As an I&O (Infrastructure & Operations) leader, do you know how to get the most bang for your buck, out of you data center and end user computing environment without sacrificing performance or reliability? Are you able to make your business leaders see servers, storage, PCs, or switches as more than capital expenses? Do you know how to run an efficient and effective helpdesk? Or, run support and configuration management functions on a shoestring budget? What does it take to be an IT I&O rockstar?

Contributors

• • Bill McCorey, Vice President of Global Infrastructure, IBM
  • Jim Fortner, VP of Global Business Services, IT Development & Operations, P&G
  • Vittorio Cretella, VP – CTO, Mars IS

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Good morning and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. Today’s topic is essentially, Are You A Rockstar IT Infrastructure And Operations Leader? Our guests for today’s show are Jim Fortner, who’s the Vice President, Information Technology for Development and Operations, Global Business Services for Procter and Gamble. Good morning, Jim. How are you?

Jim Fortner [00:00:27]:
Fine, thank you. How’s life there? It’s cold.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:33]:
All right, great. So we have Bill McCrory, he’s the Vice President of Global Infrastructure with IBM. Hi Bill.

Bill McCorey [00:00:39]:
Hi Sanjog. How are you doing?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:41]:
Very good. It’s cold here as well in Chicago. How is it live there?

Bill McCorey [00:00:44]:
I’m in Virginia, so it’s pretty day to day, about 50 degrees, so I can’t complain.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:49]:
That’s like summer for us here.

Jim Fortner [00:00:53]:
So hey.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:53]:
And we also have Vittorio Cretella, who is the Vice President, CIO for Wrigley and also the CTO of Mars IS. Good morning, Vittorio.

Vittorio Cretella [00:01:00]:
Good morning.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:01]:
How are you, sir?

Vittorio Cretella [00:01:03]:
I’m fine. It’s sunny and clear skies here in New Jersey, so I can’t complain.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:07]:
Very good, so we got quite a mix of weather. Now coming to the topic where we said, okay, let’s use the word rockstar. So we infrastructure and operations folks are super busy. We have 20 hour days, et cetera. I don’t know if you guys are having it, but I see many of them having such long days and we are very busy but at the same time, the question is, are we able to remain or become as effective as we want to be and if there is a situation that we are not able to, what is preventing us from getting to that level, Jim.

Jim Fortner [00:01:37]:
I think you’re right, our jobs are 24 by 7. We can get a call anytime, night or day, holidays and what not. So first, I think it’s important for people in our position to take care of themselves, honestly, and it starts with that and that includes investing in ourselves technically and from a business standpoint, as well as taking care of our health but I think the thing that’s most challenging that I find in my role because we at P and G, we centralize all of IT development and operations, so all application development now, we’re going to start running it horizontally as a practice

Jim Fortner [00:02:14]:
and just like we’ve been doing to some degree with our infrastructure operations, we’re now doing it with our application operations. So we’re moving into a new model but the thing I find most challenging, Sanjog, is the changing business requirement. Our business is moving at just lightning speed with new acquisitions and divestitures or new business models. So as an infrastructure and the focus today, more infrastructure operations. I think our challenge to how do we continue to deliver rock solid services for the big ERP platforms that we’ve done pretty good job I think in the industry to extend out to employee, think about employee productivity systems, handheld, mobile, wireless and the blogging and all these other kinds of technologies that are improving the collaboration of our business partners. So just staying on top of all the changing business plates, I find that challenging.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:11]:
Now, Bill, you come from an organization which is again global and you also have enough of your own infrastructure that has to be managed and you of course serve, other companies like on a global basis. So where do you see the InO rock stars that everybody wants to become at that enterprise level which you’re serving or what you’re trying to do internally? How is that any different or are the challenges exactly the same?

Bill McCorey [00:03:39]:
I think the challenges are similar, Sanjog. I think clearly globally integrated company like IBM, we really operate around the globe, around the clock. So there’s something happening 24 hours a day, seven days a week and I think it’s critically important for us in looking at the new initiatives and the ideas that are coming to the table in order to serve our internal needs and our external clients. It’s really understanding that portfolio and being able to prioritize what matters the most because there’s clearly an abundance of work, there’s an abundance of ideas, and you have to have a really strong portfolio prioritization process that really lets you dive deep into the work that matters the most and then I think it’s also important for an infrastructure leader to clearly have a roadmap that is mapped out into the future that allows you to then look at those initiatives and say, okay, are we really moving things forward and as Jim said, infrastructure is far more than just data centers and servers. It’s really the collaboration tools, it’s the what the employees are working with, it’s the solutions that we provide them.

Bill McCorey [00:04:53]:
How do we make them as effective and productive as possible? So it’s a lot of fun, but I tell you, it is a challenge to keep current and keep up with everything.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:03]:
So Vittorio, how much fun are you having with this joyride?

Vittorio Cretella [00:05:06]:
A lot of fun. This is a time of increasingly competing and conflicting priorities. I’ve been quite successful in centralizing our infrastructure capabilities and run it as a shared service, but that put our capabilities at the core in all the business activity and we see fast grow by acquisitions or people collaborating using Web 2.0 within the enterprise that put more demand on infrastructure and it’s important to have a clear understanding of what are the strategic objectives so that you can prioritize and agree those strategic objectives with your stakeholders, peers and customers, so that you can differentiate the critical from the important, another thing I’d say is what could prevent a leader to be effective is lack of talent in her or his team, making it difficult to delegate, so developing people and talent is a must do.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:55]:
Now, Bill question would be is that if you have a CIO who’s got an agenda to make sure the information flows well through the plumbing that is set properly by the InO leader and then as the information is flowing, it is effectively used from the old side, that is operations side, which is again handled by this InO leader. What kind of understanding that you expect or what is a best practice or what is a good standard to follow in terms of understanding between CIO and InO leader?

Bill McCorey [00:06:25]:
I think that’s a great question, Sanjog and I think there’s gotta be a clear linkage. Clearly we’re expected to keep that plumbing, as you say, up and running and delivering very high availability but we’re also looked at to deliver innovation and new solutions that can really deliver value for a company, for example, at IBM, we’re looking at the workplace of the future. How do we really identify the capabilities, the tools, the collaboration suite that we can provide the employees of IBM in specific roles that can make them the most effective and most efficient employees that you possibly can have, so I think it’s a balancing act. You clearly have to set the table with defining and building an infrastructure that delivers high performance, high availability, but also looking at innovation and new ideas that can even move infrastructure even more into the forefront.

Bill McCorey [00:07:25]:
as a transformational investor.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:29]:
Vittorio, if you had to do performance review of your InO leader, what are the things that you would measure him or her on?

Vittorio Cretella [00:07:36]:
One key responsibility for the InO leader is to get the CIO on board with both the potential infrastructure can provide as well as the criticalities, how the CIO must have visibility of the implications. So when it’s down to cost reductions, understand what are the how service level are going to be affected and understand a full understanding of trade off and that’s the job of the InO leader to spell out those trade offs and get the CIO on board. I often see some infrastructure managers struggling to explain how, for instance, a headcount decrease may affect service levels, disaster recovery and so on and so forth. If they don’t, they cannot blame anybody else for taking decisions without understanding the consequences.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:23]:
Jim, in your world, how much do you have to keep answering to the top guys to say, hey, I’m doing my job, leave me alone so that I can do it?

Jim Fortner [00:08:33]:
That’s a good question. I have regular discussions with not only our CIO but our audit committee and other top leaders in the company regarding the IT infrastructure and the resiliency and that kind of thing and I agree with both Bill and Vittorio here. It’s important to have very clear communications with these leaders in a business term, not technical term. So what makes it successful, I think is when a dialogue goes up a level or two and you’re talking about the business risk and why I need to spend what I need to spend. The other thing for me, three clear deliverables that I have on my plate, Bill hit them as well,

Jim Fortner [00:09:15]:
one is dollar saving, second is on innovation portfolio and the third is operational excellence and resiliency in general and I have to, I’m driving the strategy and the vision for P and G in the space, so at the end of the day, Sanjog, if my measures, if I’m not delivering against very clear measures in business terms, then we’ll have an issue and they’re going to probably help me run my IT infrastructure but it’s important for me and P and G to always remember what the purpose of our company is, which is, it’s all about improving consumer lives in more parts of the world more completely and that’s driven down from the top and even though I’m an infrastructure leader, I have to remember why I’m here and it’s all about the consumer and how we helping him and her in their everyday experience with our product.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:08]:
Vittorio, if you see that there are changes in technology, what we have been adopting or what has been brought in front of us to better manage InO and thats come along with a bunch of challenges, this is like a mixed bag, if you will, which is being handed over to you now, go deal with it.

Vittorio Cretella [00:10:25]:
I think the big issue that remains is integration which is made more visible by the increased availability of this more sophisticated system management technology and platforms. There is undeniable that there is much more complexity operation team has to deal with these days and automation is a prerequisite to stay efficient but unless we have a more open architecture to federate all these resources and system, we cannot really maximize the effectiveness of the operational teams. Especially when they are dispersed geographically or even they extend beyond the enterprise with the inclusion of vendors running managed services.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:07]:
Now, Bill, with you having of course must be leading your internal and external initiative for infrastructure. How is this open world where you are not alone, you’re looking outside in. You’re dealing with different stakeholders or people who are entities surrounding you. It could be customers, partners, shareholders, people up and down the value chain. How are they impacting your ability to handle InO effectively?

Bill McCorey [00:11:32]:
I think first and foremost, the business leaders are looking for value on top of the investment that we’re tackling. I think our external clients are very much looking to the internal IBM IT to demonstrate or showcase that we’re using our own solutions and services and extracting value, so I spend a fair amount of time without meeting with client and really demonstrating how we’re using our own solutions and services and there’s quite a bit of interest in infrastructure these days and clearly we like to point back to the whole smarter planet approach that we want to build a really smart infrastructure, one that clearly green, it’s secure, and one that takes advantage of virtualization and analytics in every sense of the work we’re doing on a consistent basis.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:28]:
So, Jim, with new acquisitions come new flavors of technologies that they may have used over a period of time and now you’re left sifting through and building one compact integrated infrastructure and operation unit, if you will.

Jim Fortner [00:12:42]:
And it is a moving target,

Jim Fortner [00:12:45]:
so when do you ever get to a stable state for you to enjoy the fruits of that labor,

Jim Fortner [00:12:49]:
you won’t. There’s never gonna be a stable state in our business. When we acquired Gillette a few years ago, we had a very robust plan right on through from the CEO right down through every employee on integrating Gillette as fast as possible and it’s not about just bolting them onto the existing kind of ERP system or the existing collaboration technology. Our vision was full integration and ultimately shut down their system so at the end of this fiscal year for us, June 30, we will turn the lights off on the Gillette data center and that was important for us because that helped us meet, we have one of the objectives I talked earlier about, which is driving saving, and being a global company, we’re able to really drive standard

Jim Fortner [00:13:38]:
but at the end of the day, Sanjog, in our business, we’re always acquiring, we’re always divesting. So this is just. We have teams that are just dedicated to that and our goal is to really take our cost and don’t have lots of discussions around which technology should we adopt because we’ve driven, we have a standard within our company and when new companies come in, we drive to that standard unless we feel like there’s a compelling need to change our approach and drive to the other company, so Gillette as an example, had some very strong planning tools. Their portfolio planning process I thought was best in class then that’s something that we’re reapplying here at P and G, but the acquisition and divestiture game, it’s important for companies like ours to use this as an opportunity to really integrate the employees in and the business in as fast as possible.

Jim Fortner [00:14:33]:
That’s where you see the greatest energy.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:36]:
Let’s take a quick break. Let’s start. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back and discuss.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:25]:
Welcome back. So Mr. Vittorio, do you think you are a magician to be able to pull this InO leadership expectations to the.

Vittorio Cretella [00:17:32]:
I don’t believe we can qualify as magicians, but over the past 10 years we have been pretty close to it. So technology has helped a lot to keep costs at bay while demand for resources was skyrocketing and by using standardization, centralization approach, consolidating, resourcing, making use of virtualization, we were able to deliver more bank for the same buck. There is a limit to that and by the way, we see many opportunities in the future with things like cloud computing. So the journey is not over. However, there is a limit to that and the only way to get out of that dilemma is to establish a discussion with the business, a governance conversation with the stakeholders so that you provide full transparency of the services you provide in business terms and help the stakeholders to make choices on the service level where it’s needed. I would say that if the InO leader feel that what the business tacts is unreasonable and the expectations are unreasonable, he is the one to blame first for failing to connect with the rest of the organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:39]:
So Bill, in your view, if somebody is trying to get some work done here and they are not able to, they are not able to create these miracles, is that truly because, as Vittorio said, a problem in setting the right expectations or in the first place, his or her ability to be able to deliver it.

Bill McCorey [00:18:59]:
I think it’s probably more toward the expectations or using the data and analytics to really spell out the facts. I’ve always found that if you come to the table with data that support your business case, you’ll be heard and prior to this role, I was a CIO for a large retailer and so I, I had that appreciation for infrastructure and knowing the appropriate questions and data points to ask for to help sell up through the senior leadership and to the board for some of these transformational investments. So I think Vittorio is right. It’s setting the expectations, it’s building that partnership and then it’s having the data to actually describe the outcome of some of our actions.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:45]:
But one of the word that Vittorio uses Governance, which again in some cases is used as it’s at least perceived as an overkill and when you’re talking about InO, prove that it is something that’s going to deliver value versus just being a cost saving machine and then in order to make that happen successfully, you want to have a governance layer which again is in some cases perceived as an overkill. What is the outcome expected out of such an environment?

Jim Fortner [00:20:17]:
You’re asking, who are you asking?

Sanjog Aul [00:20:18]:
This is going back to Bill again, system following up.

Bill McCorey [00:20:22]:
I very much agree that the governance plays a very important part and I think it’s as you define these infrastructure initiatives or investment have the business case built in a way that it’s easy to capture and or identify the true savings or the transformational value. I think, you know, it’s more than just being able to say okay, we installed the server or storage farm or we implemented cloud, be able to point back to where did it really save employees time in provisioning, where did it actually help reduce cost or where did it drive improved performance or other business value. So I think that governance process really generally ties back to from my point of view, financial ties that you can actually demonstrate the value.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:11]:
So Jim, in your case, if you were able to get a miracle going at your end, what was the secret thoughts there?

Jim Fortner [00:21:21]:
I think for us when you talk, first of all, I don’t the miracle in our business is real risky, Sanjog, one little outage could take us down and be detrimental to the company that we serve. So in the infrastructure business you don’t sit and pray for miracles as both Bill and Victoria shared but one is I believe you got to have very strong executional excellent. You gotta get that whole culture within your organization that you don’t, there’s no cowboys here. You do careful plan changes, you test it, you get very clear value proposition back to the business. It’s a very serious business that we’re in.

Jim Fortner [00:22:02]:
It really demands the best out of the people and honestly I think the job’s fantastic. The IT leaders in this space, it’s just they earn their salary just about every day and the excellence of keeping the systems up and driving innovation. So I’m a real strong believer in driving a culture of operational excellence and really lifting up the organization. My personal plea is to those folks are listening to the radio broadcast, that really think about the infrastructure operations as something very strategic. I think if you were to talk to any of our CEOs in our company, they will tell you how important our function and our job is, whether it’s security, whether it’s the IT systems itself or other aspects around the collaboration technology, we provide breakthrough for our company and then secondly, I’ll go to the fact I think Bill mentioned about the conversations that we need to have at the top, very clear communication in business be around the value proposition and then the follow up on the conversation that here’s what we’re delivering, we delivered the promise and here’s the business benefit. I think it’s really important to tie that knot as infrastructure leaders so that there’s more awareness about the result.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:21]:
So Vittorio, if you were to use your influence management, that’s a term that of course exists for any leader who needs to get jobs done by having people follow them, who don’t report to them how much of that influence management is, of course it is required, we know that it is required but then how much does it take for you to make people follow you, especially, if you are an InO leader, not everybody in business community is going to be following you right up front. So what is that pied viper approach that you have to take to make this happen?

Vittorio Cretella [00:23:54]:
I think as you say is a key requirement of the job and especially when infrastructure capability is centralized and provided as a shared service to the various business entities and the connection with the business and building the trust is a prerequisite. So you mentioned before that governance may be seen as an overkill. We found out that to unlock that and to make it much more of an agile type of discussion, creating a flavius catalog. So making transparent what is the business deliverables out of the service was essential to success and then you build trust because people don’t look at it as a black box and also you can have a meaningful discussion with people.

Vittorio Cretella [00:24:37]:
The other thing is the connection with the business entities that often is provided by business facing team, whether they are regional teams, local teams and there is not always a direct connection between the global infrastructure function and the customers and in that case it’s very important to true networking and influencing to make sure those peers and colleagues become your best ambassadors and supporters because they are the your face to business unit for the ultimate customer. You want to make sure that people perceive the value you provide.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:11]:
Bill, a question for you. While we are talking about influence management and what Vittorio says definitely makes sense for us to get anything done. Now this person cannot be the only spokesperson for that call and so that you have to have a set of lieutenants who are doing something same as what you’re doing or almost be your clone to make this happen because in larger organization that would be required. What is the team makeup that you would look for in order for you to yourself be elevating yourself to be an InO rockstar?

Bill McCorey [00:25:45]:
Sanjog that’s very important for a global company like ours. I need and have infrastructure leaders in most of the large countries or regions and I think it’s critically important for those leaders to be on the same page with me and my team so that as we make changes we can actually help the business around the world understand the value and then more importantly help the business adopt and utilize because so often technology pollute and don’t deliver their full value because the adoption rate may not be where it should be. So I think you have to build in what’s our change management strategy and plan for implementing this new solution as well and then you do have to have those leaders in our company clearly around the world operating on the same page. So I think you’re spot on. It’s very important for me to have leaders that I can reach out to around the globe and I do that on a daily basis.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:48]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and Jim, let’s start with you in fact talking about the team makeup. So what exactly did you do in your organization to pull up a very successful InO transformation and or ongoing management so that the best value is being delivered, the costs are low and everybody is happy? So what is that crew looking like and what are you doing to make that crew successful? Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:03]:
Welcome back. So Jim, what the crew looking at your end? Who’s making you and themselves successful?

Jim Fortner [00:30:09]:
I have a multifunctional team. First of all, I have a finance manager that reports into me, an HR manager and I also have a manager of communications because I think in the InO space you really need to have strong communications, equal communication. So I have a person that is dedicated to helping us really hone in on the message when we deliver value. I use also techniques in terms of we have four cards that are very clear, deliverable with our leader. The culture that we have in place is a culture that you deliver the promise, you deliver on your commitment and we spend time with clear, getting clear on our strategies and our goals within the leadership team. My leadership team is global, so we have people all over the place and then I think the last thing I’d like to mention is we really leverage our partnership that we have.

Jim Fortner [00:31:03]:
We have a strong partnership with HP, Cisco, we leverage IBM as well. We have the Xerox, these kinds of things, SAP. We leverage the partnerships to really help change, help us change the game to come up with new ideas and new innovations and then think about how do we do things much more effectively, much cheaper. So that’s the makeup, some external involvement as well as a cultural change within the team in terms of what’s expected of them and how do they drive the right result?

Sanjog Aul [00:31:35]:
Could you say that if you were indeed using outsourcing successfully, you could go vacationing in Hawaii and still get the job done?

Jim Fortner [00:31:43]:
HP runs our IT operation today. So as we speak they are monitoring our SAP systems and they’re doing all the right change management and this kind of thing. So on a day to day basis, you’re right, but we can’t, this is not a hands off kind of proposition. Even our partners would tell you that they need the P and G leadership to help drive the right kinds of investment decisions and interventions that are needed. Collectively we really win together. We on an island, we can’t do it and I couldn’t do it without them and they can’t do without us.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:17]:
So since you see companies across multiple industries and multiple continents, where do you see the. Do you see a pattern in the way InO is being handled and the type of crew, the type of makeup, the type of processes which is essentially creating a high degree of success?

Bill McCorey [00:32:37]:
I do. I think the, the framework is the same around the world. I think the difference is the rate and pace of the growth. Clearly in our growth market, the demand for infrastructure is just far greater than it would be in a mature market and it’s even down to finding solutions that are easier to deploy, better serve the customer and ones that we can very rapidly provision. So I think clearly the big difference is pace and rate of that change in some of these growth markets.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:13]:
Do you see IT leaders in companies where you even as a vendor would go in there and try to successfully help them handle InO, Is there any leadership style that you see become makes it more successful overall?

Bill McCorey [00:33:25]:
I think a lot of what I’m hearing from my panelists here is the same. You really have to look at infrastructure as more than keeping the lights on but you really have to understand there will be times where you’re going to be on calls late at night or in the early morning because of the windows trip, implementing the changes. So I think it does take someone that’s very diligent, someone that you know clearly understands when to say no. I always encourage my team, if there is a problem, let’s back out before there’s an impact and I will never address anybody for making a decision to fall back as long as we can protect the availability. So I think that operational excellence is first and foremost and to Jim’s comment on being able to step away for vacation, I understand that’s hard to do for all of us in this space because we’re always connected, always on

Bill McCorey [00:34:19]:
but I think it’s a matter of putting the right team in place, putting the right automation in place that really gives you that early warning and the ability to react as quickly as possible.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:30]:
Vittorio, do you think you can be a rockstar InO leader and still have a life?

Vittorio Cretella [00:34:35]:
I believe so but we need to evolve in the way we we run our function, so I do believe IT infrastructure operation will become even a more important prerequisite to do business and not only in terms of the amount of capacity we need to provide. With business growing very fast, but as well as the type of capabilities and I mentioned before sutalev working with the enterprise and a lot happens today in the digital world but I believe there will be more opportunities to procure an assembly capabilities to increase service while reducing costs. Now talent is one of the things that I mentioned before and I believe it’s very important that we develop that talent by adding the right skills and competencies.

Vittorio Cretella [00:35:18]:
So while retaining the amount of technology expertise required to apply good judgment, we must increase skills such as vendor management, influencing and networking within the organization and basically developing more entrepreneurial profile

Vittorio Cretella [00:35:33]:
and whenever possible perform rotation in other roles within it to enable those leaders to get the full picture. Now you mentioned also managed service and outsourcing. I do believe there is an opportunity there and a scenario where the InO function will decrease the amount of internal execution and at the same time increase the amount of service management across platforms and vendors looking basically at end to end services as opposed to specific physical technology and that’s why it’s important that the leaders have a good entrepreneurial profile and they took service, not just technology and I’m very fortunate that one part of my organization is really good to do so. The operational leg of our central organization is structured to address those needs.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:19]:
Now Jim, in your case, when you are trying to deliver value or that you’re expected to deliver value, you are also required to invest some money into the boxes and everything else that is required in the InO. Now can you truly create a tangible, measurable crystal ball, if you will, for the guys who are going to be holding the first string that yes, this is required. So I want this much money and I’ll get you this much result. Do you have the confidence and or a map that you can show, a tally you can show which will allow them to say yeah, it looks like yes, it is a good proposition.

Jim Fortner [00:36:57]:
I would turn back to my IT leaders within my organization, Sanjog and all those on the phone here. At the end of the day that’s what’s expected of us in IT. If we run our, if we run our area like a business, you can’t go to a bank and get a loan without a clear business case and in our business, if we’re driving a new product innovation and we want to invest, you got to have a very sound cash flow position of business case and send how much revenue could you expect a brander and our business is no different. When I have found mistakes made in the past is because we haven’t done a thorough enough job really rooting out the risk versus a benefit. There’s a fine line here, okay.

Jim Fortner [00:37:41]:
There are cases where we put technology on the floor that the business says “oh this is not really that critical”. Then we find out a year later that they’re running business critical information through and then now we have to play catch up and then we have to invest extra in the hardware and software to put in resiliency. This is one of the reasons why we are horizontalizing our operate our application and infrastructure operations and our development work. We want to catch this up front so when we sit down and if a business partner wants has a need and we develop the capability to meet that need, we share the risk upfront in terms of the cost and a rough order of magnitude and if it goes over, the business is aware of the risk that it could go over, so if we really share the risk together and in addition we also ensure that the quality goes in so we can have a vertical startup on our initiatives versus historically I think IT leaders around the world, just in our industry they haven’t been known for doing vertical startups on big application projects and this is something that is changing. I hear this from my colleagues and other companies and needs it certainly here at P and G to be always on and to take make sure that we take savings that we have yielded and reinvest them back in some cases in operational excellence, in other cases it’s just new capability.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:11]:
So Bill, is that any different in what across other industries and internally?

Bill McCorey [00:39:15]:
No, I think it’s very similar, Sanjog, I think we’re all looking to drive more dollars towards those transformational investments and taking the cost of run down and I think for us, as Jim said, you present your business case and I think it’s really important to be able to demonstrate when an infrastructure investment is truly transformational because a lot of times they get categorized from where merely is running the engine and that’s not always the case, clearly keeping the box current that is run, but really looking for ways through some of the techniques today, such as cloud and virtualization, to really transform how infrastructure is serving the business. So I think that’s the challenge we’re all being asked to deal with and deliver against every day.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:05]:
We see a ton of people talking to us and of course we hear them saying that my infrastructure budget and I n O budget has been cut to the bone. Now, were they not the right sales people or they did not sell it right? Is that why it happened or is there some extraneous factors that they don’t control?

Bill McCorey [00:40:25]:
I think we’re all being asked to reduce our cost and I think certainly the technology advances allow us to do so but what you also have to do is be able to support growth. So there’s a fine line of taking your cost down, but you have to be able to clearly say in this space or in this region or in this market, here’s what we’re doing to really facilitate that growth and I think clearly most business leaders are, they’re going to be open to that but as Jim said, you need to have your business case, you need to have your information ready and at arm’s length to be able to explain why this investment is important while at the same time showing over time that you are taking your cost down. So I think it really depends on a case by case but I think that’s the overarching approach I would use.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:16]:
Let’s take a quick break with this. We’ll be right back and just discuss. Maybe there are some chronic I n O challenges that we are still grappling with and there may be reasons why we are not able to handle them so far and what is on the horizon that we can look at and be hopeful that yes, we will have these final few challenges handled properly and we will be all happy. So please stay tuned. We’ll be right back and discuss.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:18]:
Welcome back. So Vittorio, we’ll get into the chronic I n O challenges that leaders might be facing till today but then before that, let’s hear your thoughts on what does it take for us to convince management that your upfront capital is required for you to get value later?

Vittorio Cretella [00:44:34]:
Sure, and I think the answer is two folded, first and foremost, I agree with both Bill and Jim that you require a robust business case which is expressed in clear financial terms and today’s leaders cannot survive without mastering. If you want the basics of financial management, the ability to describe the impact on P and L, balance sheet, cash flow, that alone often doesn’t cut it. So what a leader needs is also the trust of the senior stakeholders, which is not something that you can build overnight and is an ongoing process, is an ongoing relationship, keeping them informed, being profound about the business value proposition that infrastructure provides and that makes it much easier when you show up with your capital request.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:20]:
Now coming to the I n O challenges that you still see the world facing, Vittorio any anything that you can inventory quickly?

Vittorio Cretella [00:45:27]:
Sure, there is one that comes to mind that could be seen as a chronic challenge. I would also describe it as an opportunity, but it’s basically consumerization of IT and is a challenge that is getting worse with the fantastic progress consumer technology has made in recent years. There is always the expectation from the user side that things should work like they do at home or over the internet and that enterprise devices should be as stylish as the ones that you can buy in a mall and I’m sure we’ll get a lot of noise out of the Apple announcement today but the point is that IT in the enterprise it is different from consumer IT and it has a different control file, different data and security requirement. So I believe the enterprise will furtherly benefit from consumer technology and we will see convergence, especially in the area of Web 2.0 and social networking tools, OLT cloud computing and virtualization enable more flexibility with devices.

Vittorio Cretella [00:46:25]:
However, it is important to bear in mind that consumer IT and enterprise IT are fundamentally two different things and we need to seed that concept starting with business leaders first.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:34]:
Now Jim, do you think you would agree with us compared to agree with what Vittorio said in terms of putting consumer IT and enterprise IT in two different buckets and try to bring them together. Could they not be seen in the same light?

Jim Fortner [00:46:46]:
I agree with Vittorio, in fact, we have a project that we started as well, looking at the employee of the future. So we looked at various consumer technologies that are very popular in the marketplace and then how do we bring them into an enterprise such as P and G and create the same robust operations and tools and that kind of thing to manage IT and keep the cost down. I think the other thing honestly that I see is challenging for it more of what’s coming from the business. Our business wants to be real time, they want to react quicker and they want to have thin inventory. So that. Which means from an IT standpoint we need a different data model and a data architecture. We need to be getting information from our retailers and the consumers very quickly, integrating them into some of the decision kind of a COGS test to make it simple for our business leaders to make decisions.

Jim Fortner [00:47:38]:
So you’re going to see a lot of investments I think in IT and over the future in this whole phase of kind of real time decision making, aiding our general managers and presidents. The other is regarding the inventory, to put a lot of pressure on our infrastructure, stay up and running all the time. Our vision is to really go digital from the molecule to the shelf. How do we digitize our business flow and our work process end to end, the IT infrastructure is absolutely foundational to really enabling this. That’s a big challenge I see coming at a us.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:13]:
So Bill, what do you think?

Bill McCorey [00:48:14]:
I think Jim is spot on with regards to the analytics and I think the fact that the amount of data that we’re all dealing with and the time constraint, as Jim said, we need instantaneous information, we need tighter inventories, we need just in time demand that’s really applicable for all businesses and I think really the key is going to be using analytics and tools that can help us really dive through that data, make real decisions as quick as possible that are certainly fact based and using the data to help us deduce into the right decisions going forward. So I think really managing data and selecting and utilizing the right analytics tools is going to be critically important.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:04]:
On behalf of the show and listeners, I’d really like to thank Jim, Bill and Vittorio for sharing your insights about how the world out there who are trying to deal with this I n O challenge could really become a rockstar and if you have any questions listeners, the email is views@ciotalkradio.com that is view@ciotalkradio.com. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul you talk show host. Till next week take care and god bless.

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