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 »August 01, 2008 — CIO —
Almost ten years ago Vanguard's IT team looked at then-emerging multimedia and content sharing tools on the Web and saw a future goldmine for customers.
The mutual fund company, which holds $1.3 trillion in assets, considers a key part of its value proposition to be educational materials that help customers make better investment choices. Multimedia offered yet another way to keep customers interested in and educated about the financial markets. Meanwhile, pushing content to subscribers' Web browsers could make Vanguard's content easier to access.
By 2006, online multimedia from iTunes to YouTube had exploded in popularity, RSS feeds for subscribing to Web content were proliferating and Vanguard plunged in. The company not only revamped its website, enabling customers to personalize their experience online, but also deployed a platform for delivering multimedia content. To date, Vanguard has posted 73 podcasts and 40 videos. For its efforts, Vanguard is honored with a 2008 CIO 100 Award.
It was an uncommon step for a financial services company, says CIO Paul Heller. He thinks that the materials, which have been downloaded by investors nearly 1 million times, have helped both the company and its customers weather the current economic downturn. Vanguard claims it led the mutual fund industry in cash flow in 2007 with more than $100 billion in new investments into its funds and its mutual fund redemption ratio (a measure showing how many dollars leave Vanguard) at an all-time record low. "I'm convinced that the positive part of this recession is that the technology can still enable people to invest," Heller says, and make them more successful by giving them information.
Vanguard's 5 million customers are a tech-savvy bunch; most clients do their transactions online and have for years. "We were a virtual company before it was cool to be a virtual company," Heller says.
But investors weren't as enamored of the text-based information Vanguard had on its website. Heller and his team planned to give the customers what they wanted, where they wanted it. With the majority of Vanguard's interactions with clients occurring via Vanguard.com, Heller pays close attention to how consumers use the Web. "The trend towards Web 2.0 seemed obvious," he says of new technologies for sharing information and applications online.