From Disney to 'dogfooding': Life as Microsoft's CIO
Published: 17 Sep 2008 12:06 BST
…even more mail-as-a-service versus mail-as-a-hosted sort of thing. We'll put substantial numbers of Microsoft employees on that.
When will that happen?
We're doing it internally first. I think we have some limited customers on it now, even. But we have lots of billing things to create and lots of other systems to create before we roll it out as a big scalable service to end customers.
When you were at Disney or any of your past IT roles, what was your biggest pet peeve about Microsoft?
We hear from customers all the time, the complexity of our licensing models. It remains a big issue for, I think, most customers. There's just a lot of products there. It's just constantly a topic of discussion and I think that's something we have to just go tackle.
What are some of the big projects you are working on?
The big ones right now are a lot of investment in enterprise data-warehouse strategy, also in what we think of as our core CRM [customer relationship management] underpinnings. Those two are probably the big bets right now.
Emerging as a platform is PLM [product lifecycle management] or product management capability, which would include licensing simplification and some of those things.
Most CIOs have come to recognise that their employees and customers want to know the company is acting in an ecologically responsible way
Are things like mobile devices big? What are the kinds of things the average Microsoftie is clamouring for?
The pressure is to make things more mobile, more portable. I think you see it even surface in our products, Outlook Anywhere and Outlook Web Access — the degree of fidelity that you now have in terms of that mobile experience is just one indicator of the pressure that is on.
Also, I think when you think about where the next billion [Microsoft] customers come from, what is it that they are going to buy? Increasingly it's likely to be gaming platform, phone platform... devices that look different maybe than what today's customers look for.
What do you think is going to be taking up the bulk of your time when you look out?
It's probably three things. One is the continued simplification of our infrastructure and application portfolio. We have the legacy of richness of too many applications that are too fragmented across the company on a global basis. Simplification and consolidation onto globally scalable platforms — I think I will be doing for years and years — it's a big deal. The second is developing a set of apps that Microsoft will need two, three, four, five years out to engage in the businesses we want to engage in. We're in the middle of thinking through all of that right now. The third is just developing people.
You are [in San Francisco] for an environmental conference, EcoForum. I'm curious, what is going on in that area? I know power is a big issue.
Most CIOs have come to recognise that both their employees and the customers of the company want to know that the company they are either working for or buying products from is acting in an ecologically responsible way, and that you take these issues seriously.
From a Microsoft standpoint, we have some great products on virtualisation. We're also here talking about that and here learning what other companies are doing.
In our own space we've gone from eight percent to 25 percent virtualisation in our datacentres in just a year. Next year we think we are going to hit 50 percent. That's as dramatic a progress as I've seen, any company anywhere.
One of the things I am convinced of is that the entire technology community is going to have to come together to solve some of these issues. I came out of automotive. There was a day when if you wanted to know car gas mileage you had to write down the mileage, then drive and write down the mileage again. Then you went to the gas station and did long division to figure out what your gas mileage was. Eventually, as the world got interested in this, a chip got built in every car. Most cars have a chip built in to tell you what your miles per gallon is.
We don't have the functional equivalent to that in the IT world. As a CIO, you really want to know, what is this app costing me, all up? It's the people resources and the energy costs. The tools to do it are emerging but we're not there yet.
It shouldn't be that hard. If the technology community works together and develops the right standards and interfaces, one day you will be able to say: here's my compute factor, or my miles per gallon in terms of the technologies we use. With that we should be able to do a better job of managing our resources. I'm hopeful we could get that done.
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