In 2002, Michael Davidson, the chief information officer at Apotex, Canada's largest pharmaceutical company, was done with wasting time and money trying to back up one-half terabyte of data residing on dozens of servers with different operating systems. Instead, he decided to go with the emerging trend of disk-to-disk backup. Davidson put in two storage area networks (SANs) and licensed software from a managed back-up service. The two SANs backed up the servers across the company's three campuses, providing better protection than ever before and eliminating the $250,000 yearly cost of tape media.

To build growth within the overall business at the privately held Apotex, Davidson practices the philosophy of researching innovative practices that best fit with the company, and buying solutions that complement those practices. Recently, Enterpriseleadership.org sat done with Davidson to discuss the way he selects products, the strategic planning and governance model at Apotex, and some of the key best practices and products he has in place. Here's what he had to say.

EL: You've had the IT Infrastructure Library in place at Apotex since 2002. What components of it have you carried out?

MD: Right now, we have change management, configuration management, and we're moving ahead with problem management and release management. We've had a service desk for more than 10 years. We gave the service desk an ITIL framework when we first migrated to ITIL. We also use the ITIL framework for service level agreements.

EL: Which service support ITIL component has helped you the most?

MD: Change management has had the biggest effect on us by reducing the number of incidences that have actually occurred. We've also been very careful about the changes we've made. To this end, we've been able to show better cost effectiveness and cost reductions by going in this direction.

Today, a lot of IT shops still haven't looked at ITIL or are just starting to put it in place. When Deloitte, the auditing firm that audits our IT structure frequently, looked at us two years ago, it said not too many companies had actually put in a change management process, let alone try to hook it to configuration management. It was an interesting part of Deloitte's financial audit.

EL: What lessons did you learn about going with configuration management?

MD: We have the federated model for configuration management database. It does reasonably well for us. We had configuration management centralized at one point, but we quickly realized that as you get more and more assets in your configuration management database, you need to roll some of those assets into other federated databases. Otherwise, you'll run into some performance problems.

EL: What lessons have you learned about deploying ITIL?

MD: You can't fix something so that it works effectively and efficiently unless you know what you're doing, what you're changing, and what effect the change is going to have. That's the reason for ITIL.

EL: What new things are you doing in storage?

MD: We have room for a couple of hundred terabytes. The service we use migrated the software to other operating systems, and we've been able to include our UNIX backups. It's interesting to see just how many people are now going to near line disk storage for backups instead of putting them on tape.

Information lifecycle management is one of the storage programs we're running right now. We're spending a lot of time on archival data.

EL: You're an early adopter of many products. How do you select them so you won't get burned?

MD: We have people who build a few small things. We do, however, primarily buy software as opposed to building systems, and we do a lot of internal research before we make any decisions. We look at the longevity of the vendor and whether we think that it can meet our requirements. We also looked at where the vendor is going to fit within our plan during the next three, to five years. Is the vendor a good acquisition candidate? We take all of these things into account during our evaluation process.

EL: How do you work with executive management to make technology decisions?

MD: I chair a steering committee comprised of senior executives. Each month, we review our strategic plans and vision. We also get input from our program management system. We have projects linked to our program management system -- the program will actually go across the different silos of the business and bring together projects that are associated with that program. From there, some of the steering committee executives provide input across inter-business or divisional silos, and we can coordinate between the different business units on our overall planning. We can prioritize the various projects associated with each program. It has worked out well for us.

EL: How are you handling the tactical side of things?

MD: For the past 10 years, we've also been doing tactical planning based on our quarterly tactical plan for one year. Each time we meet, we extend the plan by one year. Our rolling strategic plan, which is updated yearly, drives our tactical plan; the two plans exist as two concentric wheels feeding each other on a continuous cycle. The strategic plan has a three-year horizon. It establishes our environment for the continuous planning to take place, and it also becomes a reference document that is linked to the business value drivers, set by the business.

On the tactical side, we're continually pulling pieces out of the strategic plan, and updating them. This process helps Information Services (IS) make management decisions more quickly. By accepting projects a quarter out, we can change the target date, unless there is a major business process we have to do. Either way, we generally don't get any major surprises.

EL: Do you have formal vehicles for performance metrics?

MD: We aren't using a balanced scorecard now. We have a scorecard for the business and each divisional business unit. We have core strategies in various areas, such as first to market with key products, excellence in customer service, operating efficiency and effectiveness, and aligned and engaged employees and business and finance management. IS maps this vision to the business value drivers and the IS services in place. IS then maps to the goals we have in place, such as business alignment, continuous business planning, and flexible and agile organization.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a free-lance technology writer from Boston , MA. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.