CIO World View: Nordic iPad success and unified comms in China

CIO is a global title and with our sister titles across the planet we bring you a new series of reports on what are the main issues CIOs face and that are being reported in our fellow CIO titles. Compiled by IDG News Service with contributions from Alexandra Heymowska, Alice Xu, Michael Kan and Norberto Gaona. CIO Mexico

When he joined Mexico’s state oil company, PetroleosMexicanos (Pemex), in March 2010, CIO Abraham GalánRamírez’s goals were to consolidate IT operations, reduce costs and create value. “Changes in the size of companies Pemex are not simple,” said GalánRamírez, who already had a good feel for the corporate culture from years spent running IT at the Pemex Refining subsidiary. But with the support of the CEO, the CIO has pulled under a single umbrella the IT departments of the five major subsidiaries of Pemex, which is the largest company in Mexico and the third largest producer of crude oil in the world. “2010 was the year of cost reduction, it is not rocket science,” he said – and he has driven the team to aim for cost savings of 15 to 20 per cent. “The hard part is to generate value, and that is where we will focus in 2011.” For Pemex, that means focusing on projects that improve the success rate of drilling, reduce investment in exploration and production, and make geoscience information available more easily. For GalánRamírez that means gaining ever deeper knowledge of the global oil industry. “Today’s CIO has to be a specialist in the field of business and in the field of IT,” he says.

CIO Sweden

The success of the Apple iPad has Swedish CIOs surrendering to the “consumerization of IT” and the reality of mixed environments – trends that run against the standardization on PCs that in past years had made it easier to manage user communities. David Craelius, CIO of online payments company Klarna believes that users should be allowed to use the tools that make them most productive. The real issue, he says, is how access to information is classified, and determining what can be safely made available via the cloud and through tools like the iPad. At his last CIO post, at online stock trader Nordnet, he oversaw development of an iPad trading app that was launched in December. At both Nordnet and Klarna the iPad has been embraced in the C-suite, and has become a popular adjunctto PCs for executives.

CIO China

Chinese clothing manufacturer Taizilonghas completed both a move to unified communications as well as implementing a business management system. Taizilong’s CIO XuJianhong explains that starting in 2009 the company merged its telephone, Internet, email, video conferencing and instant messaging services into one system; he believes his company is the first in its industry to do so. The effort has paid off in better communication and lower costs.

Xu has also spent the last two years developing a system to aggregate and analyse data from various sources to help inform decisions about when to release different clothing designs and how much of each should be produced. Xu believes both projects show how his company is leading its peers in its use of IT.