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In this podcast, C.K. Prahalad, author of The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, and Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit, talks about how CIOs can use innovative technology to reshape their company's business model, as well as drive new opportunities for poverty-stricken area. (He calls the latter the bottom of the pyramid.)

Despite the downturn in the economic, this's a great time to be a CIO or CTO. That's the conclusion from C.K, Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy and the author of best-selling management books such as The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, and Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit. He says, "Because some CIOs must work under the pressure of shrinking budgets and don't have much time for innovation, this might be a tough concept for some CIOs to grasp."

Prahalad lists four fundamental drivers that can create new opportunities for all kinds of businesses - everything from retailing to financial services to manufacturing. These drivers include the convergence of technology, convergence of industry boundaries of technology, the emergence of social networking, and the globalization of things such as the global supply chain, global markets, and global research and development in third-world countries.

He says, "Convergence of technology is all around us. For example, the cell phone and the PC are now merging into one device. We're seeing a dramatic reduction in the cost of digital technology. Social networking sites such as Facebook didn't exist five years ago. Meanwhile, many companies have taken advantage of global opportunities by expanding to new markets in China and India."

In this podcast, Prahalad provides specific examples of how senior IT executives can address new business opportunities for their companies, how new technology initiatives can drive business opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, why companies should embrace the concept of open innovation, and what the CIO role will be like 10 years from now.

Bio
C.K. Prahalad is the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and a globally recognized management thinker. He has consulted for the top management of many of the world's foremost companies, such as Ahlstrom, AT&T, Cargill, Citicorp, Eastman Chemical, Oracle, Phillips, Quantum, Revlon, Steelcase, and Unilever. Prahalad serves on the board of directors of NCR Corporation, Hindustan Lever Limited, and the World Resources Institute.

His best-selling management books include The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit (rereleased in 2009), Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision (co-authored), and Competing for the Future, and The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. He has authored numerous award-winning articles, several of which won the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Prizes. Other prizes include European Foundation for Management Award in 1993, 1994 Maurice Holland Award as the Best Paper, and the 1997 ANBAR Electronic Citation of Excellence.

Resources
C. K. Prahalad Talks about How Changing Business Models in the New Age of Innovation Will Impact IT, Enterpriseleadership.org
http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/blogs/Articles/2008/07/23/c-k-prahalad-talks-about-how-changing-business-models-in-the-new-age-of-innovation-will-impact-it

C. K. Prahalad Talks about Business Models Driving the New Age of Innovation, BTM Institute
http://www.btminstitute.org/LeadershipInsight/CKPrahalad.html

How Strategy Guru C.K. Prahalad Is Changing the Way CEOs Think
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968089.htm

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Michael Hugos provides insight from his CIO experience and his latest book, Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.

Michael Hugos, the former CIO for Network Services Company, took a different track when he wrote his latest IT book. Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World provides business executives with tools and tips on how they can help IT professionals drive business revenue. He says that IT professionals tend to forget that the business is where the money is. That's why IT exists." He adds that technologies, such as cloud computing, open source and virtualization, will provide great cost benefits to the business. "We need to be in better position to guide these decisions."

Hugos has first-hand experience working with business executives to drive revenue at Network Services Company, an $8 billion cooperative of 86 distributors that market industrial products to major companies. Before this company became agile, the profit margin on coffee cups was practically nothing and getting smaller. Multiply this by Network Services' distributors who sell to 5,000 stores across the country. He says, "We banded together under this cooperative and worked closely with sales. Interesting things started to happen and ideas for making more money started to flow." The information-based, value-added services Hugos helped to devise returned a two percent to three percent profit margin. "If you do things right, you can earn more money or what he calls the agility dividend"

Hugos thinking is nothing new. He refers to the invisible hand theory which Adam Smith, the great British economist, came up with 250 years ago. He says, "The invisible hand pushes the price of all products to their cost of production. No amount of fast talking sales people and ball game tickets will change this."

The end result for Network Services was complete transparency for more products. Hugos says, "Out of the 50 items we came up with, we carried out 25 for them. For example, we could fill an order directly off a purchasing system or via EDI or XML. We now had a customized solution that made our paper cups more valuable."

In this podcast, Hugos provides some current IT enablers that will help an organization achieve speed and agility, give some examples of companies that have achieved both business and IT speed and agility, and offers takeaways to help CIOs assess the business impact of IT based on speed and agility.

Bio
Michael Hugos, at Center for Systems Innovation [c4si], mentors companies and teams in practices of IT and business agility. Up until 2006, he was the corporate CIO at Network Services Company, an $8.2 billion cooperative distributor of janitorial product and disposable food service items. His books include the Essentials of Supply Chain Management (2nd Edition), Building the Real-Time Enterprise, and he contributed to CIO Best Practices -- Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology. His most recent book is Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.

Resources
Michael Hugos' Blog, CIO Magazine, "Doing Business in Real Time"

http://advice.cio.com/taxonomy/term/30

Michael Hugos' Website

http://www.michaelhugos.com/Center_for_Systems_Innovation.html

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Dr. Peter Beckman, director of leadership computing at Argonne National Laboratory. talks about both cloud computing and green IT at the Lab.

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) is one of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) oldest and largest national laboratories for science and engineering research. ANL uses its annual $540 million operating budget to support 100's of research projects of interest to numerous federal agencies, and academic research institutions. ANL is one of DOE's two largest supercomputing centers. The other one is at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In addition to supercomputing, ANL also offers its researchers some less expensive alternatives, namely, grid computing, and soon, cloud computing. Peter Beckman, the ANL's director of leadership computing, says that grid computing is best suited for running applications at multiple sites in cycles available to users in many locations. He says, "On the other hand, cloud computing will enable scientists to build their own solutions as they need them and run them in the cloud. It will also enable the consolidation and sharing of Linux clusters hosted on our cloud. For example, hosting will enable you to expand your 32-node cluster to a 200-node cluster for a few days. "

Opportunities for cloud computing at ANL include everything form studying the genome to looking at data from CERN's supercollider to understanding the smallest particles in the galaxy.

Cloud computing at ANL will eliminate the need for scientists to do their work on a $100 million supercomputer. Beckman says cloud computing is very appealing to some of ANL's researchers. He say, "Cloud computing's bursty, pay-as-you go for cycles model will lower the cost of getting some projects done. It will allow for demand-driven, large allocations of resources, such as a 1,000's of processors for the next couple of week, better than going to a supercomputer. It will also eliminate the need to upgrade equipment." Beckman adds that ANL would like to push some of its cloud capabilities to commercial service such as amazon.com.

In addition to cloud computing, ANL is saving money by optimizing data center technologies, such as water-size economizing, to keep the supercomputer cool and energy efficient. In fact, the chip architecture of ANL's supercomputer uses the least amount of power possible to do its scientific calculations. Beckman says, "Our data center is a factor of two less power data centers that have a different architecture." During some of the winter months, ANL uses water-side economizing to reduce energy costs. The process involves sending the water outside to be cooled by the cooling tower, and then piping the cooled water through heat exchangers in the machine room. He says, "We can cool the machine for free. We'd like to expand the number of months we can do this for."

Bio
Since 2008 Peter Beckman has been the director of leadership computing at Argonne National Laboratory, where he oversees its supercomputing facility. After receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University, Beckman helped found the university's Extreme Computing Laboratory, which focused on parallel languages, portable run-time systems, and collaboration technology. In 1997 he joined the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded the ACL's Linux cluster team and launched the Extreme Linux series of workshops and activities, which helped catalyze the high-performance Linux computing cluster community. In 2000 he founded a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory in Santa Fe that developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. The following year, he became vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the US, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. Beckman joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002, as director of engineering, and later as chief architect for the TeraGrid. He designed and deployed the world's most powerful grid computing system for linking production HPC computing centers for the National Science Foundation.

Resources

Argonne's supercomputer named world's fastest for open science, third overall, Physorg.org
http://www.physorg.com/news133014256.html

Argonne Computer Goes Green, Power Management Design Line
http://www.powermanagementdesignline.com/news/212501723;jsessionid=1S14SOXKCF1QYQSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN

Getting Control of the Cloud, Processor.com
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3114%2F69p14%2F69p14%2F69p14.asp

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Theresa Lanowitz, former Gartner Group analyst, provides some down-to-earth discussion about cloud computing as a disruptive technology, moving one step closer to pervasive utility computing.

Every household doesn't need its own energy grid. If you follow this logic, then each enterprise does not need to be in the business of creating massive infrastructure. Why not take advantage of the some of the world's largest infrastructure offered to you by Amazon.com's Web Services or Google Apps Engine? That is the view of Theresa Lanowitz, a former Gartner Group research analyst and the founder of voke, a research firm focused on breakthrough technologies, such as cloud computing.

She says that while Salesforce.com has revolutionized customer relations marketing by elevating it as a platform as a service, Amazon.com and Google.com have the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise with every enterprise. She adds, "By making their massively scalable, highly available, high-performance environment, and a solid security infrastructure available, both Amazon.com and Google.com have moved one step closer to software as a service and pervasive utility computing. As a result, companies will be able to lower the cost of doing business and to remain innovative, competitive, and profitable. Enterprises of all sizes need to focus on delivering value to the marketplace of their core competency, regardless of what it is."

In this podcast, Theresa Lanowitz discusses the following:

• What type of impact Amazon.com Web Services and Google Apps Engine will have on cloud computing;
• What other areas of cloud computing and Web 2.0 will prevail;
• Why CIOs are hesitant to embrace cloud computing; and
• What three cloud computing takeaways CIOs need to think about in making decisions about this app?

Bio
Theresa Lanowitz, is founder of founder of voke, inc., an industry research firm specializing in breakthrough technologies. From 1999 through 2006, she was a research analyst with Gartner, where she was the lead analyst for Mercury. At Gartner, Lanowitz was the founder, creator, and chairperson of the highly successful Application Development conference. She is the founding member of AppSIC (the Application Security Industry Consortium), a member of the German ComputerWoche.de "Expert Panel on Quality IT Practices" and a frequent guest on SD Times "Week in Review" podcast.

She began her professional career with McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) where she worked on the C-17 transport plane. While at Borland Software, she shipped the ground breaking Java development tool JBuilder. Lanowitz also played instrumental roles at Taligent in the areas of product management and international marketing. At Sun Microsystems, she was responsible for the strategic marketing of the Jini project – a precursor to emerging convergence market.

Lanowitz holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Resources
Theresa Lanowitz's Blog

http://voke.blogspot.com/

Ka-ching! Don't Sell Your Test Team Short, Software Test & Performance

http://www.stpcollaborative.com/users/195-theresa-lanowitz

N requirements.net, Exclusive Podcast: Theresa Lanowitz on the Economy and IT Spending

http://www.requirements.net/2008/12/04/exclusive-podcast-theresa-lanowitz-on-the-economy-and-it-spending/

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

Soon, it will be 4G wireless. This technology will not only provide a staggering amount of bandwidth, but it will create new business models, as well as a new platform for innovation. As a result, CIOs to become 4G wireless savvy immediately. That's the advice of Dr. Scott Snyder, author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in 4G Revolution. Now let's meet Dr. Snyder, author, professor, and CEO of Decision Strategies International.

Every now and then a disruptive technology comes along and dramatically changes the way we live and work. In the mid-1990s it was the Internet and TCP-IP, and in 2000, it was the iPhone. Soon, it will be 4G wireless. Consider, for example, how it could make healthcare more pervasive. A doctor in Africa doesn't need to make a dangerous trip to treat patients at a remote village. With 4G wireless technology, he can treat these patients remotely.

Since the 1990s, 3G wireless has been in place, providing us with increasing amounts of bandwidth, speed, and the ability to download multi-media content in a more efficient way. Dr. Scott Snyder, author of the New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution, says that many people think of 4G wireless, which is the next logical step in the progression of the technology, as just more bandwidth. "Yes, 4G wireless will offer up to 100 megabits per second to mobile users and one gigabit per second to fixed users. You are talking about a wireless connection that is 50 times faster than what you get in your home broadband connection. This is only part of the story. 4G wireless will provide a new paradigm that will alter the network and the handset, by enabling users to have more control over what type of content they get, and what type of services they can get from any location they might be in around the globe."

Snyder adds that user-centric capabilities will be the defining feature of 4G wireless. "Extremely intelligent handsets will have the ability to make decisions on your behalf, just like a remote control for your life. Because it is based on the cloud concept rather than a fixed network, 4G wireless has the capability to follow you around. You will have access to many networks without going back through a network. That's a scary proposition for wireless carriers that make money from people going through their network. This feature enables a whole variety of digital swarms or group behavior. Users can self-organize in this cloud without going through the structure of traditional networks."

As CEO of a Decision Strategies, a technology consulting firm, Snyder came across many executives who lacked awareness of what 4G wireless technology could do, not only to their business, but to their industry as a disruptive force and an innovation platform. The need to educate these executives propelled Snyder to write The New World of Wireless. His book is not just about what's happening with the technology, but how this technology could have broader social and business interactions to create new business models, new industries, and transformational type events.

Meanwhile, new standards for 4G wireless and experimental handsets loom on the horizon. Even aspects of the iPhone sheds light on what new business models might look like. Snyder says that because these weak signals will explode very fast, CIOs need to prepare for 4G wireless right now. "They need to start building wireless into their organization as a competency to be explored both as a communication platform, but also an innovation platform. They need to put the infrastructure in place to support both platforms and to leverage both to build an ecosystem with their customers, partners, vendors, and even your industry. They have to also start fostering wireless content, connectivity and allowing the digital swarm to take place both in your organization and in your ecosystem."

In this podcast, CIOs will learn the following:

• The top three things they should be doing to prepare for 4G wireless
• Some of the ways they can innovate around 4G wireless to become more profitable and derive more marketplace,
• The new business models that 4G wireless will enable, and
• And the security issues that will confront this technology.

Bio

Dr. Scott Snyder is the president and CEO of Decision Strategies International, a strategy firm focused on increasing the strategic aptitude of organization. He has held executive positions with several Fortune 500 companies including General Electric, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin. He has also started business ventures in software including OmniChoice, a CRM/Analytics software applications provider. He was selected as a candidate for Entrepreneur of the Year for the Philadelphia Region. He has worked with numerous Fortune 500 clients on business and technology strategy including General Electric, NCR, Verizon, as well as government organizations such as the Federal Aviation Administration, National Security Administration, and the US Navy.

He has also contributed as a co-author to the recently released Future of BioSciences 2020 Report from DSI and the Wharton School and is the author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution.

Dr. Snyder is a senior fellow in the management department at the Wharton School, an adjunct faculty member in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has lectured at MIT and RIT on decision-making, business and IT strategy, telecommunications, product design and development, and business intelligence. He holds a patent for on-line decision aids and has been quoted as a thought leader in numerous publications. Dr. Snyder earned his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania and has an executive degree from USC in Telecommunications Management.

Resources
Profile of Decision Strategies International, INC magazine

http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2008/company-profile.html?id=200819430

How Failure Breeds Success, BusinessWeek

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_28/b3992001.htm?campaign_id=nws_insdr_jul1&link_position=link1

Put on Hold: Why Telecoms Can't Get Consumers to Bond More with Their Cell Phones, Knowledge Emory

http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1138

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast Shields talks about how this roadmap closed the gap between a project's initial budget and its real cost. Now let's join Gerald Shield, senior vice president and CIO of Alfac.

Who would think that TV commercial featuring the antics of a wisecracking duck could improve a company's brand recognition by 90 percent? That's what a few quacks did for Aflac, a Fortune 500 disability insurance company. Now, Aflac associates have no trouble getting accepted into new business accounts. The payoff has meant a double digit annual growth rate since 2003, and there's no end in sight. For 2008, Aflac had revenue of about $16.5 billion and more than 8,000 employees. The company insured more than40 million people in North American and Japan.

Of course, Aflac isn't resting on Nielsen ratings from the TV commercials to stay competitive. Accelerating growth continue to drive IT to find ways key departments can provide better value and services to external customers. In fact, in 2008, Gerald Shields, Aflac's senior vice president and CIO, received an InfoWorld CTO 25 for adding a future IT projects roadmap into the company's existing IT governance process. Shields says that this roadmap has helped to close the gap between a project's initial budget and its real cost.” During Shield's tenure, both Computerworld and InformationWeek 500 have consistently named Aflac as one of the Best Places to Work in IT. Meanwhile, he was also selected as one of Computerworld's 100 Premier CIOs for 2006.

In this podcast, Shields talks about the following:

• How the future IT projects roadmap has helped to improve IT's relationship with the CIO,
• What payoffs the company has received from doing this type of roadmap,
• How the future IT projects roadmap has changed the governance process,
• What other CIOs can learn from the Aflac experience,
• How Shield's measures and communicates the business impact of IT to Aflac's constituents.

Bio

Gerald Shields joined Aflac Inc. in 2002 as vice president, IT enterprise services. He was promoted to senior vice president, CIO in 2004. Before joining Aflac, Shields served as CTO, and director of information services for LifeWay Christian Resources and held senior IT positions at Electronic Data Systems (EDS). He holds bachelors degrees from Baylor University in accounting and computer science. He also holds a Fellow Life Management Institute certification from the Life Office Management Association.

Resources

2008 InfoWorld CTO 25: Gerald Shields, Aflac, Infoworld

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/2008-infoworld-cto-25-gerald-shields-aflac-838

Symantec Podcast with Gerald Shields, Aflac

http://www.symantec.com/podcasts/detail.jsp?podid=ent_aflac

Balancing Act - How Aflac keeps the lights on while finding time—and funding—for IT innovation, Smart Enterprise

http://www.smartenterprisemag.com/articles/2007spring/casestudy.jhtml

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast, Carvallo goes into detail about building the enterprise architecture for the Smart Grid based on service-oriented architecture and cloud computing.

He also talks about his involvement in driving the IT Leadership and CTO Best Practices Collection, a 700-page document that describes essential IT processes, such as how to manage a data center to how to run a project management office. He also provides some takeaways for CIOs who might be interested in moving to Smart Grid technology. Despite the economy, Austin, Texas, has seen a spike in major businesses, such as google.com and Hewlett-Packard, moving into the area, as well as more people relocating there to find jobs. Meanwhile, Austin Energy, the nation’s ninth largest community-owned electric utility, is making sure it can meet the power demands of its one million residential customers and 41,000 businesses, and continues to return more than $1.5 billion in profits back to the community.

If all goes as planned, Austin Energy could become the country’s first electrical utility to deliver Smart Grid technology. A Smart Grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost, and increase reliability and transparency.  
 
Perhaps, the credit for putting Austin Energy on its Smart Grid journey belongs to Andres Carvallo, the organization’s CIO. In fact, this year Computerworld Honors Program’s recognized the outstanding significance of Carvallo’s Smart Grid work in the energy field. Carvallo just could become the first CIO to deliver the country’s first Smart Grid for a public utility.
 
The genesis for the Smart Grid began in 2003 when Carvallo was working on automation and efficiency and optimization of the business. In 2004, after reading the Electric Power Research Institute’s white paper on the Intelligrid, Carvallo thought it would be possible to use similar technology for Austin Energy. In fact, not wanting to infringe on the Intelligrid trademark, he coined the term Smart Grid.   In 2007, he gave his first speech about the Smart Grid. With the support of executive management, Carvallo’s team began working on Austin Energy’s Smart Grid, which seamlessly integrates four disciplines: energy, communications, software, and hardware.
 
He says, “Together these four disciplines help to redefine how we generate, distribute, and consume electricity. The project goes beyond how we collect data and move it, and how safely we do it. The decisions will be able to make about that data will affect production, distribution, and consumption of energy, from turning on and off devices, to managing plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in the house. “
 
Of course, as a public utility Austin Energy must abide by the North American Electrical Reliability Council’s standards and regulations for infrastructure protection and cyber security. Carvallo says, “We will become compliant this year.” Meanwhile, he has been one of eight people working on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cyber security standards for Smart Grids. He says, “We are awaiting the publication of the interim Smart Grid standards.”

Bio
Andres Carvallo is the chief information officer at Austin Energy.  In addition to his CIO responsibilities as CIO, Carvallo sits on an eight-person executive team, as well as on the Innovation and Opportunity Development executive board. Outside of Austin Energy, he is vice chairman for the Large Public Power Companies’ CIO Task Force. Carvallo is a frequent speaker at both IT and energy industry venues, such as CleanTech.

His outstanding work in IT has earned him many awards, including IT Executive of the Year by the Association of Information Technology Professionals in 2005, Premier 100 IT Leader by Computerworld in 2006, Best in Class of Premier 100 by Computerworld in 2006, CIO 100 Award by CIO Magazine in 2006, InformationWeek 500 by InformationWeek Magazine in 2007, and Computerworld’s Top 12 Green IT Companies in 2008 (First Ever).

Before joining Austin Energy, Carvallo held key positions at four start-ups and large companies, such as Philips Electronics, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Microsoft. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kansas, and has completed executive management programs at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Resources
Austin Energy Delivers Opportunity - Smart Grid News
Exec Calls for Smart Grid Policies - EE Times
Top 10 Smart Grids - GreenTech Media

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast, Heller talks about Vanguard’s initiatives to use Web 2.0 tools to empower both employees and to work more effectively with customers.  He also talks about the challenge of dealing with compliance issues around social media, and the process for fielding new ideas to drive innovation.

The Vanguard Group, one of the largest mutual funds companies in the country, has managed to live up to its name for the past 35 years. Today, Vanguard manages about $1.1 trillion in assets with roughly the same amount of employees it has had for the past decade. Vanguard also differs greatly from its publicly traded competitors, such as Fidelity Investments. Vanguard’s customers – both retail and institutional -- literally own the company. Eighty percent of Vanguard’s business takes place through its various Web sites. The rest of the business occurs either via the telephone or mail. By leveraging its unique structure and technology prowess, Vanguard has some of the lowest management fees of any mutual fund company.  Paul Heller, Vanguard’s CIO, says that technology enables the company to focus on its core mission – preserving and creating wealth for customers.

In 2007, Vanguard received an annual InformationWeek 500 award for being the third best and most innovative company in the country. At that time, the company unveiled its $10 million portal which gives employees better tools to facilitate communications with each other. Much has happened in the past two years. Heller says that the company has expanded its use of Web 2.0 tools both for employees and customers. He says, “For years, we have been hosting e-meetings with our institutional customers. We are now doing this on the retail side where we will invite 25,000 people to a meeting on a specific topic. They can see each others’ questions. “

Bio
Paul Heller is managing director and CIO, for Vanguard Group’s IT division. His team leads all aspects of the company’s use of technology to provide high quality, cost-effective services to the company’s shareholders. Heller has been with Vanguard since 1984. His experience over the prior two decades includes overseeing the core retail business, the institutional defined contribution business, the systems integration division of IT, and investment-only business. Before joining Vanguard, Heller worked for Mellon Bank in Philadelphia. He has a B.S. in engineering and economics from Tufts University and is a graduate of Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program.

Resources
ResourcesCIO Values – Paul Heller - InformationWeek
How Multimedia Tools Make Vanguard a Better Company - CIO
At the Vanguard - Enterpriseleadership.org Podcast with Paul Heller – 2007

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software