decisions

How Mobile IT
is Revamping
Network Strategies
Mobility is giving CIOs a new
perspective on security, network
capacity and IT consumers.

Inside:
USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS TOO

A LESSON IN TAKING
MOBILITY SKYWARD

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT EFFECT

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

SOCIAL STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE FUTURE

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

G UID IN G TECH N OLOGY D ECIS ION M A K ER S IN TH E EN T ERPRI SE

CIO

N OVEMBER 20 12 VO LUME 17

EDITOR'S LETTER

Scot Petersen

Editorial Director

Users are IT Consumers Too

are going to have to
get comfortable with the new language of
consumerizationthat is, stop calling their
employees users and instead call them
what they really are: consumers of information technology.
That may get confusing because, of
course, customers are the lifeblood a
business. But its the business internal
consumers that put that technology to
work in helping reach customers and satisfy customer needs.
Dont take my word for it. Madison
(Wisc.) College CIO Igor Steinberg said,
Our internal customers are primarily
faculty, and I guess students are external
customers. ... They are riding the wave of
consumerization and expect to do whatever
they need to do when they need to do it
and in the way they want to do it.
When Art King was the global information architecture lead for Nike Inc.,
a primary issue was working on a wireless strategy in tandem with mobile device
management, because the people using
wireless devices want to consume enterprise services, he said in this issue of
CIO Decisions.
The upshot of the consumerization
movement is not so much that consumer
devices have infiltrated the enterprise; its
that internal usersexcuse me, customersexpect the same performance, flexC I O S A N D I T L E A D E RS

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

ibility and convenience of their tech in the

enterprise as they have outside the enterprise. If they dont, they will either find a
new job or, worse for the IT department,
find a way around sanctioned technology
and do things for themselves. Thats when
problems of security, privacy and data integrity break out.
Consumerization is happening, large
file sharing is happening, and this trend
will continue. It is up to IT to figure out
how to accommodate this, because if we
dont simulate the kind of experience they
get on the consumer side, people will figure
out a way to go around us to get their job
done, said Randy Nunez, senior network
engineer at Ford Motor Co.s Mobile Computing IT Enterprise Technology Research
division.
To help understand this problem further
and consider some solutions from real IT
practitioners, read Executive Editor Christina Torodes cover story on the mobile IT
network effect. Also in this issue, News
Director Linda Tucci on building a corporate social network; Features Writer Karen
Goulart on cloud implementation project
management and an interview on data
analytics with PayPals former chief data
scientist.

Write to Scot at
spetersen@techtarget.com

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

News, views and reviews for senior technology managers

UPFRONT

ON THE JOB

A Lesson
in Taking Mobility Skyward
is what you might
call an upwardly mobile company. Not
only is the airline literally in the business
of ascending into the sky and transporting passengers, but the airline has also
long shown a dedication to promoting
enterprise mobilityand recently, mobile
applicationsto enhance its customer and
workforce experience.
Today, mobile has taken on new meaning
for the financially challenged airline, which
filed for bankruptcy protection last year.
Over the past couple of years, American
has worked at making mobility a core business process, most visibly in its offerings
for travelers. A suite of mobile apps that
work on an array of devices, for example,
has become a big selling point for the Fort
Worth-based airline, said Phillip Easter, the
airlines director of mobile applications.
To rev up its enterprise mobile apps
development, IT first had to concede that
it no longer owned IT, Easter said. Having ruled the technology playground at the
enterprise, IT was schooled by Apple into
realizing the game has changedespecially
on the front end.
UI is the new song for mobile apps. Everything about the mobile app has to have
great user interface, said Easter, whose
team develops apps for the consumer space
A M E R I CA N A I R L I N ES I N C .

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

and consults with internal IT on developing Americans enterprise mobile apps.

To really make use of those great UIs,
the back end at American had to change,
too. We have over 50 years of legacy data
securely captured in our enterprise. We
dont let it out. And now come these mobile devices needing access, Easter said.
In the past, anything that was mobilized
at American was usually a one-off, built

Everything about the

mobile app has to have
great user interface.
Phillip Easter, director of mobile
applications, American Airlines Inc
specifically for an application. As mobile
devices matured and could receive data in
a more standardized fashion, IT needed to
build a middle layer and new application
programming interfaces (APIs) for its backend systems to expose data in consumable
chunks for mobile devices.
Developers can call an API to get data
and quickly create enterprise mobile apps.
They should not have to worry about how
to open up a channel, how to do the secu-

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

UPFRONT

rity, nor how they should find this type of

data. They should be able to call the data in
an object-based API, Easter said.
Easter said he and others were surprised by how rapidly Americans full- and
part-time developers started pumping out
appsand how quickly employees started
using them. The 12- to 18-month development approachfrom proof of concept to
testing, analyzing and committee reviews
to then tweaking the end product year after
yeardoesnt exist anymore in the realm
of enterprise mobile app development.

The 12- to 18-month

development approach
doesnt exist anymore
in the realm of enterprise
mobile app development.
USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

When we say proof of concept, that really means production, because the internal
user could be using it in matter
of weeks, he said.
Easter has a final tip for organizations
eager to jump on the enterprise mobile
app bandwagon: Think intent, not location.
Knowing that you are at a certain latitude/
longitude is great, but if I know why you
are there, that is key, he said.
With enterprise mobile apps, the temptation is to cram in a lot of features, but
Easter advises his people to try to do three
things well. If you know who the customer
is and what is their intent, then you know
what to bubble up in the app. You can have
30 different things, but only show three
things at any given time, he said.
Meanwhile, Easters team also continues

ON THE AGENDA

Unauthorized
Access Tops
Mobile Security
Concerns
Fears over unauthorized mobile device access
dominated a survey conducted at a SearchCompliance.com 2012 virtual tradeshow. In
that poll, 60% of respondents cited unauthorized access control as their companys
biggest mobile device security concern in the
next year, followed by authentication (52%)
and data loss prevention (52%). When asked
to select which three mobile security technologies would draw more funding in the
year ahead, access control (44%), data loss
prevention (34%) and authentication (25%)
topped the list.
80
60

60% device security

Biggest mobile
52% concern
52%

in the next year:

Unauthorized Authentication
Data loss

access control
prevention

60%
52%
52%

Unauthorized Authentication
Data loss

access control
prevention

Three mobile security technologies that

would draw more funding next year:

44%

34%
25%

Access
Authentication
Data loss

control
prevention

40
20

0%
80
60
40
20

0%

80
60
40
20

0%
80
60
40

44

34

%
20
SearchCompliance.com
poll, May 2012,
% with 93 IT
0%
professionals
responding.
Access
control

Data loss
prevention

CIO DECISIONS
Skills to build private clouds

Departmental liaisons

25%

Authentication

NOVEMBER 2012

64%

UPFRONT

to push the envelope on opening up internal systems to provide innovative mobile

services to Americans travelers. Working
with its partner on IP telephony systems,
Easters teams became intent on pushing
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) into the
60%
52%
mobile space. The result is a soon-to-debut
service that will let passengers
chat with
Unauthorized Authentication
access
controlover a WiAmerican agents on the
ground

Fi connectionwhile airborneto adjust

travel arrangements.
Thats the kind of mobile app development that revs his engines.
Its an example of bringing together
tested technologyWi-Fi, mobile apps and
52%
Internet-enabled
phonesto bring about
aData
new
conversation with the customer.
loss
prevention

Linda Tucci

80
60
40
20

0%

BY THE NUMBERS

Cloud Computing
44
Reinventing
IT34Departments
25
80
60
40
20

0%

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

Access
Authentication
Data loss
In a recent CompTIA survey,
32% of respondents
reported
restructuring IT around
control
prevention
a cloud computing transition, and half of those companies reported the creation
of new skills and roles:

Skills to build private clouds

69%

Departmental liaisons
64%

63%
Integration specialists

61%
Cloud architects

44%
Compliance specialists

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Source: The Computing Technology Industry Associations third annual Trends in Cloud Computing survey, which polled 500 IT
and business professionals. Note: Percentages do not total 100.

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

UPFRONT

ONE ON ONE

An Insurance Policy Predicated

on Predictive Analytics
At Capitol Insurance Companies,
an IT-driven analytics strategy
focused on building data repositories
and digging into predictive analytics
is helping to drive business initiatives. Here, Troy Lethem, the
insurance companys CIO and vice
president of information services,
discusses how his business has embraced predictive analytics and is
working toward a broader mobile
strategy to benefit not only its customers, but its agents in the field.

Troy Lethem
TITLE: CIO AND VICE PRESIDENT OF INFORMATION SERVICES
TIME IN THIS ROLE: EIGHT YEARS
ORGANIZATION: CAPITOL INSURANCE COMPANIES
HEADQUARTERS: MIDDLETON, WISC.

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

Can you tell us how you are using big data?

You mentioned having massive amounts
of data to coordinate within your company.
I cant say we have big data when I look
at other industries and when I look at other
endeavorswe are a midsized company.
But we are gathering increasing amounts
of data. The initial strategy we had, which
will be familiar to most companies, is
building a data warehouse, where we take
the core information out of our core systems and bring that into a common repository that can be queried and reported
against. This is where our management
reporting is based.
The next thing we are doing is bringing in predictive analyticsand predictive
analytics says we want to do a deep analysis

of your current data as well as external data

sources. That could be by ZIP code, that
could be by crime statistics or weather patterns. Theres a lot of external data we can
bring in.
Next, by combining that data and by
doing very intense analytics looking backwardsfor example, at our claim historypredictive analytics can give us some
factors in pricing and in underwriting that
our underwriters really did not see because
they are very, very complex patterns.

Who would you say, of the executive

leadership team, is your biggest partner?
I cant pick one. We are a very tight-knit
group. I work very closely with the chief

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

UPFRONT

operating officer, obviously. I have to make

sure that the company is able to get its
business done efficiently and effectively
every daythats really to keep the lights
on. The chief operating officer, the CEO,
the underwriting folks and the vice president of operationsthe entire team is
really focused on where we need to go next.
What I try to bring in is an awareness of
or discussion about trends in other industries or in our own industry, asking, Are
they appropriate for us? How can we adopt
them?
So, I really could not pick one person.
I interact with all of the other officers of
the company on a daily basis.

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

What technology are you most interested

in exploring in the next few years?
Well, mobility is where we need to get
to, and thats a real challenge because its
changing daily. Theres a proliferation of
platforms. Theres a proliferation of off-

the-shelf applications that may or may not

have good business applications. And our
systems are still designed around the old
business model, which is Windows and a
standard Web browser. The real challenge
for us is to be able to use our existing
systems but deliver [what] our agents and
our customers want in increasingly sophisticated ways. You can imagine an agent
wanting to use an iPad or other pad device
on a sales call to get a quote and follow
through and actually issue the business.
We know how to get there, but it is not an
easy task.
Whats appropriate on a smaller device,
on a phone, that is a question we really have
to get intelligence back from the agents on.
What we write is so complex, and there
are so many data fields to input, so just the
screen size on the phone is a big challenge
there. Were looking at how we can make
our applications more ubiquitous and more
mobile for consumption by the agents.

Wendy Schuchart

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

W H AT S T H I S ?

Fishbone Diagram
A fishbone diagram, also called a cause-and-effect diagram or Ishikawa diagram, is a visualization tool for categorizing the potential causes of a problem in order to identify its root causes.
In brainstorming a problem, its symptoms and the potential causes are charted to resemble a
fishs skeletal components. Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese quality control expert, is credited
with inventing the fishbone diagram to help employees avoid solutions that merely address the
symptoms of a much larger problem.
Source: WhatIs.com

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

C OV E R S T O R Y

Bring-your-own-device programs are stretching enterprise

networks to the breaking point. Heres how some IT executives

are adapting to the new

reality. BY CHRISTINA TORODE

The Network
Mobile IT Effect

EARLIER THIS YEAR,

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

the OC3 network

for Internet traffic at Kroll Factual Data
reached a saturation point of 80%. Given
that Kroll, a verification services provider
for lenders and creditors, conducts most of
its business online, this was bad news on a
grand scale.
The culprit was streaming media slamming the companys network as employees
used mobile devices to watch videos and
download files. It was starting to have a
detrimental effect on our customers, and
for us that was the end of the story, said
Christopher Steffen, principal technical
architect at Kroll, a Loveland, Colo., division of global background screening and
security provider Altegrity Inc.
The companys IT team (with managements blessing) had no choice but to block
and limit outbound network traffic. Sure
enough, the saturation rate went from 80%
to 18%, but the limitations put on mobile
device use went over like a lead balloon
with employees, Steffen said.

IT executives across enterprises are

trying to get a handle on how to address
mobile ITs effect on network capacity in
the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) era. As
Steffen put it theres 15 to 20 ways to skin
this cat.
The solutions at Kroll were firewall
blockers and network controllers to prevent employees from going to sites like
YouTube, as well as the creation of a guest
network that handled all the dirty Internet
traffic, Steffen said. This guest network let
employees surf the Internet while keeping
the traffic separate from the core network
and the backend systems used for business
processes.
Managing the impact of mobile devices
on the network, however, doesnt lend itself
to a fire-and-forget kind of approach,
Steffen cautioned. Even with its technology measures in placeand policies that
prevent access to certain sitesmobile device traffic management continues to be a
moving target at Kroll, requiring exceptions

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

THE NETWORK MOBILE IT EFFECT

on a case-by-case basis to identify employees who need mobile access to corporate or

network resources to get their job done.

THE MANY MOBILE PATHS

TO CAPACITY ENGLIGHTENMENT

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

Randy Nunez, senior network engineer

at Ford Motor Co.s Mobile Computing
IT Enterprise Technology Research division, said there is no one right answer for
everybody when it comes to dealing with
mobile IT traffic, while the cause is pretty
straightforward.
Mobile device traffic is absolutely a
major problem as more and more people
can afford smartphones and tablets, which
are Wi-Fi devices that are now becoming
more powerful, with more content available, especially with things like multimedia, Nunez said.
People have come to expect free WiFi wherever they go. The problem is that
wireless LANs were not originally built for
this kind of capacity. They were designed
for occasional laptop Wi-Fi users, and
there was a point where laptops were very
expensive so they were limited. But now
you have laptops, smartphones and tablets using a network that wasnt designed
for that amount of traffic. And it was also
originally built for specific purposes, such
as within a conference room or certain
locations in a plant, he said.
Nunez said there are three primary ways
enterprises are attempting to accommodate
mobile device traffic:

Keeping up to date with the latest wireless LAN standards and understanding
the impact of legacy devices. Deploying
802.11n can increase throughput, and

many wireless devices now support this

standard. Also, be aware that devices
that support only older 802.11b/g standards can impact the performance of the
802.11n network, so organizations should
upgrade those devices where possible.

Redesigning the wireless LAN infra-

structure from an autonomous accesspoint environment to a controller-based

architecture with lightweight access
points. These networks are typically
easier to scale and have more robustness, he said.

Building a guest network. It may not

help with throughput, but it will help

with security concerns. For BYOD traffic,
different companies are taking different
approaches. Some are pushing mobile
device users onto the guest network
while others are setting up different
logical networks with different levels
of access for BYOD versus corporate
devices.

Consumerization is happening, large

file sharing is happening and this trend will
continue, Nunez said. It is up to IT to figure out how to accommodate this, because
if we dont simulate the kind of experience
they get on the consumer side, people will
figure out a way to go around us to get their
job done.

NETWORK MANAGEMENT? JUST DO IT

Sporting goods giant Nike Inc. gets it.

Internally, Nike has learned that wireless
is the digital oxygen employees live and
breathe to do their job. During a session at
the Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston in June,

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

THE NETWORK MOBILE IT EFFECT

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

Art King, who at the time was Nikes global

information architecture lead, said his
companys network was definitely feeling
the impact of mobile devices.
Weve been retrofitting our Wi-Fi and
working on deep, blanket wireless coverage because of the stress [mobile devices]
put on our Wi-Fi network, said King, who
has since left Nike and is now director of
enterprise services and technologies at
Spidercloud Wireless Inc.
The network issues cant be solved in a
vacuum, King said. Nike is working on its
wireless strategy in tandem with mobile
device management because the people
using wireless devices want to consume
enterprise services.
When these people were on outlawed
wireless services, nobody complained
about the network capacity. But now, since
Nike has a sanctioned BYOD program,
everyone has the right to complain and say
fix it, so we had to change the infrastructure, he said.
Sanctioned or not, mobile device use is
putting pressure on networksand therefore on ITto change its tune. In a world
of desktops and laptops, it was easy to lock
down devices and limit use. The same does
not hold true for mobile devices, as many
CIOs have acknowledged: The rewards of
increased employee productivity and onthe-fly customer interactions trump the
associated risks. As King explained, I work
for the business, and that is challenging my
[IT] organization to go as fast as [the business] goesso its a very different world.

ON THE NETWORK HORIZON

Its fairly common for enterprises to manage mobile device traffic by assigning one

SSID that directs an employees mobile

device to content behind the corporate
firewall and another SSID for guest users
that gives customers or partners access to
just the Internet, said Charles Golvin, a
principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
in Cambridge, Mass.
What is not so common is providing
connectivity for mobile devices using the
cellular connection rather than simply relying on Wi-Fi. Instead of installing large and
expensive distributed antennae systems for
wireless, some CIOs and network architects are looking at ways to use femtocells,
or tiny cell towers, to take mobile device
traffic off the core cellular network, Golvin
said.
Its still the early days for this, but with
these tiny cell towers inside the building, if
an employee goes to Google or any Internet
service, the carrier does not see that traffic because it is routed directly over your
pipe, he said. Because you are now taking
a bunch of traffic off of the cell operators
network, you could negotiate better pricing
or services with the provider because you
are helping them free up traffic on their
network.
Given that mobile device traffic is on the
rise, freeing up network and cellular bandwidth stands to be a core goal for many
CIOs. About 13% of Internet page views
in August hailed from mobile phones and
tablets, according to a recent comScore Inc.
Device Essentials report. And, according
to Ciscos Visual Networking Index Global
Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, by
the end of this year, more than 100 million
smartphones will use more than 1 gigabyte
of data each month. As for the future? The
forecast predicts that, by 2016, there will be
more than 10 billion mobile devices.

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

10

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL MEDIA

How do you build acorporatesocialnetworkfor some of the

smartest people on the planet?At one organization, the answer

was a Facebook-like platform built with opensource tools.

BY LINDA TUCCI

Social Strategy with

an Eye on the Future

have thought twice

about building a corporate social network
at MITRE Corp. The chief information
architect had witnessed the rollout of a
social collaboration tool or two (or 10) in
her 25 years at MITRE, a privately owned
systems engineering and scientific research
firm in Bedford, Mass. Do we really need
another one? was her CIOs first question.
What business value does it have? was
his second.
Besides her CIOs concerns, Cuomo was
dealing with a hyper tech-savvy user base.
With a second headquarters in McClean,
Va., and experts around the globe, MITRE
operates federally funded research and
development centers (FFRDCs) that help
government agencies develop sophisticated
technology to address thorny issues. Thats
thorny, as in developing systems to thwart
terrorists, communicate in remote terrain
and root out tax fraud. The organization
already had a sophisticated intranet, SharePoint sites aplenty and lots of listservs for
D O N NA CUO M O M I G H T

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

keeping in touch internally.

In 2009, however, when Cuomo was
charged with architecting a corporate
social network, two big cultural changes
were brewing, one internally and one in
the world at large. First, MITREs CEO had
challenged the organization to extend its
expertise by engaging with the best brains
in the world.
We are smart, but we are 7,500 people.
The charge was to use IT to do more multiorganizational and strategic relationships,
Cuomo said.
A study MITRE undertook with nearby
Babson College reinforced the point. The
research showed that what added the most
value to employee interactions on social
networks was not the size of the networks
or frequency of use, but the uniqueness of
people in their networks. In other words,
social media tools spawned the most innovation when users employed them to
make connections outside their local work
group. You may be talking to each other all

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

11

SOCIAL STRATEGY WITH AN EYE ON THE FUTURE

day long, but if I am talking to three different people who are not connected to each
other, I am getting more innovative value
out of the tool, she said.
The second major change facing Cuomo?
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were becoming household tools.
I thought, If I can know every detail of
my nieces life, who lives in upstate New
York, pretty effortlessly, why cant I get
that same situational awareness of what
people in one of our project teams are doing? Cuomo said.
But, she found, it wasnt nearly as easy.

LEVERAGING OPEN SOURCE TOOLS

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

MITREs listservs gave users an email

address but not the ability to leave messages on a contacts wall. SharePoint teams
couldnt see what their other connections
were up to. Building an enterprise social
network for the extended enterprise that
included people outside MITRE added to
the challenge.
At the time, most enterprises were deploying social networking tools inside the
firewall for internal use only, and most of
the products were consumer-grade, Cuomo
said. Her team landed on social software
from Elgg, an open source platform used
by universities, and decided that a single
enterprise social networkdubbed Handshakewould not only serve internal employees, but would also extend to external
partners as well. That meant dealing with
security and intellectual property, among
other issues.
But we needed to address those anyway,
because this was the way of the future. We
cant stay locked in our walled gardens,
she said.

Among the MITRE

customizations:
color-coded lock symbols
showing the access
controls for every piece
of information in the
Handshake system.
The Elgg software provides the ability
to put access controls on every field on the
Facebook-like Handshake page, allowing
users to determine which information (a
phone number, for example) they want to
share with whom. Handshake comes with
lots of functionality, from discussion posts,
wiki pages, photo albums and rudimentary
file sharing to the activity river that allows users to track the goings on of their
groups and connections. As a nudge to spur
participation, we built this group metrics
box to show what level of activity your
group had, Cuomo said.
Because the enterprise social network is
open source software, hundreds of public
domain gadgets can be added. It was very
extensible, Cuomo said. In turn, her team
has published its customizations back to
the open source community, so anyone can
leverage our effort.
Among the MITRE customizations:
color-coded lock symbols showing the access controls for every piece of information
in the Handshake system. Even within a
single group, you can have information that
is available to our external partners and
some that is MITRE-only, she said.
Her team also tweaked the email alerting
mechanism so users can respond without
having to go off the Handshake website.

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

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SOCIAL STRATEGY WITH AN EYE ON THE FUTURE

Handshake is integrated with the MITRE

intranet, which is built on the Apache
Rave Web engine. We built a gadget in the
middle, so you can see what people in your
groups are doing, Cuomo said. Its like
your personal newspaper when you walk
in in the morning. This really gives people
the situational awareness they were missing.
When a person joins a Handshake group,
their followers tend to also join. I call it
the baby duckling effect, she said.

MEASURING BUSINESS VALUE

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

The team conducted dozens of one-onone interviews to gain insight into how the
platform was being used, and then funneled
that data into a variety of visualization
tools (including the free interactive InfoVis
Toolkit). The interviews revealed, for example, that Handshake was changing business processes, from how disaster recovery
support was provided for MITRE Colorado
employees during this past summers wildfires to the way individuals participated in
the application development lifecycles.
With Handshake, hundreds of people
now weigh in on the app development
process early on, developers reported, and
users can share their feedback with each
other, something not possible through a
listserv. Handshake has allowed one of
MITREs military clients to publish apps to
military personnel in the field and respond
to requests with potentially life-saving
iterations in less than 24 hours. MITRE
public briefings that normally would be
confined to the employee and partner net-

works have gone viral.

Still, quantifying business value of the
social network in terms of productivity
and innovation remains a challenge, according to Cuomo, in part because many
of the groups are closed and value is tied
to the nature of the group. Groups that
add members over time indicate success,
but the dissolution of a group formed
for a finite event doesnt indicate failure.
Its hard to interpret the metrics without
knowing what kind of group it is, she said.
For now, the numbers at least signal the
platform is popular: Six thousand MITRE
employees belong to the system, so we
are almost at saturation for internal users,
Cuomo said. The enterprise social network
has 2,400 external participants and continues to grow. Almost 1,000 groups have
been formed and 7,800 files createdthis,
in an organization with an extensive SharePoint universe.
The big challenge now, Cuomo said,
is building a secure, fully functional enterprise social network platform for that
external brain trust MITRE wants to tap.
Sponsors and other people outside the firewall now are invited individually through a
secure invitation from a MITRE employee,
but that will not scale, she said, so work
is underway on cracking a trusted identity model.
And outsiders can tap into some of the
Handshake functionality, but not everything they find is useful. Architecting and
measuring the value of an enterprise social
network for the extended enterprise wont
happen overnight, Cuomo said. Thats
in the 10-year plan.

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

13

C LO U D C O M P U T I N G

A focus on people, planning and project management can

make cloud implementation a breeze, a university CIO learned.

BY KAREN GOULART

Gliding into the Cloud

IN 2011,

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

University of Nebraska CIO Walter

Weir was charged with swapping out an
email system for one that was better, faster
and cheaper. It sounded like a tall task,
but within a years time, his IT team succeeded in moving 13,000 staff and faculty
members from an on-premise legacy Lotus
Notes system to a cloud-based solution.
The cloud migration cut the IT costs of
providing and supporting email nearly in
half and will save the university an additional $2 million over the next five years.
Maybe even better, in the six months since
those 13,000 people started working on the
new system, Weir has fielded exactly four
complaints.
The calls Ive gotten have been relatively minorI used to be able to see this and
this on the same screen, and now I cant.
I tell them how to do it and theyre OK,
Weir said.
How did he pull off adopting a new
technology with hardly a hitch? Chalk it
up to old-fashioned planning and project

management, along with a deep knowledge

of his teams technical capabilities.
For Weir, the cloud migration of the
universitys email system was as much
if not moreabout the people involved
as it was about the technology product
being deployed. After reviewing bids from
Google, Microsoft, Dell and IBM, Weir
determined that Microsoft Office 365s
Software as a Service cloud solution best
met the universitys needs in terms of cost
and security. To avoid consulting costs, the
work would be completed by Weirs own
staff.
I thought, Were pretty smart, weve
got some pretty talented people, we know
about Active Directory and federation,
all those backend kinds of concerns, Weir
said. We put a project team together. We
had a charter, a project manager; we had
various entities across the structure working on creating the backend environment
to support it, and it worked very well for
us.

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

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GLIDING INTO THE CLOUD

IT SKILLS FOR A CLOUD MIGRATION

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

Weir was not talking through his hat about

the capabilities of his team of 40 IT pros.
For several years he has conducted skills
inventories of his technical staff to assess
each individuals level of knowledge; that
way, hed know where the group stands as a
whole.
I look at all the things that could happen within an IT shop involving programming languages, developmental tools,
databases. I have a whole list of things that
anyone in the IT business could possibly
know about, Weir said.
His employees score themselves on a
scale of 0 to 5 on each item0 meaning
they know nothing about it, 5 meaning
they could teach others about it. Supervisors then review those lists to see whether
they agree with the self-assessments. As
a result, Weir has a running inventory of
the skills his workers possess so that, when
projects come in, he knows whether the
work can be done in-house.

CLOUD LEADS TO STAFF REPURPOSING

A major goal of Weirs cloud migration was

to cut costs, but he was clear from the outset of the project that this wouldnt happen
by cutting jobs.
We saw the savings that would accrue
by virtue of not having the hardware here
and having a different cost-model structure for licensing of the environment, so
we repurposed our staff, Weir said. It was
an opportunity to say, Where do we need
staff?
The primary answer to that question was
in security, so staffers formerly focused
on email management were retrained accordingly. Even with the new cloud envi-

ronment, mail experts were still needed

for certain provisioning and administrative
activities, but they too were retrained to
take on other primary tasks, with email on
the back burner.
We have more work than we have
people. I look at our task lists and wonder
how were ever going to get it all done,
Weir said. [T]his was an opportunity to
repurpose people so we wouldnt have to
hire new people. Not everybody looks at it
that way, but thats how we looked at it.

TRANSPARENCY EASES
CULTURAL CHALLENGES

With his technical team set, Weir didnt

forget the other 13,000 people invested in
the project. The change could be a big adjustment for faculty and staff accustomed
to the Lotus Notes email, scheduling and
other tools upon which many had relied for the past 15 years. Weir was determined that everyone have an opportunity
to be educated about and get comfortable
with the change.
Weir set up communication teams on
each of the schools four campuses and
scheduled informational sessions on why
the change was being made. User-training
sessions showed side-by-side differences
in the systems and how to carry out tasks
in Microsoft 365. Any sort of change is
culturally challenging, but we were very
public about what we were doing. Weir
said, There was a lot of communication.
Weirs team also reached out to users for
the vital task of application rationalization, the process of finding out whether an
application is still needed by asking why it
was built, what it costs to maintain, what
platform its on and what value it holds.

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

15

GLIDING INTO THE CLOUD

Over the years, hundreds of applications

were developed within the Lotus Notes
development suite, and before the switchover to Microsoft, Weir needed to know
whether they would be missed.
If you cant justify it, its a candidate for
elimination, Weir said. Through the application rationalization process, his team
was able to eliminate 90% of the Lotusdeveloped apps. Just a handful of workflowrelated apps remained, and they are being
remade to fit into the new structure.

EMBRACING CLOUD SOLUTIONS

AS THE FUTURE NORM

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

As for Weirs next foray into cloud? Despite a successful first major outing, he is
proceeding with caution. Hes got his eye
on cloud-based storage and is intrigued by
the possibilities of ERP in the cloud.
Were starting to see things like Workday, where HR and finance are being pushed
out to cloud environments, Weir said.
Whether its private, public or hybrid
clouds, I think youre going to see more of
the cloud as people struggle to figure out
how to provide more services at less cost.
For CIOs who havent taken the first
steps toward cloud, Weir pointed to factors
that played a part in his success, starting
with talking to professional colleagues who
have been there and done that. For Weir,
this meant striking up conversations with
IT leaders at the University of Arizona and
Louisiana State University. Somewhere
out there is an early adopter; find them,
reach out, talk to them, he said. Ask what
theyre doing and why, what kind of num-

If you cant justify

it, its a candidate
for elimination.
Walter Weir, CIO,
University of Nebraska

bers theyre looking at.

While Weir bypassed outside experts for
his email cloud solution deployment, such
experts have their place. His team got good
advice from Stamford, Conn.-based consultancy Gartner Inc. We invited them to
come talk about what they thought about
email in the cloud in terms of strategy
was it all hype, or were there hard savings?
Whats real? Whats not real?
Additionally, he said, its important for
CIOs to have a conversation with their staff
about their willingness and ability to adapt
to a new way of doing business, because its
vital they be on board. Leaving unanswered
questions can incite fear. You want to be
upfront and tell them, Were doing this for
the following reasons, and this is how its
going to play out.
Most important, though its often
overlooked: CIOs should be sure to have
a similar conversation with the business
side, Weir said. A project that makes perfect sense from an IT perspective requires
an equally compelling business case. Talk
to the senior administrators youre supporting, and make sure all those players are
onboard with what youre doing. Its one
thing to have great ideas as an IT person;
its another thing selling it to the organization.

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

16

Q
&A

D ATA A N A LY T I C S

Find out how the electronic payment providers chief data scientist

extracted the highest

value from massive data sets. BY
LINDA TUCCI

The Proof is
in the PayPal Pudding

comes in torrents.
Embedded in it is everything the business
wants to know about the merchants and
buyers who use PayPals systems. Its
Mok Ohs job to figure out how to use big
data analytics to get at that particular
information.
What does the chief data scientist at
PayPal Inc. do? For me, it means anything
and everything science-y within PayPal,
said Mok Oh, who until recently headed the
data science teams at the San Jose, Califbased electronic payments provider.
With a doctorate in computer science
from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oh has a longstanding interest in connecting the offline to the online world. The
eclectic Ohhe concentrated in computer
science, art history and studio art as an
undergraduatesaid he ultimately wants to
understand the psychology and sociology
of consumer behavior.
At PayPal, at the time of this interview, Oh was immersed in big data and
PAY PA L I NC .S DATA

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

big science. His data sets were insanely

large. The enormous task was to better
match up vendors and buyers in order
to maximize the likelihood of a transactionin other words, to help PayPal
make money.

What type of data analysis are you doing at

PayPal? Is the business aim to get merchants
to advertise with you because you are sending
buyers to them?
It is to make them more successful. We are
in a kind of awesome position where we
can enable that. We have over 100 million
active users in PayPal. We have millions
and millions of merchants, from very large
to small.
With that information, depending on the
contextthe time of day, what the merchants wants to dowe can create demand,
very efficiently and in a very targeted way,
to match consumers with the merchants
and vice versa.

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

17

THE PROOF IS IN THE PAYPAL PUDDING

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

THE PROOF IS
IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

Can you spell out how, exactly, you connect

a customer and a merchant?
Lets say Neiman Marcus has some wonderful sale and they want to make sure they
spend their marketing dollars correctly, or
have more delightful or relevant information in the advertising for their consumers.
We can create that list. We can target those
people much better than others can.
The reason we call this data science is
that there is a science component to it. We
have great scientific leaders; we are very
connected to academia, where a lot of the
latest and greatest things happen.
On the data side, PayPal has awesome
datawe have transactional data. And that
itselfI am going to be very bold and bullishis the strongest signal from which we
can start predicting peoples buying behaviors. As opposed to strictly online data, this
is behavioral data. People look at this, they
look at that, they go to this website, that
website. There are signals there that help
us predict, but in commerce, transactional
data is the strongest signal.

delightful experience. Basket-size increases

because serendipitous stuff happens: I
am looking at shoes and, by the way, here
are some awesome socks. I am going to get
those, too.
We are really trying to increase peoples
appetites or trying to delight them more,
making sure that they are looking at certain
things. So, yes, I am trying to model the
subconscious piece of that shopping experience.

So, by plotting our buying behavior over time,

the idea is that you will know more about our
buying habits than we do, that this data science taps into the subconscious of the buyer?
Absolutely. You can break that down into
a couple of buckets. One is explicit shopping intentions. On the other hand, people
who really want a delightful shopping
experience may have intentions they are
not aware of. Lots of marketers, especially
on the retail side, are spending tons and
tons of money to optimize the layout and
the traffic patterns that people are going
to walk through. Lots of research has been
poured into that to make sure there is a

We talk a lot of about volume, velocity and

variety being characteristics of big data. For
companies that dont have millions and millions of customers, like PayPal, or for companies that are more specialized, is there value
in doing this type of big data analytics?
I think so. It might be small science/small
data. It always helps. A lot of startups, for
example, dont have enough data to prove
or disprove that their widget works. As
time goes by, more and more people are
realizing that data is an asset, or something
that they should own and capitalize on.
With that said, it will get tougher and
tougher to get data. That would be my pre-

This does sound a lot like what Amazon and

the credit card companies are doingthey
must be trying to tap this value of big data.
Its the holy grail, yes. I certainly implore
all your CIO readers to do the same. I dont
think this is a big hype.
So, yes, if you generalize, well all do
similar things but, at the end of the day,
PayPal will go use case by use case. We
want to make sure there is a highly efficient
and strong connection between merchants
and consumers.

CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

18

THE PROOF IS IN THE PAYPAL PUDDING

USERS ARE IT
CONSUMERS
TOO

A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

diction for the future, because people are

going to be more and more grabby. There
are going to be a lot of players popping
out that are making a business model out
of this need. Youre a startup or youre a
company that needs data? We got itbut
you have to pay for it or trade for it. There
are tons of those companies that are data
providers out there, so companies can certainly leverage that as well.
But, again, common sense should prevail.
If youre in the business of selling tacos,
the strongest signal is going to be, who
bought tacos? Even if there is tons of data
out there, there are very obvious things to
look at. People who bought tacos probably
will continue to buy tacos, and I need to
find like-people who will also buy my tacos.
I think the patterns going forward will
be that people will leverage data as an asset. They are going to invest more in data,
and I am sure there will be more walled
gardens going up, just looking at Apple and
Facebook. Those are walled gardens, not
just because of PII [personally identifiable
information], but because they know their
data is very valuable for them.
You can be very creative in how you get
your datayou can acquire it yourself, buy
it, make deals with others.

Since you are in charge of all things

science-y, what problem are you
thinking through right now that is related
to your science-y duties?
Overall, I think a lot of people see big data
as a structured-versus-unstructured-data
problem. I have been thinking about this

for a while now. One of the biggest assets

will be understanding unstructured data
out there, because I will argue that 99.9%
of the information that we have is unstructured, meaning computers cant put it into
a table, cant sort it into a table. These are
things like email or tweets or reviews or
blogs.
With Likes, theyre structured: You
either like it or you dont. Whereas when
you say, I love the taco truck; I wish they
had a location here, thats very, very valuable information. If somebody tweets that,
I want to understand it: I want to know
who said that; I want to know the merchants who can benefit from this as well,
so we can make sure we connect those
two. Again, 99.9% of the data out there is
something that computers cannot easily
understand.
So the problem then becomes, how do
we make sure that they can? If there are
images and videos and email, audio, songs,
there is no real way to understand beyond
the category. We need to find a better way
to understand that data, especially with the
explosion of information out there. YouTube gets, what, 50 to 60 hours of video
every minute? Thats ridiculous.
How do you know what is relevant to you?
Similarly, we are learning a lot more
about merchants and the things they say. I
call them digital artifacts or digital inferencesthere has got to be ways to structure that output and leverage that for all
our customers. Thats the bigger pie in the
skymaybe that is 3.0! Natural languages,
analog-to-digital conversions and making
sure there is very little lost in translation.

GLIDING INTO
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CIO DECISIONS

NOVEMBER 2012

19

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHRISTINA TORODE

is executive editor
for SearchCIO.com.
Write to her at
ctorode@techtarget.com.
CIO Decisions is a
SearchCIO.com e-publication.

KAREN GOULART

is features writer
for SearchCIO.com.
Write to her at
kgoulart@techtarget.com.

LINDA TUCCI

is news director
for SearchCIO.com.
Write to her at
ltucci@techtarget.com.
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A LESSON
IN TAKING
MOBILITY
SKYWARD

AN INSURANCE
POLICY
PREDICATED
ON PREDICTIVE
ANALYTICS

THE NETWORK
MOBILE IT
EFFECT

SOCIAL
STRATEGY
WITH AN EYE
ON THE
FUTURE

GLIDING INTO
THE CLOUD

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IN THE PAYPAL
PUDDING

Rachel Lebeaux
Managing Editor
Linda Koury
Director of Online Design
Scot Petersen
Editorial Director
Christina Torode
Executive Editor
Linda Tucci
News Director
Karen Goulart
Features Writer
Wendy Schuchart
Site Editor
Ben Cole
Associate Editor
Emily McLaughlin
Assistant Editor
Corey Strader
Director of Product Management
cstrader@techtarget.com
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20