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Robert Lloyd of Cisco, Dario Scagliotti of Pirelli, and Peter Schleidt of Danske Bank |
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Mastermind Keynote:
Leadership Marries Business Acceleration With IT Enablement
Tuesday, 11 March 2003
At Symposium/ITxpo in Florence, Italy, on Monday, senior executives from three very different businesses shared insights about strategies for IS directors. In a keynote interview with Gartner practice research director, Peter Sondergaard, and research director, Mark Raskino, were:
Robert Lloyd, president Europe, the Middle East and Africa Operations for Cisco Systems
Dario Scagliotti, CIO for Italian industrial and tires group, Pirelli
Peter Schleidt, executive vice president for group technology development at Denmark's Danske Bank
Scagliotti explained that Pirelli has to be different and better to continue charging premium prices in the commodity tires business. It has decided the way to do this is to go faster, "to create real-time visibility of demand from customers back into the supply chain."
The role of Pirelli's IT group was to make this possible, but the key to success," he said, is "the locking in of the business vision and the IT capabilities. The cultural changes took longer than expected but with top management endorsement, what started as a portal became the basis for a faster way of doing business.
At the Danske Banks, said Peter Schleidt, integration has been the theme for several years. The underlying philosophy has been to do things once and re-use the data and results. Speed is not the central concern although the bank is moving to join the Continuous Link Settlement system for settlement of foreign exchange transactions.
The latest stage in the bank's drive to have "one group and one system" is to create a single group for both business and IT development.
Similarly, one of Cisco's priorities in recent years has been to create a single customer view. But, said Robert Lloyd, Cisco has also achieved US$20 million in cost savings by opening a call center in India and linking it a unified system connected to its other service operations.
All three agree that it is important to measure their progress with focused metrics. For Cisco and Danske Bank, that metric is productivity and for Pirelli it is speed. For the future, both Scagliotti and Schleidt see increased interactions with people and businesses outside the corporation as important. Cisco's Lloyd was delighted to hear it and he agreed that "access will come from anywhare."
The three also agreed on the importance of endorsement and support from top management. Lloyd says, "the common denominator is leadership".
Garner's Rakino said they are all being too modest about what they had contributed. It is usually up to IS directors to point the way forward to what business units can achieve by replacing old with new technology.
Lloyd endorsed that by saying that, when introducing a new system, you should not allow people to continue using the familiar one. "You have to stop the old ways." he said.
Jonathan Green-Armytage
Gartner Staff
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