With unlimited budget comes endless possibility

Last year, ITWeb asked several local CIOs what IT investments they would make if they had an unlimited budget. The answers ranged from the sublime - Business Connexion CIO Hugo Winterbach wanted his own low-orbit satellite communications system - to the possibly ridiculous - Storm`s Dave Gale was dreaming of a company helicopter service.

Of the more serious issues raised, bandwidth, interoperability, user education, management systems, security, open source and VOIP all received a mention. This year`s list is a little different, although some of the same themes emerged.

Says Winterbach: "Last year, on my list I had bandwidth, spam and viruses, expensive licences, [badly stated] user specifications, [expensive] management systems and a pill for people to swallow to make them adaptable to change.

"Father Christmas didn`t do much about the bandwidth, although I must say that I believe all the WiFi and the 3G helps in a way; they must relieve the load somewhere. On the spam and the virus side, I would say that he gave me the tools to start controlling it. On the other hand, that same tool is eating our bandwidth. We installed a filter the other day to catch spam before it enters the mail system. Something like 40% of our traffic is spam that gets caught. It no longer enters our environment, but it`s still a lot of mail that just travels around the world and eats bandwidth. It also eats budget that could be used for other preventative measures."

On his other wishes, says Winterbach: "Expensive licences still remain a problem. On the user specifications and adapting to change, I`ve seen a definite improvement in my environment, so somewhere something went right there."

Father Christmas didn`t do much about the bandwidth.

Hugo Winterbach, CIO, BCX

This year, Winterbach has management systems on his list (again). "My first wish for this year relates to the background management systems that check this and run that. I would like Father Christmas to take all the vendors` offerings with one unique feature and make one extreme product that offers all the functionality. At the moment, to get it all, you have to buy two or three and there is a lot of duplication. We want an extreme product that monitors, filters and pretty much does everything."

Winterbach says that if this first wish comes true, it will take care of things like systems management, governance, viruses and such, and leave him free to fulfil the CIO function, which is "delivering business systems aligned to the company`s strategy, to the benefit of the company, clients and so on".

He adds that a lot of time goes into operational issues to make the place safe and governable, instead of thinking more in the business area. "I wish we could make the technology available to the masses. The Internet, with its vast sources of knowledge, information, applications and entertainment, is only available to the few."

Andrew Lindstrom, Adobe`s regional manager for Middle East and Africa, has been tasked with setting up a local office in SA.

"We can finally move out of the house and into an office," he notes. As such, he`s playing MD and CIO for the company. His biggest challenge? Bandwidth.

"If I had an unlimited budget, I`d go to Telkom, enquire about the cost of a T1 or T4 line and pay for it for the next five years. Our biggest challenge is cost and capping. I`m battling to find an uncapped service at a reasonable rate. You can get uncapped services, but the rates are horrific. We currently have five Telkom 3Gb accounts, which we switch on and off [as the cap is reached]. If I could, I would get unlimited bandwidth, irrespective of the cost, so that we`d have no capping and no speed issues. Most Adobe offices have T1, 10Gb or 20Gb connections. In SA, you can`t get a 1Mb line that`s affordable or reasonable when compared to what you get in Europe or the USA. A T1 line costs $3 000 here; most Adobe staff in the US have T1 at home for $15 per month. Bandwidth is our biggest obstacle to doing business. We do everything online."

Lindstrom wants to be able to give all of his staff top-of-the-range notebooks, but, of course, cost is an issue. That said, he did get his wish to install Apple everywhere, including servers in the new office.

I`d like to have more strategic relationships.

Andrew Lindstrom, regional manager, Adobe MEA

Like most CIOs or IT department heads, Lindstrom would like more IT staff and fewer vendors. "I`d like to have more strategic relationships, even if I had to pay more. Here, you go to the vendors; one can give you half the stuff, so you have to deal with multiple suppliers. If you ask them what you need to do to only have to deal with one supplier, the prices that come back are ridiculous."

Also on a singular note, Lindstrom would like a single view of his IT environment. "I would pay someone to create some way to see all of our IT infrastructure - hardware, software, infrastructure and so on - in one."

Lastly, Lindstrom says he`d give everyone a new iPod - customers, suppliers, staff; pretty much anyone with whom Adobe has key relationships.

Dimension Data CIO Alpheus Mangale would spend some of his 'unlimited budget` on business process re-engineering. "You find CIOs in a lot of organisations having to fit new technology and technology decisions into processes that have been in place for decades. Take, for example, the banking sector. Many of the banks have existed for many years and CIOs have to consider processes that they`ve had no control over. If I had unlimited budget, I would spend it on business process re-engineering. If the business processes were right and aligned to where the business wants to go, I could select whatever technology I wanted to enable that."

Second on Mangale`s list is the mobility issue. "I would spend endless amounts of money improving mobility," he states. "For example, I live 15 minutes from work but spend an average of three hours a day on the road going to and from work because of traffic. As a CIO, I would spend a lot of money on enhancing productivity by ensuring that employees do not need to come to work to be productive. We can provide communication mechanisms, be it from home or wherever, so people don`t need to spend three hours travelling to work; they can rather work from home."

Mangale`s third wish could be applied to many operational aspects of business. "I would be training my IT staff," he says, "on what the business is all about. I`d be surprised to find any CIO who has the budget to do that, but if they did, it would go a long way in terms of increasing the value of IT within the business."

Mangale says he would invest in making his IT environment environmentally-friendly as well as invest in every CIO`s dream: constant technology refreshes. Finally, he says, he would spend a little more on that aspect of security everyone forgets: data stored on desktops and laptops.

"We spend millions securing infrastructure and so on, but we forget the small things like, if someone walks in and takes my PC, would I be able to continue functioning?"

When making up a wish list, eBucks CIO Benjamin Marais has making life easier on his mind, from standards and mobility to people-friendly applications. "One of the biggest problems in IT is that manufacturers of electronic goods (PCs, cellphones, etc) don`t really adhere to the same standards, so you have incompatibility issues. I would love these guys to stick to one standard and adhere to it across the board so that everyone`s lives become a little easier. If you buy one piece of equipment and plug into something, it should just work."

Second up, says Marais, is customer service. "I`d do away with call centres and train enough staff within the company to be able to resolve customer problems. That way, if a customer has an issue, they can speak to the person who built the application, for example. You`d not only have help from a person who has first-hand experience of the issue, but also a person who is ideally equipped to fix it.

Thirdly, he says: "What if we could get all applications to work like Facebook? If you think about online banking or online shopping, what if you could build an application in the online banking environment that works for you? I`d like to give people the freedom, within certain parameters, to set these things up so that it suits them. That way, you extend the flexibility of the environment and make the customer experience really enjoyable."

Something else that would make people`s lives easier, Marais says, is to come up with a true mobile solution. "Sure, you can get your e-mail at home or file stories remotely and so on, but it`s not a total solution. If you`re not at the office, you miss desk phone calls; if you`re overseas, you have a different set-up. Ideally, you could move all the tools with you, either plug in at home, overseas or at work, and it would just work. I feel that there is more we can do to make that experience easier, even down to computers that could be lighter."

Further, he says: "What if we could build electric cars that drive themselves? It would be good for the environment, and good for people because they could sit in the car and work. Either we get public transport sorted out or we build cars that have less impact.

"This links to a more technical issue: I want to start spending IT budget on virtualisation of servers; it reduces the amount of hardware you have to install, you benefit from electricity savings, less heat is generated, less cooling required, and it makes IT`s life easier if it works as it should." Finally, Marais says he would design a chair that shapes to fit your body to create a comfortable seating position. Not only will it do this, but it will also shift during the day to accommodate changes as your body picks up stress or changes in other ways. "If it could give you a massage and a bit of stress relief, that would be cool," he notes.

If we take our very small sample as representative of CIOs across the board, virtualisation, security and environmental issues will definitely be receiving a lot more attention in 2008, as will mobility and productivity issues. No surprises there; just a lot of things that need doing and limited budget with which to do them.