Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »January 15, 2005 — CIO —
Buy a laptop anywhere in the world and there is a one-in-four chance that T.J. Fang will process the order. You'll just never know it.
Fang's secret is cloaked in IT, in servers that consolidate purchase orders from name-brand American companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple and IBM. The order trail leads to Fang's ERP system at Quanta Computer in Taipei. Fang, assistant vice president and head of IT operations at Quanta, feeds those orders to his Taiwanese and Chinese suppliers and factories, and within five days, Quanta "drop ships" to the customer a laptop that the buyer himself configured on the brand-name website. No one at the company selling the laptop ever lays a finger on it. Indeed, investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates that the manufacturing for 89 percent of American brand-name laptops are outsourced today. What's more, many of these famous computer brand names don't even design their machines anymore. New models are chosen from a shelf of fully functioning prototypes offered up by a handful of Taiwanese companies. Quanta's ability to design and build new laptops from scratch has helped it gain a 25 percent share of all laptops sold in the United States. "In the past 10 years, [companies such as Quanta] have gone from undercover stealth to a massive global business," says Adam Pick, senior analyst for iSuppli, a market intelligence consultancy.
Outsourcing has reached the highest level of the manufacturing supply chain: R&D. By outsourcing R&D offshore, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can freeze a portion of their R&D budgets while growing their product offerings. Even R&D powerhouses such as IBM, HP and Motorola have frozen—or even reduced—their R&D budgets since 2000. "[Outsourcing] is a tremendous opportunity for cost savings on R&D," says Jack Faber, vice president of operations, enterprise systems for HP.
But there may be a downside to all this R&D reshuffling. Some economists say the outsourcing of manufacturing—and now design—is the leading edge of a longer-term trend toward reduced innovation and competitiveness among U.S. companies. As OEMs turn over the development of new products to outsourcers, it could have a withering effect on these companies' ability to create the next breakthrough, especially as many freeze R&D spending. Spending on R&D by U.S. companies declined more in 2002 (3.9 percent) than it has since the National Science Foundation began tracking the number in 1953.
Though the technology slump that began in 2000 may play a big role in these declining R&D numbers, there is a larger, more disturbing trend at work, argues Gregory Tassey, senior economist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For the past 12 years, the proportion of R&D money going toward new innovation—the "R" in R&D—has also been going down, displaced by incremental product development (next year's laptop, for example). Product development—the "D" in R&D—swallows more resources than the "R" work, and it does not create new opportunities for revenue; it merely extends current product categories.