Excerpts from the interview follow:
You indicated in your keynote address that IT didn't force mobile computing on your workforce and worked with your business units to achieve heavy laptop penetration and thousands of smart phones. How forceful can you be as a CIO or IT manager to bring about these kinds of changes? Our desktop-to-mobile conversion wasn't done in the dark. We like to do pilots and get hundreds or even thousands of users in the pilot. We're very data-driven at Intel and have to have data supporting our decisions. The pilots prove a concept. Some innovations are early-adopter-focused and we just built on that success.
You have something like 85,000 laptop users, about 85 percent of your workforce, which is an increase from 66 percent using laptops in 2003. What's the most important measure of the ROI with that change? We know we get two hours per week per employee of improved productivity based on a 40-hour week. That's a very conservative measure. That's roughly a 5 percent improvement. But the proof of the value is in the decision by users to keep using mobile computing, laptops and handhelds. It's not an IT effort or to reduce head count.
Has that productivity resulted in lost head count? Really, it's more so in getting more done with what you have. People can cover more ground.
OK, you have a lot of laptops being used internally at Intel. What about tablet PCs? They haven't sold nearly as much as the vendors would have liked, and I'm wondering what users think. I've tried tablets a few times, and they're not ready for my usage model. They're getting better, and the software is still evolving. The usability is still not quite there. The ones we've seen weren't quite as stable as you'd like, with problems with restores and locking up. There appear to be bugs in the software, although they are certainly better than they were a year ago.
In general, how do you deal with standardization of devices used at Intel? Do you follow a middle course recommended by many analysts that requires business units to pick from one of, say, three devices in order to receive support? We try to limit devices to one supplier for laptops and handhelds. You have the [total cost of ownership] worry, so you manage costs, and if you bring in more variables and more things to update and manage, it adds to complexity. But with PDAs and smart phones, you have to be more liberal because they are changing so fast. Every three months, there's something new, and it's exciting but difficult to stay on top of things.
What is happening with smart phones at Intel? We have two different devices, and I don't want to name names. The top priority is a phone, then e-mail, and we're piloting a method to tunnel into applications so that a user can look into our ERP system. A sales person could actually be sitting with a customer and check the status on an order of a million chips. We have about 6,000 smart phones deployed. One example of the productivity gain is me standing in line at an airport, and I can check e-mails and my calendar. It's about getting things I need to get done at the time I need to do them. We get convenience and productivity out of this model.
You mentioned the value of running pilots. How much of your job requires you to be intuitive about the value of a new technology versus getting a feeling ahead of time for the return on investment? It's not always easy to predict how you would even do an ROI analysis. You could spend a year figuring out ROI, and then you might have wasted a year. You do need to figure out what's the business value proposition.
So it sounds like you're saying that leadership matters. Leadership matters, yes. It you approach this technology purely from an ROI perspective, you'll be late. When I hear upper management say, "What's the ROI of this technology?" it's just another way for them to say, "I don't want to do this." Of course, everybody has limited budgets. In my experience, it's good to think of value and conduct small pilots and have credible conversations with business groups to find value.
You've spent something like US$25 million in the past five years on mobility initiatives. What are the two biggest lessons you've learned? Here's two: When we went from desktops to laptops, we had to go from a support model that supported the desktops to a service center model. It was not intuitive, but we found the desktop support would go to find a mobile user and they'd be gone, so now we have a service center in various locations, where a technician might fix what's wrong while the user waits, or send for help from a hot spare-parts model. So we learned we had to change our service model.
The other one is connecting from a wired to a wireless model, going through the VPN tunnel and making it secure. You've got to spend time thinking how to approach it. So we've put a lot of energy into the seamless connectivity vision going forward as you cross access points in the wireless LAN, and as you leave the wireless LAN and go out into the cellular world. It's for a voice and data combination. If you like technology, this is a wonderful time to be in the business.
Someone at the conference mentioned how "director of mobility" is the fastest-growing job title in IT. Do you have that position at Intel? No, but there's a director of productivity in my group who analyzes collaboration applications and shared workspaces that use mobility. The position looks at the entire office platform and handhelds and other hardware to drive the fullest use of that technology that we can.
Are you staying atop the need for robust telecommuting capabilities, with some public officials warning about the possibility of long quarantines if there is a bird flu pandemic? It's one part of our business continuity planning. We found that an ice storm last year in Oregon didn't really cause much trouble because of our mobility. Mobility is important for business continuity planning.