December 10, 2007 (Computerworld)
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How does an IT leader choose the most innovative IT project to take on these days? For some, the decision comes down to one thing: speed.
Qualifying customers faster, getting proposals out more quickly, and making it fast and easy for the customer to do business with the organization are the keys to success in an environment where business interactions occur at an accelerating pace. Here's what you can learn from three Premier 100 honorees who led successful cutting-edge projects.
Guido
F. Sacchi
CIO, senior vice president of corporate strategies, CompuCredit Corp., Atlanta
The project also met the CEO's mandate that IT drive down the unit cost per customer and leverage the business's economies of scale. "That was a direct alignment," says Sacchi, 43. He started the "nuts and bolts" supporting infrastructure upgrades over a two-year period that ended in 2006. After that, he says, "we did all of the BI layers that are visible to the user," completing them earlier this year.
Strategically, one of Sacchi's smartest moves was to separate the infrastructure-building phase in Year 1 from the business intelligence application phase in Year 2.
The infrastructure capital request went through corporate headquarters rather than individual business units. "I didn't have to cross-prioritize that against direct business initiatives," an approach that tends to starve infrastructure projects in favor of those with more immediate payback, Sacchi says. Once the foundation was laid, he budgeted with the business units to develop the BI applications, where direct benefits were evident.
To sell the job and keep interest high during the multiyear process, he demonstrated it to the president of CompuCredit's credit card business unit, Synovus Financial Corp. The president was so impressed that he immediately challenged his staff to begin using the tool.
Sacchi also brought on other potential users as part of the 30-member project team right from the start. "My best contribution was to pick the right team and empower them," he says.
Sacchi played a critical role in keeping staffers on task by keeping other projects off their plates and making sure their time wasn't overallocated. "Guido provided the air cover we needed to make the project successful," says Blake Sanders, executive director of enterprise development and data services.The project sped up queries, gave workers access to more timely data, automated reporting tasks and empowered more staffers to perform their own queries, freeing up IT resources for other tasks. Creating a single, streamlined ETL process enabled more timely integration of data on daily transactions for CompuCredit's 5 million credit card customers, shrinking the load time from 36 hours to less than three.
Early on, it became clear that performance improvements would be dramatic. One user reported thatprocessing time for a complex query had dropped from 43 hours to 12 minutes. As the capabilities became more evident, Sacchi needed to keep expectations in check and the project on track. "The danger in a project of this magnitude is controlling the scope," he says.
Once the system went online, it improved collections and lowered the cost of acquiring customers, saving the company $5 million — a 12-month payback.
"Innovation for business value is one of the most important things we do as CIOs. This project was the best in my career," Sacchi says. "It's a good example of how an innovative solution can be architected and delivered in a cooperative fashion."
Bradley
D. Furukawa
Vice president, sector CIO, Northrop Grumman Corp., Redondo Beach, Calif.
In a large-scale, multiyear project such as Northrop Grumman's effort to develop a supercomputing cluster, a successful outcome depends not just on getting the initial funding, but also on keeping the money flowing from year to year, says Furukawa, 50. While a team of IT professionals and scientists built out the cluster, he says, "it was my job to make sure the funds were there, make sure [the project] stayed visible in front of the vice president and president, remove any administrative barriers ... and let the engineers and scientists do their thing."
Before the supercomputing cluster went online, "things" moved more slowly. Each program within the space technology business had its own workstations or small clusters. Furukawa had to sell the business on the idea of going from a culture where every project had dedicated resources to one where resources would be shared.
Having a common resource not only allowed work to be completed faster, but also helped programs with limited funding as well as new program proposals that required some upfront analysis to close new contracts. Furukawa was also careful not to tie the project to any specific program. "By keeping this sector-focused, all programs would benefit," Furukawa says."He did a good job in getting people to work together with an enterprise perspective rather than taking the narrower, project view," says Clayton Kau, vice president and general manager of Northrop Grumman's space and defense products division.
That paid off. Users building new program proposals, who previously lacked computing resources, used the shared cluster to add more simulations and analysis to proposals. That enabled the space technology unit to gain more business, meeting the CIO's challenge to "raise the bar on performance."
The shared cluster "increased our probability of a win in all of our program pursuits," and it provides analysis that keeps existing contracts funded when they come up for review, Furukawa says. "Continuing to show over many years what the programs will do keeps the programs sold," he says.
In launching the project, Furukawa also helped to set up a governance board to determine which people and programs would get to use the resources and how those resources would be allocated. "No matter how much computing power you have, you can always max it out. They set the priorities," he says. Based on those decisions, the team can set controls to allocate the resources and monitor their use.
Visibility was critical to the project's success. As the cluster grew to 979 processors last year, the governance team got scientists up and running on it as quickly as possible. "The positive feedback made it all the way up to the sector president's level," Furukawa says.
In fact, the program was so well received that Furukawa not only kept his funding for the following year, but was also given some of the funding earlier so that the project could expand faster.
"Keeping the project on schedule and within budget really added to the success and credibility," says Kau.
Furukawa says he's trying to keep interest high as the project moves from 1,800 processors to its ultimate goal of 3,000 CPUs, and he has opened up access to the rest of the company over Northrop's internal network. "I don't want to see the utilization dropping off at 2,000 CPUs," he says. "That would stall further investment."
David
G. Zanca
Senior vice president of e-commerce technology, FedEx Corporate Services,
Collierville, Tenn.
On a warm October day, Zanca, CIO Robert Carter and the rest of the IT team are flipping burgers at an IT-sponsored cookout for 2,500 employees at FedEx Corporate Services' Memphis facility. "It gives me an opportunity to create a connection with these folks," Zanca says, and that's part of his strategy for success.
There are three keys to a successful project, he says. In FedEx's distributed, 7,000-employee IT operation, perseverance pays off. "If you really believe in a game-changing shift, you're going to have to persevere and convince various folks that a new technology, a new approach, will work," he says. For Zanca, 49, that vision — and the strategy for execution — is the culmination of many years of work.Three years ago, FedEx Corporate Services was tasked with breaking down FedEx's monolithic capabilities into Web services, building on the company's core FedEx.com and Ship Manager applications, and advancing the technology toward next-generation services that would give customers instant access to FedEx services and tracking data.
To that end, Zanca's group last summer introduced the Developer Resource Center. The Web-based offering makes key services, such as tracking and dispatch, available through standards such as WSDL and provides code snippets that help businesses take advantage of those services.
Zanca's group also recently developed and launched MyFedEx.com, which lets users track both outbound and inbound shipments. And it enhanced its mobile device support, enabling customers to use smart phones to generate shipping labels, for example.
In addition, it introduced a series of plug-ins, including ones for Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Outlook, that let users upload, prepare, price and submit print jobs to Kinko's shops.
The plug-ins "changed our strategy from FedEx.com being a destination to FedEx being an embedded part of [a customer's] environment," Zanca says.
To get these projects completed, Zanca built consensus through what he calls the "Max Plan," which involves regular meetings with top executives.
His second key to success lies in keeping close to his own staff as well as internal constituents. "The people who are down in the trenches are the folks you have to stay close to. You have to listen to them," Zanca says, to set realistic goals for success — and to move those goals if need be.
"David is into the details," says Bob Thomas, managing director of technology services. His group helps customers use FedEx's Web services offerings.
Zanca helped launch early Web services efforts at FedEx Corporate Services before moving to the FedEx Freight division for a couple of years. He returned to FedEx Corporate Services last January.
Shortly after Zanca came back, Thomas had a meeting with the staff. "I told them, 'Don't be surprised if you get a call from David with a specific question about one of our products, because he is into the details and he will go straight to the source.' And that's a good thing," he says.
The third leg of Zanca's strategy is to maintain transparency with internal business partners so that there are no surprises. "There are going to be bumps in the road," he says. "You have to keep executives informed and manage expectations."
Zanca's team also built tools that measure the success of each initiative. The company can see how much business is coming through new channels, such as mobile, Web services or plug-ins. "We have metrics as one of our design criteria so we can see where the business is coming from," as well as whether the business is "channel shift" or truly new business, Zanca says. "It's definitely [bringing in] new business."
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