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“A CIO must earn his place as an equal business partner”
 Telecom software provider Aricent was formed in 2006 after the consolidation of seven entities spread across the globe that were a part of the erstwhile Flextronics International. Mike Webb, vice president and CIO, Aricent, speaks to Ashwani Mishra on his accomplishments and plans, and on the role of a CIO. Prior to his current assignment, Webb served as senior vice president and CIO at Flextronics. Aricent has a staff strength of around 6,700 and annual revenues of $300 million.
What have been your major accomplishments in IT deployment since your appointment as the CIO this year?
Since the time Aricent has come into being, we have focused on producing a foundation network which allows us to operate the company from a global perspective. The challenge was to separate the entity from a tightly integrated group without causing any disruption in the ongoing services.
Could you tell us more about the foundation network? How has it benefited the company?
The project was called AriNET and it had to be completed within six months. The IT teams of Aricent in India, China, Germany, South Africa, Ukraine and Palo Alto, US, and the Flextronics teams in Singapore and the US worked together in a well-coordinated and planned effort to complete the project in the stipulated time. The project posed many technical challenges, was dependent on external partners such as vendors and service providers, and involved protracted techno-commercial negotiations and working across different time zones.
The global Aricent WAN and the associated IT infrastructure was made successfully operational at all sites and was separated from the Flextronics IT infrastructure in March 2007. The most significant highlight of the project has been negligible downtime and consequently a near-zero impact on business.
We created a sophisticated MPLS-based network backed by a VPN network. This ensured that each of our centers around the world was established in a similar manner, and was robust. We used private IP addressing that is scalable and requires no modification. Active directory for authentication was put in place.
What are the other focus areas that require your immediate attention and which you feel would contribute significantly to the business?
Aricent has now become a global company looking to provide global services to our customers, so we need to standardize on our applications. We plan to set up a global base environment in terms of our applications and for our systems like ERP, finance, HR and project management. We are already in the process of doing this, and have standardized on SAP usage across the company. Parts of it—like the HR module—have already been deployed.
Once this standardization is over, we would need to differentiate the company by supporting business in a much stronger way.
We will be focusing on the area of improved collaboration-type tools. We have also standardized on Lotus Notes and use it effectively across the company. There is a lot of modern technology that’s available, like Web 2.0 tools, that allows greater levels of collaboration. We are in the process of making such kind of tools available to the company. These are the areas that can make a significant contribution to the business side of the company.
As a CIO, how have you ensured that the role of IT is made more productive within the organization?
I spent the first few months with the various business groups and tried to find how technology could best serve the business side. I also devoted time to interact with my IT team and looked at every single activity or project in which we were investing. From these interactions we developed a 100-day plan that was focused on improving the contribution of IT to the company. We have only just completed the plan.
We focused on processes in the company. Within processes, we carefully examined the implications of ‘time to cash.’ The amount of working capital employed in the company is dependent on how quickly a project can be completed as that ensures quick payment from customers and the possibility of reusing that capital.
You can actually work out the value of bringing in the number of days to cash in real terms. There is an attached dollar value per day, and it is quite substantial. We worked with our finance department on how to reduce this cost. We found that reducing the time to cash by even a few days would result in savings of several million dollars of working capital for a company of our size.
Another area that we found was a concern for our business partners was the complexity involved in accessing systems. There were several systems that had different user names and passwords. We therefore set up a program that allowed us to use active directory authentication to provide one-time authentication on the network, thus providing users with seamless access to various applications. This included both the proprietary and standardized ones like SAP. There was a huge business benefit in providing efficient access.
This area of improved collaboration tools improved the ability of the user community in the company to own the technology and contribute toward it in terms of collaboration of sites, for projects and for knowledge forums.
The role of a CIO is constantly evolving. What according to you is a key differentiator for the growth and success of a CIO?
The most important and critical thing for a CIO is to earn his place as an equal business partner. We have definitely moved on from IT being a support activity within the company to IT being a business partner. This was a big barrier for a CIO.
One area where IT can really contribute is the area of providing a global space for people to work in and to do so at a reasonable cost. We have introduced VoIP, video conferencing and collaboration, and will continue to focus on such areas. We have also introduced a huge mobile computing platform based on BlackBerry technology which streamlines the whole activity of being able to work as a single company rather than working in isolation.
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