Motorola CIO: Patricia Morrison

Dan Farber: Patty thanks for joining me.

Patricia Morrison: Great to be here Dan, thanks.

Dan Farber: Now you've had a long career in IT, with stints at Proctor and Gamble, at Office Depot, and now you're in Motorola, you've been there since July 2005. What are some of the big projects you're working on to affect change?

Patty Morrison: A couple of areas. Supply chain is a great example, we're doing a lot to consolidate our supply chain, work with our suppliers more effectively, just to keep up with our growth, the number of units we're producing on the mobile device side, changes in consolidation in our networks and enterprise business, and a lot of our time and attention is focused on enabling the supply chain activities.

Dan Farber: When you talk about enabling supply chain activities, how much of that is a technology problem, how much is it a business process issue?

Patty Morrison: Well every IT problem starts with the process business, but just as an example, we use a lot of EMS and 3PLs on the supply side as part of our manufacturing process and in the past if we wanted to bring in a new supplier, it could take us, sometimes, up to three or four months to get them integrated in and have visibility into our supply chain. We've been able to use service oriented architectures and web services to reduce that to two to three weeks to bring on a new supplier. And that's just an example of how technology can help you grow very rapidly and add that kind of capability into your process.

Dan Farber: And again what are some of the other areas that you've been innovating in?

Patricia Morrison: Another area for us is just getting better visibility to supply and demand. When you have the kind of growth we have, for example, in the third quarter we produced 53.7 million units, and that's more than we did in all of 2005, in one quarter. And we're growing so fast it's very, very important to know what demand you have, what supply you have, and so we make it possible to see, every single morning at 6:30 am, what our demand and what our supply is on a global basis, for our mobile device leadership, and now we're doing that in our connected home and in our networks and enterprise business. And it is mission critical to running the business every day. We happen to deliver that on the Q, and so Ron Garriques is our biggest Q user, he's the president of our mobile device business, and that's because he's relying on that information to run his business every day.

Dan Farber: So is this a case that as you develop products you're eating your own dog food?

Patricia Morrison: Oh absolutely. We use a lot of Motorola technology. Part of what's happening in the world is, as the internet goes to the air, and the possibility for seamless mobility gives us capability that we can have our people closer to our customers all the time, and actually just be more efficient through mobility. So we use a lot of Motorola product in order to make that happen. Anywhere from the Q, obviously, but even our WiMAX technologies that enable us to bring up a new facility really quickly by putting a canopy on it for connectivity.

Dan Farber: Now aren't there some risks in term of using prototypes, eating your own dog food, in that some of the operations or business processes you're trying to accomplish may not be completed because it's too early in the prototype stage?

Patricia Morrison: I think that the risk to the user's experience is definitely true, if you put a prototype device into the user community there is a little bit of tolerance for it not being exactly what they want, or having all of the features and functionality that they may have switched from, but the risk of not doing that, what we've learned from experiencing that within our own company is so powerful for what we can deliver to our customers, that it's definitely worth the trade-off.

Dan Farber: Now, Motorola is in a very competitive industry, especially in the cell phone marketplace, and certainly IT is part of the equation about how you compete, so what can you tell me about how IT and innovations in IT have you really helped you stay ahead, or at least up with your competitors?

Patricia Morrison: Well, for example in our cell phone market, reach to the customers is extremely important, and historically the market - even if you look particularly at the U.S. it's still this way - has gone through carriers. And as we reach individual consumers through retail channels, distribution/trading partners, as we grow in countries like China and India, our ability to distribute into those channels, track, make sure we don't have out of stocks, the inventory management, all of those factors become IT-enabled problems to solve. So we've done a lot of work, particularly in north Asia and China, in supporting opening a store every day. We just opened a flagship store in Moscow. How we change the information that we supply to "feet on the street" for doing assisted selling. All those things are critical for us to compete with all of our competitors, and that's some of the work that IT's doing to make that happen.

Dan Farber: And would identify some of the core technologies that you're using to enable you to be more competitive, and to, let's say, out-innovate your competitors?

Patricia Morrison: We use a lot of different technologies. We have an ERP suite of applications that we work with.

Dan Farber: And which ERP flavor are you using?

Patricia Morrison: We happen to be an Oracle shop and we have a very close strategic relationship with Oracle. And part of what we do is work with them on mobility applications. It's not about taking an existing application and making it fit a smaller screen to fit a mobile device for example; it's about thinking how business processes and transactions happen in a mobile world, and making the processes more effective and the software to support those processes more effective. So we have to have close relationships with our software providers and we work with companies like Amberpoint who is helping us on the SOA side, where you know we really do believe in the importance of rapid IT and how we can reuse, and we even use technology to support IT like Amberpoint, believe it or not. IT is a big function in most enterprises and needs in IT support, staff just like finance, HR, legal, supply chain, marketing all do. So, we're cobbler's children that wear shoes, when it comes to using IT to make us more effective.

Dan Farber: And given the massive supply chain and manufacturing operations you have around the world, is RFID much of a factor at this point?

Patricia Morrison: I think RFID is still a little bit less mature as a factor, in terms how we're actually applying it to the product. In the supply chain area, in terms of tracking through your supply chain, we use extensive barcoding in our warehouses and RF and scanning devices, whether it's the HC700, which is a product that we use extensively in transportation and distribution with customers like FedEx and UPS and Deutsch Post, and the US Postal Service, we use those same technologies internally. And now with the acquisition of Symbol Technologies, which we're very excited about in IT at Motorola, because they have a lot of technology that has a great application in that space for us, within the enterprise as well.

Dan Farber: Now you mentioned Symbol, which you acquired for four billion dollars, and you recently just acquired Good Technologies. Seems like you have some integration challenges ahead of you, and do you have any guidelines that you apply to various integrations, given you've been at Office Depot and Quaker Oats, where you did the transition into PepsiCo. So what advice do you have in terms of these kinds of integration challenges?

Patricia Morrison: I think it's very important for the IT function to focus in an acquisition on what the business needs to accomplish within the first 90 days, within the first year of the acquisition being integrated. A lot of times that has to do with organizational integration, has to do with being able to close the books quickly, it has to be to do with the developing the synergies, not only the cost synergies, but the sales synergies as well. And so we focus our M&A and integration work in IT very much on those four areas. Day one, you want the new organization to feel a part of Motorola, do they have a common e-mail access? Do they have access to the intranet? Are their organizations integrated into our HR processes and systems? Typically that's followed by the closing of the books. And a lot of times you have integration challenges just in how the accounting processes actually occur from company to company. We're getting pretty good at this, we've done a lot of acquisitions in 2006, of course Symbol is our largest one, Good the most recent one, Netopia we just announced in our connected home business, and we have a very dedicated team that repeats these processes over and over again and we learn from them each time.

Dan Farber: I think one of the areas that becomes an issue when you're integrating all these companies, and when you have a company where you have, I think it is, what, 320 facilities in 73 countries, I mean, how do you collaborate? How do you fuel innovation when you have a company that is that distributed?

Patricia Morrison: Well, innovation comes out of your culture. One of things that I love about Motorola is that it has at its core an innovative culture. All the way from the traditions that we've introduced, the cell phone we invented, the radio we invented, and how we've taken those technologies and reapplied them to different business problems. And I think that that is very much part of Motorola's fabric. We really listen to customers: that's where your innovation comes from. And the same is true with IT, we have to listen to the customer and really understand what problem they're trying to solve. Sometimes that innovation even means saying no to things that people want to do because we just don't think that it's worth the investment for example. So, listening to the customer, really solving a real problem, and applying all the resources you have, the talent that you have, to solving that problem.

Dan Farber: Now you talk about applying the resources and the talent to solving problems, but what tools, technologies, processes do you have in place to unleash those capabilities especially given how far flung you are. You have research centers, I guess, in Korea, China, the U.S.; do you have to use wikis, blogs? We see that in a lot of companies today.

Patricia Morrison: We use all of them. We do as much knowledge management and sharing, we have a very, very robust portal capability, internal content management capability, we do blogs and wikis internally, the RD organizations collaborate this way all the time on products. Can we do better? Yes. But we are very open to applying all new kinds of new technologies to enabling that type of collaboration across the enterprise.

Dan Farber: Do you have a group that looks at new technologies, whether it's from large companies or small companies that could give you an edge, or could provide some capability that is unique to what you need to do?

Patricia Morrison: Absolutely. And I invest in that, and I protect it. When you're fighting over every budget dollar, it's important to protect it. They do have a dedicated organization that focuses on architecture, integration, data, and new technologies. My lab's even used for Motorola engineers who want to put new technology that could be used in an enterprise into a production environment so we can test that and give them feedback. And we're very, very aggressive around that. One of things that's great about working at a company like Motorola is IT can be bleeding-edge, we're not always just a fast follower, we're really pushing the envelope on new technology all the time. And we do a lot with our new ventures group, we actually invest in start-up companies, and we spend a lot of time with those companies. We have a part of our labs organization that does early stage accelerator type of work that we collaborate with. And then we reach out within the venture capital community, the start up community all the time to find the best ideas. And we make that a part of our process all the time.

Dan Farber: Now can you give me an example of something you've done recently that's been bleeding-edge?

Patricia Morrison: You know I'll give you an example in using the Q. The Q was launched with Verizon in June of 2006. We had a thousand Qs deployed by the end of 2005. And part of the bleeding edge of the Q is you're looking at the hardware itself, the operating system, ours happens to be with Microsoft Mobile 5.0, and the synchronization capability for the wireless synchronization, and we were able to get these Qs deployed to meet very specific business problems, like the one I mentioned earlier, but also to really learn about the challenges of traditional provisioning and management of the devices. Frankly, we had a lot of influence in the decision to acquire Good because we think that it adds into our enterprise mix a lot of capability that will make the Q that much more powerful as an enterprise tool.

Dan Farber: And finally, if you were starting from scratch, and going to kind of build out a system, what are the key components that you would use today?

Patricia Morrison: I tend to be a very big advocate of focusing on data architecture, when you're looking at how you build out from scratch. ERPs, if you have the wonderful opportunity to be in a situation where you have one single instance and one ERP and not many companies really have that today, but suppose that you did. - you are sitting with one set of master data. Most companies need to proactively manage their data so that it becomes the center of how you integrate. The challenges of rolling out new applications, integrating applications to each other, integrating new acquisitions, and then, running your infrastructure as effectively as possible, much of that can be fixed if you have good data management. One single source of truth. A lot of times it gets replicated and that's what causes a lot of the redundancy you have in your infrastructure. So, I like to start there.

Dan Farber: Great. Well Patty, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Patricia Morrison: You're welcome Dan. Thanks for having me.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Patty Morrison, who is the CIO of Motorola. For CIO Sessions I'm Dan Farber, thanks for watching.