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During her climb up the corporate ladder at SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, Suzanne Gordon, SAS's vice president of information technology and CIO, developed an air-tight strategy for how IT could work in lockstep with internal SAS customers to reinforce the company's success. A roadblock stood in the way of selling her idea to management. Meanwhile, she decided to move out of IT and into the sales consulting side of SAS. It was here that she saw IT from the customers' perspective.

In 2003 when the CIO position came opened at SAS, a company that provides 44,000 customers with analytics software, Gordon got the job. She now could turn her vision into a reality with her IT staff of more than 300 employees. In fact, that same year, Computerworld recognized Gordon's leadership talents by including her in the list of Premier 100 IT Executives for that year.

In this, her second interview with EnterpriseLeadership, Gordon talks about how the collaborative governance process makes IT project decisions, how the value of IT gets measured, how innovation gets carried out at SAS, and what it takes to develop a culture of trust between IT and its internal customers.

Bio
In 2003, Suzanne Gordon got promoted from vice president of SAS Information Systems Division (ISD) to chief information officer. She also served as the director of National Technical Consulting and acting vice president within SAS Professional Services Division. Before joining the professional services organization, Gordon headed the management information services department in ISD for about 20 years. She joined SAS in 1980. She received a bachelor's degree in math and computer science and a master's degree in statistics from North Carolina State University, where she a member of the board of trustees.

Resources
SearchCIO - SAS CIO Sets Example for the Whole Company
LocalTechWire - SAS Exec Suzanne Gordon Builds Success Around Persistence and 'Short Memory for Negative Things'
LocalTechWire - Head of IT at SAS Sees Risks, Opportunities

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Doug Marcis - Audio Editing

Liberty Mutual Insurance has turned out to be the company to watch in the fiercely competitive global insurance industry. Since 1996, this sixth largest property and casualty insurer in the U.S. has seen its annual revenues triple to about $26 billion. Today, Liberty Mutual ranks as the sixth largest property and casualty insurer in the U.S, has $85 billion in assets, and has more than 40,000 working across 900 officers worldwide.

Because Liberty Mutual's offers a variety of lines of business, ranging from personal auto, health and life insurance to commercial property insurance and workmen's compensation, the company has adopted a highly decentralized business unit structure. Although this is a powerful business model, it also has presented many challenges to Stuart McGuigan, Liberty Mutual's global CIO. Enterpriseleadership.org recently sat down with McGuigan, who was the former CIO of the $32 billion Medco Health Solutions, to discuss how IT delivers the technology required by the business units to meet marketplace demands. Here's what he had to say.
EL. Can you describe the structure of your IT organization?

SM. We have 3,000 people in a centralized IT organization. We don't bother to draw a dotted line to the businesses. We have established business CIO who report to me, but who sit on the staff of the president of the business units. These CIOs attend staff meetings, strategy sessions, and offsite meetings. Their entire focus and their passion include how to use technology to make the business more successful. This structure keeps everyone talking to each other. Although these CIOs work for me, I don't want the CIO supporting the personal markets business concerned with what the CIO of the commercial markets is doing, unless an initiative can help a CIO do something better, faster, and less expensive for a business unit.

EL. What factors can you attribute to Liberty's rapid financial growth to?

SM. We can attribute our success to Ted Kelly, our CEO, who came to us in the early 1990s. He discovered the secret of growing a large company with significant diseconomy of scale.

When I came to interview at Liberty Mutual with Kelly, I began to understand why management capacity has driven Liberty's growth rate in the insurance industry. Kelly empowers general managers to exploit everything from niches to significant markets with a tremendous amount of operational latitude, and with a certain amount of standards to minimize financial risks.

To this end, the executive leadership of each Liberty Mutual business unit determines how that entity goes to market, how it is organized, how it approaches its marketplace, and what type of technology it uses. As a result, Liberty has exploited numerous niches in midsize businesses by acquiring companies, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S. These companies very quickly adopted Liberty's business model. In every case, we've succeeded in the business case. This's something many large companies struggle with.

EL. What does the decentralization of management authority mean for IT?

SM. If you don't do something differently, then every group and every application team decides its own technology. You end up heterogeneous technology environment, which leads to cost. You can't sacrifice the responsiveness and effectiveness. Over time, we've been making Liberty more than the sum of its parts. We looked at technology in a different way starting layer by layer and said: Which technologies provide no value, which technologies offer added benefits, or which technologies are different across the various business units. We gradually moved up in technology stacks. Does it really matter what Unix server people use? Some people initially said that it did matter. We determined that some applications could you use certain types of Unix servers. These three servers became a standard. We said if you want to use these standard servers, then you can't take 100 days to complete the installation, you have to do it in 10 days and at this cost. If the business units could derive enough business value from using unique technology or custom technology, we told them to for it.

EL. Can you go into more detail about how you built flexibility into the decision to go with standard technology?

SM. Some IT organizations tell the business units that they can only use standard technology, or what IT has stamped as standard. So how can they benefit collectively when no one benefits individually? That's the dilemma of dealing with some types of enterprise architecture strategies. We've avoided that by saying we're going to standardize up to the point of indifference and beyond they can choose. We're not continually going to challenge their decision.

We're trying to standardize where it doesn't make a business difference and to allowthe businesses to decide what technology will enable them to be successful. Because they bear the entire cost, which is the biggest part of their business resource decision making, this IT philosophy fits in with the way they manage the business. It's not something external.

EL. Do you see any difference between the way business units make IT investment decisions versus any other operational business investments?

SM. Usually IT people believe there are two separate entities -- IT and the business. IT is a business function that manages technology. The thinking that does into the decision to hire 20 underwriters shouldn't be any different from the thinking that goes into the decision to spend a million dollars on an underwriting system. Both decisions will produce different results, but you're looking at the same variables. Getting that balance right is the secret to realizing some of the benefits of being a large-scale enterprise, but you don't want to sacrifice your ability to exploit smaller business niches, such as startups.

EL. What aspects of IT do you need to improve and why?

SM. First of all, look at our decentralized business structure. Each business unit organizes itself around business, products, and customers. For example, the real driver behind the retail business isn't the product, but the retail marketing operation. Think about the technology that a sale-driven and a direct marketing retail organization needs versus the technology that a business-to-business organization needs to support customers such as IBM! Think of the differences in business processes, product requirements, and customization.

If they were truly separate companies, no one would argue they should have the same architecture. Several standalone, billion dollar businesses comprise Liberty. Although we are a large company, we found that the cost of IT isn't our issue. In fact, our cost of IT is really a percent of premium or revenue, which is on the low side.

Our issue is this: like every other insurance company, we need to improve out time to market. If we save 10 percent of our IT cost, but we don't improve our business, then we'll be out of business. If a good IT project is a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 investment over time, then IT spend too much time trying to make that $1.95 or not enough time making sure we get the $2.

EL. What's wrong with the discussion about aligning IT with the needs of the business?

SM. The conversation about business and IT alignment infuriates me. Of course, I try to be patient if someone wants to talk about it. If you step back and think about it, what does it mean to have IT projects that aren't aligned in the business? You're spending money on things that don't produce a business result, not even in theory. Don't do it! What other business area makes capital investments and refreshes its equipment with no idea of how it's going to contribute to any business results? Only IT does that. We have to get out of that cycle. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, have a replacement cycle for when their tablet-making machines will produce lower quality products or breakdown. There is a cost associated with replacing those machines. It comes down to an optimal point to which you maintain and replace those machines. It's not vendor recommended because it's end of life.

Three years a go, we had a proposal to replace all of our Intel servers with smaller departmental servers. The vendor said they were at the end of their life. I questioned what made them end of life -- a decrease in performance, many outages, or high energy costs. I said we shouldn't do it. My decision shocked everyone because we had the money, and because we did it every three years. I told my staff to keep track of the mean time between failures, keep track of performance, and keep track of newer versions of the software. If we started to see any of these things go south, then we'd have the beginning of a business proposal to spend the capital to make that replacement.

Three years later, we're now replacing those servers because of those changes. We had the highest level of availability, the lowest cost of any one else in recent benchmarks. We accomplish that because we didn't fool with the systems Changing your environment can produce defects in reliability. We put the maintenance on a different footing, made different decisions, and made sure our staff understood that we weren't walking away from technology. Instead, we were investing technology dollars in an area that could produce the biggest return and that could avoid significant issues. We didn't fall prey to follow the leader by replacing technology and making IT investments just because it's common practice.

EL. Can you describe your governance model?

SM. We have a project management office for governance. We need to follow guidelines for both Sarbanes Oxley and for good practice measurement. We need the ability to see whether we're improving our processes, improving our quality, or improving our productivity. We have mandated criteria from product development, such as phase gates or stage gates, project initiation, design readiness, development readiness, testing readiness, production readiness, and the new post-implementation evaluation. The milestones we assign to a project require us to go through a structured set of questions before we can move to the next level. These questions address how prepared we are to move to the next level. We don't wind up 90 percent into a project only to realize we don't have a chance of success. We catch issues and problems early as part of the evaluation. That's how we exercise quality governance.

EL. How do you look at projects that will benefit the entire organization?

SM. We have a set of projects we do across the enterprise. For example, we have some infrastructure investments that will help everyone. We'll discuss these investments with the heads of the business units. Our chief executive officer who reports to the CEO drives many capital IT investment decisions. For example, last year, he spearheaded a very aggressive project to enable voice over IP to our 300 offices. It was a technology needed by out retail business, but it is clear to us that we could use that flexibility in all of our operations in the near future. Rather than do it piecemeal, we did it as an enterprise project.

EL. How do you justify IT projects for each of the different business units?

SM. We justify projects on a business-by-business basis. For example, two of our business units have invested in customer centric data management, which will them provide a 360-degree view of the customer. This's a new capability in insurance. It is also good for marketing and good for relationship management. These business units need that technology as fast as they can jointly build it together.

Meanwhile, the commercial business that includes worker's compensation and general liability for large companies, is a mature business. We've put much good technology in place for this business unit. This business unit's projects are all about reducing the cost of business process and IT to provide more pricing flexibility.

The small commercial and personal line business unit goes through independent agents as oppose to selling directly to end customers. These independent agents handle relationships with multiple insurance companies. They have a different business model than other business units. They also use an entirely different set of tools. They also have a whole set of different issues. They're in very early stages and they're trying to build some basic integrated capabilities and consolidating some operations. They have a different set of needs.

Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

Accenture ranks as one of the largest global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing companies. In 2001, Accenture's IT organization supported 75,000 employees. Today, that number is 178,000 employees. Meanwhile, company revenues have gone from $11.5 billion in 2001 to $19 billion in 2007. By moving both IT service delivery and many internal business transactions to an online, self-service model and consolidating key applications, Frank Modruson, Accenture's CIO, says that his company will spend 30 percent less in real dollars in 2008. "As a percent of revenue per person, we've cut IT by 60 percent. That's a dramatic a reduction to the cost to serve."

Enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Frank Modruson, Accenture's chief information officer, to discuss how IT has cut costs but improved service delivery to internal customers. Here's what Modruson had to say in his second interview with www.enterpriseleadership.org.

EL. What improvements have you made to become more responsive to your internal customers?

FB. We've always focused on this as a priority. As the capabilities have evolved over time, we've had the opportunity to take it to the next level. All of our internal business transactions at Accenture happen online. We're a virtually paperless company. It doesn't mean we don't print paper, but all of your transactions as a business customer, whether it's changing your address or looking at your pay stub, occur online in a self-service model similar to the way you'd do any e-commerce transaction. For example, when you create a time report at Accenture, you create an online document, but you're really creating a transaction. We view that as being very customer centric.

When it comes to IT, we handle more than 40 percent of our helpdesk calls online in this self-service model. If you go to esupport, you can look up your problem, read about a solution, or escalate to a chat directly with the helpdesk via Instant messenger.

EL. Given that Accenture is an IT delivery company, what types of online services do you provide your external customers?

FB. First, we call our external customers clients. We don't do many things for them online because of the nature of our work. We have Accenture.com and other content sites about our business. We offer our clients micro sites that we'll tailor to them or to their industry. That's where it is ends. We've been racking our brains about what other online things we can do for them.

IT is trying to bridge the technology gap differently with our clients. For example, we've developed 12 telepresence sites internally. While I was speaking to a client about planning his trip to visit our facility in India, I told him that he might want to get on our telepresence link from Chicago to Bangalore and plan the trip that way. In fact, I added that he might consider conducting the visit via telepresence rather than traveling to India. This client was incredibly enthusiastic about them.

EL. What is your IT strategy and how does it to contribute to making Accenture a leaner, more efficient organization?

FB. Our IT strategy focuses on serving the business of Accenture by looking to make it more efficient and effective. To me, IT is about taking out the friction of our business and making it easier and easier to do the work of Accenture. One the key points in our strategy is to have a single instance of key applications globally. To this end, we only have one application to serve the entire organization for any particular functional area. We have one set of financials for the world. All of the transactions reside in the one system. You can drill down to any level of detail you want. You'll find one version of the truth. We don't have anyone saying this's what my report says and it doesn't agree with what your report says. Companies that have this scenario end up reconciling all the different reports to find the truth.

We also have one recruiting system and one scheduling system. If you go down the list, you'll find that we have one of anything. As a result, our data is cleaner because there are no discrepancies where this system has these fields and this other system has different fields. If you try to put these systems together, you have a problem.

EL. How do companies fall into the trap of redundant systems?

FB. Several years, we brought in a consultant to help us lead a strategic procurement project. I asked her how our technology compared with other companies she had done work for. She said that most companies begin the process by collecting all of the procurement transactions from all of the different systems, put the data altogether to try to make sense of it, and then do the analysis. We said that we skipped that step because we already had all of the data in one place. She said most companies don't understand how big a deal that is.

Here's how people fall into that trap. If everyone has their system, they do get their data faster. However, it doesn't work holistically across the company. You create a Tower of Babel where everything has a different name in each part of the world. It becomes difficult to get everyone to talk with each other. That's why we have companies with multiple ERP systems. I've heard of companies with 70 instances of their primary ERP. You wind up hosting 70 ERP systems, and you wind up reconciling all of these individual ERP systems to get total revenue. Accenture has one ERP system.

EL. What types of social networking or collaboration tools have you given your internal customers?

FB. This is a major program for us. We've launched Accenture Collaboration 2.0 to provide our internal customers with the next generation of social networking capabilities, similar to popular We-based sites such as Facebook. For example, in Accenture People Pages, employees can post their photo, a biography, a resume, and personal information, such as hobbies and interests. They can also list their areas of expertise, who they've worked with, and what things they have contributed to the Accenture Knowledge Exchange. Anyone can free text search this customized, extensible profile of our employees. IT contributed all of the base information, such as employee's name, address, phone number, and email address, but then we told employees to put in what they wanted.

We also have a media exchange similar to a Youtube for all of our media. We're doing an expert's page. We've introduced video from telepresence down to video on the desktop. We're deploying Office Communicator that will tie in Instant messenger, email, phone, and video -- all on the desktop. Since we have one Active Directory, one global email system, and one global desktop, our rollout of this Office Communicator will be straightforward.

EL. How are employees using these collaborative tools to make their job easier?

FB. We want people to cut through the company's hierarchy when they're searching for information and capabilities. People can locate expertise around the firm rather than going up and down the hierarchy of the person they report to. For example, when I did a free-text search on People Pages to find employees who have wine and beverage industry experience, I got 768 hits matching wine. I narrowed the search and found some people who had beverage, wine, and spirits brand management experience. If I go to Office Communicator, I can then check the presence indicator next to each picture. The indicator tells me if the person is online and available or not. Because I see the person's calendar, I know when he or she has a meeting or will be free. If the person is online and available, I can go ahead and contact the person via either Instant messenger, email, or telephone. This capability breaks down the barriers because we can just click on the person and reach out to them. We're trying to make it seamless for our people to get connected to the technology and then to make the experience better. We're trying to bring the power of 178,000 employees to each employee.

EL. Have you improved the way your employees search for documents on the Accenture Knowledge Exchange?

FB. We've added a new, enhanced search and preview feature. Our old search feature was similar to google.com. If your search found documents, such as PDFs, you had to search again on the term to find the page you want. With preview, you see a picture of the page in the document that has your search term. If Accenture is on page 32 of a 50-page document, then you see page 32 highlighted.

EL. What has been the most unusual experience with social networking?

FB. We put up a Wikipedia on Accenture so employees can add their entries about Accenture. Meanwhile, we launched an application, a social network experiment, call Percenture, which tells you the percentage of employees who've joined the company after you did. It also gives you a perspective about the size of the company, where you are, and how long you have been with the company. We didn't post it anywhere on any of our applications. We sent it to out to people via email. In the next 24 hours, more than 30,000 people hit it.

A couple of weeks later while I was speaking to a 100 people, someone asked me where he could find the link to Percenture. I said that because Percenture was an experiment, we didn't post it anywhere. One person raised his hand and said that the link was in the Wikipedia. Apparently, someone went into the Accenture entry and created a link to Percenture. The person who knew where the link was had been with the company for just two months. He knew to look there because of his online experience outside of the company. The best part of it is that someone created the entry for it.

EL. What unique wireless tool have you given employees who travel?

FB. We have a utility that allows employees to get connect to a wireless hot bus around the world. When I was going through Toyko Airport, I opened my laptop, and connected immediately without exchanging any credit card information. This utility just works.

EL. How do go about looking at the right technology mix for your internal customers?

FB. We do a variety of things. We have a portfolio management process for our applications. We manage those applications as products as we work with the customers they support. We do the same thing with our infrastructure. We channel initial funding requests through our IT steering committee, which I chair. The committee includes the chief operating officers of Accenture's operating groups, and the chief operating officers for internal functions for HR, strategy, and finance. Everyone gets one vote. We go through all of the project requests, and then prioritize them based on the importance to the business. Our portfolio management system tracks all of these products.

EL. What determines a successful product?

FB. Before any project gets going or funded, we put together the business case, which includes the cost to do the work and the expected business benefits both in hard dollars and in soft benefits that have some metrics attached to them. Once any project goes into production, we monitor attainment or realization of benefits against that original business case. We do this for three years. Once a year we have an internal audit to look at the process of measurement, to select business cases, and to report those findings to the IT steering committee right before we do funding for the next year.

Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

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Since joining Scottrade as CIO in 2005, Ian Patterson has racked up a series of IT accolades for the stock brokerage firm, which manages $55.7 billion in assets. In both 2008 and 2007, Computerworld named him to its Premier 100 IT Leaders, a list of the country top IT executives. In 2007, under Patterson's leadership, Scottrade got named to the CIO magazine's CIO 100, an award that recognizes outstanding strategic IT leadership. Scottrade has also made it on the InformationWeek 500 list of the most innovative users of IT in the U.S.

What has made Patterson so successful? As a former consultant with Deloitte, Patterson realized that many companies view the IT organization as an outsider, different from other business units. He says, "This never made any sense to me. Why should IT be treated any differently from marketing or finance?" At Scottrade, Patterson created an environment to converge IT into the overall corporate strategy to promote growth and profitability. He says, "Of course, a strategy without execution is just a dream. Our leadership meets regularly to review our five-year plan and to make any adjustments to it."

Every year, Patterson makes sure that the company carries out technology initiatives to better compete in the marketplace. Because do-it-yourself traders comprise much of Scottrade's customer base, Patterson strives to be proactive about what would happen if a market crash occurred, causing a huge spike in the company's trading volume. He says, "We look at our average volumes on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis and come up with our capacity needs to be three to five times that volume." For example, before Scottrade built its recent $25 million, 34,000-square-foot data center. Patterson made sure that the data design had enough redundancy and processing power to support both transaction growth and unexpected transaction volume caused by market fluctuations. IT also upgraded the network so the 300 branches would have a more streamlined, faster, more secure and stable connection to the home office.

In this podcast, Ian Patterson, CIO of Scottrade, talks about how the governance council plans and executes on key technology initiatives, how the company measures the success of these initiatives, and what the company has done to improve the customer experience.

Bio
As CIO at Scottrade, Ian Patterson oversees all of the company's technology staff and technology operations, including the data center and the internal network for more than 300 branches. Before joining Scottrade, Patterson was the senior manager of IT strategy at Deloitte. He also previously held positions at Pivotpoint and Electronic Data Systems. Some of Patterson’s past clients include General Motors, Del Monte Foods, Graybar and W.W. Grainger. Patterson has a B.A. in Business Administration with an emphasis in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona.

Resources
St. Louis Commerce Magazine - Takin' Care of Cyber Business
St. Louis Commerce Magazine - New Data Centers for IT Surge
Computerworld - JScottrade's New Data Center - Redundant Everything

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

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In the early 1990s, Jim Champy saw the writing on boardroom walls -- companies have to change the way they work if they want to be effective and profitable. No wonder, Champy's book, Reengineering the Corporation, became an immediate best-seller, being translated into 17 languages. Although the Internet didn't exist when Champy wrote this book, he says that the concept of work flowing horizontally inside a corporation and across the boundaries of a corporation hasn't changed.

In his book X-Engineering the Corporation, Champy argues that companies have to go beyond their walls and think about how their processes, their systems, and their technology can connect across organizational boundaries to customers, suppliers, and partners. He says, "We see much inefficiency in those processes. About 40 cents of every healthcare dollar goes to settling healthcare claims. If you want to reduce that cost, you have to look at the processes between hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies."

According to Champy, the new version of the corporation will have much built-in transparency. He says, "Of course, companies will always have physical walls and various processes they'll own. The Internet has forced companies to become more transparent because of what their constituents expect and what regulations require for disclosure."

Champy says that the new corporation will change the CIO's role, providing a greater opportunity to change how work is done, both inside the corporation, and across its external boundaries. He says, "IT changes what a company does and what type of value it delivers to its customers. The new corporation, however, has to realize that IT is the great enabler of business process change."

Back in the late 1990s, Champy saw the need for the convergence of business and technology to form the overall corporate strategy, especially in companies where IT doesn't form the business's underpinning, such as in financial services or e-commerce. The good news, Champy says, is this convergence has finally happened. He says, "The strategic nature of IT always has been, and always will be, how the technology is used in combination with business processes to create a company's distinctiveness. That's why you have to tailor the IT strategy and the corporate strategy as one. Strategy is about developing distinctiveness in your marketplace by combining technology and how it changes your business. Distinctiveness is the engine that powers your business."

To write his latest book, Outsmart--How to Do What Your Competitors Can't, Champy embarked on a journey to find out how companies have devised new ways to do things, and what we can learn from them. Using a filter of triple-digit growth, he came up with more than 1,000 companies. He selected nine companies to profile in Outsmart. He says, "Companies, such as Partsearch, that are innovating how to deliver a better customer experience use a combination of high-tech and high-touch. Of course, IT plays a role in this process."

In this podcast, Champy talks how about the new corporation will expand the CIO's role, what the CIO must do to identify and to create corporate innovation, and what a CEO should expect from a CIO.

Bio
James Champy is chairman of Perot Systems Corporation’s consulting practice and is also head of strategy for the company. He directs the company’s team of business and management consultants. Before joining Perot Systems, Champy was chairman and chief executive officer of CSC Index, the management consulting arm of Computer Sciences Corporation. He was one of the original founders of Index, a $200 million consulting practice that CSC acquired in 1988.

Champy co-authored Reengineering the Corporation, which appeared on the New York Times' best-seller list for more than a year. His follow-up books include Reengineering Management, The Arc of Ambition, Fast Forward, X-Engineering the Corporation, and his latest book, Outsmart-How to Do What Your Competitors Can't.

Resources
CIO Insight - Jim Champy on Corporate Darwinism
Forbes - The Invisible $15 Billion Market
CIO - Five Things Jim Champy Has Learned About Beating the Competition

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

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In 2007, Andrew Moss, the former chief financial officer at Lloyds, became the chief executive officer of Aviva Plc, the world's fifth largest insurance group and the largest insurance company in the U.K. He immediately devised a strategy to drive 20 percent growth across Aviva's three lines of business: long-term savings, fund management, and general insurance. The company manages about $800 billion for about 45 million customers. Moss's strategy includes transforming the business by streamlining costs and making sure that all 57,000 employees work toward the goal of providing better value to customers.

Since becoming global CIO of the Aviva Group in January 2008, Toby Redshaw has had no problem incorporating Moss's strategy into how IT operates across the three lines of business. Redshaw says that his role is to make sure IT operates at the right pace, with the right resources, and with the right talent. He also takes a bottom line approach to IT by challenging his front-line IT managers to ask their financial counterparts how specific IT projects relate back to the profit & loss statement. Redshaw says the conenction between IT and the company's bottom line is the biggest gap that IT has with the business. Getting and keeping customers or customer turns shows up on the bottom line. IT managers need to understand what they can be doing to improve this metric, and thus the bottom line."

In this podcast, Toby Redshaw, the global CIO of the Aviva Group, talks about three areas that IT needs to improve: keeping an eye on the bottom line, trying to innovate ahead of competitors, and keeping the current talent base engaged and focused on the company's goals.

Bio
Toby Redshaw is the chief information officer of the Aviva Group, based in London, England. Before joining Aviva, Redshaw was a corporate vice president at Motorola, where he oversaw strategy, architecture, e-business, intranet and collaboration solutions, common platforms and enterprise data warehousing and analytics. He also spent 17 years at FedEx, where he held several senior leadership positions, including CIO of a business unit serving 53 countries. Redshaw is the past chairman of the Kellogg Innovation Network (at Kellogg Graduate School of Business), and chairman of the RosettaNet Council.

Resources
Atlassian - Dan Bricklin Interview's Toby Redshaw on Wiki Use
InfoWorld - CTO 50 - Toby Redshaw
Top XML - Toby Redshaw on SOA

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

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In 2005, when Warren Bennis, the author of several best-selling management books and a professor at the University of Southern California, gave a talk at Harvard Business School, he asked the audience how many knew what the blogosphere was. One third of the audience raised their hands to acknowledge their familiarity with the term.

In his latest book, Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor, Bennis takes on the world of social networking and the world of transacting business across virtual borders. His premise is simple: if companies are going to succeed today, they must be as transparent as possible. Whether companies like it or not, blogging is here to stay. Bennis says that the CEO of Starbucks tunes into blogs to learn what employees in the company's 15,000 stores are feeling, thinking about, and doing. He says, "If companies can't handle transparency, then someone else will come out with the news ahead of them, or offend them, or surprise them."

He adds that there has to be enough trust in the organization with people working at distances from one another. He says, "The only way organizations can succeed in building alliances with other companies or having a geographical disperse workforce is to have crystal clear terms of engagement. The need for transparency is going to become more monumental than ever before." In this podcast, Bennis talks about the challenges C-level executives face today in a creating a culture of candor that must co-exist with social networks.

Bio
Warren Bennis is the Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California. He also serves as the chairman of the advisory board of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School and is the Thomas S. Murphy Distinguished Research Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He is Visiting Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter and a senior fellow at UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research.

He has written or edited 26 books, including the best selling Leaders and On Becoming a Leader, both translated into 21 languages. The Financial Times named Leaders as one of the top 50 business books of all time. His book, An Inverted Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change, wasnominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent books include Geeks & Geezers, Judgment, and Transparency.

Bennis has served on the faculty of MIT's Sloan School of Management where he was chairman of the Organizational Studies Department. He is a former faculty member of Harvard University and Boston University, former provost and executive vice president of State University of New York. He has received 12 honorary degrees and has served on numerous boards of advisers, including the Salk Institute. He has served on four US Presidential Advisory Boards and has consulted for many Fortune 500 companies, including G.E., Ford, and Starbucks.

The Wall Street Journal named him as one of the top ten speakers on management in 1993 and in 1996, Forbes magazine referred to him as the "Dean of Leadership Gurus."

Resources
Management Skills & Development - Interview with Warren Bennis
Slacker Manager - Warren Bennis - Still Valid After All These Years
The Wall Street Journal - Judgment Trumps Experience

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