A Call to Experiment

Manjit Singh is responsible for IT at a $3 billion Fortune 500 company with operations in 70 countries on six continents. He's also a technology executive who believes that experimentation is a good thing -- especially if it saves money.

As CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc., Singh was one of the first high-profile users of software-as-a-service. Now he's back at the leading edge, deploying wikis, expanding Chiquita's VoIP usage and looking to do more with open-source software.

"CIOs as a group are very risk-averse. As a result, we don't tend to embrace the new technologies as much as we should," Singh says. "But the economy has forced people to take a more serious look at this. I think it's good. This is a paradigm shift that will be around long after the economy recovers."

At Chiquita, Singh says, "we're constantly looking at things, trying to figure out if there is a different way to achieve the same benefit or value." For example, the company relies heavily on VoIP throughout its remote operations in Central America. Now, Singh says, Chiquita is getting more aggressive about deploying VoIP in other regions, notably Europe. Chiquita recently fully VoIP-enabled its headquarters in Switzerland.

"For us, it was a step in a different direction," he says. "Now is the time for experimentation."

"Before, we were using e-mail and PowerPoint, and you know the limitations of those technologies," Mihelcic says. "With a wiki, it takes seconds to get knowledge online."

"By providing collaboration on an enterprise level, we can also communicate across organizational boundaries," adds Rebecca Harris, head of global information grid enterprise services at DISA. "It provides us with a way to invite in, at a moment's notice, unanticipated users to help with problem resolution. It really is a different way of providing a traditional capability."

The overall goal is to "crush the hierarchy of information in the DOD," says John Garing, DISA's CIO and director for strategic planning. "The DOD has a chain of command, and information traditionally has had to go up through the chain of command, and decisions flow back down. Now, senior leaders want information to flow very quickly."

Garing says DISA IT personnel have visited Google Inc. several times to learn how the company handles product development. "They do things in small teams and bites and constant beta testing," he says. "They can add things to the network quickly, and if they're not a hit, they can kill them fast. We also need to be able to move things quickly before they get to be monolithic programs."