We invited a group of the state’s top IT managers for a discussion of the challenges they currently face and the skills required to stand up to them. Participants included Jeremy Simmons, Huntsman Cancer Institute CIO and director; Debra Anderson, Novell CIO; Katherina Holzhauser, Evans & Sutherland, VP and CIO; Bill Harris, Cadence Design Systems director of IT Operations; Darren Pulsipher, chief architect for Cadence; Niel Nickolaisen, Deseret Book CTO; Mike Bills, Feature Films for Families CIO; Ken Elliott, State of Utah ACIO; and Glenn Robinson, VP and CIO for Questar. Special thanks to Richard Nelson, CEO of UITA, for moderating our discussion, and to Cadence Design for hosting this tech summit.

As CIO, what are the top two metrics or impacts expected of you to be successful in your executive role?

HOLZHAUSER: The number one thing that I get measured on is availability. I’m sure many of us do. And that’s been challenging for a small company. I came from the Boeing company, where I headed up operations in the Everett plant, and it has very similar expectations yet we’re so much smaller. And when you have two people on the help desk, 24-hour-a-day coverage is quite challenging.

ROBINSON: Some of the things that we focus on clearly are supporting a very diverse business structure. Many of our businesses are very regulated, and cost is a critical task.

HARRIS: One of the main things that we’ve been told to toe the line on is expenses. And our biggest measurement at this point is, how do we keep our expenses down and our services at the same level? I guess that’s one of the challenges of trying to do more with less. And the other metric is the service levels, the availability, the up time of the network as well as the service to the desktop. When you have an engineer or a group of engineers down for a couple of hours, it has quite an impact on productivity. And we have a lot of people who complain quite loudly when that happens. And connectivity worldwide, with 68 offices worldwide.We start in India in the morning, and Europe develops in their time frame, and then we end it up here in the United States and then turn it back over to India again in the morning. So all that information has to be transferred across to keep up on a seven-days-a-week, 24-hour-a-day period.

SIMMONS: Huntsman Chemical went through a major restructuring about a year ago. We went from about 15 people in IT to two, including myself. Basically metrics wise, [our challenge has been] the consolidation of restructuring the whole company, losing three-fourths of our IT infrastructure completely, and still trying to give them the same service level and support as what we had originally. We’ve outsourced a lot of our IT. We are in the process of rethinking that, and we’re trying to figure out how to keep a lid on all the new technologies and all the new supports and everything that’s going on inside of Huntsman Chemical and inside of biotech.

ANDERSON: As a software technology company, nobody comes and takes inventory and says, you know, we have 50 products and you only run 20 of them. But clearly I hear about it when we’re not working closely with development to figure out how to deploy something internally. The other metric is the cost containment part of it. So as much as we’ve put in significant governance processes, made it very visible what we’re working on, it’s still very difficult to continue to justify or go and pitch for extra money given the economy. So even some of the best of projects that our business customers would like to see pushed at this point go up for significant discussion at the executive level.

PULSIPHER: Basically, the metrics I am judged on are decreasing cycle time for product development and decreasing the amount of hardware we have to purchase each year.

ELLIOTT: The governor has given us some very clear guidelines of what he wants IT to do, and he’s laid out a 1,000-day plan to move us toward bringing those governance services on line as well as getting high-speed bandwidth available to all the citizens in the state. And that’s a major breakthrough for us in simplifying the process of doing business with the State, as well as getting people out of standing in line when they deal with the State.

NICKOLAISEN: I was brought in specifically to change out Deseret Book’s 23-year-old system. So a primary success metric is not just being cost-effective but an effective implementation of new technologies over the next nine months. The second thing is linking those system changes to operational improvements in inventory management, cost of goods sold, etc. Because the Legacy system doesn’t manage those things well.

How do CIO roles vary from company to company, and how has your role changed as a CIO in the last three years?

ANDERSON: I spent most of my career in grocery retail with Albertson’s. At Albertson’s, the business customers don’t know technology, so they’re relying on you as the CIO to be the expert, to provide the leadership for where they should be a year or two out. At Novell, I didn’t know about the Ximian acquisition until Monday. So you don’t participate in the strategic direction decisions because those are made by the development organization. How it’s changed? Expectations have changed. Three years ago technology was cool for technology’s sake. It was perceived you couldn’t go wrong. Frankly, those days are over. So I think the job’s changed significantly. [Presenting] the right strategic technology for a year from now is not enough of a business case to make it fly.

HOLZHAUSER: Let me go backwards. Three or four years ago I think many of us were in a very different spot, putting the money part aside. We were in a place where we were mostly pretty naive with technology. We had all come through the mainframe distributed to PC ranks, but PC and desktop was very immature. And we had massive decisions and problems to deal with. We had a lot of down time. Even networks weren’t great. So we were investing because it was fun, but it was also to get us stable. We were talking about Oracle ahead of time. We were on Oracle 10.7, and you can’t compare that to where we are today with Oracle 11.03 from a stability standpoint. So we all had a huge cliff to climb. And I think we’ve kind of climbed to the top, and there’s little levels you can go to, but now the question is what’s the next little mountain? We’re at 10,000 feet. What’s the next technology that is going to totally revolutionize things? Before, it was leveraging the technology for everybody, just to make the whole thing more efficient. Now it’s, how do you pick and choose the components that are going to affect that business plan, [that are] going to bring in the new business, not just keep it all stable?   

HARRIS: Well, three years ago, I was looking at technology for technology’s sake. We were at 600 people supporting 5,500 people in Cadence. It almost felt like money wasn’t an object — whatever the engineers wanted, they ended up with. But it was one of these things where if you get too many machines then you can’t be productive because you’re spending too much time managing the machines, or you thrash and crash, as we used to say in the old mainframe, because you’re swapping things in and out faster than you can actually do development. So we had to turn around and look again at, how do we focus in and how do we make our customers more effective in spite of themselves so they don’t have to buy more machines, so they don’t have to hire more people to do system administration?

NICKOLAISEN: Having done both, a CTO is interested and passionate about technology, product development in the company. The CIO cares about how to integrate, implement and use the technology that the CTO created for him. To me that’s the difference. It’s product development and product management.

How do you become a CIO?

NICKOLAISEN: You have to have a tendency toward masochism.

HARRIS: And being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

NICKOLAISEN: Yeah, you have to be the guy that’s left.

SIMMONS: Honestly, you’re the last one standing. No joke, really. When I speak about how we only had 12 people in IT and now we have two, this is for Salt Lake City. Obviously Huntsman is a global company, it’s a huge company. But that’s what happened in my position, that eventually we had to consolidate everything and get rid of a lot of the overhead, and to do that they ended up keeping me around just because I could do most of the different roles. A lot of the people were specialized; they could do the network, somebody else could do the desktop support or whatever. But I was, luckily, the only one on board that could potentially do everything they wanted done.

NICKOLAISEN: I don’t know how I became a CIO, but the thing I enjoy about it besides the masochistic part is that I think it is the toughest job short of the CEO in the company, because we have to support competing constrained demands, and we also have to be thinking forward ahead of our business fears on what they should be doing, and at the same time we’ve got all the operational support issues. Technology is fragile, the vendors don’t work well together; all these parts and pieces. It is an incredibly difficult job, which is I think what makes it so interesting.

HOLZHAUSER: You cannot be single-threaded just to be valuable to the corporation, regardless of whether you’re going to head into a CIO position. Because if you’re single-threaded, that’s death, not just for yourself but for the company. Almost every person on my staff has to have at least two major areas that they are responsible for, and the more of them you know, the more valuable you are to the company.

ELLIOTT: In the governmental environment, the CIO doesn’t have to be the chief techie for the state, but he does need to have a good understanding of how the state functions and how he can take the governor’s vision and move it forward, dealing with the legislature, dealing with all the various departments, dealing with the cabinet. And so it’s more of a political position.

As a C-level executive, what makes a successful CIO? Be specific. Give a couple of Skill sets.

HARRIS: Well, I think a couple people hit on it. You have to know how to operate in the political arena of upper management. A lot of times it’s getting those pet projects through and building consensus and being able to present your ideas to a board that doesn’t want to spend the money. You know, that’s one of the skill sets I think is very important. The reason you don’t see a lot of technicians or IT people being successful as CIOs is they’re very set on their ways and they say, well, it’s obvious that this is the way we should go, right? Why are we going there? So political savvy is very important. And the other is being able to think outside a box, not come up with your standard canned solutions. You’ve got to get creative. I think there’s got to be a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit in every CIO.

ROBINSON: You have to be selling. And a lot of what you have to do is you’re selling for the business you’re leading, but in many cases it’s a shadow of leadership and it’s consensus building.

ANDERSON: It’s an interesting dynamic. It is very political —it’s all about communication. It’s all about influence. The cycles are much longer than I think any of us would be happy with.

So you see something that’s just painfully obvious. So forget the system you knew, forget the technology that you knew. It’s all about relationships.

NICKOLAISEN: Another one I’d add is, I think there’s an important component of staff development to free me up to develop the relationships. And I have to have credibility as a department in order to develop those relationships.

As a CIO, what is your most pressing concern?

ROBINSON: I think some of the key issues are really to deal with the competitive pressures. We’re in a regulated business, our costs are very closely scrutinized; and the other part of our business is it’s a very cyclical business. And so the pressing concern is really to put in place a cost structure that allows you to ride through those very difficult times in the business cycle that will always be there, but at the same time meet the requirements. And that’s hard.

HARRIS: I think for us it’s positioning ourselves to be ready when hopefully this graph starts back up. Right now we’re doing the Linux conversions ourselves. We’re converting a lot of our products that have always run on Sun platforms to Linux platforms and Windows 2000 and 2003. So it becomes a training issue: how do you train without a lot of training budget? A lot of it’s peer-to-peer and on the job and over the shoulder, and you pair people up and get them trained that way.

What [new] technologies are being embraced and pursued, and how will they impact our Utah companies?

PULSIPHER: I’m pushing grid technologies right now inside Cadence. And we’ve seen incredible benefits from the grids that we’ve deployed. Our average is about 60 percent decrease in cycle time for some of our product teams, and in some cases it’s been up to 94 percent in their test and build cycles. And most of this has been done without additional purchase of hardware. It’s just using the resources we currently have and the technology that we currently have.

ROBINSON: I think a lot of the new technologies are really the old technologies. What we’ve traditionally had in many organizations is a lot of silos and isolated systems and platforms and so forth. And I think the most important technologies that are going to be in place in the next five years will really be the middleware technologies, the things that continue to link those platforms. That’s been key to how the industry has continued to meet the needs of customers during this time when budgets have been lower

ANDERSON: Maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s just I get more skeptical as I get old. But I now look at most of what’s pitched to me and highly question it — really watch to see what’s happening with it before I even consider doing something with it.

ELLIOTT: I think some of that middleware like Web Services and XML are going to be the tools we can use to break down barriers. Particularly in the governmental environment after 9/11, we have to be able to share information better at local, state and federal levels. Those are going to be the tools that let us break down those barriers .

HOLZHAUSER: What we should talk about is what we don’t have. There’s quite a few places where I’m feeling that we’re going to have some seriously pressing needs, areas like dealing with all of our Legacy data. I don’t know of anybody who knows how to deal with that, whether it’s Excel spreadsheets that are clogging up your network or large designs because they run the job five, six times and they forgot to clean it up. So data management, security. There is no good answer for security management.

In today’s economy, where budgets and sometimes staff are being significantly reduced, we are all forced to better utilize our current resources. What are some of the ways your company has done more with less?

HOLZHAUSER: We’re constantly evaluating contracts, I mean, constantly. Because there’s always leverage.

NICKOLAISEN: And I constantly renegotiate existing contracts. And with the business climate the way it is for technology companies, I’ve gotten some pretty amazing concessions from suppliers, vendors on things like maintenance contracts, reducing them or delaying them.

PULSIPHER: We felt we weren’t using the resources that we currently have effectively.

NICKOLAISEN: Why pay maintenance on something you’re not using?

PULSIPHER: Exactly. Most of our hardware resources were sitting around 6 to 7 percent utilization.

NICKOLAISEN: What I’ve found is you can go to the hardware vendor and say, rather than cancel maintenance, I’m just going to not pay you until I start using it. And given that choice of getting nothing or something later, they’ll take something later.

ROBINSON: I think the next step, after you go to the vendors and work on that side, is really to go to the business and say to them, ‘Here are the things that you’re requiring, here’s what they cost,’ and really getting them to participate.

ROBINSON: So by moving more of that responsibility to them, they can make choices. A lot of the expensive tools, software you have is really driven by the business. So what you need to do as a CIO is expose to the executive level within the business units what really this activity is costing. Because the middle managers or the users of that technology may have near religious attachment to it, and it’s not transparent to the executives within those business units.

SIMMONS: Honestly, I’ve gone to the few of us that are left and gone to Huntsman where E.D.S. is and say, I understand you have a help desk, I understand you have a network admin, I understand you have a desktop admin, but can we utilize these people? Do any of these people have some down time? Is there any way I can take those resources and in their down time utilize them somewhere else to do something else, be more productive. Don’t just focus on your specific help desk tickets for your group, you know. If this guy can help out on the servers and we need help over there, why don’t we take him out of a position where he’s twiddling his thumbs and use him over there every once in a while. Same thing on the telecom side or whatever else. Take the people that we have and their expertise and diversify them.

Ken, the taxpayers expect an efficient organization. What are you doing for the governor and for the taxpayers of the state of Utah to do more with less?

ELLIOTT: We’re trying to get enterprise projects recalled to where we’re getting single products going across multiple businesses within the state, where we are trying to simplify doing business with the state and to eliminate some of the redundant things that are currently being done between departments. Some of those things would be an enterprise-permitting project where an agency or business could go to a single location to get a permit with the state. Consolidating some of our business practices we’ve done in the past where we don’t have those practices within the individual departments but they’re being done by a central location.