CIO Straight Talk - Issue 10 - 30

FOCuSIng On
STRATegIC ISSueS
Thanks to the cloud, during the merger we have
been able to focus at the business process level
from the very beginning without getting caught
up in technical details. Having a dedicated
group of people working on the project also
helped. Instead of a technical team, the transition
was handled by a group of skilled program
managers who focused on making sure the users
understood and were prepared for the change.
This combination of streamlined technology
and a strategically focused team of skilled
communicators made the email consolidation
much easier than it had ever been before.
It seems to me that, little by little, the cloud is
elevating a lot of IT jobs in the same way. And
it's accelerating the evolution of the CIO's role.
These days, to be a good CIO, you not only
need to be able to manage the technology, you
also need to be able to have a business-level
conversation - and do it without resorting to too
many three- or four-letter acronyms.
The cloud is also beginning to yield some
interesting new opportunities in our core
business. We have 10,000 design engineers
working on new chips, and they are always
hungry for new technology that will let them
design better chips and better solutions for
our customers. From the IT perspective, their
demands can be pretty tough to meet: faster
processing, more capacity, and a more secure
development environment. One way we are
able to help them now is by using the cloud to
create flexible capacity for our chip simulations.
Previously, the lack of variable capacity meant
that we had to either over-buy computers or
make the engineers wait. As we often have tens
or hundreds of products running in parallel, this

30

meant that there were periods when either that
capacity went idle or the engineers just had to
wait their turn. This was a particular problem
when multiple teams wanted to do their final
simulations at the same time.

"ThESE DAyS, To BE A GooD Cio,
you NoT oNLy NEED To BE ABLE
To MANAGE ThE TEChNoLoGy,
you NEED To BE ABLE To hAVE A
busIness-level	conversaTIon	
AS WELL-AND Do iT WiThouT
resorTIng	To	Too	many	Three-	
or	four-leTTer	acronyms."

STICkIng TOgeTHeR
Of course, in some areas, it's not yet possible.
The cloud capacity just isn't big enough to
test massive designs, for instance. Maybe in a
few years the servers will be robust enough to
run those simulations, but not yet. Then again,
in a few years, the designs may be even more
massive, so tomorrow's larger cloud may still not
be able to handle those simulations.
At the same time that we've made this move to
the cloud, we've also sent more and more work
out to partner companies. Here, the challenge is
different. People evolve a lot more slowly than
computers, after all, so the task of the manager
is still the same as before. Whether their
paycheck comes from your company or from
their company, to get the best out of them you
need to treat them as real partners, as part of
your extended team. Of course, in outsourcing,
the responsibilities and line of authority need to
be clearly defined, but you'll be able to set them
out more easily if you treat your partners in a fair
and non-demeaning manner.
CIO Straight Talk - Issue 10

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CIO Straight Talk - Issue 10
