The McCue Interview: Steven Bandrowczak, CIO, Nortel

Being the CIO for a tech vendor can often be something of a double-edged sword.

Sure, you get access to cutting-edge tech and some of the smartest engineers around but the nature of the business means you're often a beta guinea pig for all those new products and, of course, everyone in the company is an IT expert and thinks they can do your job better than you.

On the other hand these vendor CIOs face many of the same challenges of their CIO peers working for non-tech companies.

Steven Bandrowczak has spent time in both camps and is now CIO at global networking supplier Nortel.

It's a big job - the company has a tech budget of around $300m and 900 full-time IT staff supporting 35,000 employees worldwide. That includes two major data centres and 12 satellite centres, along with 1,500 servers and 40,000 desktops running Windows XP, and SAP for business applications.

Bandrowczak joined Nortel in the summer of 2007 and, not surprisingly given the above figures, one of his main priorities is consolidating and simplifying infrastructure as part of a major IT transformation programme.

Nortel currently has around 1,100 applications and Bandrowczak wants to cut that down to 100 over the next 18 months.

"Today the portfolio is too large. Consolidation of IT applications helps with IT operating expenses, global business processes and helps improve cycle times," he says.

The second plank of the IT transformation strategy is portfolio management, which involves more rigorous scrutiny of the business case for projects and adopting best practice.

"When I came we had a lot of projects not necessarily 100 per cent aligned to key initiatives. We are investing in projects that have the highest payback and are driving transformation and we are adopting and implementing best practice around project management, such as Prince2," he says.

Each IT project goes through a 'project opportunity assessment' and must tick three boxes: alignment to business strategy, alignment to IT strategy and less than 18 months payback.

Bandrowczak says this approach is about not only operational efficiencies but also making the right tech investments in the first place.

All of this feeds back into the goal to reduce the operational expenditure to capital expenditure ratio of the IT budget from 80:20 down to 70:30 over the next 18 months.

One of the biggest IT projects on Bandrowczak's plate is a global implementation of SAP for HR and finance. But not surprisingly, given the products and services Nortel sells, all things networking and mobile are also high on Bandrowczak's list of priorities.

Top of this list is the "e-enablement of the enterprise".

"How do we make sure each and every aspect of the enterprise is easier to do business with Nortel - customers, partners? Everything we do needs to be e-enabled," he says.

Two of the buzzwords in this area are 'unified communications' and 'hyper connectivity'.

"We talk about hyper connectivity - when you look at how many things will be connecting to the enterprise tomorrow, cars, houses. How do we as an enterprise take advantage of that," he asks.

Bandrowczak's experience stands him in good stead for the task ahead. With an educational background in computer science he went on to become global CIO for logistics company DHL and then CIO for Lenovo Group where he helped lead the initial stages of the $11bn spin-off from IBM in 2005.

"My whole life I have grown up in IT," Bandrowczak says.

Looking forward, he sees the role of the CIO and IT department changing radically: "It's not just delivering a desktop any more. That's what IT departments of businesses need to be - agile of device and transparent."

One of the trends that interests him is on-demand software - or software as a service as it is more commonly known in the industry.

"I don't need to have my own email system. I have no problem outsourcing that. Today we will continue to head in that direction. Those core services are not core competencies in CIO," he says.

One of the real challenges in all this increased mobility is security and, specifically, striking the right balance between securing data and usability. Bandrowczak says it is all too easy for IT departments to just ban things such as IM, Facebook and blogs.

"We have a variety of different users and you need to be able to enable that and not stop that. Not be a barrier to that. Do we secure every single data set or do we enable business? We enable business. It starts with a mindset."

As the CIO of a tech vendor Bandrowczak spends a lot of time with Nortel's customers, feeding back his experience of using the company's products and also bringing back feedback from those customer CIOs into Nortel.

This is part of the ongoing evolution of the CIO role, according to Bandrowczak.

"If you look at my role 10 years ago versus today it's dramatically changed. You have to drive customer value and shareholder value. There are skills around communication, driving change - CIOs are being asked to do a lot more than keep data centres running.

"It's a key role. You have got to have credibility in the organisation. I sit down with the CEO and talk about transforming the business."