Geri Martin-Flickinger, CIO, Adobe

Larry Dignan: Hi, Gerri, thanks for joining me today.

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: Thanks, Larry, It's great to be here.

Larry Dignan: Now Adobe covers a lot of turf. It has Acrobat, PhotoShop, Flash, and it dabbles in Web 2.0. What are your current priorities as a CIO?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: At Adobe in IT, very much like many companies, one of our struggles is really unleashing the power of all of the information we have. As most enterprises we've implemented a very large ERP environment, in our case SAP, and we're challenged with constantly finding effective ways to take all of the information, historical information, transaction information and really provide visibility and transparency to the business with the right type of analytics. So this year, especially in this type of economy, it's going to be really important for us to understand what our customers are looking for and making sure the information analytics about our customers is highly visible to the business.

Larry Dignan: What are your biggest challenges for this year?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: I think some of our challenges are really not new challenges. One challenge that I think all CIOs face right now is that there is a real wealth of information in data in most companies and trying to get the right kind of analytics and visibility on that data is really key to our success as well as most company's success. So I think that's a challenge and I think it's an ongoing challenge it's been in the industry for the last few years.

Larry Dignan: You've been at Chevron, VeriSign, Macifee, what are your three best project management tips you can give?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: I'm pretty bullish on project management. I think if you can manage your deliverables to the business that you can be very successful. The first thing that would be my first tip for every CIO or IT director is know what you're working on. I've walked into many shops and talked to many colleagues who simply don't know what their staff is doing, so getting a really good portfolio inventory. And then second, understanding where your people are spending their time. Just because you think you have the top three projects nailed, doesn't mean there aren't another hundred underground projects consuming their resources. And last, I think it's pretty obvious, but is to ensure alignment with the business, to really develop a partnership, some sort of governance model to ensure the priorities that IT is working on are really aligned with the business, so visibility in the projects, resource management and some sort of partnership governance model.

Larry Dignan: What about your time horizon? Have projects gotten shorter in recent years?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: You know I think we've seen two phenomenons occur. I think that many projects have gotten shorter especially those that leverage our IA technology to do rapid prototyping, rapid visualization of data. But at the same time, we've also seen the mega projects continue to exist especially around ERP implementations, partly because of the complexity of ERP continues to increase not decrease. So, I sort of see two paths happening here, one is that certain projects are accelerating in speed and we're seeing a lot of 30-90-60 day deliverables, but other projects still look like those 6-9 month, 12 month, monolithic, very expensive products, especially around the ERP space.

Larry Dignan: I've noticed part of your job description is to basically eat your own dog food and use your Adobe products internally, what are the challenges with that?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: Let me generalize a little bit about eating your own dog food at Adobe. One of the things that we've been noticing is our enterprise customers are coming to us more and more and asking things like how can they make their internal business applications look better and be easier to use. You know, most of us know what that ERP experience is like, and it's not pretty in many cases. Folks are actually coming to us and asking us to be more engaged in the enterprise. Part of my Adobe at Adobe Program Office is about not just eating our own dog food but exploring how Adobe products can be leveraged across the enterprise in interesting and unique ways. For example, we've built applications on Adobe product like Adobe Air with Flash that are leveraging information from our SAP enterprise, from our Microsoft Office environment, from a number of different enterprise data sources and bringing those into Rich Internet Applications with very rich GUIs, and we're doing these things in 30 or 60 days as opposed to big, long, monolithic BI projects or data integration projects. So, Adobe at Adobe to me is all about, "How do we take the power of Adobe products which tend to be in the areas of rich internet interfaces, data integration, collaboration, and take those tools and explore them and exploit them inside the enterprise?"

Larry Dignan: Now as you use your own products internally, how does the feedback loop work with the product team?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: Our program office for Adobe at Adobe is actually tightly coupled with our product management teams. So we're involved in the visioning sessions with the engineers who built the product when they're talking about the next release of the enterprise functionality, and we provide feedback about what we think needs to be added to the product or areas for extension in the product or adjacencies for the product that would be interesting. We also engage a lot with our enterprise customers at Adobe, myself and my Adobe at Adobe team, to make sure that we're bringing the voice of our enterprise customers back to our engineers in a language that they can understand. A lot of times what I found is that it's the translation of what we see in IT in the business to what the engineers coded, and we are providing that conduit of insight to them. So, yes, they very much listen and we're a part of the entire process, including the alpha-beta test before it's ever delivered to a customer.

Larry Dignan: Collaboration tools are coming into their own right now. What's your read on where collaboration is going?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: I think collaborations are a really interesting topic, and I love to use an example of something that I've seen very successful at Adobe that I'm actually very impressed with that I think explains for me why collaboration works for me in some cases and why in other cases it just looks like a lot of tools. When you're a new employee at Adobe and you arrive, you're actually given a virtual room, and it's a connect room, but it's a virtual room where you can hold your own meetings, you can invite people in, you can setup your virtual room in any way you like in a customized way with various pods that do different things like chat or sharing desktops or sharing applications. So, in the Adobe culture, it's pretty interesting. You go into a meeting and the first thing you'll notice is that almost everyone there has their notebook. The next think you'll notice is people don't use overheads or screens anymore in the conference rooms, they use a connect room, and it's a virtual meeting room. What's interesting is it really has changed the culture. It's changed the way people share documents. They don't do all that email, you know, email the PowerPoint deck, or email the PDF file, or email the 16 documents for the presentation. They all join a connect session and have the opportunity collaboratively to engage in that conversation. That kind of brings me to what I think the kernel is: you need to do collaboration around some event or activity. It's more than just hold a meeting, it's more than: "Let's just throw up a site and let people throw content at it." It's about, "What is the work product and the activity you're trying to accomplish?"

Larry Dignan: Let's talk Rich Internet Applications. Where do these go in the future, and can they replace the bloated applications we have on our PC?

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: One thing that I'm seeing definitely in the enterprise is that people respect the fact that there is a legacy investment in information stores. Systems like SAP or Oracle clearly are pivotal in holding the enterprise information. So, where we're seeing Rich Internet Applications in the enterprise really being of interest is providing visibility of information into those back office applications. I think there's a very good future in that, because that actually has been the hurdle in many companies for really getting the most out of the investment in ERP. The other thing about RIA that I think is very interesting is that RIA is more than just Internet applications in a browser context. It's now becoming the ability to control the entire user experience, so if you look at the Adobe Flash platform and what's happening with Flash as an application development environment through Air, people are now reclaiming the ability to build their own application UI, and that's something we haven't seen since before the Windows days, and I think that's very exciting. I think there is a very good life for RIA, and I think it's untethered from the browser life.

Larry Dignan: Gerri, thanks for your insights today.

Gerri Martin-Flickinger: Thank you, Larry, it was great.

Larry Dignan: I've been speaking with Gerri Martin-Flickinger, CIO of Adobe. For CIO Sessions I'm Larry Dignan. Thanks for watching.