Inside the New Big Blue: A Q&A with IBM's CIO
Mark Hennessy speaks candidly on transforming the IT organization at IBM, maximizing the value of social networking tools and taking advantage of an imminent technological game-changer.
Thu, February 12, 2009
CIO Canada — Mark Hennessy speaks candidly on transforming the IT organization at IBM, fostering a culture of innovation, managing IT during the financial crisis, maximizing the value of social networking tools, and taking advantage of an imminent technological game-changer.
CIO CANADA: How are you, as a CIO, responding to the current difficult financial situation on an immediate and longer term basis?
HENNESSY: We are being very deliberate about what the returns are going to be from the investments we're making and what the business cases are behind those investments. We're also trying to shorten the time to value for those investments; we're working on projects that have quicker returns, more hard-dollar benefits, as opposed to multi year projects. And we're also trying to shape projects so that they're smaller, so that they can be turned into value for the IBM company quicker. We're also trying to make our application development and our transformation programs more agile and more tightly integrated with the business units, so we really understand what value needs to be created quickly and what the return on that is going to be. While we're doing all of those things, we're still driving down the cost of our run and our maintenance activities as quickly as we possibly can.
CIO CANADA: How is the IT landscape at IBM changing?
HENNESSY: We've gone through an IT transformation over the past five to ten years, going from 128 CIOs down to one. We're focussing on ways to drive more efficiency, such as centralisation in terms of reducing the number of data centres, sunsetting legacy applications, working with partners much more closely, and optimising our global resourcing. At the same time, we're ensuring that we have a tight relationship with the business units. We're making sure we have a balance between the operational excellence that we're looking for as well as the business value that we're trying to drive, and we're creating that balance with a set of standards, with an architecture, with a governance model, and by building a skilled team -- all of those things that go into an IT transformation.
CIO CANADA: How far have you progressed with the IT transformation?
HENNESSY: From a centralisation standpoint, we've made a lot of progress, consolidating 155 data centres down to five strategic centres around the world. From an application sunsetting standpoint we've gone from 16,000 down to about 4,700. I still think 4,700 is too many and we've got work underway to bring that number down. We've done a very good job in terms of working closely with partners. As an example, we have one global network now as opposed to sourcing our network from lots of different places or driving it internally. We've also made some fundamental steps forward in things like Voice over IP. Canada is a great example of that -- one hundred percent of IBM Canada's communications is over Voice over IP.
