CIO Panel: Software 2007

At Software 2007 in Santa Clara, Calif., panel chair, Ernie von Simson talks to CIOs Neil Cameron of Unilever, Rob Carter of FedEx, Patricia Morrison of Motorola and Tony Scott of Disney. The CIOs share their "biggest gripe" with enterprise software companies. They also discuss the challenges behind implementing SaaS, and Web 2.0 technologies within an organization.

Interview:

Ernie von Simson: All these people out here are presumably software executives, quite a few of them are from software firms. Is there a single gripe or two gripes that you have, looking at them, that would make your life and their ability to innovate in your companies, improve that enormously if they did X?

Neil Cameron: I think you're all fantastic.

Tony Scott: One is, drop the introduction that is "we are the world's greatest or the world's only, you know, whatever." That's rarely the case. And two, bring me an insertion strategy in terms of how I can take whatever your great idea is and deploy it broadly to our company worldwide, whether that's through a partner or through something else. I think most software executives particularly from small companies don't have any idea at all about how to get something started in a large company; and that's a big problem for us.

Patricia Morrison: We have twelve thousand software engineers at Motorola and have enormous quantities of embedded software in our products which are all warranteed and indemnified. My gripe in the software world that I buy from is that everything I get is full of bugs and issues and I get no recourse for it. And you know, you pay the price, and it's the quality. Quality is my plea to the software industry. You have to focus on it and the enormous amount of time it takes us to go back and patch, fix, change is just consuming the organization and it's something that the cost of which to all of us, the customers and our suppliers, is enormous.

Neil Cameron: No I think you are all fantastic. Well if I say anything else, I'll get about fifty emails telling me why I'm wrong. Why would I do that?

Rob Carter: I will turn it around a bit and say, you know it's so difficult, you have to realize that every time we add something new to the mix, it adds cost and complexity and we're all besieged by the requests, you know you can't live without us, you must come do this. It's a relationship oriented business is what it comes down to. There is a tremendous amount of noise out there and you have to figure out ways to, you know as Tony says onramp, provide technology migration strategies that aren't rip and replace, that don't cause you to abandon things and certainly don't add a lot of cost. My main gripe is just the level of noise and having to find ways to establish important relationships and work those and not offend the rest of you because we just don't have time.

Audience Question:

I'm interested in two things from you. One is, your point of view on software as a service as enterprise leaders. Second of all, what would be some of the challenges, we kind of see this almost as disintermediating as the PC was to many of the IT groups, so how do you see that, some of the challenges with software as a service in your companies?

Ernie von Simson: Great question. Who wants to take it?

Tony Scott: I would. We're embracing it. We use SalesForce and we're starting some as an example among others but we're starting to use AppExchange and I'll just give you a couple of examples of areas where we've found it to be useful. I have a ton of legacy department applications that we run the business on; the person who developed it has long since moved on to another role, it got thrown over to the IT department and said, "here support this thing," and it's, you know, three revs down on the software stack and nobody can find the backup tapes or the original stuff that it was built on, and so on, and so if you ask me if I have a dollar to spend, do I want to spend that dollar on maintaining this stuff that admittingly brings value to the company and upgrading it and all the stuff that goes along with it or do I want to use a platform like AppExchange where I can just let it live. And there are others as well, but those are the tradeoffs and I might even be willing to spend a little more money than I would internally because what I really want to do is focus our resources, our development resources, on the core business problems, the creative stuff, and so on, and I'm very happy to take this other stuff that's important to the business but not strategic and use software as a service. So that's one example and the second is there's just lots of things that we're never gonna be good at and I think some of these software as a service ideas are gonna help us get to market faster with the stuff that we want to do versus buying it, integrating it, supporting it, and all that sort of stuff in our data centers, so we like it. I don't have any issue with it at all.

Patricia Morrison: I would just add, we also are an advocate of software as a service and use it in several areas but like all business models it's good for some situations and not for others and I think that the important thing is the flexibility to move back and forth into different models for the companies that we work with in the software industry so I like to be able to do things on demand in certain situations and also to bring it in-house in certain situations. A lot depends on you know the ability to scale for example and you know, how do you scale the number of employees and partners that we have is always a challenge. The speed of scale, when you can't do adequate capacity planning cause you can't predict or forecast what demand is going to be, so we look at all those kinds of factors and have been very very happy with some of our software as a service providers and very unhappy with some of them as well, so it's a mix for us.

Neil Cameron: Software as a service is coming. I think it's here. It's inevitable and we need to embrace it, but it's not a panacea, I don't think. I mean, you know, we've got a bunch of legacy stuff in there and there's an integration issue which we always faced challenges with, particularly around information and information flows. So for me there's a bunch of opportunities in entry level activities so deploying CRM in Africa, software as a service is much easier to deploy than the old big Siebel or SAP CRM applications so I think for me, do I believe it will scale? Probably. But it's not my challenge right now. But are there opportunities to do things previously we've been either not inclined to do because it's too difficult, too expensive, just too hard? Yes there will be. And the question for me is will we run a hybrid solution or will it eventually start to intrude into a more traditional space and I just don't know, but my guess is there will be some level of convergence because I think Hasso is here and I'm sure SAP will provide some componentry in their on-demand or as a service and we will just have to see how that plays out a little bit.

Audience Question:

So a lot of these Web 2.0 technology mash-ups, social networks, and like AppExchange really require a different type of developer activity, turnaround time, and just a number of differences. How are you dealing with that? Are you setting up separate groups? Are you building that within the business units? How are you trying to address the new requirements of these technologies?

Ernie von Simson: Great question again.

Patricia Morrison: At Motorola, we are doing a lot in this space and we tend to have an architect and distribute model where we start at the center and we build out core capabilities with very small teams. It's not large groups of people, less than ten, but I mean deep expertise. It's not things that you know you could just have light skills. People really have to be able to think creatively and so it's a different kind of group and it's something I protect investment in. It doesn't have an immediate payback. It's not something with an immediate ROI and I actually, I told the team the other day, I was reviewing their work, "Don't tell me how much it costs. I don't want to know." Because then I'm going to think, "oh if I have to cut something," you know, I just don't want to know. You have to really have a focus, almost an R&D-ish kind of environment for it and it works incredibly well. They are getting great stuff deployed. Our knowledge management blogs, wikis, which are kind of early Web 2.0 but as we get into social networking, mash-ups, etc, we're doing a lot of that work and it's very very exciting. The challenge is once you get it architected in the center is to get everybody else trained and understanding what it means to them, because it's a new architecture to design into. So you have to understand when you're deploying a traditional transaction application, what is this new portal environment mean for me? How do I think about web services in a different way in that environment? And so we're kind of at that point of starting in the center and really starting to build some really great business case examples and then you get into this evangelical kind of mode across, you know, the organization; but it's something you have to protect and do.

Neil Cameron: I think it's a very good question in the sense that I don't have an answer for you because we're really challenged by this. I think as we've sourced our services, whether it be infrastructure, application development, and support of applications, we've suddenly changed the whole nature of career structures in IT within our business. And the big challenge is asking how are we bringing talent through the pipeline? What skills do we need? How do we develop them? And what's the career proposition to our own troops. And there are a couple schools of dancing on this one. There's the one that says lets go back to how we used to be and do everything in-house and then it's easy to flow through. There's the other side that's says let's employ as few people as we possibly can and buy that skill when we need it because all of this stuff in transitory, it's changing so fast that we're going to get caught in another trap of bringing in a bunch of skills and then be caught with a bunch of people who now need to have a skills transfer against them. And my guess is we're going to operate two. My guess is we're going to do a bit of both here and we're trying to work out what skills we really need and how we're going to develop them and for Unilever, who have been a cradle to grave, soup to nuts career proposition in the past, we can't offer that anymore. So we're saying goodbye to lots of colleagues and we're going to have to say goodbye to people and welcome them back later when they've gone and got the skills, but I do think we're going to have to access them externally in a different way. So it won't be let's go and talk to Accenture about all of our Web 2.0 skills that we might need, I don't think that's going to work either. So we're going to have to sit back and really figure it out but it's a real challenge frankly and one we don't talk about a lot because it's quite difficult cause I'm talking about, you know, five thousand people and their lives and I don't want to trivialize it, but it's quite a big challenge for us.

Tony Scott: Being in Hollywood, Burbank, I have a different problem which is everybody that works for us is a frustrated script writer, director, movie actor, whatever and so they tend to be pretty up on the latest stuff and shoving stuff in front of us so that skill problem isn't one that we're generally having.