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 »May 15, 2004 — CIO —
Shortly after Dick LeFave arrived at Nextel Communications in February 1999 as the company’s new senior vice president and CIO, he concluded that Nextel could vastly improve its IT operations and its sagging bottom line (it had posted a $1.8 billion loss in 1998) if it outsourced a good portion of its IT. "The need here was to build a company that if [Nextel CEO] Tom Donohue wanted to press a button tomorrow and say, ’Hey, LeFave, we’re going to grow this thing two or three times,’ I didn’t want to be standing in front of him saying, ’We can’t scale.’"
LeFave had negotiated and led outsourcing arrangements for two of his previous employers, Southern New England Telephone and The Boston Co., a subsidiary of American Express. So he knew what he was getting into when, between 2000 and 2002, he signed long-term, big-money contracts with Amdocs to run Nextel’s billing system (nine years, approximately $1 billion), with EDS to take over desktop and help desk support, network management and data center operations (five years, $234 million) and with IBM to manage Nextel’s call center (eight years, $1 billion). He kept project management, application development and testing in-house.
What LeFave knew was that once he signed those contracts, his role would change, his department would change, and the lives of the 700 people working under him would change.
LeFave had no illusions. He knew shrinking the 285 Nextel workers in the IT operations department down to 20 wouldn’t be pleasant. And he knew that he wasn’t suddenly going to be free to spend more time fishing for flounder off the coast of Connecticut where his family vacationed. He knew his beeper would still go off every time a server went down, although it would no longer be his job to bring it back up again.
LeFave knew all this because he’d been through it before.
But maybe you haven’t.
Right now, many CIOs are considering outsourcing significant chunks of their IT to cut costs, improve performance or obtain the scale their companies need to grow. Indeed, organizations around the world spent $180 billion on IT outsourcing in 2003, according to Meta Group, which predicts that this market will grow 10 percent within the next two years.
But despite the accrual of experience these numbers would suggest, the decision to outsource remains a difficult one. It has become a political issue, particularly when American jobs are sent overseas. (For more on the politics of outsourcing, see "Backlash" at www.cio.com/printlinks.) It alters the relationships between managers and employees, and between business and technology executives.