PPM: Validating the Value of ITdocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109017/item... · Infographic TK UPFRONT % OF BIG DATA IN 2012 THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN USEFUL IF TAGGED AND ANALYZED:

CIOAPRIL 2013 VOLUME 21

CIO MASTERS THE ART OF M&A

BUILDING A MODEL SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

C IS FOR CLOUD … AND COLLABORATION

A MULTI-VENDOR APPROACH TO ERP

Inside:

PPM: Validating the Value of IT

Project and portfolio management helps IT executives prioritize their most pressing initiatives, leading

to better project spending and accountability.

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RESISTANCE ISN’T FUTILE

STEERING THROUGH A DATA TRAFFIC JAM

CIO DECISIONS • APRIL 2013 2


STEERING THROUGH A DATA

TRAFFIC JAM


PPM: VALIDATING THE VALUE OF IT

BUILDING A MODEL SOCIAL

ENTERPRISE

C IS FOR CLOUD … AND

COLLABORATION


HOW TO MAKE IT project management less of a, well, project was a tall task for Bob Biles, an IT director for the city of Mi-ami Beach, Fla. Following several kickback scandals, maintaining transparency and accountability throughout the project life-cycle became a mandate, not only for IT but also for city project planners. Biles’ answer was a project and portfolio management tool in the cloud—the first and only cloud app now used by the city—that laid out the billable hours of his staff and aligned these hours with proposed projects and bud-gets in a simple format. All team members can view this information to budget and plan against; in conjunction with a change management system, everybody from the project team leader down to an application

Resistance Isn’t Futile

EDITOR'S LETTER

Christina TorodeEditorial Director

tester is held accountable for the success or failure of a project based on his or her docu-mented actions—or lack thereof.

Not everyone likes these new IT project plan procedures, Biles admits, but break-ing bad habits and getting people to accept change for the good of the business is par for the course for IT executives, as seen throughout this month’s issue of CIO Deci-sions e-zine. There’s the project championed by Ralf Larson, director of online employ-ment and engagement at AB Electrolux, to “nudge” the workforce toward a new way of working online through social collaboration. As reported by Executive Editor Linda Tucci, Larson overcame objections from the com-pany’s top brass, and stared down the tech-norati (CIO included) when they lobbied for




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ployees were given little guidance on how to use the platform.

The message is clear: When it comes to any IT project plan, prepare for some resis-tance, and keep processes simple and trans-parent.•Please write to me [email protected].

the vendor they knew rather than somebody new. He also weathered the failed initial launch of this social platform to champion the relaunch of an effective business social network.

“We launched it (initially) saying it was our internal Facebook for business, and that was a big mistake,” Larson said, adding that the initial launch also stalled because em-

EDITOR'S LETTER

mailto:[email protected]




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EVER WONDER HOW all that up-to-the-minute traffic information gets to the mo-bile apps on your phone or the GPS on your dashboard? Between point A and point B lie billions of data points. Companies like Kirk-land, Wash.-based INRIX Inc. sift through and make sense of all that data so drivers in 32 countries can get where they’re going faster.

Using a crowdsourcing-based model, INRIX taps into mobile devices and dash-boards to get real-time information. Once upon a time, this data was gathered by sen-sors placed by departments of transporta-tion and traffic helicopters. The company’s SmartDriver Network aggregates traffic data from nearly 100 million private and com-mercial sensor-carrying vehicles globally to

provide real-time, historical and predictive traffic information.

For INRIX, analyzing big data—and doing it quickly—is its stock in trade. Most com-panies struggle with deciding which data points are keepers, but for INRIX essential-ly all the data coming in is useful. The real issue is getting it back out to customers in a quick, meaningful way.

As a service to its customers—as well as a marketing tool—five years ago INRIX

Steering Through a Data Traffic JamON THE JOB

UPFRONTNews, views and reviews for senior technology managers

Using a crowdsourcing-based model, INRIX taps into mobile devices and dash boards to get real-time information.




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created a Traffic Scorecard. Initially, the an-nual scorecard aggregated a year’s worth of U.S. traffic information to show year-over-year trends. INRIX customers, reporters and departments of transportation were keen to have the information. But for INRIX, there was little bang for the buck.

“We wanted to make a much more usable report that we could update on a monthly basis and take just a few hours to do,” said Ken Kranseler, INRIX’s senior director of product management. “So we were looking for a tool that would allow us to reach into this vast database that we have, summarize it [and] report it in a dynamic way.”

Several data analysis tools were considered; there was even an exploration of whether the team could better leverage Excel or SQL to meet their needs. INRIX eventually settled on a tool from Seattle-based Tableau Soft-ware, which offered INRIX the ability to crunch the numbers and present them in a

UPFRONT

WHAT’S THIS?

Egress FilteringEGRESS MEANS “OUTGOING,” so egress filtering is the process in which outbound data is monitored or restricted, typically by means of a firewall that blocks packets of data that fail to meet certain security requirements to ensure that unwanted or destructive traffic—such as malware, un-authorized email messages or requests to websites—do not leave a particular net-work. Egress filtering can be used by en-terprise organizations to allow only certain servers or computers within an organiza-tion’s network to send data out of that network, preventing employee use of cor-porate computers for casual Web surfing or excessive personal correspondences.Source: WhatIs.com




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visually understandable way on its website.“We figured out that with the flexibility

of the tool and the way it analyzed the mas-sive amount of data we were throwing at it, we could accelerate the process we had and create these traffic scorecards all around the world,” Kranseler said. “Now when the press or a department of transportation wants to see what we have to offer [or] why the infor-mation is useful to them, they can go to our website and pick the city, month, year they want and the data flows from there.”

The response has been overwhelmingly positive, Kranseler said. Departments of transportation and other public sector groups are thrilled they now have the infor-mation they lacked the funding resources to gather. Urban planners and journalists are also fans, and these new data processing methods helped win INRIX new business in Europe with the UK Highways Agency. —Karen Goulart

With Metadata, Big Data has Big ValueDo you have a handle on metadata? Enterprises are increasingly categorizing and tagging their Big Data in a practice resulting in metadata. According to an IDC report, 23% of Big Data in 2012 would have been useful if tagged and analyzed. Of this 23%, only 3% was actually tagged, and only .5% was analyzed. Moreover, the digital universe will double every two years between now and 2020, when experts estimate one-third of that data will have value if properly tagged and analyzed.

Source: The Digital Universe in 2020: Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East, a December 2012 report by analyst firm IDC and sponsored by storage vendor EMC.

Infographic TK

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% OF BIG DATA IN 2012 THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN USEFUL IF TAGGED AND ANALYZED:

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only 3% was tagged

only 0.5% was analyzed23%

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UPFRONT

ON THE AGENDA

Mobility on our MindsMobility continues to move on up as part of the changing IT landscape. In 2013, mobility is less an issue of mobile devices replacing desktops and users replacing IT as their own admins, and more about blending mobility into the enterprise. According to a recent TechTarget survey, top priorities include:

Source: TechTarget’s IT Priorities Survey 2013, which polled 3,282 IT professionals about their 2013 spending forecast.

38% 37% 29%

28%

Smartphone use in the enterprise

Tablet use in the enterprise

Mobile device management

plans

Mobile security programs

Mobile enhancement of corporate data or apps

Mobile virtualization

38+62+z 29+71+z28+72+z 21+79+z 12+88+z

37+63+zTOP PRIORITIES IN BLENDING MOBILITY INTO THE ENTERPRISE

21% 12%




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A bold move? A last-ditch effort? Whatever the markets make of Michael Dell’s $24 billion offer to take his namesake company private, one aspect seems clear: Dell Inc. Global CIO Adriana “Andi” Karaboutis, named to her post in January 2012, is taking a lead role in the company’s transition from PC maker to IT services provider.

ONE ON ONE

Karaboutis occupies a prime spot at the table for the many acquisitions critical to Dell’s turnaround—eight and counting, just on her watch as CIO. The Michigan native is no stranger to business strategy shakeups. Before becoming CIO, she led a transforma-tion of Dell’s manufacturing operations. Be-fore that, she was in the thick of big change

CIO Masters the Art of M&A

at General Motors, where she oversaw a major move to outsource manufacturing and supply chain IT, and at Ford Motor Co., where she tapped her Six Sigma expertise to help boost efficiency.

What’s it like at Dell right now?Really exciting days. It’s a great go-forward plan for the company. Obviously, we are still publicly traded; we know what’s on the ho-rizon. Personally, I’m excited and looking forward to Dell’s new chapter.

Adriana “Andi” KaraboutisTITLE: CIO

ORGANIZATION: DELL INC.

HEADQUARTERS: ROUND ROCK, TEXAS

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 110,000

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Do you see IT as the change agent or the internal glue as Dell executes on its turnaround strategy?Yes and yes. We have our transformational objectives and agenda, and we also don’t lose focus on operational excellence. There are some fundamental things. You’ve heard the old terms uptime and keeping the water running. That’s everything from making sure our employees have seamless communica-tions to good user experience devices and tools, all the way up to the transformational agenda of supporting our solution-selling focus and the fact that we have done 18-plus acquisitions over the last couple of years—and knitting all of that together.

Dell’s many acquisitions in recent years are critical to its transformation from hardware supplier to a technology services company. Do you have a template for quickly folding in acquisitions, like a Wyse

Technology, into Dell?Absolutely. IT is part of the discussions around acquisitions from the early days. Dell is very strong at making sure that all the functions within the company are engaged during the early assessment process, during the finalization, during the close process and obviously during the integration. We design all the checkpoints and all the analysis we need to do for each integration. And each one is different. But the topics—the things you have to cover and need to assess—are pretty much the same. We have a playbook that takes us from Day 0, Day 1, Day 30, Day 90 and final integration to complete. The definition of what needs to be done for those milestones differs by acquisition, and we go in with fresh eyes to every one of them. So, a playbook to ensure we’re cover-ing all bases is kind of our gospel.

A former CIO of Citigroup who also had

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worked at IBM was talking to us recently about the different flavors of integration strategies. One approach is to standardize your acquired companies on your systems as quickly as possible. Another strategy is to let these companies do their own thing, with the understanding that this was a successful busi-ness to begin with and it’s not productive to mess too much with its processes. It sounds like your Dell playbook is able to encompass both approaches.Absolutely right. And that’s the key thing. You don’t go in with absolutes. I have found Dell as a company to be very good about not going in with predispositions. We go in with the base principle of, “I’d like everything integrated on one platform”—that is kind of the CIO’s dream. But the reality is there are shades of gray. For me, the companies that don’t do successful integrations are the ones that don’t assess and analyze what “functional integration complete” should

be. I’ve got integrations where we’ve fully brought them in—100% integrated on our platform—and I’ve got integrations where we’ve said, “There are spaces where we really like how they handle areas and where we don’t have the capability internally,” so we adopt that as part of our base platform. But what we don’t do is leave gray areas: It is positive check-off and then ensuring that we’ve got a good plan for every acquisition coming in.

Can you give an example of where that adaptability was put to use?Our Quest acquisition, one of the best ac-quisitions we’ve done, that came with 300-plus offerings we were using prior to the acquisition and continue to use. This was a software acquisition. Traditionally, Dell was a hardware-centric company. As part of the acquisition, we realized they had some great fulfillment capabilities around software, re

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curring billing capabilities, renewal capabili-ties that come inherently with the software business. Recognizing that we are going to be a strong player in the software indus-try with the Dell Software Group, we said those are the plan-of-record systems within Quest, and that’s become part of my base platform. We’re looking, for example, at our App Assure and SonicWALL acquisitions and using some of the base platform we have from Quest for the software capabili-ties we need. It’s that adaptability that’s key.

One of the analysts who sounded off on Dell’s turnaround strategy expressed doubts it will succeed because the Dell culture is not geared toward selling services, in particular to CIOs.

Does your work at Dell include helping the sales force sell to CIOs?One of the core objectives of Dell IT is to serve as the reference account for our own solutions. We are the large-scale IT organi-zation that successfully consumes our own products and services. Dell Services pro-vides the resources that enhance and sup-port our application development, delivery and infrastructure management. We use our own storage, device management, monitor-ing and security tools, to name a few. We are in the process of setting up our own con-verged infrastructure. Dell not only knows how to sell services, [but we] show how we also are consuming our own services suc-cessfully. —Linda Tucci

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AS THE APPLICATION division manager for the city of Miami Beach, Fla., Bob Biles knows all about oversight. Every move that his 14 developers make for the 30 depart-ments they serve is documented down to the minute, and while some may cringe when they hear the word transparency, he embraces it.

Not that Biles had a choice in the matter: Several officials have been collared for taking bribes for city projects dating back to 2006, with public outcry leading to new project oversight procedures. Still, Biles saw the ac-

countability mandate as an opportunity to introduce project management best practices that would prove just as beneficial to IT as they would to the project steering commit-tees asking questions about how taxpayer dollars were being spent.

Biles’ first move was to the cloud via a project and portfolio management (PPM) tool by Métier Ltd. that he uses to input his developers’ billable project hours and cor-relate those hours to project buckets based on ITIL v3 project lifecycle phases: service strategy, service design, service transition,

PPM: Validating the Value of ITAn accountability mandate helps an IT director introduce project management best practices that make his staff’s value apparent— and transparent. BY CHRISTINA TORODE

COVER STORY

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/tip/Project-portfolio-management-dead-Try-these-tips-for-your-PPM-process




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service operations and continual service improvement.

Because he categorizes the 30-plus proj-ects his team works on in a given year in these ITIL buckets, Biles is able to compare his teams’ service delivery performance against national averages for IT departments of similar size and project workload. “I pull the numbers from published Gartner or Forrester reports, and every time it justifies that we are in line with, if not above, similar IT departments in terms of project comple-tion,” he said. “Having that kind of data tied back to ITIL, that’s the money.”

But the real “IT bling,” as he calls it, are the graphs and reports that validate how his developers are spending their time.

“I’ve lost six developers over three years, so now when they ask me why some de-velopers only have 100 billable hours (out of 1,500 annual hours worked on average—with many of the developers working more

than that) to spend on strategic projects, the graphs break down why that is happening,” Biles said. “Because [steering committees] have the data in front of them, showing how much time we spend on operational proj-ects, they’re more comfortable letting me contract a project out or replace systems that we are taking too much of our time maintaining, so we can spend more time on strategic projects.”

For the IT steering committee, Biles’ proj-ect categorization method helps members connect the number of projects each depart-ment wants completed in the coming year to the hours Biles’ staff has available for the


“ Having that kind of data tied back to ITIL, that’s the money.”

—Bob Biles, application division manager, city of Miami Beach, Fla.




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year, and in which category. “They look at the strategic project list and new develop-ment and the ROI on those projects, then price them out until they burn through the number of hours my staff has for those proj-ects types for the year,” he said. “It removes a lot of the guesswork.”

The projects change size and scope as quickly as the government in residence comes and goes. “We are somewhat at the whim of what the current government thinks is important, but the next govern-ment will come in with entirely new ideas, so we are always working on new projects,” Biles said. These projects range from a mo-bile app that city visitors and residents can use to find open parking spaces in city ga-rages—that conveniently routes them past local businesses—to multi-year projects for applications that display city spending on a public-facing website.

Short-term application projects also pop

up, such as an app that will warn at-risk residents during the April flood season that they live in a flood zone. This initial three-week project is stretching into months as more departments get wind of it and want to add features, such as the ability to find free parking for resident cars in the flood zone. Then, somebody thought of adding a device that scans licenses to automatically lift the garage gate for these residents.

The application isn’t just a friendly public service, but one that will take some of the pressure off of city workers as they work to fix drainage problems in these areas. Other apps under development will alleviate pro-cessing costs, including one that allows resi-dents to pay their city taxes online

A homegrown change management sys-tem records every aspect of these short- and long-term projects, from the initial and ongoing meetings, all of which are recorded and converted into MP3s, to edits made to


http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240177470/Mobile-application-development-Fast-furious-and-flawed

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240177470/Mobile-application-development-Fast-furious-and-flawed

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240149587/Forward-looking-CIOs-need-to-focus-on-app-dev-skewed-toward-mobile

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240149587/Forward-looking-CIOs-need-to-focus-on-app-dev-skewed-toward-mobile




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project deadlines or budgets and who ap-proved these changes.

“People used to walk up to us and ask us to make a change. Now they have to make a change in this system and have it approved. We no longer have situations where some-one says they approved or didn’t approve a project or a budget because it’s documented now. Some people hate it, but to be success-ful, we need transparency,” Biles said.

Moving to a culture of transparency can lead to departures—although Biles didn’t experience any due to the new project man-agement procedures, but rather budget cuts. That was not the case for the New York Stock Exchange Euronext’s IT department when Robert Kerner, senior vice president and chief digital officer, introduced a proj-ect transparency program as part of a move from waterfall to an Agile project develop-ment methodology.

About 100 people left once metrics were

put in place to track team members’ day-to-day progress and display them publicly. “For a lot of people, that kind of transparency is too much, so they leave,” Kerner said. “But I told the business, if they want to look at a line of code, they’re welcome to it. They can look at any level of detail. I have nothing to hide.”

Kerner found that those who chose to em-brace the cul tural change were real “super- stars.”

“Only the really best people decide to stay and work in that environment because they love transparency. They want to show off what they can do,” Kerner said.•

About 100 people left once metrics were put in place to track team members’ day-to-day progress and display them publicly.


http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240150764/Agile-development-methodologies-transparency-pay-dividends-for-NYSE

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/tutorial/Agile-project-management-from-agile-to-waterfall

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/tutorial/Agile-project-management-from-agile-to-waterfall




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RALF LARSSON IS the business owner of the corporate intranet at AB Electrolux, a Swedish appliance maker with operations in 60 countries and 58,000 employees. His actual title, a relatively new one, is director of online employee engagement and devel-opment, and his job is to help foster a social enterprise.

For the past three years, he’s been on a “social journey,” as he calls it, navigating, nudging and needling when necessary the Electrolux workforce to change the way it works online. Along the way, he has over-

come objections from the company’s top brass. He’s stared down the technorati—CIO included—when they lobbied for the ven-dor they knew rather than trying something new. He’s lived down an inauspicious launch that left fellow workers underwhelmed and unengaged. And, happily, he’s survived to see the re-launch of an effective business social network.

Today, the Electrolux intranet, driven by IBM Connections and Microsoft SharePoint, boasts more than 100 information portals managed by 450 editors and read daily by

SOCIAL COLLABORATION

Building a Model Social EnterpriseAB Electrolux has surmounted several setbacks to build a social enterprise model that fires on all cylinders. BY LINDA TUCCI




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business unit in Brussels and moved it to Stockholm. A trusted social enterprise plat-form turns out to be a good change manage-ment tool.

As Larsson’s three-year effort attests, suc-cess was neither swift nor seamless, but a result of working through mistakes. Here are three takeaways.

PUT BUSINESS SCOPE AHEAD OF VENDOR PREFERENCEElectrolux’s benchmarking for the social enterprise platform drew on two compo-nents: IT architects who evaluated prod-ucts on their ability to scale and integrate with existing systems, and users who tested products and rated them on a scale of 1 to 5. The IT benchmarking took only about two weeks; defining business requirements took more like two months, and was based on eight pilots.

9,000 employees. There are more than 1,100 collaboration spaces with 8,500 members.

This communications beehive, accessible from mobile devices, now includes buy-in from the top down. Using the social enter-prise platform to communicate and connect with employees is becoming part of the job description for the “TMC,” the top manage-ment community of Electrolux’s 200 most-senior leaders. The CIO is now a “leading star in terms of how he uses” the platform, showing how “modern IT leadership” inter-acts with the business, Larsson said. IT and Larsson’s team now partner on social busi-ness projects. “We have shared budgets; we trust each other.”

Beyond the expected interactions among employees (finding experts, collaborating in real time), the new platform also has proved useful in unanticipated ways, notably as an effective (and humane) communications vehicle when Electrolux recently closed a





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also did not meet all the business require-ments. “If you look at our intranet, it is a mix of different solutions. We would never have been able to accomplish what we’ve done with either SharePoint only or IBM Connections only,” he said.

ENGAGE LEADERSHIP IN DECISION MAKINGBuilding a social enterprise platform that connects employees as powerfully as Face-book connects its members is a laudable goal. Just leave the name “Facebook” out of it, Larsson said.

“We launched it saying it was our internal

“We asked the business owners of these pilots and their teams [about] what was most important to them in making our in-tranet more social,” Larsson said. That took some a priori thinking because three years ago the term social enterprise barely regis-tered. The pilot groups, however, managed to identify 10 business priorities, which in turn “were ranked higher than benchmarking the product,” he said.

A caution for CIOs: Even before the pilots got under way, Larsson’s business-side team spent many months arguing with IT about how to proceed. “IT wants to do things with the standard platform they already have,” in this case SharePoint, Larsson explained. “I said we are not going to do it.”

Ultimately, a looming business deadline moved the needle. The company was on an old version of Internet Explorer, which would have required updating to go with a SharePoint-only solution. A single solution


Building a social enterprise platform that connects employees as powerfully as Face book connects its members is a laudable goal.




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ruary 2011 with a newer, “better” version of IBM Connections, Larsson took the vendor’s advice and recommended that employees begin with their own expert profiles. “It’s easy to explain the concept to employees: Update your profile so others can find you.”

Technical fixes also spurred adoption. Those included getting rid of redundant menus. “When users entered IBM Connec-tions, they had two top menus, one for gen-eral navigation in the company intranet and one for navigating inside IBM Connections. It was very confusing,” Larsson said. Inte-grating email and instant messaging allowed employees to drag an email into an IBM

Facebook for business, and that was a big mistake,” he said, explaining that some se-nior managers declined to use it, based just on the name. Their kids used Facebook—they had better things to do.

Now simply known as “Social Connec-tions,” the platform has won favor with company leaders. It hasn’t hurt that Elec-trolux measures its top 200 executives on their ability to communicate and be trans-parent with employees. A series of ongoing webinars and “shared stories” sponsored by the social business folks keep top leadership invested.

Early mistakes weren’t confined to senior management. In the initial launch, employ-ees got little guidance on how to use the platform—in particular, on where to start. One value of a social enterprise is that it gives employees the means to find experts in real time to solve real business problems. When the platform was relaunched in Feb-


One value of a social enterprise is that it gives employees the means to find experts in real time to solve real business problems.




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“When this was communicated in Q1 2012 to the employees affected, this took place in a social community owned and driven by the head of human resources and legal. It worked like an open Q&A in three different languages,” Larsson said.

The social community supported town hall meetings, it helped management pre-pare for those meetings and it meant that all employees got the same input at the same time. “The whole change management went smoother because we took this creative ap-proach.”•

Connections “activity” stream and discuss matters in real time, reducing email attach-ments.

INNOVATE AROUND CROSS-FUNCTIONAL CHANGE MANAGEMENTElectrolux made a decision early this year to move the headquarters of its European business unit within major appliances from Brussels to Stockholm, a decision affecting around 240 employees. The move took place in September.





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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CIO Laura Pat-terson is on a mission to bring the school’s faculty and students to the cutting edge of innovation. In 2010, the university embarked on NextGen Michigan, a five-year-plan to adopt next-generation technology to ad-vance research, teaching and learning.

The road to that goal includes aggressive consolidation of the IT infrastructure that’s spread across the university’s 19 schools and colleges. The aim is to build an IT in-frastructure flexible enough to support both shared services and mission-unique

services. The goal is faster innovation.A major step toward that goal was adopt-

ing Box, a cloud-based file-sharing, stor-age and collaboration platform, to facilitate collaboration between students and faculty members. Patterson, a strong proponent of cloud computing, became an early adopter of Box Inc.’s offerings tailored to institu-tions of higher education.

Since Box became available to all students and faculty last fall, 20,000 people have adopted it. Tens of thousands more of the 100,000 possible users are expected to join

Q&A CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

C is for Cloud … and CollaborationIt’s back to school with cloud, as the CIO of the University of Michigan talks about embracing cloud solutions as part of a cutting-edge technology strategy. BY KAREN GOULART




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in by the end of the academic year. Here, Patterson discusses how this cloud offer-ing meets NextGen Michigan’s three main objectives of collaboration, mobility and globalization, why she chose this particular cloud solution, how Box fits into her over-all cloud strategy, and why she thinks early cloud adoption is a competitive advantage.

Why was having a cloud service like Box important for NextGen Michigan?Box met the three key objectives we have within NextGen Michigan. Collaboration is very strategic to the future of the university. We do team-based interdisciplinary research within the university, and our research-ers collaborate with researchers around the globe.

So, we’re seeking to build a collaborative environment that is easy for researchers, students and staff to use in their interdisci-

plinary work and that enables faster innova-tion. The same is true for learning: Team-based learning is the model now. Students are very social. They work in groups, so we wanted our collaboration environment to make it easy for researchers and students to work together.

In terms of mobility, students come to campus and on average bring three to five devices each. The expectation is they can access information anywhere for any of those devices. We’re expanding our reach globally, so we were looking for a solution that allows people to work together and to access their own documents at anytime from anywhere, using any device.

We also recognized our students, faculty and staff were starting to adopt cloud-based storage services that are consumer driven and didn’t have the contractual protections we needed for institutional information. When Box came along, it was the perfect so-





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lution for the business problem that we had, and it also advanced NextGen Michigan.

So, you had campus-wide shadow IT?Right, because while we offer storage solu-tions here—in fact, we have more than one on-premises storage solution—they were not easy to access and were not built for collabo-ration, but instead to store documents.

Did you consider options other than Box?Under NextGen Michigan, we had made a decision to move the entire university to Google. And then Internet2 through its NetPlus service made us aware of the Box offering and that they were looking for uni-versities that would work with Box. Because of our NextGen Michigan initiative, our focus on collaboration and our strategy of cloud first, we very quickly decided that

we were interested. So, I would say it was really Internet2 that introduced us to each other.

Do you always move that quickly on IT decisions?We made that decision in a very nontradi-tional way. Typically, our IT decisions in-volve a great deal of input from the campus, and we go through a governance process. In this case, when the opportunity, through the Internet2 NetPlus offering, came to us, I sat down with a couple of my key direct reports and I said, ‘What’s the risk here?’ The risk was we could pay for this for a period of time and it doesn’t get adopted on campus. That’s the biggest risk that we have. Right now the risk of not doing this is we don’t meet the needs of faculty or students, and they continue to go to consumer products rather than enterprise products.





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It was a very different decision-making process, but it is the way we need to be in order to work in today’s environment. We can’t take a year to make a decision on a product. With this cloud service as a Next-Gen solution, I was not investing in the physical infrastructure, I didn’t have to hire new staff who had to learn new tools, and I was able to subscribe through a service agreement to a service I was very confident was going to meet the needs of our faculty and students—and it has.

How do the adoptions of Google and Box fit your cloud strategy?We have moved the whole university to Google. Our health system is not using email and calendar because of HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Account-ability Act], but we did provision a Google account to everyone—even everyone in the

health system—so they could use Google Docs and other Google apps for collabora-tion. We have a Software as a Service sys-tem called Concur that we use for travel and expense reporting and reimbursement. And right now we have an RFP out on the market for a provider of Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. Our dental school is working on a project for dental records in our dental clinic that will be a cloud-based offering.

For a while, we’ve been looking at the opportunities for research data storage in the cloud, but we haven’t made any deci-sions there yet. I’m very interested in high-performance compute clusters in the cloud also, but there again, we’re just looking and haven’t taken any action.

What are some of the challenges you’ve found in implementing cloud solutions?





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One of the things that I find interesting about cloud solutions, and something that I think we need to get better at, is how to in-tegrate the offerings into the existing infra-structure.

If people have to go to a different site to get a tool, they’re less likely to use it. But if the tool is integrated into where they’re accustomed to working, then you see faster adoption.

One way we’ve addressed that is we’ve in-tegrated Box into our learning management system so that you can be in the system and launch Box just with a click. The faculty wants us to do even more integration into Box so that it’s even easier for them to use it.

But one of our challenges in using cloud offerings from various vendors is how you pull them together into one coherent of-fering for your user community so the user experience is intuitive.

Is it fair to say you have a pretty high comfort level with the cloud compared with other CIOs you know?You know, some of my colleagues have made the statement, “It’s just a different way of sourcing.” I don’t think of it that way. Every few years in IT, there is a significant para-digm shift. When technology moved from mainframe computers with dumb terminals to microcomputers in [LANs], that was a significant paradigm shift. When we shifted from networked computers to the World Wide Web, that was a significant paradigm shift. I think the cloud model is also a sig-nificant paradigm shift; it is not just a dif-ferent way of sourcing. And because of that, I think early adoption of the cloud is a com-petitive advantage.

What still gives you pause about the cloud?We are heavily compliance driven, and so





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for us to adopt across the whole university, cloud providers have to meet HIPAA com-pliance; we also have to have a way of meet-ing ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations] compliance, export controls, PCI [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard]. Additionally, all applications and services have to be accessible so that sight-impaired or learning-disabled students or any disability students and faculty and staff have an equal experience; accessibility is as important to us.

How mature are today’s cloud solutions in terms of meeting the needs of a large university?Ah, they are not very mature. But, again, we’ve taken a bit of a risk at Michigan in that because we believe cloud is an industry trend, we believe that the providers that are going to be successful and win in the industry are

those that can meet the compliance and ac-cessibility requirements. For example, re-cently Microsoft signed a business associate agreement, which is a HIPAA requirement, for their email and their collaboration of-fering—and that was really big because that really made a statement to other vendors.

Are vendors not getting in your door if they don’t meet all the compliance requirements?It’s an overstatement to say no one gets in the door. In fact, some of our cloud vendors haven’t met all our requirements but we have a high level of confidence that they are going to. With some vendors, we’ve held up on certain projects until we could see move-ment that they would meet our needs and requirements. We’ve talked about barring the door going forward, but the industry was just too immature when we started to be able to use that strategy.•





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MIKE MACRIE, vice president of IT at Land O’ Lakes Inc., had a big ERP strategy problem on his hands.

Recruited by Land O’ Lakes two-and-half-years ago, Macrie joined an IT leadership team in charge of a $100 million upgrade of the corporation’s IT platforms, including its core business management software, JD Edwards ERP.

Macrie’s ERP problem was not the upgrade to Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne sys-tem, hard as that surely would be. Rather, it concerned the company’s growing number

of partnerships, joint ventures and small (in some cases, brand-new) businesses spread across the U.S. and internationally that were not served by the on-premises JD Ed-wards system.

“My challenge was how do I meet the needs of those operations—some of them with unique international requirements—without impacting the direction and cost of our main $100 million effort,” Macrie said.

Mention ”Land O’ Lakes,” and most people think of an Indian maiden in a feather head-dress on a butter carton—a brand image that

A Multi-Vendor Approach to ERPLand O’ Lakes solves a $2 billion problem by adopting an ERP strategy that optimizes support for both its big and small business units. BY LINDA TUCCI

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with slight modifications has been around since 1928. Today, with 9,000 employees and 3,200 producer-members, the Arden Hills, Mich.-based member-owned coop-erative (one of the nation’s largest) has a lot more than butter going on. In addition to its dairy operations, it’s become a leader in agricultural products. The $13 billion business portfolio includes subsidiaries Purina Mills, the animal feed business acquired in 2001, and WinField, a maker of seed and crop protection products. The domestic and foreign subdivisions and small businesses in need of ERP software account for “the last $2 billion” of that portfolio, Macrie said.

TWO-TIER ERP STRATEGY GAINS GROUNDIT orthodoxy has long held that large com-panies are best served by a single-instance, single-vendor ERP strategy for the core fi-

nancial and other back-office processes that govern, operate and support their business-es. A single ERP system deployed across all business units can deliver many advantages, from the productivity gains realized by hav-ing standard business processes, to im-proved regulatory compliance.

Increasingly, however, companies are reex-amining that strategy, according to industry experts. Under pressure to rein in costs and save time, companies are using so-called tier 1 solutions from Oracle or SAP to support headquarter operations and major divisions, but considering cheaper and more flexible solutions from vendors such as NetSuite, Sage and Microsoft Dynamics for their smaller business units and/or foreign sub-sidiaries.

That strategy turned out to be the right choice for Macrie. Money was an issue. Im-plementing the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne system at the smaller businesses and joint





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ventures would siphon IT resources away from the main $100 million transformation project. Macrie was also leery of burden-ing these smaller businesses with processes designed for big companies.

“These small businesses in a big company portfolio tend to change a little bit faster and come and go a little bit faster than the core businesses,” he said. “Forcing them into the mold tends to stifle their growth and innovation—the very reason you bought them.”

Instead he opted for a two-tier ERP strat-egy, using the Oracle JD Edwards Enterpris-eOne platform at corporate headquarters, and choosing NetSuite OneWorld for the smaller business units. The cloud-based NetSuite solution, which is designed to handle the different currencies and the vari-ous taxation rules of foreign countries, will integrate back to Land O Lake’s core ERP system.

CIOS, CFOS RECONSIDER ERP GOVERNANCEAnalyst Nigel Montgomery of Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn., said reasons vary for adopting a two-tier ERP strategy, but “cost and governance pressure” are big driv-ers for both CIOs and CFOs.

A recent report by Montgomery and co-author Denise Ganly on how to determine if two-tier ERP is the right strategy points out that implementing a single-system ERP suite throughout the organization remains a very difficult path for most companies. Hurdles range from a lack of support from senior management to the issue of “using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.” Single-system solutions may be too complex for business units to manage effectively. Beyond these inhibitors, Gartner invokes the “conflic- ting pressures” of supporting a mobile, socially enabled workforce, which increas-ingly requires “information visibility” in real-time.





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“This is far removed from the traditional, monolithic and IT-driven world of ERP most organizations inhabit. To remain current, competitive and even relevant, organiza-tions must consider alternatives to single-instance and, potentially, single-vendor deployment strategies,” Montgomery and Ganly argued. “Companies that want the benefit of single-vendor strategy but find the roadblocks too steep should consider a tiered ERP suite strategy.”

Ron Gill, CFO of San Mateo, Calif.-based NetSuite, said he has seen an interesting change in how companies are buying Net-Suite’s cloud-based ERP solution. In past years, the primary buyers were on the busi-ness side, typically the CFO or local manage-ment, but in 2011 CIOs at very large enter-prises became more proactively involved in second-tier vendor strategies.

That is the case at Land O’Lakes. The local

CFO or controller is in charge of the cloud-based ERP system. IT provides oversight, “but aside from that we have reduced our internal IT costs to zero,” Macrie said. In the two implementations already completed (in Mexico), his team trained super users who field questions and deal directly with Net-Suite. A China implementation is underway. Given the relative immaturity of cloud in-tegration services, access to architects who understand Web services and cloud infra-structure is essential, he said, but that chal-lenge is outweighed by the low total cost of ownership.

“It’s under $100,000 a year to operate this [second-tier cloud ERP solution] for our businesses.” he said. “Getting a system that you know is certified financially and that can do so much—for one of the lowest TCOs I have ever observed—accomplished what we needed.”•





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CIO Decisions is a SearchCIO.com e-publication.

Rachel Lebeaux Managing Editor

Christina Torode Editorial Director

Linda Tucci Executive Editor

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PPM: Validating the Value of ITdocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109017/item... · Infographic TK UPFRONT % OF BIG DATA IN 2012 THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN USEFUL IF TAGGED AND ANALYZED: