Collaborative Approach to Smart IT

As the CIO of a large merged entity, Dohsung Yum, CIO, The Attachmate Group, had the tough task of ensuring a smooth IT integration of four businesses. As a veteran of the IT industry, Yum advises senior IT executives on how to plan IT strategy and work out an effective collaborative approach and a smart project plan in a merger scenario

As the CIO of such a large entity, which has gone through several mergers and acquisitions, what are the inherent challenges such situations throw up? How can the IT team address these?

Every new acquisition throws up a huge challenge to the IT team in its initial days.The Attachmate Groups mergers have been very different and unique. Each company has its own scope of operations and complexity with regard to the IT framework. The four entities are

a) Novell - offers solutions in the collaboration, data management and end-point management space with its unique set-up

b) SUSE the Linux Platform for both enterprise server and desktop

c) NetIQ includes the entire groups offering in terms of Security & Compliance, Identity & Access, Disaster Recovery etc, and has its critical IT infrastructure in place and

d) Attachmate includes offerings in terminal emulation, legacy modernisation, managed file transfer and enterprise fraud management.

In driving the integration, the role of IT is not just complex, but also an expensive proposition. In my opinion, it is not about technology alone, it is about the teams adaptation to the business and culture of the enterprise. It is critical to understand what the business needs are and get the required coherence in the enterprise to drive smoother integration of IT processes and systems. In any large merger and acquisition, IT is put to a litmus test as the situation is chaotic, with several unknown factors and outcomes. The primary reason is that most IT teams are caught up with short term gains and support and focused on core activities. Whats missing is a broad vision. What most IT managers forget is to reach out to the business partners and manage relationships, to make their task easier. I found that the only way to address challenges was to encourage my team to work closely with the business groups individually, wherever IT could be of use, whether finance, sales and marketing, HR or operations and understand the nuances. After the assessment, I brought in the required changes in the support system, technological deployment and processes. The biggest initiative that helped was a two way communication process between employees and IT, which helped us win half the battle.

How does an IT team decide on investment priorities during the integration process in any acquisition period?

In any merger scenario, 100 per cent of the investment made is tied to the success of the company from a global perspective. In general, IT also gets a boost in terms of investment and the team plays a vital role in working out the investment modalities. Some of the key areas the IT team should focus on are:

• Taking into account all the necessary support activities for the business groups
• Fixing all the support and infrastructure tools necessary and working out training modules
• Getting a quick insight into the various barriers and work out ways to phase out
• Formalising and bringing in certain standardisation within the enterprise that can support hierarchy
• Collaboration among teams, which will help in working out better investment procedures

How do you think collaboration helps in effective integration of processes and systems and standards?

In the case of any large integration, such as ours, bringing in certain standardisation is a Herculean task. It is not just IT infrastructure that calls for an effective integration strategy, its also about people. There are several IT heads with varied backgrounds. The most pertinent question that my team faced was how to device a common strategy for all of the Bus which can streamline the IT operations and framework and make it agile. The question was about how save cost using core technologies while empowering the Bus and employees to make decisions in real time. It was critical to make the systems more flexible and scalable for a clear interface with the existing IT platforms. We also worked towards having a very scalable architecture and replaced many applications over the legacy ones. While some applications were integrated with the legacy ones, some were left unchanged, as they were very customer focused and operated as a standalone. For instance, the running CRM system Siebel, was integrated with the common system to enable sales teams to leverage this, as we decided not to have four different CRMs. Novell was running SAP CRM which continued from an ERP stand point; we decided to migrate to SAP. In the process, several costs had to be written off, despite the fact that a huge investment had been made in them. It was essential to drive down the cost of operations and capex as we moved ahead, as supporting the old applications was expensive.

What kind of project implementation strategy should one look for in such a scenario?

The most important aspect is to make sure to design a well thought out plan. It is important to have a project implementation plan which helps in sustaining and creating sufficient agility in the architecture to cater to the future expansion needs. Having the right processes to imbibe the culture of every BU is mandatory - an aspect of project management. It is critical to have stakeholders from the business group in the project, which can help devise a better project plan. IT teams need to ask the stakeholders more questions if they have to build a smart project. It also depends upon the technologies that both the business group and IT is betting on to drive better value and RoI. It is essential to follow these principles before embarking on a huge project plan:

• Align a basket of requests from the stakeholders
• Formalise the process of seeking inputs from the stakeholders
• Work out ways to analyse the responses\ information sought from the stakeholders
• Not to hesitate to ask questions about the costs, technologies, need and outcome of the project
• Call for a high-level meeting with the top management
• Work out cost benefit analysis to discuss how much ITs support system would cost to meet the requirement

As a contributing member of the leadership team, what according to you are the leadership skills necessary for budding CIOs?

While IT managers need leadership skills if they need to scale up in the career, a mergers and acquisition scenario makes it mandatory to develop these skills at a faster pace. The reason is that IT managers need to be capable of addressing global challenges and drive global operations and, in some cases, handle global teams, which is quite a big task. They should develop the habit of addressing the team concerns and handle crisis management at various junctures and not just IT alone. Moving out of the core job of keeping the lights on, or keeping up the uptime, they ought to get into strategic mode and think at a macro level to run a global enterprise.

To be a leader and build a vision of growth, IT managers should:

• Imbibe different cultures of a multi-national company
• Evolve an effective communication tool and policy with the staff of all Bus
• Understand competitive environment of the organisation
• Pick up market intelligence of the best practices
• Learn to process new ideas and be prepared to have open dialogues with the business teams
• Embrace vulnerabilities in IT
• Develop a collaborative framework to support all the communities spread across globally
• Start aligning with partners to leverage infrastructure support to make the task easy

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