The Real-World Benefits of SAP Safeguarding...

When customers can expedite implementations and upgrades, they can reduce downtime and increase satisfaction.

The Real-World Benefits of SAP Safeguarding Services

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2 execuTive downloAd: SAP Safeguarding Services

Perhaps the hardest thing in iT is knowing what you don’t know. Most

iT systems are a mass of interdependencies that, thanks to a great

deal of integration, provide data to an organization’s users highly

reliably. But systems never stay static. They always change.

new technologies come on the scene, prompting changes in infrastructure and

hardware. vendors upgrade applications and stop supporting older versions.

even iT departments change: in-house experts get lured away by competitors or

startups. new hires require training in established as well as new capabilities.

in a constantly shifting landscape, it’s impossible for any one cio, or even any

one iT department, to gain knowledge or maintain experience in all the areas that

constitute the modern iT deployment: hardware, software, middleware, network-

ing, storage, databases.

even more challenging is maintaining the knowledge of their integration idiosyn-

crasies—how some systems work together; how they don’t; and more important,

what to look for to avert problems before they crop up.


To help cios address the vagaries of

the shifting landscape they face, SAP

offers Safeguarding Services, a unique

software engineering program that

includes high-touch technical support.

Staffed by professionals who are vet-

erans of numerous deployments and

who have access to other members

of the global SAP team, Safeguard-

ing Services helps companies save

money and resources by reducing

implementation delays and downtime

and increasing reliability and system

performance.

of course, most technology offer-

ings—whether software-, hardware-

or service-based—make those same

claims. To determine fact-based

evidence of such claims, idG Research

Services conducted interviews with

15 customers of SAP Safeguarding

Services. in these conversations,

idG Research asked about specific

projects, cost savings and ancillary

benefits. Projects included initial

implementations as well as upgrades,

and benefits ranged from financial to

operational to efficiencies in basic

iT operations.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools: Taking Advantage of More Knowledge

when Miami-dade county Public Schools first began

its deployment of its SAP eRP application to sup-

port human resources and operations for its 50,000

employees, the process did not go smoothly. Midway

through the implementation, iT took over the $85.4

million project from the finance department and a

third-party integrator, but it was already behind schedule and over budget.

one budget item cio debbie Karcher felt strongly about keeping was the SAP

Safeguarding Services element. “it was a Safeguarding Services report that

showed we had major technical problems. it confirmed our concerns about

the implementation.”

Going forward, SAP Safeguarding Services enabled Miami-dade Public

Schools to stay on its revised schedule. “The Safeguarding Services team

verified that the system was ready to support the number of users we had

projected,” Karcher says. “it verified not only the application code but also the

technical implementation of the servers, their layout, their configuration and

that the database was sound.”

Having the SAP Safeguarding team available during the final hours of the

implementation was invaluable for “technical insurance.” The project required

not only hardware and networking expertise but also expertise with software

beyond SAP’s, such as vMware. Karcher says, “There were so many mov-

ing parts that we needed an extra set of experts on call throughout the final

weekend to handle the issues that came up.”

The SAP Safeguarding Services team provided skills that Karcher’s team simply

wasn’t able to duplicate. “we were able to take advantage of the expertise of a

big company, SAP, to get the job done. when we went live, we stayed live.”

overall, the survey respondents reported a variety of key benefits, including

the following:

4 Reduced project durations/

shorter implementations

4 Reduced downtime

4 Personnel savings

4 expedited issue resolution

4 improved system performance

Together, these advantages present a picture of how SAP Safeguarding Services

provides invaluable insight during the most challenging period in the life of an iT

department: the rollout of crucial and anticipated capabilities.

Project Benefits of Safeguarding Services Survey respondents reported that

bringing a Safeguarding Services team

on board provided multiple benefits

for individual projects, from both a

proactive and a reactive standpoint.

Based on its broad experience with

previous projects, the team is able to

anticipate potential challenges when

integrating specific products with SAP

applications.

Because Safeguarding Services teams

are available around the clock, imple-

mentations and upgrades on con-

densed and constrained schedules aren’t subject to weekend delays. vijay Sethi,

vice president and cio of Hero Honda, a delhi-based joint venture of Hero Group

and Japan’s Honda Motor corp., was severely limited in his time frame for deploy-

ing SAP’s enhancement Pack 4 for their SAP eRP solution. “we had committed to

doing the upgrade on december 26, and we had no time flexibility, given the high

demand we were facing in our manufacturing facility,” he explained. “we were

scheduled to go live at midnight, but we were able to go live two hours early.”

Sethi attributed the smoothness of the upgrade to the advance mock drills the

Safeguarding Services team conducted. “when issues arose, the team came up

with the resolution immediately, whether it was onsite in india or offsite in Ger-

many or somewhere else,” he said.

Respondents reported that Safeguarding Services teams were also able to iden-

tify areas where they could tweak configurations to increase system efficiency.

Axel Baumann, director of application service management for Paris-based Air

liquide, a global provider of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and rare gases, reported

that his company was able to optimize its end-of-month billing: “we have to cre-

ate hundreds of thousands of invoices in a very short time, because the finance

department needs to close out the month. The Safeguarding Services team

helped us improve system performance to reduce that cycle time.”

Finally, the teams’ extensive experience with other vendors’ applications helps

them share knowledge about potential issues, conflicts and pitfalls. connie long,

SAP solution architect for Sydney-based GPT Group, a real estate investment firm,

reported that her company’s launch of SAP eRP also involved links to oracle Hy-

perion Financial Management and Microsoft SharePoint. “The SAP team was able


Alejandro Bombaci, cio of empresas Polar,

estimates that on one storage project,

the team saved Empresas Polar $2 million, thanks to its suggestions

on archiving versus online storage.

to provide some recommendations

on how we could improve the inter-

face performance through additional

configuration and system settings,”

long said, “and due to the diagnostics

and integration checks it set up, we

were able to complete our business

process performance optimization

setup earlier than scheduled.”

Financial Benefits of Safeguarding Services These capabilities delivered by the

Safeguarding Services teams translate

into a variety of important financial

benefits, not the least of which can be

a reduced need to hire consultants or

staff. Because Safeguarding Services

teams offer insight into applications

and products beyond those offered

by SAP, companies don’t have to bring

in more expertise. Tim Paramore, se-

nior project manager for Birmingham,

Ala.-based energen, which develops

and distributes energy reserves,

noted that SAP was able to provide

access to Safeguarding Services

experts in multiple areas. “if we had

gone with consultants, we would

not really have known which people

might have expertise in one area or

another. with SAP, we could pick up

IMG Worldwide: Enjoying Resource Flexibility

As a global leader in event management

and talent representation across sports,

fashion and other areas, iMG worldwide

had a unique need for adding SAP’s human

capital management capabilities to the

financial management modules it had already installed. its SAP support team

of 11 people was deploying five major projects simultaneously in 2009, repre-

senting a $1 million budget, and it brought in a Safeguarding Services team to

help it work on those projects.

The projects involved setting up portals for manager self-service (MSS) and

employee self-service (eSS). “The Safeguarding Services team reviewed the

technical aspects of our design and highlighted where we were at risk,” says

Tricia chorney, director of SAP Applications for iMG. “The team highlighted

how critical the interfaces were between SAP and AdP [payroll processing] as

well as some facets of security.”

The Safeguarding Services team members helped chorney’s team use SAP

Solution Manager to troubleshoot the installation. “our portal needed a lot of

tuning to get ready for eSS and MSS,” she says. “we could never have done

that without their help.”

chorney particularly cites the team’s flexibility in fulfilling the Safeguarding

Services contract. “You get so many days of expert-on-demand, so many on-

site visits. it quickly became apparent to us that we were going to need more

expert-on-demand days than we had originally anticipated to cover the areas

we weren’t up to speed on.” The team members committed some of these

days to conduct internal workshops both before and after the deployment.

“They came in and did the work with us side-by-side so that we could see

how it was done and then conducted additional workshops to make sure we

really were well positioned to support the entire project going forward. Their

work saved us the equivalent of one and a half full-time people.”


Respondents reported that bringing a Safeguarding Services

team on board provided multiple benefits for individual

projects, from both a proactive and a reactive standpoint.

Based on its broad experience with previous projects,

the team is able to anticipate potential challenges when

integrating specific products with SAP applications.

Source: idG Research

the phone and report a problem and

Safeguarding Services could reach

out to somebody who had expertise

in that specific area.”

other financial benefits include in-

creased uptime, both before and after

the rollout. Helmut Schuett, cio of

Stuttgart-based vehicle manufacturer

daimler AG, reported that his compa-

ny has used Safeguarding Services for

several years. “if we have problems

with our SAP system, that can affect

production relatively quickly. every

hour you lose in production means

the loss of a lot of engines or vehicles.

Safeguarding Services helps us reduce

the risk of those problems.”

Because the Safeguarding Services

team can frequently identify poten-

tial system inefficiencies, companies

can also take advantage of reduced

hardware costs and better resource

utilization. Requiring fewer hardware

devices also translates into lower iT

monitoring and maintenance costs.

Business Benefits of Safeguarding Services Frequently the Safeguarding Services

teams’ insights translate into quantifi-

able business benefits. lance neal,

eRP infrastructure program manager

for lexmark international, the lexing-

ton, Ky.–based printer manufacturer, said that the Safeguarding Services team

identified a couple of configuration issues that intrinsically affected application

performance. in one case, the team conducted business process optimization

tests and discovered that the system was doing tax calculations too slowly. “it

was taking 400 milliseconds,” said neal, “which isn’t very long, but doing a lot

of transactions starts to have a big impact. The team was able to set up dual

paths for the calculations, which cut the time down dramatically.”


Empresas Polar: Thirsting for Ongoing Risk Management

As one of venezuela’s leading

food-and-beverage producers,

$7 billion caracas-based empresas

Polar relies on its SAP eRP application

to serve its 300,000 customers, 25

manufacturing plants and 195 distribution warehouses. of its 32,000 employ-

ees, 14,000 rely daily on the application, which is supported by 270 internal

employees and 40 contractors.

cio Alejandro Bombaci made two decisions in 2002: deploy SAP packaged

applications rather than customized software, and avoid spending more

money than necessary on developing in-house technical expertise. He had

extensive experience in deriving value from using SAP Safeguarding Services

through their SAP MaxAttention engagement.

“we do not use the Safeguarding Services team members in a traditional

outsourcing way, where someone comes in and does the work for you. we

use them as experts on a project when we’re incorporating new technology

or doing something very complex with an application we already have,” says

Bombaci. “we bring them in to tell us if the scheme we’re considering is the

best one possible to make sure we’re making the most out of the software to

solve our needs.”

The team’s recommendations go beyond software, however. Bombaci

estimates that on one storage project, the team saved empresas Polar

$2 million, thanks to its suggestions on archiving versus online storage.

Because empresas Polar is a 24x7 operation, Bombaci likes having access

to Safeguarding Services expertise during off-hours. “when you’re operating

every day of the week, you don’t want to wait until Monday morning to start

analyzing a problem that began Saturday morning,” he says. “we probably

would have to double the number of technical people onsite to 40 FTes if

we didn’t have Safeguarding Services support and suggestions for improv-

ing the way we operate.”


Such outcomes are what make Safeguarding

Services invaluable for neal. “when you’re

working crazy hours, you can miss potential

issues. it’s great having someone come in

and take a look with a fresh set of eyes.”

when implementations progress smoothly,

the business can more quickly take advan-

tage of the new applications offered. when

upgrades happen more smoothly, there are

fewer impediments, either financial or emo-

tional, to embarking on them. That boosts

agility, because iT is helping the business

react to changes in the competitive land-

scape more quickly. Thanks to the insight

Safeguarding Services offers into other appli-

cations, iT departments gain a better sense

of how applications work together and of

the business processes the business relies

upon. That, in turn, enables them to more proactively and intelligently suggest

other improvements to business processes, which in itself triggers improved

customer satisfaction.

Benefits Safeguarding Services Brings to Overall IT Operations overall, respondents reported that bringing Safeguarding Services in on projects

conferred a higher level of technological assurance. with its focus on knowledge

transfer and education, users believe they get more knowledge transferred to

internal staff than they would in traditional consulting engagements. companies

are able to deploy systems with fewer problems and, indeed, spend less time

correcting errors. Teresa Sanz Rodriguez, system architect for empresa Municipal

de Transportes in Madrid, the city’s transportation authority, said the evaluation

that took place during the safeguarding process helped her team identify poten-

tial problems in the most important modules, fix them and be confident that it

would not “run into any nasty surprises” when the system went live.

That translates into a system that’s more reliable, with fewer outages at a

crucial time: when the business is waiting for the new features an upgrade

promises. increased system uptime comes without the company’s needing

to hire more iT staff.

As noted earlier, doing rollouts is among the most challenging functions of an

iT department and can bring increased vulnerability. when a deployment or

an upgrade goes poorly, it detracts from iT’s reputation. And because people


remember problems longer than they remember successes, the negative effect

can linger. But when the process goes smoothly, it enhances the reputation of

the iT department.

Behind the scenes, SAP Safeguarding Services takes what it has garnered from

thousands of deployments, helps educate iT about what it doesn’t know and

makes it smarter in the process. The result is an iT department that is not only

more knowledgeable but also one in which the business develops a higher level

of trust. That, in turn, enables iT to evolve into the aligned and enlightened part-

ner every business desires. n

Additional Reading

SAP Co-CEO Talking InnovationJim Hagemann Snabe was appointed SAP co-CEO in February 2010. Jim Joined the organisation in 1990 and has been a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG since 2008. He spoke with CIO about how he fosters innovation within the enterprise. By Trevor clarke, cio, June 2, 2010

Jim Hagemann Snabe was appointed SAP co-ceo in February 2010. Jim Joined the organisation in 1990 and has been a member of the executive Board of SAP AG since 2008. He spoke with cio about how he fosters innovation within the enterprise.

cio: we talk a lot about innovation being technological advance, but what is innovation for you and for you indi-vidually as a leader? How does a leader drive that in a business?

Hagemann Snabe: we’re doing a number of things. we sat down and tried to define what we meant when we say “innovation” and people often confuse creativity with innovation. They think having great ideas is innovation. we believe having great ideas that don’t impact business is not innovation — they’re just great ideas. And so the ability to bring great ideas to consump-tion is key and that’s where we see an opportunity to combine the best of two worlds.

on one side, we are today known for our ability to scale. we have almost 100,000 customers, we’re in almost every single country in the world and we have a very strong and powerful ecosystem. if we bring something new out we, can bring it out globally and rapidly? The second dimension — and what we’re missing a little bit — is the entrepreneurial aspect. Having smaller teams bring these ideas to life.

That’s what we have with agile methodologies; we’re empowering [teams] to have time to innovate with customers.

Bring these two aspects together and you have real time to innovate. creative ideas are brought to the mar-ket in large scale. The iPad is a good example of that. what was it, 1 million sold in 22 days? And the iPhone sold a million in seven days. That’s innovation and impact. That’s what we’re looking for; engineering is challenged by look-ing at how it is easy to consume.

it’s easy to disrupt the market by saying: “we have something new.” it may be innovative and creative, but if you need to delete everything [in order] to adopt it, it’s going to be a slow impact. The challenge is to find ways to deliver disruptive technologies in non-disruptive ways to our customers. That’s much harder, but if we do that we achieve impact like no-one else in this industry.

one example is the memory technology. we launched this idea at Sapphire this year that instead of dramatically changing current applica-tions, we put an appliance next to the business suites that takes a copy of the transactions and replicates it real time into the memory and you build new applications on top of that. it gives you the power of no disruptions with a very disruptive technology.

That’s how we define innovation. How we drive it is to look at time it takes from an idea is generated until 100 cus-


Additional Reading

CIOs Looking to Increase Business Value From TechnologyCost gets downgraded as Tesco inspires CIOs to lead customer understanding KPMG study finds. By Mark chillingworth, cio, June 21, 2010

Post credit crisis cios will not be totally focused on cost reduction, but instead looking to use technology to add value to the organisation. in the same month that saw the announcement that the next ceo of retailer Tesco will be their cio; a study by KPMG finds that cios are looking beyond the recession to really drive the business forward through technology use, just as Tesco (TSco) did.

A KPMG study of 450 cios came to the conclusion that cios will now focus on the price and quality of deals from iT vendors and outsourced service provid-ers, with 81 per cent reporting that they are focusing on getting value from their iT as their top priority. in doing so KPMG said cios “expect to iT to contribute di-rectly to realising the business strategy and have a central role in management.

Bryan cruickshank, a partner at KPMG Advisory, which completed the research, said a clear example of this is supermarket Tesco, where Philip clarke, the international director of iT will replace Terry leahy as ceo later this year.

“Tesco have used iT to understand their audience and grow as a business,” cruickhsank said of how Tesco has gone from an also ran in the uK supermarket sector to the undisputed leader. it has achieved this, he said, through its use of technology for its loyalty card and sup-ply chain systems, leapfrogging rivals Sainsbury and Asda. “it is usually or-ganisations that have gone public about the need to change the organisation, such as Tesco. Toby Redshaw, cio at Aviva (Av), formerly at Motorola (MoT) is another example and will bring an em-

phasis on how technology delivers value and change to the Aviva business.

“The cio job is changing and requires a more intuitive understanding of busi-ness priorities. when looking at tech-nology they are looking for something that adds value to the business, rather than getting a technology to right price point. cost optimisation is considered to be about cost reduction, but it is not the case now, because the lowest cost is not always the best option,” cruick-shank said.

KPMG Advisory does expect out-sourcing service providers to be placed under increased pressure to deliver value as cios review their outsourcing arrangements. cios told KPMG that internally they see people as the most important component of the value equation they offer the organisation. n

tomers are using it effectively. That’s not just the production time — it’s looking at how you go to market, how you get it installed — that’s a whole process that we want to shrink. we need to reduce the time to impact.

The idea of smaller groups making an impact through knowledge or creativ-ity reminds us of Google (GooG) in the way it operates. what other businesses do you look to in our industry or other industries who have achieved that vision of innovation?

A large number of companies who are our customers in the consumer

industry have achieved real innova-tion. obviously there are companies like Apple, but also nestle and colgate (cl) -- innovative consumer orientated products. And we get inspiration from different companies.

i took my whole leadership team to eA Games in california where we learned: How do you get customer feed-back? They receive more than 1 million feedbacks per game and the feedback comes directly from the players — that is extremely valuable feedback. And we’re trying to learn from the best in different categories about innovation

from different companies.we went to Porsche to learn about

lean and we went to cisco to look at how do you incubate new businesses. we’re always eager to learn but we also have an opportunity because we are in 25 different industries, so a customer can learn from another customer. A retail bank could learn from a retailer. Banks feel they are in a limited environ-ment — well try and look at pharma-ceuticals. There’s a lot of learning that can happen across the boundaries of industries and we’re trying to facilitate that. it’s all very interesting. n

SAP Co-CEO Talking Innovation continued


Additional Reading

How to Improve IT Performance and Deploy Technology FasterThe “White Space” approach to innovation helps to cut the time and cost of deploying new technologies. By Adam Hartung, cio, April 29, 2010

when the ceo wants to reduce iT costs while increasing how much technology the company has, the cio is squeezed. She is stuck supporting existing systems while needing to spend money to evalu-ate and implement new technologies. no one is happy when there is a wide gap between where the money is being spent and where you’d like it to be.

The solution to this conundrum is to use “white space,” an approach for rapidly evaluating and executing in-novations. it can replace typically costly rounds of testing, evaluation and vendor demonstrations, making iT more respon-sive in the process.

white space projects are not, in fact, tests (which are easily defunded, and often don’t demonstrate much value

or address serious implementation issues). instead, management commits to deployment and project teams get a wide berth to find the implementation methods that bring maximum value. Such projects aren’t expected to align with legacy data structures or applica-tion environments—limits that might add cost and reduce value.

Failure isn’t an option. only by com-mitting to implementing new technology in a mission-critical environment will you be able to devote enough of the budget to the project and get employees and vendors to make it work.

Be more flexiblewhat’s more, with each white space project your team carries out, employ-

ees get better at managing implemen-tation and evaluating new technology and its payback. over time, you’ll become more flexible and make end users happier.

Technology advances faster than most iT departments can evaluate and adopt it. But too often, legacy business practices and their costs cause a company to lose its edge. A high-performance iT department must be effective at rapid evaluation and implementation of new technologies. white space is a way to make that happen. n

Adam Hartung is a consultant and author who specializes in innovation. Contact him at [email protected].

Additional Reading

The New New CIO Role: Big Changes AheadIt’s make-or-break transformation time for CIOs. Those who can only take orders are being ousted. Those who seek to become true strategic business leaders should concentrate on four key areas. By Thomas wailgum, cio, August 20, 2010

cios know all about change manage-ment—from jettisoning legacy apps, to prodding line of business vPs to share virtualized resources.

But today, cios themselves are in the midst of a make-or-break personal change-management project: cios who can only take orders, who can’t speak the language of the business, who can’t

step out of the proverbial back-office and into the front lines of customer service, social media or supply chain management will soon go the way of ancient tech gear—remembered fondly on occasion but sidelined in the future.

Simply put, there is no future for the “order-taking, looking only for efficien-cies” type of cio: change or be ousted.

“do not expect iT value from a cio with an operational profile,” proclaims a 2010 KPMG report. chris Potts, an iT strate-gist and author of FruiTion, says “the big game in town now has moved on from efficiency—although that is still important—to how everybody exploits iT to create value and what that does for a company’s investment plans and the


changes that [the company] makes.”cios are not oblivious to their

decades-long struggle: They know they need to be more “strategic.” And they’re certainly sick of hearing about “business-iT alignment.” Has there ever been another department so ruthlessly grilled about the value it is (or is not) delivering?

But facts are facts. Those percep-tions of the cio who doesn’t get the business big picture still linger today.

The cio extreme makeover neces-sitated right now isn’t a mere cosmetic rehab, however. it will demand a mighty effort from those iT leaders whose comfort zone involves four walls, lots of servers and voluminous air-conditioning.

in fact, say cios and iT strategists interviewed for this article, a cio who wants to transform must concentrate effort in four key areas. we’ll call them the “4 P’s”: Perception, Profile, Participa-tion and Performance. each is critical to understand, analyze and explore. Those cios who’ve nailed the “new new cio” role—and all four of the “P’s”—say the job demands much, but can be unlike any other out there.

“The cio role is a very exciting role to play in when you don’t think about it as an all-technology role, but when you think about it as a business leader role,” says wayne Shurts, cio of grocery giant Supervalu. “You’re a part of the strategic leadership team; you’re on the inside of all the issues to help the company win today, tomorrow and the next decade.”

Do You Really Want to Be CIO?First things first: who’d actually want to be a cio now? The question might sound flip. naive, even. But con-sider how companies have tradition-ally thought of the cio role and those people given the assignment: Men and women who knew how to keep the trains running on time and lights on.

The New New CIO Role: Big Changes Ahead continued

Grown-ups who knew their servers and storage, but were prone to techno-bab-ble once called to The Big conference Room. Strategists? Hardly. Business leaders? Yeah, right.

For that matter, just what is a chief information officer actually supposed to do? unlike, say, the cFo title, “cio” has been a nebulous moniker for many business execs from the get-go. The title is “very diffused,” says Abbie lundberg, the former editor of cio magazine, now a consultant working with cios on strat-egy and executive communication skills. “it has tons of potential and can mean different things in different companies, depending on what their goals are.”

it’s no surprise, then, that Tom dav-enport, Babson college’s distinguished Professor of Management and iT, says this: “i hardly get anybody ever who wants to be a cio, which is probably indicative of something. And if they do want to be a cio, it’s like: ‘Fine, it’d be useful to rotate through this for a while on my path toward ceo.’ i think people respect technology, but there aren’t that many people anymore who want to be career cios.”

why? “it’s just not the center of the action anymore, in terms of technology,” davenport says.

As strange as davenport’s last state-ment may sound (read it again), one can easily make the case that iT leaders face unprecedented challenges today. First up, there’s the “c” word: complexity. According to the annual iBM (iBM) survey of ceos, 80 percent of ceos are worried about growing complexity in their busi-nesses (of which iT is a big concern) and more than half of them admit that they are ill-equipped to deal with it.

Then there’s the new normal eco-nomic climate laden with instability; and a push for ever greater business efficiency and “do more with less” man-tra. Finally, there’s the advent of cloud computing, social media and mobile

devices that have greatly empowered workforces everywhere.

“The whole consumerization move-ment is really tough on cios,” says dav-enport, “since now, for probably the first time in history, people have more pow-erful technologies at home and in their pockets than those that are provided by iT. i also think iT is more perceived as a barrier to getting things done now more than it ever was.” one stark example: Articles in The wall Street Journal and Forbes openly encourage execs to bypass iT for their sales, cRM, marketing and business intelligence applications.

where does that leave the appointed leader of corporate technology strategy?

Supervalu’s (Svu) Shurts, for one, doesn’t view the “going around iT” mana-gerial initiative on tech purchases as a bad thing, necessarily. “The key is having an iT department that is relevant, proac-tive and helpful. Because where i’ve seen business units getting their own technol-ogy and implementing it, for some of that, iT has to look itself in the mirror, be-cause iT probably has been slow to act, been not too easy to do business with. That has probably lead the businesses to say: ‘i have to go do something, because the world’s getting by me.’”

in short, he says, “we, as iT, need to get on the front foot, because we’ve been on the back foot.”

if you’re ready to move to the front and change into a strategic executive, dive into the four areas where you must concentrate.

PERCEPTION: Shape How You Are Viewedwe all know that perception does not always equal reality. But most any cio’s transition from “order taker” to “strategic player” is going to be that much tougher if he and his iT staffers are perceived mostly as geeks who manage the help desk, Pc passwords and data centers.

Here’s the rub: Before cios even


leadership of the organization—not just the ceo, in particular, but the rest of senior leadership team,” Ford says. He contends that some cios subjugate themselves to a lesser standing among peers—they let the role define them rather than them defining the role. “A big part of this is how you treat yourself, as well as how you allow others to treat you,” Ford says.

So what does that look like? Says Ford: “if the company has some strict fi-nancial goals and objectives, and you’re ahead of everybody trying to help not only your group but everyone else to ful-fill their goals and objectives unsolicited, then you will be viewed differently than if the cFo is chasing you around about ‘can you get your expenses down by 1 percent,’ and you’re fighting him on it.”

when it comes to the perception of iT’s strategic worth these days, cios will continue to have to overcome plenty of skepticism. Ford’s appearance on For-tune’s 2010 “Smartest People in Tech” list was gratifying to him. Yet he was the only cio who made it.

PROFILE: Craft More Than Your Org Chart SlotA decade ago, it was easy to tell the type of profile a cio had within a given company: was the cio listed among other execs on the “Senior Management” page on the corporate website? Though it’s rare not to see the cio’s photo on that webpage today, it doesn’t mean that the cio’s stature among peers is that elevated. or secure.

one reason cios have struggled: ceos require that their cios should innately be both operationally and stra-tegically sound, Shaklee’s Harris points out. That combined skillset is highly sought-after yet not easy to come by.

in a June blog post, Patrick Gray, the president of iT consulting firm Prevoy-ance Group, writes that the cio role continues “to suffer from a multiple

start talking about being more strategic, they first have to nail the iT basics. no one is arguing that the bread-and-butter iT deliverables are going away. it almost goes without saying these days. Almost.

Ken Harris, cio of nutritional product maker Shaklee who also had senior iT roles at the Gap (GPS), nike (nKe) and Pepsico (PeP), says that the elevated, strategic cio position today is “a mix of two dramatically different roles.” one part is composed of the operational requirements: keeping systems, ap-plications and data centers up; having security and disaster recovery covered; and ensuring subsecond response times on queries, just to name a couple, Harris says. “That is absolutely critical to be done,” he says, “but by itself, it’s not a sufficient condition for success.”

if the perception is that iT can’t even keep the trains running on time, then there’s no way that cio will ever be considered a business leader by peers. Perhaps just as critically, cios also have to maintain the respect of the iT department while in pursuit of the brass ring from Mahogany Row. which is no small feat.

Yet even if a cio does master op-erations, that doesn’t mean a cio will suddenly be seated next to the ceo in the boardroom. That comes from the second role that a cio has to play today. Harris calls it the “change agent” role—”finding ways to enable the strategic opportunities within the company.”

To Monte Ford, the cio of American Airlines, the status of the cio is related to what he calls the “earned political capital” of the iT leader. in his mind, there are those iT chiefs who work in systems development roles, and that’s what they are known for, more or less; and then there are cios, he says, whose roles are “integrated into the fabric of the business.”

“That’s as much a function of the person as it is the view of the senior

personality disorder of sorts.” At one moment, Gray says, cios must under-stand and capably discuss the strategic direction of their company and, seconds later, consider a complex technical prob-lem with costly ramifications.

“Some cio job advertisements laugh-ably demonstrate this dual role, in the same sentence asking for a ‘strategic partner’ and ‘extensive cobol knowl-edge,’” Gray writes. “it is as if the cFo was called on to make journal entries after discussing the latest M&A activity, or the coo running down to the shop floor to spend a few hours on the drill press after pondering a complex rethink of the global supply chain.”

ceos want what they want, of course. And if they want a cio who can discuss brand positioning and blade servers in the same breath, then so be it. “i think most cxos have a vision of what a change agent can do, but there’s a lot of them who don’t really know how to help make that happen or find the right person to make that happen,” Harris says. “That’s one of the big chal-lenges that cios face: To try to educate the executive committee, ceo and cxos on how a cio truly becomes success-ful and becomes that person that they want the cio to be: that change agent. By and large, cios won’t get there by themselves.”

lundberg concurs with Harris’s as-sertion. “Part of it is: does the cio have the right combination of skills, mindset and abilities?” she says. “And part of it is: is the rest of the organization there as well?”

According to lundberg, there are many leading companies that are knowledgeable of and adept at using technology to the fullest. inside those companies, cios can flourish.

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