CIOs at non-technology companies often deal with many third-party vendors. On the other hand, Bill Vass, CIO of Sun Microsystems, also faces the same task, but he has the dual role of dealing with another vendor -- Sun. He oversees company-wide beta deployments of Sun's systems. Products aren't shipped from Sun until Vass signs off on the beta release.

Like most CIOs, Vass faces the challenge of organizing and centralizing manpower resources, technology, and process to eliminate system duplication and unnecessary spending. By spearheading initiatives like company-wide open source, thin-client desktops, and global desktop access, Vass has sliced Sun's IT budget in half, from $600 million to $300 million.

EnterpriseLeadership.org's Elizabeth Ferrarini recently spoke to Vass about Sun's iWork project, the way he weaves IT strategies with those of the business units, and his vision for IT.

EL: How did the thin client and remote access projects come  about?

BV: We began the iWork program in 2000; the real leadership for the project came from our workplace resources group, real-estate group, and Scott McNealy's staff. Surveys showed that one-third of Sun's employees didn't go to their offices daily. Instead, they moved from campus to campus for meetings or they were traveling. At the time, Sun only utilized dial-up modems, Windows desktops, and Solaris for employee telecommuting. The benefits of the iWork program included reducing real-estate costs and attracting new employees to Sun.

EL: Can you talk about the leadership initiatives you instigated to  get the iWork project going?

BV: Most of us had to learn how to manage employees remotely. iWork allows us to carry out a goal-based and metric-based management process rather than physical observation. Sun still has managers who prefer to have their people nearby, but our statistics show that we're getting more than eight hours a day of work from employees when we provide this type of an environment.

EL: What type of a device do employees use for iWork?

BV: About 70 percent of our employees use the ultra-thin Sun Ray client. I really like this device because it doesn't require IT to do any maintenance and it is very secure. You can't get a virus on it -- the Sun Ray is like a TV set to your desktop. You can go to any Sun Ray, insert your Java-based badge, and get your desktop, encrypted and delivered to you personally.

EL: How did you sell people on deploying this  technology?

BV: We sold people on iWork and the Sun Rays by turning the skeptics and leaders into believers. We first asked some of the senior managers and directors to use the system; they, in turn, showed it off to other colleagues. This helped. Next, we gave Sun Ray to the true skeptics at Sun, such as engineering lab personnel. We also put Sun Rays in the conference rooms and in the break rooms. Some executives installed Sun Rays in their home: They simply carried their badges between home and the office to work whenever and wherever they wanted. They quickly became the most enthusiastic advocates for the concept.

Another aspect of iWork is the ability to use a Java-based badge to connect remotely through our edge services or visual Web services. The badge enables a Sun employee to go to any device, anywhere in the world, and to access their email, ERP applications, sales projections info, and calendar. They can have access from a cellphone or airport kiosk; they can save documents into this infrastructure, create a document on a Mac, then go to a another workstation and convert that document to other formats, such as XML. This flexibility is based on our Java enterprise system J2EE and portlet and tagging technology on our edge mail servers.

EL: You were quoted in CIO magazine about the need for a CIO  to develop good sales skills. Can you elaborate on this?

BV: I spend a lot of time getting employees to understand new concepts. Even employees who work for a technology-based company often do not accept change right away, especially when change involves the company's products.

At Sun, we beta test our products, which can prove disruptive, because the products don't always work well. For example, we might widely deploy a product because the product team needs to validate how well it scales. Then, if the systems goes down, employees get upset, and two years later, when everyone is using the product, some employees choose to elaborate on the bad experiences they'd had with it previously. A big part of my job is to run things so that our employees don't have these kinds of negative issues. Sometimes we'll push a new product on the people who created it first, because they have more tolerance if a system goes down.

I have an internal blog where I put tips for our employees, such as to how to configure their phone to do remote access, how to work on any devices, and what a wireless Sun Ray is like.

EL: How do you weave IT strategies with other parts of the  business?

BV: Sometimes, things works out well, such as Java badges with Sarbanes-Oxley and WaveSet. Other times, things don't go so smoothly. For example, we had an issue when we were deploying our identity product really early on a large scale. The business units unrealistically expected better functionality from an unstable product. I took some heat for that. When this happens, I have to explain to the business units that they're running this product temporarily as it is. Then, I might have to balance their interests, and allow them to go back to their original system, or use a temporary system until the new product is ready.

EL: What is your vision for how IT will build your organization  successfully?

BV: Like any CIO, I focus on people, process, and technology. If you put each one of these at each end of a triangle, you want to stay in the center of the triangle. We do what we call "reference deployment" of Sun products in a beta-type situation, followed by production deployment of Sun products, and then product deployment of Oracle, or Seibel, depending on the business need.

For example, we have a process called "Sun on Beta Sun." Someone from IT is part of every product team, collects metrics, and then provides the product team with recommendations about how and where to deploy the product. In the past, a product team would hear from hundreds of IT people.

The purpose of the Sun on Beta Sun process is to balance the business risk with the product risk to ensure product teams get the right exposure. We don't always push this process -- we wouldn't put our ERP system on a beta product right away. However, we might put pieces of the finance system on a beta release. But products don't get out of beta until the IT departments signs the release.

IT at Sun is unique in other ways besides the way it deals with product development. For example, we utilize specific Sun identity management and access control management products for Sarbanes Oxley compliance.

Since I have been at Sun, I've eliminated any unnecessary system redundancies. We went from eight data warehouses to one operational data store; 60 extract-and-load tools to one; and 37 portals to one.

Selling iWork was the easy part of my job. Every CIO faces the same hard part -- getting the business to accept change, and to prioritize a portfolio of what items to consolidate. I spent 18 months going through the painful process of consolidating 67 order-entry and order-management systems onto a single instance of Oracle globally, for the entire company. The most critical instance of leadership I could provide for Sun occurred during this move. I had to convince everyone that the move was more than just changing how employees worked; it was about causing the business to change to meet the software. So, selling change is about getting people to realize that the move was for the greater good of the company, being careful not to disregard the efforts of those who'd built the previous system.

EL: How do you manage IT spending?

BV: Very tightly! For me, all IT business spending has a dotted line. I make sure the money is spent in a consistent and coherent manner. Twice a year, we go through a formal IT budget review, in which we prioritize and allocate expenditures for specific business unit projects and for projects IT needs to execute for itself, involving compliance and infrastructure.

EL: What best practices do you have in place?

BV: We've an aggressive Six Sigma program that we called "Sun Sigma." We manage our data centers using best practices found in the IT Infrastructure Library. In fact, we standardized our service levels around it. We've built our development environment around CMM3 certification or higher. And we didn't buy any particular software to carry any of these three best practices; instead, we use a variety of tools to carry these things out.

EL: What disruptive technology are your considering?

BV: We started employing service-oriented architecture [SOA] in 2002, and  our visual Web services runs on that platform. During 2006, we'll be planning many of our applications on grid-enabled systems. This move will allow me to stop spending money on capital all together; I'll buy grid services from the place we sell to our customers.

--

Elizabeth Ferrarini is an IT consultant and freelance writer from  Boston, Massachusetts. Elizabeth can be reached at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.