improve collaboration among internal employees, without exposing themselves to risk. Companies are wary of employees releasing sensitive information like layoffs and acquisitions.

“The risk that comes with social media is how viral it is,” Dangson says. “It’s the risk of scale that can work both ways.”

That’s why many businesses will opt to create their own internal social networks, which can be controlled and open only to employees, and perhaps to business partners.

In 2010, you’re likely to hear the phrase “Facebook for the enterprise.” Salesforce.com recently announced “Chatter,” a social-networking application that is designed for internal business use but can also incorporate content from public social networking sites by taking advantage of the Facebook and Twitter APIs. Therefore, employees can receive in the same feed a mix of private content from their bosses and fellow employees, and public content from Facebook and Twitter that is related to their jobs.

Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy for Salesforce, says he doesn’t know anyone without a Facebook account. Eventually, he thinks employees will develop extensive corporate profiles as well, and relationships between the public and corporate profiles will develop.

“The question we are asking everyone is ‘why is it you know more about strangers on Facebook than you do about your colleagues and employees?’” Francis says. “You know who has gone to the movies, but you don’t necessarily know about when one of your key sales reps has just visited a major account.”

Even though many CIOs seem wary of social networking in the workplace, Francis is confident that IT executives will ultimately embrace the trend.

“I think that every CIO is looking at what’s been going on with the rise of social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” Francis says. “Companies are wondering, ‘how can I capture that energy, that relevance, that better way of managing all the information that’s important to me, how can I capture that for my company?’”

Just as in Facebook, Chatter allows people and applications to send users news in real time, but the security model will allow IT to determine what types of information employees can see. Salesforce believes this granular privacy control will help assuage concerns businesses have about the security of public social networking sites.

There are also private alternatives to Twitter, such as a service called Yammer, which lets companies create streams available only to their own employees. New privacy controls for Facebook, which have been criticized by many users for making too much information public, may ultimately make it easier for people to present different information to business colleagues and personal contacts.

“What companies are really asking for is a better way to collaborate,” Francis says.

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By Kim S. Nash
CIO.com
December 16, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - What about the CIO role do you think is changing?

I don’t think we’ve seen significant enough change. But in the next five years, it will be very dramatic. Interesting disruptions loom, such as cloud computing, Google’s Android operating system and mobile telecom.

Cloud computing–any computing over the Internet–just isn’t as good as enterprise computing. It’s not as secure, not as fast, not as reliable as your internal network.

But like all disruptions, it’s getting bigger and better. As it does, it pulls applications, one by one, out of the corporate network into its world. CIOs have to manage that.

In the past, the CIO’s role has been deciding what services and what software he is going to make available to the users of his network. As users source more of what they use from the Internet, they will use applications more on an as-needed basis.

The CIO’s role must be to help people find what they need on the Internet and create security systems to be sure the corporation is not compromised.

Can’t CIOs just block these applications?

Not really. Look at e-mail. E-mail is increasingly done on BlackBerrys rather than on laptops and in airports rather than at the office.

That’s just the first manifestation of individuals choosing to use one platform versus another and it’s very hard to stop. Others are deciding to use Google Docs, not Microsoft Word.

Should we still be talking about business-IT alignment?

Unfortunately, we’re not beyond it yet, but it’s a problem with all management, not just CIOs. Executives conceive of their markets incorrectly.

Most companies developing a new product know they can’t make something that does everything for everyone. So they develop a product to target a segment of the market. Forty-five-to 65-year-old males with college degrees. Middle-income females with kids.

CIOs try to define the average need of all the customers–the users–in a particular department. But the average customer doesn’t exist.

What should they be doing?

The customer is actually the wrong unit of analysis. It’s the job that the customer is trying to accomplish that’s the correct unit.

Understanding the job connects your development efforts with what causes the consumer to purchase and the user to adopt. The job is like true north for CIOs.

When you nail a job with your system, competitors have a very hard time copying you.

Every CEO wants to make money for his company. They want to be smart and maybe cool. They want to be Steve Jobs. What do CIOs want to be?

Deep down in my heart, I know CIOs want to make people happy. They want to make their customers as effective in doing their jobs as they possibly can. When you see them offering technology for technology’s sake, or see their customers having to do workarounds because the data doesn’t come at them in a way that helps, it’s because the CIOs have thought of their world by product category. “We need to upgrade the ERP system.” Not “We need to find a new way to coordinate this information to help this person do his job.”

I’m surprised to hear CIOs still talking about how they can get a seat at the table. Do they have an inferiority complex?

When CIOs are not pulled by fellow C-level executives to the table, it’s because CIOs have framed their mission by product or customer category. Not by this idea of doing jobs well.”

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By Leo King
Computerworld UK
December 11, 2009

LONDON - Chief information officers in the UK are still spending two thirds of their time keeping the lights on, according to research.

Sixty four percent of their time was spent managing existing IT systems, and only 36 percent on delivering innovative technology, the research, by Colman Parkes for SaaS vendor Salesforce, found.

The CIOs expressed frustration at the lack of time they had to innovate. Of the 100 surveyed, 96 said coming up with new ideas and systems was meant to be an important part of their job.

Part of the problem was money, 60 percent said, and over half highlighted time as an issue. But nearly a third said the attitude of senior management, combined with company culture, presented an obstacle to change.

CIOs had trouble effecting change because of a lack of influence. Only 14 percent said they sit on the management board.

One of the areas of change that some CIOs expect to make is a shift to some cloud computing. While 38 percent use software on the web, in the next five years a further 17 percent expect to make the move.

Mobile working was another key area, with 34 percent saying it was a key challenge in their company. A quarter said their company had “not yet” resolved the issue of giving mobile workers access to applications when they need them.

Andy Jacques, VP Northern Europe at Salesforce, which commissioned the survey, said CIOs wanted to “go beyond” simply maintaining existing systems and instead deliver change.

The survey questioned 100 senior It directors and was evenly split between small companies of 100 — 500 employees and 50 medium/large companies with over 500 employees.

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By Thomas Wailgum
CIO.com
November 16, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Corporate IT budgets may have gotten slashed in 2009, but that apparently didn’t stop companies from investing in their ERP software this year.

Forrester Research survey data of nearly 400 North American and European enterprise software decision-makers shows that two-thirds of companies are actively investing in ERP application portfolios-from pilot projects and implementations to expansions and upgrades, notes Forrester principal analyst Paul Hamerman, in the report The State Of ERP 2009: Market Forces Drive Specialization, Consolidation, And Innovation (subscription required).

Even though the survey was fielded during the fourth-quarter of 2008-when the global recession was sending businesses into full panic and spending lock-down mode-the data shows that just 1 percent of respondents had plans to decrease their ERP investment.

Even with the frustration over maintenance fees and upgrade costs and today’s corporate emphasis on business intelligence, analytics and CRM applications, an ERP suite is still considered the “backbone” of today’s enterprises: supporting common administrative functions of finance and procurement, and often supporting the company’s main operations and assets, revenue-generating activities, supply chain, and distribution channels, Hamerman points out.

While the amount of ERP investment certainly can be discretionary, it appears that it is not optional-even during a global recession. “This level of activity is significantly higher than the other key packaged application categories,” Hamerman writes, “including customer service, human resource management, order management, and supply chain.”

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By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
November 12, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - In past recessions, IT budget-cut demands handed down to CIOs were deep — and indiscriminate.

“The attitude was, ‘Let’s cut, cut, cut, I don’t care,’” said Jerry Luftman, a professor of information systems at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

With this recession, IT budgets have been trimmed to be sure, but there has also been “a lot of concern with how IT can be leveraged to reduce the cost of business,” said Luftman, who analyzed a survey released Monday by the Society for Information Management (SIM). The results were released during this week’s SIMposium 09 conference, which was held in Seattle and drew more than 400 CIOs. The Chicago-based group counts 4,000 CIOs and other senior IT leaders as members.

According to this year’s survey of 243 SIM members, “IT cost reduction” ranked fifth in their list of management concerns. Topping the list was “business productivity and cost reduction,” followed by “IT and business alignment.”

As proof that businesses have been willing to invest in IT to save or make more money, the most popular areas of investment this year are business intelligence, server virtualization and ERP (enterprise resource planning).

Investing in the latter two can help companies quickly save money, Luftman said.

BI is a different beast. Analytics can help a company boost its top line. But even though companies are “struggling” with longer-than-expected rollouts, they haven’t given up.

“Because there’s a lot of promise, BI hasn’t been pushed to the wayside,” Luftman said.

Overall, the recession has pinched CIO wallets. Fifty-two percent reported that their 2009 budgets were smaller than the prior year’s. However, the percentage of CIOs who are expecting their 2010 budgets to be smaller than 2009 shrinks to 28%.

That hasn’t changed their attitudes in one key area.

“Companies are not hiring next year because they worry about what it will cost them from a health-care benefits perspective,” he said.

Instead, CIOs are turning to outsourcing. It is expected to comprise 15% of IT budgets in 2010, versus 12% in 2010. Offshoring of internal employees is also growing fast, expected to take up 6% of budgets in 2010 compared with 4% this year.

Infrastructure spending remains weak, and is expected to fall to 31% next year from 33% now.

“Now is not the time to be a vendor,” he said.

IT budgets this year comprised an average of 3.83% of their company’s revenue, which is up slightly from 3.63% from 2005 to 2008. Twenty-two percent of unlucky CIOs reported their IT budgets comprised 1% or less of their corporate revenues. A lucky 42% reported their budgets comprised 5% or more of revenue.

Another notable data point: The average CIO tenure continues to grow, hitting 4.6 years in 2009. That’s up from 3.6 years just three years ago.

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By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
November 11, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - In past recessions, IT budget-cut demands handed down to CIOs were deep — and indiscriminate.

“The attitude was, ‘Let’s cut, cut, cut, I don’t care,’” said Jerry Luftman, a professor of information systems at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

With this recession, IT budgets have been trimmed to be sure, but there has also been “a lot of concern with how IT can be leveraged to reduce the cost of business,” said Luftman, who analyzed a survey released Monday by the Society for Information Management (SIM). The results were released during this week’s SIMposium 09 conference, which was held in Seattle and drew more than 400 CIOs. The Chicago-based group counts 4,000 CIOs and other senior IT leaders as members.

According to this year’s survey of 243 SIM members, “IT cost reduction” ranked fifth in their list of management concerns. Topping the list was “business productivity and cost reduction,” followed by “IT and business alignment.”

As proof that businesses have been willing to invest in IT to save or make more money, the most popular areas of investment this year are business intelligence, server virtualization and ERP (enterprise resource planning).

Investing in the latter two can help companies quickly save money, Luftman said.

BI is a different beast. Analytics can help a company boost its top line. But even though companies are “struggling” with longer-than-expected rollouts, they haven’t given up.

“Because there’s a lot of promise, BI hasn’t been pushed to the wayside,” Luftman said.

Overall, the recession has pinched CIO wallets. Fifty-two percent reported that their 2009 budgets were smaller than the prior year’s. However, the percentage of CIOs who are expecting their 2010 budgets to be smaller than 2009 shrinks to 28%.

That hasn’t changed their attitudes in one key area.

“Companies are not hiring next year because they worry about what it will cost them from a health-care benefits perspective,” he said.

Instead, CIOs are turning to outsourcing. It is expected to comprise 15% of IT budgets in 2010, versus 12% in 2010. Offshoring of internal employees is also growing fast, expected to take up 6% of budgets in 2010 compared with 4% this year.

Infrastructure spending remains weak, and is expected to fall to 31% next year from 33% now.

“Now is not the time to be a vendor,” he said.

IT budgets this year comprised an average of 3.83% of their company’s revenue, which is up slightly from 3.63% from 2005 to 2008. Twenty-two percent of unlucky CIOs reported their IT budgets comprised 1% or less of their corporate revenues. A lucky 42% reported their budgets comprised 5% or more of revenue.

Another notable data point: The average CIO tenure continues to grow, hitting 4.6 years in 2009. That’s up from 3.6 years just three years ago.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
October 15, 2009

CIOs from the ASEAN region are becoming more involved in the business side of their company’s operations more than their Western counterparts, a global CIO study from IT solutions firm IBM revealed Tuesday.

The study, conducted among 2,500 CIOs around the world, showed that CIOs from the region are increasingly recognizing the need to be deeply involved with the business. “IT is no longer a separate part of the company in most successful organizations,” said Sandy Vann, country leader, IBM global business services, IBM Philippines.

Vann said ASEAN CIOs are driven primarily by their respective company’s business processes, driving these executives to see themselves as less of an IT manager and more of a member of the company’s strategic planning team.

“ASEAN CIOs have more voice in the business, which enables them to help drive revenues up,” Vann claimed, adding that traditionally, ASEAN businesses have more personnel taking care of technical matters than their Western counterparts.

This shift in the role of the company CIO is pervasive around the world, as majority of information executives surveyed in the study say they are slowly easing out of managing technical aspects of the company and moving into strategically leveraging IT for the business.

In fact, Vann said, most of the CIOs surveyed are spending less on ongoing business, and are “exerting efforts and putting investment on slowly transforming their business.” “84% of the respondents said the simplification of business processes—more than consolidation—act as a major key for growth,” he added.

Of top CIO priorities globally, business intelligence and analytics turned out to be their top visionary plan (83% globally and 71% in ASEAN), followed closely by virtualization (76%), risk management and compliance (71%) and customer and partner collaboration (68%).

“CIOs are investing [heavily] in business analytics capabilities to help them improve decision-making at all levels,” said Fiona Capstick, vice president, geography integration executive, office of the CIO, IBM. “CIOs understand that analytics can be key to new growth markets and in gaining a competitive advantage in these new markets.”

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By Julia King
Computerworld (US)
October 9, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - She was one of the first women to shatter IT’s glass ceiling and become a top technology executive at Xerox Corp. back in the 1980s. She has been a senior vice president at Citibank, CIO for the city of Phoenix and a director at American Express. In the late 1990s, U.S. Vice President Al Gore requested her help with his “reinventing government” program.

So what is the one question that Laraine Rodgers, now president of her own consulting company, Phoenix-based Navigating Transitions, has been asked more than any other?

” ‘Will you fix my PC?’ I get asked that all the time. It’s a situation I’m very familiar with,” she laughs.

There’s no doubt that family — and friends of family, and friends of friends of family — gravitate toward their relatives in IT for help with any and all things digital: cell phones, cameras, GPS gadgets, big-screen TVs, electronic pinball games, you name it.

One network administrator tells how she has come home to find PCs sitting on her front porch — new “patients” from friends and relatives who heard through the grapevine that she had a special talent for ridding computers of viruses, pop-ups and spam.

Every IT person seems to have a few friends-and-family fix-it stories. Even CIOs can’t say no to their loved ones’ pleas for tech help. We asked IT folks to tell us about their most unusual support requests; here are some of our favorites.

Google guru saves day, basks in adulation

Google CIO Ben Fried says that many of the phone calls he receives from his 74-year-old father, an author with 23 history and political science books to his credit, involve questions about either hardware or software. “This is a man whose main tool prior to getting a Mac not that long ago was a 1938 Smith-Corona typewriter,” Fried says.

Fried doesn’t mind fielding unusual support calls, like the one he received from his dad complaining that his computer was running very slow. Upon closer examination, Fried discovered that his father had written the first 275 pages of the book he was working on as a footnote — rather than as a document — in Microsoft Word.

Fried simply copied and pasted the manuscript into a text document — a feat that his father responded to by saying, “Son, you’re a genius.” After that, Fried says, the volume of calls from his dad’s friends stepped up for a while.

Hess honcho is family hero

Hess Corp. CIO Jeff Steinhorn describes himself as “the default help desk for my wife, my kids, my friends and my parents.” So it wasn’t at all unusual for him when his 11-year-old son called him at work with “an emergency situation at home.”

Steinhorn recalls, “He had just ordered four tickets online to an exciting amusement park we typically treat the kids to once a year, and he needed to get them printed.” But the printer wasn’t working, and Steinhorn couldn’t troubleshoot and fix it over the phone.

“I know my son’s e-mail ID and password — as every parent of an 11-year-old should — so I went into his account and found the e-mail confirmation number, so that he could take that to the entrance gate and have the tickets reprinted there,” he recalls. But Steinhorn got more than he bargained for. He found a confirmation for 12 tickets at a cost of about $500 charged to his credit card.

“I can only assume that he hit Enter a couple times too many,” Steinhorn says. “I was much less concerned about the printer than I was about the season’s [worth of] passes to the park I had just funded.”

The story does have a happy ending. The Steinhorn family did make it to the amusement park — several times, in fact, since they had a dozen tickets and never managed to get a refund for the extras. “And looking on the bright side, in the end it was just a printer jam, so the actual equipment failure did not end up costing me anything.”

Accenture expert makes multiple connections

Chris Crawford, a global applications architect for internal functions at Accenture in Chicago, recalls the panicked call he received from a good friend who had just purchased and set up a very expensive sound system for his home. His friend couldn’t discern any significant difference in sound quality — despite the great amount of money he had paid for the system.

As it turned out, a woofer on one of the speakers wasn’t hooked up properly. Crawford adjusted the wire and was an instant hero.

Crawford says he’s especially busy with requests around the holidays when friends and family want to know which electronic gadgets he recommends for gift-giving. He even started an internal blog at Accenture where colleagues post their favorite tips and recommendations.

“I like computers so much that it’s fun to be an expert,” Crawford says. “It can also come in handy as an ice breaker at cocktail parties.”

Amerisource Bergen ace gives new meaning to “software support”

Tom Murphy, senior vice president and CIO at Amerisource Bergen, a $70 billion pharmaceutical services company based in Valley Forge, Pa., says he has certainly received his fair share of tech fix-it requests throughout his career. Once, for instance, he was summoned to a former CEO’s home to fix a phone. (He plugged it back in.)

But he’s also gone above and beyond answering calls for high-tech help. He has been asked to fix colleagues’ personal work-life balance issues, and once, he recalls, he even had a request to see if he could help fix a marriage.

“For whatever reason, people have always approached me to discuss personal issues,” Murphy says. “To me, the best part of my job is helping to fix the real ’software’ — i.e., human — challenges.”

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By Computerworld Hong Kong staff
Computerworld Hong Kong
September 30, 2009

HONG KONG - Orange Business Services announced Monday the results from a recent CIO survey in which IT decision-makers identify that unified communications, which refers to simplifying and integrating all forms of communications, can improve productivity.

Respondents indicated that integrating mobile devices into the enterprise, implementing real-time identification through presence, unified messaging, instant messaging, followed by audio conferencing and desktop videoconferencing, can all have a positive impact on business efficiency, said the service provider.

The report, which surveyed more than 600 CIOs from multinational corporations operating in a wide-range of industries, highlighted that on average organizations support at least seven different communication tools and applications used by employees, said Orange, adding that it is this multitude of communication tools that pose increasing challenges to internal collaboration and ultimately slow down business processes and decision-making.

Respondents were asked about the obstacles multiple communications have on their organization. Ninety-five percent agreed that advancements in communication technologies have undoubtedly had a positive impact on business productivity, but they that the speed of communication has been compromised as a result of the increasing number of communication tools in place, said Orange.

Fourty-five percent of CIOs consider that multiple communication channels cause severe delays in colleague response time which can negatively impact business processes and productivity, said Organge.

Another 35 percent agree that uncoordinated or ineffective colleague contact can hamper an organization’s ability to meet deadlines on time. This has a direct link to lost sales and revenue or increased customer dissatisfaction, Orange added.

An increasing number of companies, nearly 41 percent, are currently exploring unified communication strategies, while another 15 percent are trialing or evaluating a unified communications system, said Orange, adding that 6 percent of organizations have fully implemented related products.

Respondents identified that customer services, 33 percent, and sales, 28 percent, are the major beneficiaries of unified communications, Orange noted.

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By Denise Dubie
Network World (US)

FRAMINGHAM (09/25/2009) - CIOs and IT leaders can see the light at the end of the dark economic tunnel, but that hasn’t shifted the majority of their focus from increasing productivity and reducing costs, according to recent research.

Recession-resistant: 10 technologies CIOs are still buying

More than half of nearly 250 CIOs, CTOs and IT executives surveyed by the Society for Information Management (SIM) said their top business concern in 2009 is business productivity and cost reduction. About one-third of respondents noted IT and business alignment as a concern, followed by close to one-fourth who indicated they were concerned with business agility and speed to market. Nearly 20% of those surveyed by SIM said business process re-engineering topped their list and 17% listed IT cost reduction, which ranked fifth among IT management concerns in SIM’s 2009 IT Industry Trend Survey.

“The results of the study confirm that the economic downturn has caused a significant shift in priorities,” said Jerry Luftman, a former SIM vice president and executive director of Graduate Information Systems Programs and distinguished professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, in a statement. “IT executives are focusing on ensuring that business is conducted efficiently to get more mileage out of their budgets.”

And while cost-cutting remains a priority, SIM’s findings show that IT compensation might not continue to be impacted. Some 80% of respondents said staff salaries stayed the same or increased in 2009, and 91% expect pay to remain flat or increase in 2010. As for budgets, 52% experienced budget decreases in 2009, but looking ahead to 2010, 27% expects IT funds to increase and 45% expect finances the stay the same

Among the technologies and IT project areas that respondents indicated to SIM were a priority in the coming months are business intelligence, server virtualization, ERP systems, customer corporate portals, enterprise application integration and continuity planning/disaster recovery.

Separately, the Computer Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, polled some 200 U.S.-based IT organizations and learned that overall the confidence in business is growing. The survey revealed that nearly half of companies polled expect to increase investment in research and development and other revenue generating initiatives. It also found that nearly one-third plan to increase spending on technology. And more than half of those surveyed expect to keep staff levels the same, while nearly 30% expect to increase hiring in the next six months.

Looking ahead “67% of firms rate the outlook for the IT industry positively, compared to 55% today,” the report states.

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By Julia King
Computerworld (US)
September 23, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - The newly minted college grad comes to your door with a four-year computer science degree and a résumé full of technical acronyms. He knows about simulation and modeling, parallel computation and Internet software development. He’s very familiar with Web 2.0 applications and social networking technologies. He has even built a Web site to showcase his talents. Surely, he’s every employer’s dream entry-level IT staffer, right?

Not exactly, CIOs say. More often than not, there are significant gaps between what even the smartest and most tech-savvy graduates learned in school and what CIOs need from new members of their IT staffs.

What’s more is that most companies have neither the time nor the money for on-the-job training. They’d prefer that universities incorporate more training for real-world IT roles into their curricula so that graduates are ready to start contributing their first day on the job.

“The problem is that universities don’t train people to take jobs,” says Michael Gabriel, CIO at Home Box Office in New York. “If they were better prepared to hit the ground running, they would be a more effective and lower-cost resource that could compete with offshore talent. They wouldn’t hit potential constraints imposed by the time and effort required to get them to be productive.”

Here’s a rundown of some key gaps three CIOs from the insurance, financial services and entertainment industries see between what computer science graduates know and what they need to know to be truly productive and valuable to the business from Day One.

1. Inadequate Grip on Business Realities

Most of the college graduates that Cindy Warkentin talks to have what she considers “unrealistic expectations.” “I had one young man tell me that unless I could offer him $75,000 or above, he’s not interested. That’s way above what’s normal for a trainee,” says the CIO at Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund in Annapolis.
Pathways to the Real World of IT

More internships for university students majoring in IT — and a formalized road map of skills and talents required to be successful in different IT jobs — would go a long way toward closing the gap between university life and the world of work, CIOs say.

HBO CIO Michael Gabriel, for one, is calling on IT executives to step up and contribute to the cause. Among other things, he suggests that IT executives let universities know what skills they’re looking for and describe the corresponding jobs that use those skills.

“Academics haven’t been in the workplace for a while, so they may not be in tune with what’s really needed. You really need CIOs,” he says.

Specifically, what’s needed is a repository of information that explains various IT career paths and the skills and competencies needed to achieve success, Gabriel says. At HBO, Gabriel has put in place a similar career skills repository so IT staffers can see what they need to know in order to achieve their career goals with the company.

“For every level and every position, we defined the key skills and competencies we believe are necessary for success in that job,” Gabriel explains. “We then have training programs, books, classes, mentoring and projects that we put people on to develop those competencies.”

CIO Cindy Warkentin says she’s working to get more internships approved for the IT department at Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund.

“I think that’s where the secret lies,” she says. “I would love to get more people some real-world experience, to bring a technology student in and have them contribute to a project.”

Warkentin says she too would like to see an “alliance” between business and academia so that students working toward technology degrees would be better prepared to enter the world of work.

One way CIOs can get involved is to sign up as speakers for on-campus career programs or to host on-campus meetings of IT professional associations, such as the Association of Information Technology Professionals or the Society for Information Management, and invite students to attend, says Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

“Inevitably, the talk will turn to jobs and the skills that companies are looking for,” he says.

Warkentin says recent grads also seem to think that they’ll be able to approach work the same way they approached their studies when they were in school.

A full-time job “is a 9-to-5 commitment, and that really does seem to throw them a bit,” she says. “They have a sense that they should be accorded opportunities at work to take long breaks, like the time in between classes.”

As for IT skills, Warkentin gives university curricula high marks. “From a technical standpoint, the book learning and the experiences that technology students have is fairly sound. I don’t see any huge gaps,” she says. “But the university doesn’t teach them what it’s like to be in the workaday world.”

This is exactly the kind of talk that gets Lew Temares of the University of Miami hopping mad.

“Yes, they’re missing business experience, but they can’t get that from a textbook,” says Temares, who is CIO and dean emeritus of the university’s school of engineering in Coral Gables, Fla. The best way students can get that experience is for companies to hire them as interns sometime after their sophomore year. But internship opportunities are down, Temares says. “The reason I hear is that companies don’t have the people to train the interns. A lot of companies have cut summer internships, but it’s a stupid place to cut. If you hire interns upfront, you get the best people in the long run,” he says.

Temares says he hires many students to work at the university during their sophomore and junior years. When they graduate, he’s willing to offer them full-time jobs, because he knows that they’re well versed in his IT organization’s technology and culture.

“If you don’t take them when they’re young and don’t offer internships, you have no right to expect anything but book knowledge” when they show up on their first day of a job, he says.

To effectively bridge that skills gap, businesses and universities must form partnerships that bolster the currency of IT education and prepare IT graduates with the “right” business and technology skills, says Ravi Nath, an IT professor and director of the Creighton University College of Business. “Without such university-industry dialogue and partnerships, the disconnect between what industry wants and what graduates offer will remain.”

Like Temares, Nath recommends that companies hire computer science students as interns.

“Clearly, no university can be expected to train graduates in every conceivable IT tool, programming language or technology platform,” he says. “We have IT internship programs with several local firms where IT students work as interns for an extended period of time with the same business, beginning their junior year. This provides students with invaluable IT work experience, and upon graduation these students are ready to take on challenging IT positions.”

Nath says these long-term internship opportunities are a win-win both for the employer and the student. Interns get IT work experience, and the businesses get an opportunity to assess the skills and dispositions of the interns as full-time employees.

2. A Narrow Worldview

As a global real-estate brokerage and consulting firm, Cushman & Wakefield Inc. does business around the world. CIO Craig Cuyar needs and expects IT professionals to be aware of and knowledgeable about cultural differences.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that staffers must have experience living or working in a foreign country, he says. “Not everyone can travel, but since we live and work in a global economy, we should expect undergraduate programs to prepare students with a fundamental understanding of the cultural differences, historical perspectives and common business practices employed by all the major countries within it.”

Ideally, Cuyar says, “there should be a course in global business practices and cultures. At the very least, there should be a few classes taught on this subject.”

Cuyar says he has seen a seemingly small thing like time zone differences throw off new employees. “People need to really understand there’s a 12-hour time difference between Hong Kong and the U.S. That’s a conference call at 9:30 p.m. versus 9:30 a.m. You can’t schedule everything on U.S. time.”

Cuyar says that to help new recruits get acquainted with various cultural norms and what it’s like to work on multicultural teams, his strategy is to assign new hires to participate on committees that will enable them to develop those skills.

3. Social Networking Skills but Wobbly Relational Skills

Rare is the new college hire who lacks skills involving Facebook, texting or any other form of electronic communication. But face to face, many of these same people have difficulty reading interpersonal signals and communicating, especially in the increasingly multigenerational workplace, says Warkentin. “Most of the gaps I see are on the social, soft skills side,” she says.

“The older generation tends to be more structured. They tend to have the expectation that anyone coming into the company will have the exact same experience that they did when they started their career,” she says. “They expect a great respect for authority and a willingness to do as they’re told.” In contrast, “young people expect to receive respect for bringing new ideas.”

New ideas are not at all a bad thing, the CIOs agree. Rather, what’s needed, they say, is a better understanding of, and respect for, the various sets of values so that new employees are better at working on multigenerational teams.

“What I’ve seen is that people coming in don’t have the necessary skills or understand the fundamentals required to build relationships with senior people,” adds Cuyar. “A newly minted college grad is not going to be able to forge relationships with senior people via Facebook or LinkedIn.”

4. Lack of Career Focus

To CIOs, it seems as though college grads don’t get any advice about how to match their talents and interests with specific IT jobs.

“From what I’ve seen, universities basically take more of a shotgun approach. They teach [computer science students] a little about a lot of things, but not enough to be effective in a corporate environment,” says HBO’s Gabriel.

For example, he would like to see colleges help students determine what their strengths are and then match those strengths and ongoing education to specific career roles within IT. “The idea is to build upon people’s strengths,” he says. “If someone is strong at math and they’re analytical, there is a career in IT that leverages that, in business intelligence or data analytics.”

Gabriel suggests that university should teach IT skills that cut across all IT careers, and they should offer minor areas of study that focus on certain key skills needed for specific IT jobs. “For example, if you like accounting or finances, you may want to work in financial systems,” Gabriel says. “I don’t know of any university with a specific focus on the things you need to know for financial systems — things like process flows, change management, chart of account conversions and project accounting. Universities could help students focus on certain skills and competencies. Students would still have a general IT degree, but it would be geared toward what really interests them.”

As it is, Gabriel says, students seem to get little guidance from college career counselors or other university resources about determining where their skills really fit and what types of jobs they could get.

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By Jenalyn Rubio Comouterworld Philippines

“As ICT becomes the backbone of businesses, CIOs are also becoming increasingly essential and integral members of senior management teams,” Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua says during his keynote speech as he opened the Computerworld Philippines CIO Forum yearend event and Christmas reception.

Sharing the results of a 2008 global survey of CIOs conducted by the Center for CIO Leadership, which aimed to determine how CIOs assessed themselves based on four competencies, namely: leadership, business strategy and process, innovation and growth, and organization and talent management, the CICT chairman said survey responses revealed that CIOs are “ready and confident to assume leadership roles, and are being integrated in the decision-making process.”

“A CIO is basically the chief architect of ICT strategies among businesses and institutions, and has the potential to lead the transformation of these organizations They are also emerging as leaders of innovation with their knowledge of technology and how it can create new business opportunities,” adds Roxas-Chua.

Although there is no clearly-defined CIO position in the government, Roxas-Chua says the CICT acknowledges the importance of having a CIO in every organization, this is why one of the provisions in the DICT Bill, should it finally be approved by the Senate, is to strengthen the CIO Forum as the official CIO Council for government so that cohesive IT initiatives could effectively be pushed across the government.

According to the Secretary, the CICT also recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chief Information Officers Forum Inc. (CIOF) for joint cooperation and coordination of ICT activities within the public and private sectors. The CIOF is an organization comprised of CIOs from different government departments and agencies.

“The MOU signifies a commitment toward closer collaboration and, in part, it defines and strengthens the role of the CIO in planning, reviewing, coordinating, and implementing government agencies’ ICT agenda.”

This MOU, likewise, affirms the commission’s commitment to continuous collaboration on national ICT priorities, mandating the review of the Government Information Systems Plan and the government agencies’ Information Systems Strategic Plans; the development and strengthening of ICT competencies of government CIOs; and the establishment of policy and technical committees on ICT procurement, e-governance, and interoperability between public and private sector ICT systems, says the CICT chair.

“It is very clear that the role of the CIO, both in the public and private sector, will continue to grow in importance. As the global economy relies more on the innovative use of technology, it is imperative that the CIO professional be able to take the lead in leveraging ICT to attain the goals of businesses and organizations,” adds Roxas-Chua.

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A gathering of all CIOs and IT executives who have shared their time and expertise with Computerworld Philippines’ various events and monthly print issues throughout 2008, the CIO Forum year-end event was highlighted by a panel discussion on “Bridging the Digital Divide: The CIO from the CEO’s Perspective,” where three chief executives shared their views about the role of the CIO today.

“I want my CIO to be a leader, to be able to anticipate what I want and what the company needs,” says Alberto Lina, chairman of the Lina Group of Companies. Believing the CIO of today is just a heartbeat away from becoming the CEOs of tomorrow, Lina advises guest CIOs present at the event to take advantage of the information that they have right at their fingerprints and to harness this to enable them to play a more strategic role in the organization; so strategic, in fact, that they may even end up knowing more about the company than their CEOs, Lina says.

Asked what would be the criteria in choosing “the perfect CIO,” Edwin Domingo, head of marketing and business development at Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc., says there is actually no perfect CIO. Domingo was presenting on behalf of his boss, Mario Locsin, president & COO of ETPI. “There really is neither a perfect CIO nor CEO, it’s actually not about each individual but how these individuals work as a team.” According to Domingo, the CIO, aside from being technically competent, should, above all, function as a team player and have the attitude of a businessman.

Meanwhile, George Tan, president and CEO of Digital Paradise Inc., agrees and says that CEOs are really always looking at value for money in the business and the CIO should be able to do his job as a business partner and also help in developing the right culture for the company.

“The CIO should know how to align IT with the overall strategies of the company. CEOs still look for technical skills but they want business skills combined with that, so being well-rounded is very important,” says CICT Chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua.
For CIOs aspiring to be CEOs someday, Domingo has this advice: “You have to be able to communicate to the CEO. You must have the CEO attitude, understand the business in the same level that he does and apply your CIO skills to be able to improve on it.”

Roxas-Chua’s Tips:
- Be part of the overall strategic plan of the company.
- Well-rounded personality. Those who do not think just one way. Even though we still need the technical skills we also want the well roundedness combined with business skills.

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By Melba-Jean V. Bernad
Published in the December 2008-January 2009 print edition of Computerworld

SINGAPORE—Chief executive officers (CEOs) worldwide are expecting significant changes in the months to come but feel that the ability to manage change—an opportunity for chief information officers (CIOs) to be the “catalysts for change” in their organizations—has not grown at the same pace.

However, change is just one challenge CIOs are faced with. In a Global CEO Study conducted by IBM Corp. this year, the collective insights of over 1,000 CEOs representing 32 industries have been collated into five core traits of what IBM dubs as the Enterprise of the Future.

The traits are:
1. Hungry for change. “The next four to five years is going to be very tough, thus, CEOs are expecting faster, broader more uncertain change in their companies,” says Colin Powell, IBM Asia Pacific consulting services leader. “The world is shrinking, creating the need for speed and change.”

2. Innovative beyond customer imagination. Powell says CEOs now recognize that customers are more informed and intelligent, thus, they want their organizations to be effective at engaging the new and changing customer. “CEOs want to satisfy the information omnivore,” he points out.

3. Globally integrated. Jeanine Cotter, vice president for systems services of the IBM Global Technology Services group, says CEOs are moving aggressively toward global business designs, deeply changing their capabilities, partnering more extensively and using mergers and acquisitions to grow.

4. Disruptive by nature. “CEOs don’t want to stay in their comfort zone. They want a disruptive business model that is adaptable to different ways in doing things,” says Powell.

5. Genuine, not just generous. Explaining the fifth trait, Cotter says responding to customer expectations of corporate social responsibility is an opportunity for CEOs to differentiate themselves from the rest. Cotter says CSRs include manufacturing products with right governance, such as “going green” and making sure product components are safe. “CEOs see CSR as an engine for growth, thus, they want to include it in their values and business strategy,” she notes.

With the identification of these five core traits, Cotter says CIOs are expected to play two key roles in the transformation of the enterprise to that of the future. The roles are as catalyst for change across the enterprise as the service provider and ally of the CEO, and as leader of the transformation of the IT organization into a model of the enterprise of the future.

“The CIOs direction is needed to deliver results in each area of the enterprise of the future vision,” says Cotter. To enable change, she says CIOs must apply unique IT applications and mitigate risks associated with new opportunities.

Explaining how CIOs can “innovate beyond customer innovation,” Cotter says CIOs must turn information into business insight. “They need to empower customers by giving them secure access to relevant information,” she adds.

Meanwhile, to allow the enterprise to be globally integrated, CIOs are advised to remove operational, technological, and cultural barriers.

“Build on common standards and shared services,” suggests Cotter. “Create a collaborative working environment.”

To enable a disruptive business model, Cotter says CIOs need to remove obstacles to business model changes and facilitate rapid integration of acquisitions and mergers.

Lastly, to support the CEOs vision of a “genuine, not just generous enterprise,” CEOs need to initiate green computing campaigns, reduce the environmental impacts of their technology infrastructure, and enhance workforce mobility alternatives.

IBM Services
To help CIOs respond to budget pressures and build the organization as an “enterprise of the future,” IBM’s Global Technology Service (GTS) group aims to help improve the ROI of IT initiatives by cutting operational costs; leveraging existing infrastructure; increasing productivity of a lean IT staff; and helping with financing.

“ÏBM can help companies cut costs while maintaining or improving IT performance,” says Ruth Seah, Asia Pacific director for infrastructure services at IBM GTS. Seah adds that IBM can conduct an assessment to identify costs savings, simplify and consolidate computing and networking, and virtualize IT to reduce costs and enhance performance.

According to Seah, IBM can help defer capital expenditures by helping companies get more from their existing infrastructure. Strategies include network optimization, server virtualization services, and storage optimization. To reduce downtime and breaches, IBM’s solutions include information protection services and Internet security systems.

“We can help companies improve productivity and take pressure off their staff by managing some, or all, of their IT environment for them,” says Seah.

Catalyst for Change
The Enterprise of the Future provides CIOs an ideal opportunity to be the “catalysts for change” in their organizations. Specifically, it can allow them to:

• Identify and leverage cross-enterprise synergies
• Lend an unbiased, informed voice to the company’s strategic direction
• Increase the flow of knowledge
• Establish enterpise-wide standards
• Weave collaboration into the fabric of the organization
• Develop a corporate risk strategy

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By Computerworld Philippines staff
Published in the November 2008 print edition of Computerworld Philippines

Over the years, technology has radically earned a strategic place in the enterprise, with a growing percentage of local organizations’ budgets being allotted to IT investments. With government, however, this may not entirely be the case.

Although its awareness and interest in new technologies and innovation may more or less be at par with private firms, the public sector often finds itself at the mercy of whatever ‘modest’ budget is approved for its IT initiatives. This does not, however, hinder these government offices from constantly looking at ways to incorporate IT into their operations, believing technology is one of the best vehicles for delivering better service to the public.

At Computerworld Philippines’ 10th CIO Roundtable, four IT officials from different government entities shared how IT is helping them improve efficiency in their operations and delivery of public service, the primary challenges they face in relation to both eGovernance and eGovernment, and what eGovernance framework they believe would work best for the country.

Present during the roundtable were: Dr. Hypte “HR” Aujero, assistant program manager, National Telehealth Center; Myra Brucelo, chief of MIS, National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA); Atty. Maverick Sevilla, officer-in-charge of the MIS department, Pasay City government; and Claire Umali, IT division head, Mandaluyong City government.

Also present to share his reactions and insights about the role of IT in government was Carlo Francis Raymundo, program coordinator of the infrastructure governance and regulation program, Asian Institute of Management Policy Center. The CIO roundtable was held at the Dusit Hotel in Makati City.
Excerpts of the discussion follow:

CWP: How is information technology helping your agency serve the public better? What applications have you deployed that has made a big impact on your dealings with the public?

Sevilla: For the City of Pasay, we have instituted the GEMS (Government Electronic Management System) project and, as a result, various systems, such as the BPLS or Business Permit Licensing System, are now in place. The BPLS is used for the registration and securing of business permits. Pasay actually has 32 systems in place, but the one with the biggest impact is the treasury system which has computerized the collection, as well as the payment, of taxes and other government fees. But for the real thrust of computerization which is e-governance, we are still in the process of getting there. Because as far as the Pasay City government is concerned, there is a big difference between e-governance and e-government. We may have already attained an e-government stature with the many systems we now have in place, but as for e-governance, which involves building relationships not only within the government itself but with the people - our constituents - through technology, we are still going through the process.

Umali: The city government of Mandaluyong began its computerization program about 20 years ago in 1989, starting off with the Business License Tax Administration System. Since all of our computers were just standalone units then, it was only after four years that we started to make improvements on the network. After that, the next systems that we implemented were the payroll for our employee Data Management System and our HR System. We even included a Biometrics Attendance Monitoring System to encourage promptness and attendance among our employees and to discourage absences. Also, we were able to manage our service records well. In the past, only those who were “blessed” were exempted from filing their absences while the rest of the employees, particularly those on the grassroots level, suffered the most. As a solution, we put a Biometrics Attendance Monitoring System in place. However, we are still working to improve the system, which has been running for about three years now. But note that with such a system, we are already able to save around P500,000 a month in salary payouts. More importantly, our casual employees now get their salaries on time, unlike 10 years ago when they often had to contend with salary delays of about five days.

Brucelo: The main thrust of the National Commission on Culture and Arts is to provide public information on culture and the arts in the Philippines. From 1997 – when our MIS team was established – until 2003, the commission only had a static Web site. It just contained text and had no visuals. When I joined the commission in 2002, I encouraged my boss to join the Philippine Web Awards (PWA) and, since 2004, we’ve been a regular contestant of PWA. Because of this, our Web site went through the five stages of development prescribed by the National Computer Center to become an e-commerce and e-government site. And since we had to meet the NCC’s requirements at each stage, we did a lot of dynamic versions. Most of our viewers today are students, researchers, artists, local governments, organizations, and even people of different nationalities.

Dr. Aujero: We are all aware of some of the conditions that prevail in our country today, such as the limited budget allocations for health despite the ballooning population, the dispersal of Filipino doctors and nurses – and all other professionals for that matter – so specialists tend to aggregate in urban areas although we already have lots of specialists there. Most cardiologists, for example, are practicing in the big cities, but there are none in most rural areas. All of these contribute to the dismal Filipino health situation, so what the National Telehealth Center is doing now is come up with a solution or, at least, a part of the solution. Telehealth or E-Health, in a nutshell, is information and communications technology for the delivery of appropriate health services for the underserved. It is an alternative means of delivering health services but it is not the total solution.

At the National Telehealth Center, we use ICT to provide and support healthcare when distance separates the doctors from their patients. It is an alternative means of delivering expert care to underserved communities and geographically remote areas where healthcare expertise is largely unavailable. Created in June 1998 by the UP Board of Regents, NThC’s mission is to increase access to health information and services through ICT with our three arms: E-Medicine, E-Learning and E-Records.

E-Medicine, for instance, is a professional network, but it depends on the available ICT infrastructure, meaning whatever is available in that area, be it the Internet, a cell phone network, or just a two-way radio. It is a combination of the BuddyWorks Project, SMS Telemedicine, and the Telemedicine Project of the Department of Science and Technology. The BuddyWorks Project is an eGovernment Fund-supported telemedicine system that seeks to reduce the inequities in the Philippine health care system. It also helps curb the negative effects of the exodus of health professionals and, more importantly, it connects doctors wherever they are in the country through the DOST’s Telemedicine Project. It uses SMS (cell phone texting), the so-called Lifelink (RxBox computer/laptop) and the ECCS (Emergency Care Coordination System) to make possible real-time teleconsultation.

In 2005, we began this project aimed at giving specialist opinions to four different regions. We selected four project sites in Cagayan Valley, Capiz, Leyte, and Iligan City in Lanao del Norte. The project provides specialist opinions for those areas. It was another eGovernment Fund-assisted project of the CICT (Commission on Information and Communications Technology) and it was funded for about P43 million. The areas were selected by virtue of their remoteness.
E-Learning, meanwhile, refers to the program of upgrading the knowledge of health workers at all levels, from the municipal health office leaders and staff to community health volunteers. E-Records, on the other hand, is an open source-, Web-based electronic health records system for government health centers that quickly and automatically generate standard reports for local, provincial, regional and national use.

CWP: But are these ICT programs really benefiting your constituencies?

Umali: Yes. For instance, since our Business License System was put in place, our generation of business permits as well as the processing of those permits improved. Several years ago, we also included our Treasury office in the system. Previous to this, we did things manually and there were a lot of long queues. But with the establishment of our network, payments to the Treasury are now automatically updated in the database. Payment transactions have become faster and the long rows of people lining up in the Treasury have all been eliminated. Shortly after that development, we went ahead to improve our PATMS or the Property Assessment and Tax Management System.

In 1992, we started our Geographic Information System or GIS. We even got a budget from a congressman. But, unfortunately, nobody was interested in it at the time, and so we were the ones who build everything, like the data layers. Nobody from the Engineering and Planning office picked it up and so the project stagnated and moved very slowly until we finally contracted Geo Data to do GIS for us. But it didn’t provide us any instant relief as it was a very tedious process. We got copies of the land titles and then digitally generated the parcels from the technical descriptions in those titles. But now, we are really able to identify those properties that previously were not being declared to us.

Brucelo: We earn lots of praises but more from foreign nationals than Filipinos. Most of the time, we serve as research aides of foreigners in their search for our national artists. We provide information and we also have a library system. We allow people to browse all the contents of our books through our Web site. We also have an online query facility on Philippine culture. When I arrived in 2002, there was only at dial-up infrastructure at NCCA and we were only allowed to go online from 12 noon to 1 p.m., that was just about 20 hours a month! That was the tedious time before. I even told them that when it comes to PCs, the brand is not that important. I introduced them to open source – the white box computers – and we saved a lot. At that time I think our budget was only P1 million but now we have about P4.8 million. Our main office is in Intramuros and we don’t have a satellite yet or other branches, but we are working through our committees, several of them from the culture and the arts communities – teachers, researchers, journalists and many others. In addition to our online query, we also have an online registry. We invite all local artists from Luzon to Mindanao.

CWP: So your Web site is constantly updated?

Brucelo: Yes. Actually other researchers that query us are not all cultural organizations. We have the LGUs and also the broadcasting networks which are really dependent on us for information. We are inter-related with DepEd (Depart of Education) and CHED (Commission on Higher Education). Right now it’s a database driven Web site, so a lot of it involves digitalization of data. We already started the e-books, the timeline of the Philippines and the information of culture and arts. A log of e-books now is available online and we are upgrading the connection from dial-up to DSL but we are moving into a one-on-one connection like E-Meralco. We are trying all these now and we hope to have a wireless connectivity on December but this is still under a bidding process.

CWP: How big is your IT team?

Sevilla: Right now we have four regular programmers, one IT officer, and at the top of the organization background is my position, and under it is the IT officer 2 and below that are our programmers. One of the thrust of our budget proposal is to upgrade the plantilla positions because as soon as our contract with the company who did the project expires, the next thing to do would be to turn over the technical knowledge or technology transfer. Our difference from Pasay and Mandaluyong is that under our contract, it is the obligation and duty of the end-user to build-up the database. At the MITS (Management Information Technology Service) office, there was only assistance and we have to oversee how they do the data build-up. For example, from the assessor’s office, it is their function to build up the data. We constantly follow this up and those are the things we do with respect to other problems we encounter. Right now the COA is presently having a systems audit of the Pasay GEMS project.

Umali: Plantilla wise, we have 30 items occupied. There are people who handle hardware and others for system development and maintenance. And for people in the GIS, what we do in the implementation is, we form our end first then we turn over things to the users. Usually, the offices concerned are not really into it. So what we do is built-up the database then turn over the system and everything to them. During the database built-up, we ask a representative from those concerned so they could give us feedback.

CWP: Are the maintenance and the implementation of these projects done in-house or do you outsource?

Umali: No, we’ve been through several systems already and we started with systems development, which was outsourced. Our problem then was we were so dependent on the developer. We started with standalones, so when we upgraded we have to pay them again to re-develop the whole thing and every time we have changes in the tax rates we have to run back to them. So finally we decided to do an in-house system.

CWP: How does the NThC Web site works?

Aujero: The NThC Web site is like an e-mail that you have to log-in because we have issues in security and confidentiality regarding patients records that’s why there’s only limited access. We had on-site trainings since 2005 and so once in a while we go there. We decided to expand the E-medicine project to help those really in need because we found out that those centers in Capiz and EVRMC are regional centers themselves. They have a few specialists in there too. So we expanded this using text medicine to help doctors to the barrios because most of the time these doctors are the newly graduates. They don’t know anyone in the area and the only doctors they know are probably their professors or even some of their relatives. They don’t know how to connect, so we branched out with them. From four provinces, we are now all over the country. Actually there’s even one up there in Batanes, so from north to south there are doctors to the barrios that we are helping. So this included all equipment, all available infrastructure there is, because initially, we just use the Internet for the BuddyWorks project, even SMS, e-mail, and landline if they want to.
CWP: What major problems or challenges are you experiencing in connection with automating your agency’s processes? How are you resolving these issues?

Umali: Based on our operations, we are only a division under the city administrator’s office and during project implementation we sometimes encounter some problems since I deal with department heads and I’m only a division head. So we are looking forward to the creation of the DICT (Department of Information and Communications Technology) so we can have an official identity and it would be easier to push for IT projects from our end and even get them declared as priority projects.

Sevilla: In local government, there must first be a law creating and institutionalizing a particular office or position before it can exist.

Brucelo: I think every three or five years, the National Computer Center and CICT ask different government agencies to submit an Information System Strategic Plan to evaluate all projects that need a budget for infrastructure and other requirements. Once you submit the proposal, you have to undergo a budget hearing in Congress and the Senate so they can determine how much budget will be given to you or where it will be placed in the list of priorities. Then after you get the approval, there is an annual audit that checks what happened to the project. It is also our only way to upgrade the salary level of our programmers, which is usually 25% less that than what an ordinary programmer in the private sector earns. Since the salary grade is standardized, it is hard for us to compete with the private sector and would often lose our staff to private companies. That’s why there is a high turnover rate in IT in the government.

Sevilla: Let me add to that. One of the downsides in government, especially in local government units, is that the MIS often becomes a training ground for these programmers. Once they secure the necessary certifications and service experience, they leave. That’s why we included in the contract that they must render service to the city government for a certain number of years so that there would be a chance for us to mine and benefit from their knowledge before we lose them. The contract also calls for the proper turnover of their work.

Brucelo: That’s the same with us. It’s usually factoral, so if you get six months of training, you have to stay for one year or if you get a one year scholarship you have to stay for, at least, two years.

Aujero: For me, I was only 11 years old when I promised myself that I will not go out of the country. that’s why I have stayed. At the NThC, we try not be personality-based when it comes to implementing projects, meaning we encourage interaction with different doctors to ensure continuity. Although sometimes we cannot avoid it. For instance, some patients would still send the SMS queries directly to me. I just forward them to the center because we want the projects to be known on an institutional level.

Raymundo: Government is not in the business of doing business. Its business is to serve the people. This is why I believe that the CICT should be elevated from being a commission to a full-fledged department, since this will give more value to ICT and make it more important in the Philippines. Migration is a choice and we can’t force people to stay, but, at the very least, we can provide an environment that would allow these people to give something back to the country. They say that innovation basically is making the most out of your limited resources, so collaborative efforts should be espoused, especially in an area with limited resources.

CWP: We’ve heard that sometimes the hindrance to computerization in government are the very people in government themselves. Is this still true?

Umali: Actually, what we are trying to do is to change the culture one step at a time starting with the training. Most people in government are afraid that, with computerization, they will lose their jobs. So we try to explain to them that computers will not take over their jobs. In fact, they will have more time to do other things aside from what the computers are already supposed to produce. We include both the department heads and their staff in the training program so there would be an understanding from all levels. For example, with our GIS project, we were supposed to turn over everything to the assessor’s office because that’s where the data transactions are done. But since they don’t want to be tied up with the project, we had to designate an IT staff. We even suggested that they absorb the staff in their plantilla so that they would not feel that they were being “invaded” when they create new items. So we really have to make adjustments.

Brucelo: One of the hindrances that we encounter during the computerization of our information system is the resistance to change, especially from the people who have been with the commission for a long time. They would complain that the system is not user-friendly or that there are a lot of bugs. And if you correct them and point out that they’re mistaken, they would take it personally. Since they are not happy with the system, they take it against you. So what we do is show them the value of technology by incorporating it in daily tasks like creating a database for easy reference or distributing memorandums and other documents via e-mail so that there would be less paper work. Simple things that would make their jobs easier and faster.

Raymundo: The end objective of e-governance is good governance, but in order for e-government projects to get off the ground, you need good governance. So it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. And this is where enlightened government leaders and the DICT come in because they have the clout and position to make things happen. I believe that people in government are not hired to be mere data collectors but to become knowledge managers. Why? Because the government is a policy-making body and so people in government not only need to collect data but should also make sure that the information they collect is analyzed and translated into useful policies and programs.

Brucelo: That’s why it’s always good to start with the head of management when pushing for change.

Aujero: For us, it worked the other way around because we started from the grassroots, wherein we offered our services to the local government units first. When these were well received, we spread implementation to other parts of the country.

Raymundo: That’s a good strategic model actually because there’s a saying “Think big, start small.” And right now, the way that I’m seeing it, the local governments and other organizations are in the best position to actually come out with something new and innovative. They serve as the proof of concept. Now the question is, “How can you replicate it as fast as possible?” That’s where the national government comes in.

Sevilla: The bottom line when it comes to subscribing to e-governance is really the political will of the leaders. Political leaders must be able to visualize how technology will affect the lives of their constituents. Local government unit leaders must recognize that ICT is a tool for achieving better governance.

CWP: In your opinion, what would be the suitable e-governance framework for our country?

Raymundo: I think Atty. Sevilla has already described it very nicely when he talked about shifting e-government and e-governance from mainly just using ICT to effectively deliver services to the public, to essentially coming up with better management decisions and, eventually, using the data collected to manage whatever available resources the national or the local government has domain over. The first question that we’d always ask people when we sit down with them to develop a strategy is: “For whom is this?” We caution them to think out of the box because sometimes your stake holders aren’t only external but also internal. Also, at the end of the day, we ask them “Why do you want to make things efficient for you clients or stake holders?” We are not only talking about reaching out to as many people as possible but also about the depth of the impact of giving quality service or even saving lives. It’s also about efficiency, which is where your back office benefits from e-governance. We often tell our stake holders in the Policy Center that every time they start anything that involves the government, there has to be clarity of function. To streamline the procedures these questions must be answered first. “What do you need to do?” “Is this process really necessary?” “Can there be a one-stop shop for this?” “Who will handle it?” But as you go on, I think the question of sustainability should not only be looked upon from the financial or technological side, but also on the political side and that’s where your coordination has to be really in place. Some e-governance activities in the Philippines are very personality-driven. That’s why I think there has to be an institution or mechanism in place that will make the beneficiaries of a project dependent not on any person or group of persons but on the project itself.

Brucelo: For me, the framework should focus on digitizing the data in order to systematize the process and make the information accessible in any form, whether it be through the Web, SMS or any other channel. However the manner of implementing this depends on the thrust of the agency and how it can help the public. For us, for instance, our focus is to provide information access especially in remote areas and even outside the country.

Raymundo: Once we know who you are serving, the challenge now is how to deliver the service. But we always have to remember that when we ask the question “How?”, we have to make sure that it’s accessible, available and, most especially, acceptable not just with the end-users but also within the government so that decision-making will be better. I think we are on the right path in terms of e-governance because there are sparks of hope in various small organizations and agencies. Now, the next challenge is scaling this up and I think that’s where the national government should come in. We found out in our studies, that the really good best-practices cases in local government and organizations happened because of a unique environment where there is a good leader and available funds. I think that in replicating e-governance success, the national and local government unit should step in with the help of all the other organizations within the area. More than half is done at a local government level, so now it’s more of integration on the national level. One more thing, of course, is the fact that when we look at e-governance projects, there must also be effective management and that’s where the challenge comes in.

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By Computerworld Philippines staff
Published in October print edition of Computerworld Philippines

In a call center and business process outsourcing (BPO) environment, business continuity and information security are two major concerns. Often at the core of a company’s IT infrastructure, the data center is given the tasks of ensuring the availability and reliability of all computer systems, data communication connections, security devices, and even the backup power facilities that it houses.

At Computerworld Philippines’ 9th CIO Roundtable, three IT managers discussed their data center challenges, their strategies in addressing these, as well as the future trends in the data center space that they foresee and how they are preparing for these.

“If we were to contrast the BPO and call center business with other industries, the BPO sector is an IT-enabled service (ITES), which is why the data center and IT systems are much more important in this business compared with other traditional industries,” said Jan Espino, regional IT manager for Asia Pacific at risk mitigation and business solutions provider, First Advantage.

This is why most companies in this space allot a big bulk of their IT budgets to investments in the data center. “I can say that it is also more than half of our total IT budget,” noted Michael Principe, IT manager at contact center firm, Logicall Inc. “This includes securing the information, having the redundancies, and all the other things related to these.”

For his part, Oscar Liao, global IT director at Admerex Solutions Inc., cited three data center issues which could shape future trends: virtualization, cooling, and power generation. “The first will somehow address the second and third, but there are still some equipment that are not yet designed for virtualization and whose manufacturers have yet to design a less power-hungry system. For now, system consolidation and vendor-hosted services are key factors in addressing these hurdles,” he said.

Sponsored by EMC Philippines, the roundtable was held at the Dusit Hotel. Also present during the discussion was EMC Philippines country manager Geronimo “Ronnie” Latinazo.

Excerpts of the discussion follow:

CWP: Can you share with us what your data center environment is like right now?

Jan Espino: Around six months ago, we had a study on how we can streamline our data center operations and, as you know, First Advantage grew by acquiring some 51 companies over the last several months, so we currently have 17 data centers—16 in the US and one in India . Now, we are in the midst of consolidating, hopefully, four or maybe five of these data centers. It’s very hard to say how many servers we have at this point but for Asia Pacific, which is what I’m handling, our main data center and our major applications are hosted in our Bangalore data center. It is a mix because we have our own data center in Bangalore and we also are using the IBM data center in Bangalore, but, eventually, when the data center we are building now is completed, these applications will all be housed under our own data center. For Asia Pacific, our main application is in-house developed (mostly because there aren’t a lot of companies doing what we do) and is very intensive on storing information and keeping confidential information. So we have educational details, social security numbers, sometimes even salary details—these are what we call “personally identifiable information” and we keep them in our servers. I think we have 20 people running the data center in Bangalore and in our major hubs like Mumbai and Manila. I have around 11 other people also and smaller offices where one or two people are running the servers, but the main application is stored in servers in Bangalore.

Principe: Currently, we are at about 30 terabytes in terms of our data center, where we house about 25 servers and that include the major PBX servers, our dialers, Cisco equipment and others, running on a mix of Linux and Windows platforms. The applications we use are built into the system—PBX, CRM tools, and other software that we use to manage our clients and their requirements. Segmenting it is another challenge since if we buy licenses for each of the applications for each client, it would be very chaotic and difficult to support, so we just try to put in layers for each application so that we will be able to manage them.

The whole IT department is currently made up of seven people. Some say this number is big given our current size. However, the number of applications and hardware that we have within the data center is pretty much pulling in our resources in people. Also, they’re not only supporting the data center but also the daily operations.

We have put in a lot of intelligence and redundancies in our system in such a way that it could react in a timely manner and correct any issues that we have. Now, since we are expanding our current business, we are looking at managing it with the same number of people but we are adding more intelligence and redundancy to it and we will now have two data center sites. Having two sites will then allow us to maintain our 24×7 redundancy and provide disaster recovery.

Latinazo: When are you planning to set up your second data center or have you already started?

Principe: We are currently already looking for new partners and providers that would be able to aid us in the setting up of the data center.

Latinazo: I just want to validate an observation: What we are typically seeing in the contact center industry is that most of the data that is used is still housed in the customer or the client side. Very few, if any, is actually taken into the country, probably for security or legal compliance. Will the same setup be the case for you?

Principe: Yes, we have the same setup, though there is some data which, in the near future, may be stored locally.

Latinazo: But how are most contact centers doing it today?

Principe: Right now, most are into segmented storage. On our end, we have our own file servers and we do have storage for the network. We are also looking at how we would be able to improve the availability and security of some particular information, specifically when clients would ask for a certain file or a certain recording outside of our network. So that is again one of the challenges that we are facing; technologies right now are vast and we want to be assured that those types of services would be available.

Liao: The Admerex Limited Data Center in our Sydney office hosts most of our enterprise servers. The contact center business in the Philippines, Admerex Solutions Inc. (ASI), hosts its own servers and the telecommunications equipment used for its collection operations. Meanwhile, the Global IT (GIT) group is based here in Manila and supports 100% of ASI’s IT operations, together with the rest of the global infrastructure. Though we employ vendor support on our remote sales and satellite offices, the GIT group, with its eight professional IT support staff, fully manages the contact center office. GIT handles massive numbers of transactional database and reports incorporating a huge voice network infrastructure for ASI’s outbound and inbound process.

CWP: How much of your IT budgets usually go to data center expenses? Is spending on data center investments increasingly being given priority in your company?

Espino: If we consider everything that’s in the data center, including the applications, I would say that it takes up more than half of the total IT budget. In our case, we spend a lot on developing internal applications, so if we include that, it definitely is more than half. We are basically a data company, without the data we are nothing. This is why, for last year alone, we spent I think US$10 million for securing data alone. The data is very important because if that data goes out, nobody will trust us with their information anymore, so the database in the data center is very vital.

Principe: If we’re going to define it as a whole, including applications, servers, etc., I can say that it is also more than half of our total IT budget. This includes securing the information, having the redundancies, etc. Yes, there are a lot of solutions in the market right now, some are also available at cheap prices, but we need to be more cautious about this because some might not meet our requirements, especially since we are servicing clients worldwide. With the expansion that we are currently undergoing, the budget may increase but it may not be that significant.

Espino: If we were to contrast the BPO and call center business with other industries, the BPO sector is an IT-enabled service (ITES), which is why the data center and IT systems are much more important in this business compared with other traditional industries. So you see, for them, if the total IT budget exceeds 1% to 1.5% of the total revenue, that’s already high, but in our case, about 8%-10% of the revenue is poured on IT. I remember when I was working in the manufacturing industry before, if 2% of your revenue goes to IT spend, that’s already high for a manufacturing environment, but not for IT-enabled services.

CWP: Has this budget allotment remained constant over the years or is still increasing?

Espino: I think it’s increasing because, in this line of business, automation is key to getting competitive advantage and if you automate you need more technology and, hopefully, less people. So in terms of percentage, I think this is still going to grow. Even in our case, all the new spending in IT now is geared toward automating more of our processes, doing more with less people and more technology.

Principe: We have also increased our IT budget and investments on IT infrastructure, especially since we will be expanding. However, we are very cautious about expanding the IT infrastructure because we will also need to allocate some other budgets to the total expansion of the company. This is why we are also looking at how we could be leaner in terms of the headcount and why we are increasingly going into automation.

Liao: I have only been with the company for slightly over three months and, during this period, we have invested on infrastructure where it’s mostly needed. ASI has been growing tremendously and, within a year of operating its collection business, we have expanded to another building floor, built a secondary data center and expanded our voice network infrastructure, with our investments reaching about a quarter of a million dollars. The company is always willing to invest on technology that will enhance its efficiency and profitability.

CWP: What main challenges do you currently encounter with your data center and how do you, as head of the IT department, address these issues?

Principe: A challenge right now would be the flexibility of the total data center, primarily because there is a lot of growth in terms of the services and clients. Another challenge is maximizing the investments on the infrastructure that we have, without compromising quality of service and ensuring that we still meet the expectation of our internal and external customers. In IT, the mandate is always to do more with less.

Espino: The main challenge is speed—delivering what the business needs at the soonest possible time. In our business where information is our lifeline, availability is also paramount. One way to address these issues is to be pro-active, anticipate what the business needs so we can plan early. Another common challenge is trying to do more with less. In the current business environment, the pressure to optimize all costs, not just IT, is much greater than before.

Liao: Since ASI’s setup as a call center business is new, we still do not have any major challenges on our data center setup aside from the cooling system where we need to add another five-tonner airconditioning unit to cope with the heat coming out of the equipment we added for our expansion project.

CWP: How different are your data center challenges compared to those in other industries? Does a call center environment demand more from data centers?

Espino: Compared with, say, a traditional manufacturing environment, BPOs demand a lot more from their technology departments. In traditional manufacturing companies, for example, the business can survive a significant downtime of their ERP systems (enterprise resource planning). They may take some hit on the timeliness of their financial reporting, but the plants can go on making the products, sales can go on in manual mode, etc. In our company, the moment our main system goes down, virtually all work stops; we might as well just send our people home.

Principe: In the call center and BPO industry, we face a lot of different challenges. One of these is the flexibility of the design of our current data center and the need to ensure that it could cater to the different requirements from different customers. We also need to comply with standards to ensure the security of our information and the robustness of our disaster recovery system to maintain 24×7 availability.

Liao: Being in the industry for just a few months limits my view of the industry’s data center challenges in comparison with those of other industries that I have worked with before, but I think a BPO or call center environment demands just as much as with those in the financial or retail industries, since they also require a robust IT infrastructure.

CWP: Given the current trends in server consolidation, virtualization, and the recent buzz about “green IT” and “green data centers,” what initiatives, if any, have you undertaken in line with these?

Espino: Like I mentioned earlier, First Advantage grew through more than 50 acquisitions in the past five years throughout the US and the Asia Pacific region, and, as you can probably imagine, we have disparate systems located in 17 different data centers globally. We have started a move to consolidate four or five data centers, primarily to lower costs and enable more synergies across the company. Besides consolidating our data centers, we are also moving into server consolidation using virtualization technology such as VMWare to derive more savings in hardware, software, administration, and power consumption.

Principe: We are looking at really maximizing the infrastructure that we currently have and avoiding additional electrical loading with the addition of new hardware. We are also looking at consolidating applications into one server without, of course, compromising security and availability.

Liao: Admerex Limited has been into server consolidation and virtualization for quite awhile already. Its contact center business, ASI, has only started its collection business for a year, so its server technology structure is not big enough to reap the full benefits of these virtualization and consolidation technologies. However, with our expansion plans lined up over the next two years, we will surely go into this as well.

CWP: What future data center trends do you foresee affecting local organizations and how are you preparing for such changes?

Espino: I see more local companies moving into outsourced data center services, eschewing the traditional view of building and maintaining their own data centers, primarily to lower costs. I would think that if local companies actually do rigorous financial analyses on their data center costs, it would turn out to be cheaper to outsource, especially for medium-sized companies that don’t have sufficient scale to justify maintaining their own.

Principe: We are taking a serious look at the scarcity of space and the spike in the price of space and electricity especially in the commercial areas. We are then looking at several strategies to prepare for these, like having a smaller hardware footprint, moving from 1U-type (one rack unit) servers to blade servers, and going into server consolidation and virtualization.

Liao: There are three data center issues which I see affecting future trends: virtualization, cooling, and power generation. The first will somehow address the second and third but there are still some equipment that are not yet designed for virtualization and whose manufacturers have yet to design a less power-hungry system. For now, system consolidation and vendor-hosted services are key factors in addressing these hurdles.

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