CIO Executive Council Panel Session. From left to right: Caroline Bucknell, General Manager, CIO Executive Council; Chris Clark, CIO, Brookfield Multiplex; Carsten Larsen, CIO, ACMA; Garry Whatley, CIO, Corporate Express.
What I have taken to the business is some very high level reporting that shows some figures around how much is spent on support and innovation against the budgets that are assigned to our roadmaps. I’m also KPI-ed on how much the business spends on innovation, so I can tracks all the hidden funds they have been able to find. So I needed a way that I could show the business I had clear visibility financially and investment in staff.
Staff could also see that they weren’t just keeping the lights on -- they were getting some traction. Three months down the track I could show the staff the report which showed that we had moved from 90 percent support 10 percent innovation to 80 percent support and 20 percent innovation. Because you have so many people on the team who are not sure about what they should really be doing, this really bought clarity. The business can see it is getting value for money and it has helped the staff, too.
Audience question: Gary, how did you bring 30 projects down to five? What was the process?
Gary: We got the executive around the table and decided on projects that were, 1) strategic and 2) delivered the value we wanted. What we found was that we didn’t have the resources do 30 projects at once.
When we decided on the ones that were strategic, we found that there was enough work there for 12 months anyway. There are lots of the areas pushing for projects -- and in some cases they have a great ROI -- but they weren’t strategic. We had limited resources and needed to focus. The ones we focused on were really the game-changing ones.
Audience question: How does IT help the business improve the way it does business?
Carsten: You can achieve savings across the business using IT. We have a $4 million travel budget for example, and we have used video conferencing to pull a significant amount out of that. One thing we have at ACMA is consolidating business processes -- not having the one complaints system, but having the same process for handling complaints. Not having different processes for every single silo.
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