January 5, 2004
(Computerworld)
The stakes are high when choosing technologies and vendor partners. Get it wrong, and sales can tank or projects can fail. Pair that decision-making responsibility with the ongoing constraints on budgets, and IT executives say the task of picking the right technology or the best vendor is an enormous weight to bear and requires meticulous evaluations.
Several of this year's Premier 100 IT Leaders say they minimize that risk in several ways. Frank communication with staff and vendors at the outset and strict adherence to agreed-upon strategic plans are the cornerstones of this process. Also, a willingness to seek outside help or partners for all or part of a development or implementation process is key.
Here's what these IT leaders had to say about the risky process of partnering up.
Put Communication First
IT executives say good communication starts by establishing an overall process that includes frequent meetings and even takes into consideration the word choices they make when speaking with vendors and decision-makers.
"My job is part political and part visionary and part orchestra leader," says Philip J. Brody, chief technology officer of Nevada's Clark County School District in Las Vegas. With 289 schools, it's the sixth-largest district in the U.S.
In 1999, when such a decision had an "extreme element of risk," says Brody, the district navigated the complex political process of rolling out a Gigabit Ethernet WAN. The $16 million network is expected to reach 130 of 300 sites this month and to support the district's 268,000 students and 30,000 teachers and staff.
"The biggest lesson I learned in this process is persuading people to buy into the project. Once they have buy-in, they can be counted upon," says Brody.
Part of the project's success can be attributed to a steering committee that has met twice monthly from the start and has experienced minimal member turnover. The committee has helped stem the flow of unpopular decisions from the top, Brody says.
At the project's inception, the committee talked about requests for proposals and technologies and decided to implement a two-year demonstration project of the network. Now the members meet regularly to discuss the rollout and any accompanying problems that crop up.
Shift Some Burden to Vendors
Don Buskard, senior vice president and CTO at AXA Financial Services LLC in New York, also puts an emphasis on communication. When talking with vendors, he says, "I don't ask for the world. I describe what I'm asking for and why, explaining what the impact of the decision will be."
In recent months, AXA has been evaluating and conducting lab tests on tablet PCs from several vendors, with the prospect of rolling out as many as 7,000 over two years to its field sales force, Buskard says. Battery life is currently only two to three hours on the tablet PCs, but Buskard wants three to four hours per battery so sales associates need carry only two relatively heavy batteries to make it through a day in the field. He says he has been meeting "pretty regularly" with all the vendors about battery life and other issues, "shifting the burden ... back to them so the risk doesn't shift to the sales associate."
Buskard may well get his wish within two years if he persuades vendors to decrease the power requirements for the chip set his operation requires. "I try to give vendors information that helps them understand why what I'm asking for is important," he says.
Plan Well, Partner Well
Good planning also reduces risks in picking vendors and technologies, especially when IT executives can rely on strategic plans and widely agreed-upon architectural blueprints.
Michael J. Ashworth, managing director and CIO at J.P. Morgan Chase Investment Bank in New York, for example, says he and his management team have adopted a "commercial decision-making" philosophy in the past two years that challenges his team to decide whether there is anything it can buy rather than build.
In the past year, the bank has adopted that philosophy in partnering with Platform Computing Inc. in Toronto. The software provider is building middleware for the bank that handles the distribution of risk management calculations from as many as 40 end-user applications to the bank's compute backbone, Ashworth says.
Platform Computing brought the tool kit, and the bank developed code around distribution. "It's a melding of us both," Ashworth says. "What we could buy wouldn't have solved our problem here. This solution is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a box-by-box solution."
DHL International Ltd. in Scottsdale, Ariz., has consolidated several data centers in the Americas in the past 18 months while at the same time rapidly expanding through the acquisition of Airborne Express and other companies. Those changes have mandated a new vision that relies on outsourcing "tens of millions" of dollars in development work to Infosys Systems Ltd. in Fremont, Calif., says DHL CIO Steve J. Bandrowczak.
The choice of outsourcing partner was complex and required decision-making skills similar to those involved in selecting a particular vendor or technology, Bandrowczak says.
"Whether you manage internal or external resources, good leadership and project management make the difference," he says. "If you paint a vision and articulate it to your teams what the vision is, it's much easier for everybody to accept the tactical pathway to get there."