by Elizabeth M. Ferrarini

David Thompson, Symantec Corp.'s chief information officer, has a good track record for providing great value to both internal and external IT customers. During his tenure as CIO at PeopleSoft, he lead an enterprise transformation initiative that enabled the company to realize more than $100 million in savings and to increase the company's earnings per share. Prior to joining Symantec, Thompson was CIO at Oracle Corp. , where he oversaw the information technology group, and before that, he served as CIO for PeopleSoft.

At Symantec Corp., he oversees 1,300 employees located in three major worldwide global centers. His department runs all of the data centers around the world, the telephone network, all network operations, desktop support, and all the internal systems and operations, such as financial, human resources, customer relations management, and some of the line-of-business systems used to support renewals.

Thompson recently sat down with Enterpriseleadership.org to talk about his IT leadership efforts at both Symantec and PeopleSoft. Here's what he had to say:

EL: Can you tell me how you align IT with the goals of the business  so the company is more competitive?

DT: My role is to be the business leader of IT for my peers. I want to find out their pain and their objectives for the year. To this end, I need to make sure that my IT strategy aligns with what they're trying to accomplish and to put the appropriate infrastructure and resources behind the initiatives. We have multiple lines of business: consumer, enterprise security, and enterprise data availability. The IT organization supports all of these. For the consumer line, IT has provided an architecture and infrastructure to help customers renew their products, most of which are purchased via our Web site. Because we want our customers to extend their product subscriptions for a long period of time, we've spent a lot of time analyzing the renewals to find ways to retain our customers.

EL: Do you have a business intelligence system in place for the  renewals?

DT: Our enterprise data warehouse has analytics on top of it. At any time, we can look at our renewals customer base from a variety of ways, such as geography or demographics. The IT department has some business analysts who sit near the people responsible for querying the data warehouse for their business unit.

EL: What does your governance model look like?

DT: We have a centralized model using an IT portfolio management strategy for overseeing the intake of IT projects and the control and distribution of those projects. We use the CobIT framework for some of the major controls of IT. I chair the committee that sets the IT strategy and direction. I involve all of the key business leaders and executives of the company in this committee.

EL: How do you gauge the effectiveness of the governance  model?

DT: We measure the business value of every project that comes through our portfolio. The assigned business value metric is what we expect to achieve. Because IT is expensive, we want to maximize our investments. We go into every project knowing the costs, revenues to be generated, and the metrics we're going to have. Once the project goes live, we continue to measure our ROI.

EL: What is the biggest risk you've taken as a CIO and what did you  learn from it?

DT: It was the enterprise transformation process the CEO of PeopleSoft asked me to lead. We weren't leveraging the available products that could help us to automate a lot of our manual processes. By deploying a lot of self-service transactions, I helped the business remove intermediaries. In addition, by effectively leveraging automation, we were able to reduce headcount in IT. We realized more than $109 million in savings. This amount had a direct affect on PeopleSoft's earnings per share. The earnings conference call to investment analysts mentioned this transformation cost savings.

The CEO put me in a risky position. Realizing that the business leaders could gun me down at any moment, I worked carefully to understand what each one did and what their pain was. I aligned with them as a partner in this initiative. I got them to step up to the plate. I functioned as the lead project manager and the person the CEO held accountable for this initiative. In the end, I learned that if you're going to have a seat at the table, you're going to have to provide value to your internal customers.

EL: What innovative technologies are you considering for IT?

DT: We're looking at tools to help our data centers become more efficient. We have the luxury of drawing from the rich Symantec product family. For example, our Relicore acquisition provides us with some great enterprise vault technology.

I worked for an enterprise software company that didn't have very effective tools for doing discovery for lawsuits. In fact, I found the discovery process overwhelming. This isn't the case at Symantec. Our enterprise vault tools put e-mail in a vault by categories. When a discovery situation occurs, you can give the attorneys access to secure locations so they can back in time and find what they need for the courts. A new ruling has eliminated a lot of previous loopholes to get out of producing data for the courts.

EL: Do you have any comments on Nicholas Carr's book, Does IT  Matter?

DT: When I started to read it, I thought it was kind of controversial. The more I got into it, the more I started to understand Carr's premise -- business is the one in the driver's seat, and IT is its steering wheel. A lot of IT people put themselves on a pedestal, and then wonder why they loose credibility with the business units.

EL: Since IT uses a lot of Symantec products, do you still have a  vendor management program?

DT: I've just added a vendor management office. It's important to stay abreast of your contracts, and have governance in place so you can make sure you are getting the service the vendors have promised you. Also, a vendor management office enables you to maximize the strategic relationship you have with key infrastructure vendors.

EL: Do you think that IT is becoming more conservative these  days?

DT: It has become more rational, as well as conservative. The days of "Big-Bang," multimillion-dollar projects are gone. IT has realized that projects need to be carried out in more manageable chunks. You need to show regular delivery of business value to the entire company. IT has had to become more conservative because we're under more compliance pressure, as well as under pressure to mitigate risks.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a free-lance technology writer  based in Boston, Massachusetts, and is the author of two computer trade books.