Andrew Lam Po-Tang, CIO of Fairfax Media, shares insights on how enterprises can harness one technology pillar — the cloud.
Vendors are evolving, says Lam Po-Tang at the recent CIO Summit in New Zealand. Cloud providers like Google and Amazon are consumer based businesses that happened to discover the enterprise market.
“I can rent a CPU for an hour at Amazon,” he cites. Meanwhile, legacy vendors insist on selling bundled fixed fees for their products and services.
Lam Po-Tang says as CIOs engage with these vendors, there are certain trade-offs.
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“You expect certain points of give and take with these vendors,” he states. “When Google looks at me they don’t see me as CIO of Fairfax, but someone who signs the cheques for 10,000 users.”
Legacy vendors, on the other hand, “take time to understand you, go out of their way to adjust their offerings.”
He notes, however, that Google and Amazon are moving up on building these “enterprise relationship skills”.
Barfoot & Thompson CIO Simon Casey underscores the new dialogues across the C-suite, in particular the working relationship between IT and marketing.
Real estate and the virtual assets ICT deals in have historically been two very distinct kinds of business, says Casey, who was joined by the real estate group’s chief marketing officer Jennifer Lucie-Smith.
“Now we [marketing] need what you [ICT] supply,” points Lucie-Smith. When an advertisement runs, the extent of the public response is immediately obvious in web and social media statistics.
The pervasiveness of digital channels has changed the dynamics of the company’s relationship with its customer base, she says. Prospective customers are less willing to allow themselves to be sold to. “It’s now a matter of ‘give me the information, so I can compare’.”
The customer knows they have more power and can specify what they want and ask several potential suppliers which of them can satisfy the need immediately. “The only way we know about that is keeping our ear to the electronic ground,” she discloses.
The teams have become “co-creators of value for the company,” Casey says. They have relocated in the same area of the office and work on projects and solutions to business problems as collaborators rather than supplier and customer.
The speakers asked the largely ICT-specialist audience how often they spoke with marketing staff and others at the front line of business. Only three or four out of an audience of about 50 indicated that they spoke several times a day, which is normal at Barfoot and Thompson.
There are differences in outlook and ideology to overcome, shares Lucie-Smith. “We [marketing] like to make decisions immediately and get things done; and [ICT] likes to write a requirements document and take time to think about it thoroughly and scope it out.”
ICT is perhaps more conscious of the possibility of a plan going wrong. “If we run a marketing campaign and nobody likes it, we can immediately stop the ads, take down the billboards next day, and forget that it ever happened.”
Governance practices in ICT have meant it’s harder to reverse a decision without cost, “but we see that changing,” she says, with ICT becoming in some respects more agile but equally “educating” the marketing team on the constraints around the development process. Marketing is involved in a decision, for example, on whether to do a few small “quick-win” developments or devote the resources to a longer-term project.
Mobile apps have proved a boon to the company’s salespeople; it has evolved an online presence and some staff are “dabbling” in Twitter and Facebook.
Online access to the complete database of properties means anyone can promote any property, and the performance of each agent can readily be measured and exposed, encouraging everyone to improve their performance.
Date: 06 August, 2013