Caution: IT Spending Ahead
By Robert McGarvey americanwaymag.com

July 15, 2004 -- CIOs have money for the first time in years – but every project has to pay off. Where will these cautious spenders put their dollars?

Think small, think carefully. That’s the mantra of today’s chief information officers. Though fresh IT initiatives are coming, the projects are practical, bottom-lined oriented, and there’s not a CIO who’s rushing to resume the high-spending style of the late 1990’s. They’re still under pressure to show benefits from tech projects past. “They are more cautious,” says Alejandro Sarmiento, principal of Topologe, LLC a CIO-for-hire consulting firm. “The major push is for continuous improvement of existing systems. But they are and will be spending on new initiatives this year.”

What new technology might you see at your offices? Here’s a peek.

Wireless connectivity. Public wi-fi networks may be stumbling (cost and security issues are big hurdles), but private wi-fi networks set up to serve a specific employee population are multiplying like kudzu in the Carolina sunshine. Corporate office towers are becoming wireless hot spots, says John Carrow, CIO of Unisys, an IT consulting and services company

“We are retrofitting wi-fi into many of our buildings,” says Carrow, who explains that in an era of a mobile workforce, nomadic employees – and that’s many of us – don’t have time to hunt for telephone jacks, Ethernet ports or wires to hook into the company network. They need connectivity now, and at Unisys they’ll find it. Employee laptops are equipped with wi-fi cards and a simple log in will link them to the Unisys network – whether they’re in a conference room, a lobby or a borrowed workstation. At some companies, you don’t have to be an employee to connect. Vendors, employees of partner, organizations, even guests can hop online.

Organizational portals. Lots of companies are beefing up their home pages, and the aim is blunt: They want to shift most employee interactions to the web. Whether employees want info on how many vacation days they have or need to file a travel itinerary, companies want transactions to happen online. They’re cheaper online, usually faster and in most cases there are fewer mistakes. Harried HR staff can’t mail the wrong brochures or forms when employees download their own.

Who’s doing this? Jan Dressel, CIO of Siemens, says his company is polishing its portal as “a one-stop web site for employees to connect.” Cigna, the giant health insurer, is not only funneling employees to the web, it’s engineering MyCigna.com to absorb most customer interactions, too. “We’re seeing greater user satisfaction,” says Cigna’s CIO Andrea Anania, and greater productivity. A web-savvy audience can get what it wants faster from a polished web site.

SPDE. That acronym stands for Service Provider Delivery Environment. Sounds dry and boring – but it’s revolutionary. SPDE (pronounced speedy) will allow your mobile phone, hand held computer, Blackberry or other device to “talk” to your desktop computer. Remotely. From a client’s conference room, you could retrieve a document off your desktop and beam it to a printer. Prepping for an off-site meeting, you could tap the company’s sales database to brush up on a customer’s buying habits.

IBM’s SPDE software is about to transform Sprint, says the telco’s CIO Mike Stout. “Your hand-held can become your office,” he says. “We can put almost any application on a phone.”
Lots of workers lug laptops when they don’t need so much computing power. But they do need to access their desktops. “We’re making that real,” says Stout, who well knows that plenty of software promised the same but never delivered. “This is really happening, and it is changing how we work.”

Look for other companies to unveil tools and products aimed at this niche as other large organizations unveil pilot projects. Most CIOs are closely eyeing SPDE because the promise of turning the already ubiquitous cellphone into a miniature version of the desktop is exciting indeed.

Knowledge management. Every large company has heaps of knowledge about its products and services but often it’s squirreled away in filing cabinets or separate computer systems. If every employee could tap into that vast wisdom at will – and find the information they need, quickly – wouldn’t work be easier? No more hunting around for answers to a customer’s question, no more searching database after database for the figures you know are somewhere.

No wonder a major objective of corporate computing has been the development of robust, user-friendly knowledge management (KM) tools. One obstacle is that organizational knowledge is so massive that it’s tough to assemble. Another is learning how to ask for the info you need.

That may be changing. At least there’s mounting confidence at wireless company Cingular where CIO Thaddeus Arroyo says new KM tools are changing how customer service is delivered. That’s because customer reps can now query the assembled data in pain English, not arcane, complicated phrasing – allowing them to deliver answers to customers quickly. Which, we all know, is the holy grail of customer service.

Texting. Text messaging – sending short burst of info to cellphones and pagers – is popular in Europe and Japan, but many Americans have ignored this tool. No more, says Gene Fredriksen, vice president of information security at financial services firm Raymond James. His company is using text messaging to distribute alerts and news to employees who need to know, now.

Why? Cellphone text messages allow up to 140 characters, “enough to tell you what’s important and ehat you need to do,” says Fredriksen. Distribution and receipt are essentially instantaneous, and better still, these alerts can travel across national borders, wherever there is a wireless network. “Texting is fast, cheap and informative,” says Fredriksen. Note: Most cellphones can already receive text messages, so the costs of a rollout are minimal.

Going paperless. Guess what: It’s starting to prevail, says Bob Best, CIO of UnumProvident, the largest disability insurer and a business traditionally swamped by paper. It’s publishing electronic transactions now.

Half of UnumProvident’s stakeholders resisted paperless interactions just a few years ago. “That’s down to 18 percent and we expect it to be down to 5 percent within a few years,” says Best. “We’re shifting everything we can to a paperless, electronic format.”

Other companies are doing likewise. Money is transferred, employees are evaluated and customer contracts executed in paperless mode. “Electronic signature technologies have been developing rapidly,” says Best, and at UnumProvident, “people like paperless transactions.” A big reason: It’s so easy to misfile a piece of paper, but so easy to find it when it’s stored digitally. As people see the advantages of going digital, paperless transactions will flourish, says Best.

SO IT”S CLEAR CIOS are still dreaming digital dreams – where interactions are instantaneous and easy, where paper doesn’t pile up, where people can do their jobs anytime, anywhere – but there’s a big difference. A few years ago, CIOs may have plunged into new IT because the technology was “cool” or they feared being left behind. Such thoughts don’t motivate spending now. How fast will the investment bring return and how big will that return be? When the answers are right, that’s when IT budgets grow. Says Sarmiento: “ROI is the important theme.”