Preparing for change is necessary with technology, and in Peter High’s Technovation Column, SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon talks important trends facing CIOs and how these trends can help drive competitive advantage.
03-04-2013
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
Gaurav Dhillon was an early enterprise data integration success story. In 1993, he co-foundedInformatica at a time when data integration was not nearly the buzz-phrase it is today. He would lead that company for 12 years, and see it to a market capitalization of over $1 billion. (It’ market capitalization is currently nearly $4 billion.)
For an executive who has accomplished so much and seen his vision so fully realized, it is impressive to find that he is back at it again, pursuing a different vision in a related field as though he is an entrepreneur for the first time. Ben Horowitz wrote in his blog that he hates to fund new ideas from already successful entrepreneurs. He wrote, “Ordinarily, we would automatically disqualify an entrepreneur with such a massive financial success from funding, so when he came into pitch us on his new company…I was skeptical… our diligence found him working round the clock, running a hyper-intense environment and looking very much like a 20 year old entrepreneur on a mission from God.”
This new mission is SnapLogic, a commercial software company that provides data and application integration tools for connecting Cloud data sources. I recently interviewed Dhillon as part of the Forum on World Class IT series (access that interview here). As someone who has correctly read and shaped the technological zeitgeist, I was curious what excited him in terms of IT trends. There were three in particular that he focused on. None of them are new, but the nuance that he gave to each was enlightening.
Now that Cloud ROI is Proven, It is Time for the Cloud to Mature
Dhillon has assembled a CIO advisory board at SnapLogic, and posed a question to that group. “Which functional technologies are least likely to migrate to the cloud?” Dhillon says, “It was pretty unanimous: ERP would take a while and supply chain would take a while. Everything else can’t get there fast enough. That has less to do with technology. Companies like Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, these companies are doing a great service to the industry, helping people understand that cloud computing is appropriate for a wide array of old functions to the enterprise.”
The pace of change has been aided by the fact that the return on investment on cloud computing is getting easier to prove. In the early stages of its hype, CFOs were not big believers in this new way of doing things necessarily. Today, it is more widely appreciated that by moving an application to the cloud, less people are needed to rack and stack technology, demand for servers decrease, the need for cooling and power generation decreases as well, to take three prominent examples of costs savings. Cloud computing also renders one’s workforce more productive, as data is more easily accessible on multiple devices and can be made available in many settings. Dhillon stresses that the real opportunity is for CIOs and other IT executives is to make the case on this ROI, and then to plug the savings back into innovation.
Dhillon underscores the point by suggesting that CIOs need to be less “information officers” and more “integration officers.” He says that as CIOs, “you are an orchestrator of capabilities… [CIOs] should not be worrying about HR and payroll. You do need to worry about some things that are tailor-made and that are sources of competitive advantage, but anything that is a cost item that can be turned into to the cloud gives you more money to be innovative to do new things.”
Additional Trends Discussed in this Article are:
2. Data Analytics Will Separate the Best IT Executives From the Also Rans 3. “Mobility is a Monster”
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As the former EVP of Global Services and Chief Information of Merk, Chris Scalet oversaw the centralizing of IT infrastructure, Human Resources, and Finance, but the devil was in the details.
12-17-2012
This is the fifth article in the CIO-plus series, covering CIOs whose roles have been augmented due to the good work they did first and foremost as CIOs, but also recognizing that the good work translated into other areas. (You can access the prior four articles here) I recently spoke with Chris Scalet, the former executive vice president, Global Services, and Chief Information Officer at Merck & Co., Inc. as part of the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Scalet developed one of the first shared services organizations at Merck when he centralized infrastructure, yielding a nine-figure savings per year in the process. The CEO of the company was sufficiently impressed that he asked Scalet to do the same in other parts of the company. Scalet began with Human Resources and with Finance, but eventually took responsibility for a wider array of functions. Scalet humbly surmises that the path he pursued should be accessible and achievable by most CIOs, no matter the industry, though he readily admits that the devil is in the details.
Peter High: Chris, you began your time at Merck as the company’s CIO. Your role was augmented substantially as your tenure continued. What was it about the CIO role that lent itself well to this augmentation?
Chris Scalet: There are four factors that come to mind. First, most CIO’s have a strong business mindset. They have a strong tendency to focus significantly on the business processes that underpin the operations of the company. Throughout their careers, they have likely digitized the majority of these processes and have developed a broad and deep understanding of how they fit together as well as how they flow to move the business.
Second, CIO’s today are strategic in their thinking. They have been forced to be in both a business and a technology sense. Both business environment and technology are changing quickly, often at paces that are considerably faster than in the past. Reacting to change is no longer acceptable. To be effective today, CIO’s must anticipate where both are going, make choices, and put actions in place that make sure the two are effectively aligned.
Third, CIO’s are operational thinkers who are organized and methodical in their thinking. They can break down complex business problems into simple tasks, and work to solve each simultaneously. They are also effective risk managers who can see around the corners and ensure proper contingency plans are in place to manage the business.
Finally, CIO’s are generally very good influencers up, down, and across the organization. They have developed the appropriate skills to set a vision and sell the vision across the organization.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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Call it “CIO squared.” Companies are tapping savvy execs to handle two complementary roles at the same time: chief information officer and chief innovation officer.
by Peter High, article published on CIO.com
02-29-2012
We’ve all noticed that CIOs are acquiring responsibilities outside of IT. Examples include David Johns of Owens Corning (CIO and chief supply chain officer), Sheleen Quish of Ameristar Casinos (CIO and SVP of HR), and Karl Salnoske of GXS (CIO and EVP of service delivery).
But an even more interesting dual role has emerged that I call the “CIO squared”—the combination of chief information officer and chief innovation officer. Examples of the CIO squared include Tim Stanley, former CIO and senior vice president of innovation, gaming and technology at Harrah’s Entertainment; and Ben Allen, who is both chief innovation officer and chief information officer at the professional services firm Marsh and McLennan.
The chief innovation officer position is less than a decade old, and most companies still don’t have one, so there’s certainly no predetermined place within the corporate structure where the role should be located. The position is meant to ensure that there’s someone to shepherd innovation activities (ideas, processes and incentive programs) and be responsible for the success or failure of innovation.
Given today’s business trends, the CIO-squared combo makes a lot of sense. With the rise of social media, mobility, the consumerization of IT, big data, and business intelligence, IT-centered innovation is growing. IT leaders are well positioned to sit at the hub of discussions with the heads of business units and departments about the sources of innovation and the technology to support them.
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