It's all in the teamwork

In case you didn’t get the memo, the world of IT is in the midst of a transformation. Again. A constantly evolving sphere of clouds, virtualized data-centers and revolutionary devices, today’s technology landscape is rife with challenges for the IT executive, and while the likes of Google, Microsoft and other major players in the techno sector are paving the way for the future of the industry, keeping abreast of that innovation and integration in a business that uses technology but does not produce it is no mean feat. So how can corporations worth millions of dollars, and with a staff base in the thousands, manage the constantly evolving technology across the whole organization?

"That's a great challenge," says Richard Scott, CTO at Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. For Guardian, an insurance firm with around 5,400 members of staff, technology is a key enabler of the business strategy. "We're not unlike a lot of companies where we have individual lines of business that all have their own driving forces," says Scott, adding that the key to implementing innovation and development is socialization, ensuring that there is a constant conversation between the various departments of the organization to develop the best strategy for the whole business. "We've got to be out there," he says. "We've got to be talking to the lines of the business - the tier business people, the application side - and then look for the greater good. That's not always possible. You can't always have a solution that meets everybody's needs, but to what extent that we can, that's what we focus on."

Still, in order for innovative new technologies to be implemented throughout the business, they have to be present in the first place. "For us it's about unleashing and enabling people to innovate," explains Scott. "We encourage people to go out to different vendors to look at the trends in the industry. We will support them in internal trials, but we have the strong governance process that requires any new technology to go through a series of vetting steps before it can be made live or get into an area that it might impact our compliance or regulatory reporting requirement. It's really just allowing people to do it rather than trying to say, "A group of three or four people are the R & D team." That doesn't work very well."

The pendulum can swing both ways though, and while Scott actively encourages an innovative culture, there comes a point where the best interests of the business get overlooked. Scott explains that only once an idea has reached maturity can it be considered for implementation across the organization. It is at that stage, he explains, that the collaborative internal culture. "That's when we bring in different departments to look at this as a group," he explains. "We have representatives from all different areas that come together and say, "Is this a technology that can benefit Guardian as a whole?"

This seems to be a recurring concern for Scott in his capacity as CTO. Taking what he describes himself as a "horizontal view of all of IT", he is firm to ensure that new technologies are beneficial to the greater interests of the whole firm, and he highlights that Guardian operates a governance process to ensure the right technologies are emerging into the business. "It's not one person saying, "You can't do that," and putting the hammer down," he explains. "We're having a representative group from business, from technology, security, infrastructure, all these different areas saying, "Is that really in the best interest of Guardian?"

And in the two years since this process has been operating, Scott explains that Guardian is reaping the rewards. "Just knowing that the process is in place has caused people to rethink trying to introduce just anything though. Ideas are very well-vetted before they get to that level, and they tend to go straight through because they are well-defined, well thought through and clearly address a business need."

Clouds ahead

With regard to the technologies that are currently revolutionizing the business world, Scott speaks candidly. "I personally don't like the term ‘the cloud'," he reveals. "It means too many things to different people. I like to look at the cloud as a utility. We look at where the cloud is taking us, and it's becoming a commodity; so if I need to run a business process, I'll simply reach out and run it on the cheapest commodity-based compute platform I can find out there, or if I need storage for the business here. I'm going to find the least expensive storage option available to me."

Like his approach to innovation, Scott sees little to be gained from just adopting a new cloud-based system for the sake of doing so. "I envisage that within the next 12 to 18 months we'll probably dip our toe into the world of development," he says, underlining his firm's caution to take on a new technology infrastructure that might compromise sensitive company information. "I couldn't take, for instance, some of the customer data we deal with and put that in the cloud today," he says. "It's just not mature enough."

He highlights also the concern many technology executives share, will external software providers have the firm's best interests at heart? "If we pick a vendor to host our stuff, are they going to have the right maturity, the right service levels, the ability to pay the same amount of attention as we do to our own environments today?" asks Scott. "Are we going to get the same or better or a guaranteed level of service?"

Still, Scott is optimistic that these are just kinks that will work themselves out with time. "As the technology evolves and security techniques become tried and tested and the comfort level raises itself, these concerns will go away. I don't think that there's anything that will stop this, but it is a concern today."

He remains realistic that a move to the cloud is an ultimate inevitability for businesses' IT infrastructure, and explains that despite his reservations, his department are looking towards it as the next generation of technology platform. "We'll try to get some of our IT folks to begin to make provisions for environments in one or two cloud providers so we can begin to free up our own infrastructure for production use, and have this more dynamic infrastructure in the cloud for development. It'll probably go from development to test to user acceptance testing and one day to production.

"I still can't forecast when that production date is. There's some neat technologies that are being introduced today that will allow us to do some of this work internally before we push it out, and then seamlessly move the workload into the cloud without a lot of modifications. Our focus is going to be on investing in and preparing ourselves for that eventual date. It's going to happen. We need to do what we can to prepare ourselves to make that transition as seamless and painless as possible."