Informative article from EMC site (Access magazine):
Albert George, vice president of financial information services, has been with MCI since the early 1980s. At Salem College in West Virginia, he majored in psychology and played defensive halfback on the college football team. He also played semi-pro football for seven years, culminating in a try-out with the Denver Broncos. After a brief stint working with under privileged juveniles, George added college-level data processing courses to his resume and began his career in IT. His years on the playing field have helped him professionally by honing his competitive spirit and teaching him what it takes to put together a winning team, he says. ACCESS editor-in-chief Michael Alexander recently talked to George about enterprise storage, the impending merger with WorldCom and what it's like to head a team of 500 employees at MCI.
ACCESS: Do you think your background in sports has made you more competitive or aggressive in business?
George: Yes. I have always been aggressive and this has enhanced my competitiveness, but I am also known as being a risk taker. Sometimes I rely upon my gut instinct while at other times my decisions are based upon business realities. Nine times out of ten, you have to go with your gut feeling and be a risk taker. You can not be risk-adverse if you are going to make it in this world, because the nature of competitiveness today. If you are there after somebody else, you lose.
ACCESS: Your industry is especially competitive.
George: I wouldn't use the word "competitive," but the word "chaotic," because you've got everybody running out and calling themselves "multi-service providers." They buy access from MCI, AT&T, Sprint, or whomever, put switches in their basements and go to work selling connectivity. You're going to see a lot more of this happening during the next couple of years, but only a few will survive when the dust settles.
ACCESS: There's been a number of very big mergers, too.
George: Every other day there's another one.
ACCESS: Companies with good consolidated storage can handle these mergers a lot easier, can't they?
George: Exactly. Small companies with their data in one place — whether on PCs, midranges, or mainframes — can merge on the turn of a dime, so to speak. Mid to large-size companies with data dispersed and in a variety of formats including paper copy have a tough time when they go through the throes of a merger. EMC certainly can be seen as a contributor to assist companies in their ability to merge in an expeditious manner. It is EMC's software and the tight integration of their product sets that can attribute to this. The ability to manage information across different technologies definitely will provide us an advantage as we move forward into the merger arena.
ACCESS: I've talked to some of your counterparts in other industries and one of the issues they have to deal with is that users are very proprietary about their data. They don't want to lose control of it. And when you tell them you're consolidating it, they immediately think that's it's going to be stored out of reach.
George: I call those people "data-hoarders." In the old days, the hoarding of information meant power and importance: a control factor. But information availability is the key to success these days. It is imperative to get as much critical information to the decision makers as fast as possible. We don't deny people information access. Instead, I facilitate data delivery by building repositories for them such as data warehouses or datamarts with the critical business indices that they define and then provide access to it on a real-time basis. We advertise that we can provide our customers with the ability to retrieve and process this information instead of locking it away. Yes, we have consolidated our information to leverage our resources and as a result of this, EMC has allowed us reduce our cost of doing business. At the same time we have satisfied our customers' business needs while managing our information more efficiently.
ACCESS: You've got data that you're trying to centralize, but because there's a lot of different platforms and different operating systems, sometimes it's not easy to get the information from where it's stored to the desktop where it's needed the most. Has this — what one survey calls the "information gap" — been an issue for you?
George: There will always be "information gaps". But it's my job to bridge them and provide the essential information needed by our customers. In order to do this there are several items that must be addressed: What is critical? What is the business need? What is to be solved? Where does the information reside? Answer those questions, and I guarantee that we can provide access to it. It's my job to manage the "information gap" and get critical business information to the folks who need it. With the help of EMC we have consolidated our data. Using EMC along with the enhanced technologies found in our midrange platforms, relational databases and the various software technology tools that we have employed today, we are continually closing the gap.
ACCESS: You talked about the criticality of information, its strategic purpose and so forth. In recent years, it seems like a lot of people like yourself are talking about information as a strategic asset. What happened? Why did information go from being mere data to a strategic asset?
George: Let's use an analogy. Years ago, if you wondered how much money you contributed to Social Security, you had to send them a letter and six months later, you'd get a letter back. Today, there's a web site, and you can enter the information and they guarantee a 24 hour turnaround. Now, that's managing information. We are certainly a technology-empowered society and information is power. The information has always been there, but we as enablers have leveraged technology to deliver this information: thus providing power verses controlling it.
ACCESS: In your industry there's a drive to get closer to the customer, too, right?
George: Yes, it has always been my belief that understanding your customer is key to your business success. Embrace your customers. Find out all you can about your customers: where they live, their spending habits, marital status, their educational backgroundŠthe more you understand about your customers the better you can service them. You want to build a relationship with them, because loyalty is everything today.
ACCESS: The flip side of that is that you can gather a lot of information, but now you've got to decide how to store and manage it.
George: Correct, as well as how to analyze and disseminate it.
ACCESS: How are you coping with this massive amount of information?
George: We're buying a lot of storage! [laughter] I could keep companies like EMC in business just by storing everything out there. But we're going through a very large re-engineering project right now at MCI involving our financial systems. We have legacy-based mainframe systems that are 15 to 17 years old. These systems store huge, huge amounts of data. We are currently re-engineering these systems, using the SAP R3. Guess what? We estimate that only 60% of that data is essential to our business today. When we first started the project, people said, "Let's just take all the old data, port it over into the SAP system and decide what we need to keep later." I said "No, no, no, no!" I forced the user community to do data clean-up, looking at what is really critical to the business and this is what is being stored.
ACCESS: Analysts say that corporate data storage requirements are doubling every 18 months. Do you buy that?
George: Yes.
ACCESS: Do you have storage acquisition strategies? I mean, is that something you can strategize?
George: It's based on supply and demand.
ACCESS: Supply and demand?
George: Yes. I hate to admit it but I don't use a scientific method for growth projections. I can't say, "I average X-amount of storage a year." I'm comfortable in saying that I'll probably buy 30% more storage next year just based on some initiatives that I have up on the drawing board. The plain and simple fact is, I have to store critical information not only to support our merger with World Com but new products that we plan to launch.
ACCESS: A lot of companies are moving mission-critical kinds of applications — decision support, data warehousing and all that — on to NT. They're doing these mainframe-like jobs, but not necessarily with all the supporting infrastructure that you would get with mainframes — like the ability to manage, protect and share information. Are you doing mission-critical work on NT and are you also consolidating NT-based information as an overall part of the project?
George: Yes. But I wouldn't say that I'm doing everything on NT. It depends upon the scope of the project/system. If the system was going to support 55,000 users, then I'm surely not going to put it on an NT machine. You have to leverage the proper technology to solve a business problem. Don't just implement technology for technology's sake, because you will back yourself into a corner. You want to leverage technology and use it to solve the business challenges.
ACCESS: When you make these improvements or when you take these initiatives, can you measure what you're doing? And if you can, how do you measure the benefits?
George: Almost everything we process starts on the mainframe and I don't want 55,000 employees attacking the mainframe every day. We would never get anything done. I could ask, "How many less jobs are being run on the mainframe? How much DASD on the mainframe is being used? How much of the mainframe resources are we utilizing?" Or, "How am I leveraging our resources, both staff and technology? Is my staff leveraging technology and are they reducing costs and increasing productivity across the enterprise?" The metrics I use to measure the benefit of our efforts is our ability to do the same amount of work for less, whether it's the cost of people or company resources. In order to reap these benefits you have to take your critical information and push it down into the hands of the decision makers. We have done this by developing in a multi-tier environment — the right platform for the right job — be it mainframe/mid-range/file servers or the end user's desktop. Our overall goal is to provide our customers with the necessary information using friendly tools, and then measure productivity on both sides of the application — IT staff and end user.
ACCESS: Can you measure whether you've become more responsive to your user population?
George: Sure. Your customer should be able to state: "You have expedited information delivery. You delivered exactly what I asked for. You automated the process and enabled me to retrieve the information I need, reducing my dependency on your organization and increasing my productivity." In doing this we assume the responsibility of delivering the information to the customer accurately and on-time. Every time a project is initiated, I always ask, "How can we measure the project's success and it's benefit?" I look to my customers for their feedback as well as measuring our ROI. I've spent a lot of money on development and support, but what does it mean for the customer? It means by getting the information to them and understanding their needs, we get closer to our customers. My people are much more than IT professionals. They are also business smart people, which means they can function in both worlds. By better understanding our customers, the company profits, because we are more productive and responsive.
ACCESS: Let's switch gears here. Are you coping with a distance limitation in moving data from one place to another?
George: Yes and no. This is a major issue for the industry; for all those that process in a distributed environment. We have recognized this challenge and are currently designing several solutions that will minimize our risk of data latency. In the past we have used bulk data transfers or even tapes shipped via air carriers. Today we are getting ready to implement EMC's product SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) between our processing centers, providing us with remote mirrored copies real-time. Ok, so it has a data latency of a second or two. We are also leveraging EMC's TimeFinder product to do real-time mirroring, which will allow us to do point-in-time backups — without any impact to production processing, as well as providing us a production copy real-time for testing. TimeFinder will allow us to run backup copies, 7 X 24. Now, I call that a very impressive backup window as well as a major innovation for quasi-production testing. Subsequently, you're not backing up or mirroring in a real-time instance, b
Access Home
Management
Leadership
Technology
Strategies
Business
StartUp
Fast Access
Interview
New Products
ThinkPiece
Quick Poll
Archives
Contact Us
Albert George, vice president of financial information services, has been with MCI since the early 1980s. At Salem College in West Virginia, he majored in psychology and played defensive halfback on the college football team. He also played semi-pro football for seven years, culminating in a try-out with the Denver Broncos. After a brief stint working with under privileged juveniles, George added college-level data processing courses to his resume and began his career in IT. His years on the playing field have helped him professionally by honing his competitive spirit and teaching him what it takes to put together a winning team, he says. ACCESS editor-in-chief Michael Alexander recently talked to George about enterprise storage, the impending merger with WorldCom and what it's like to head a team of 500 employees at MCI.
ACCESS: Do you think your background in sports has made you more competitive or aggressive in business?
George: Yes. I have always been aggressive and this has enhanced my competitiveness, but I am also known as being a risk taker. Sometimes I rely upon my gut instinct while at other times my decisions are based upon business realities. Nine times out of ten, you have to go with your gut feeling and be a risk taker. You can not be risk-adverse if you are going to make it in this world, because the nature of competitiveness today. If you are there after somebody else, you lose.
ACCESS: Your industry is especially competitive.
George: I wouldn't use the word "competitive," but the word "chaotic," because you've got everybody running out and calling themselves "multi-service providers." They buy access from MCI, AT&T, Sprint, or whomever, put switches in their basements and go to work selling connectivity. You're going to see a lot more of this happening during the next couple of years, but only a few will survive when the dust settles.
ACCESS: There's been a number of very big mergers, too.
George: Every other day there's another one.
ACCESS: Companies with good consolidated storage can handle these mergers a lot easier, can't they?
George: Exactly. Small companies with their data in one place — whether on PCs, midranges, or mainframes — can merge on the turn of a dime, so to speak. Mid to large-size companies with data dispersed and in a variety of formats including paper copy have a tough time when they go through the throes of a merger. EMC certainly can be seen as a contributor to assist companies in their ability to merge in an expeditious manner. It is EMC's software and the tight integration of their product sets that can attribute to this. The ability to manage information across different technologies definitely will provide us an advantage as we move forward into the merger arena.
ACCESS: I've talked to some of your counterparts in other industries and one of the issues they have to deal with is that users are very proprietary about their data. They don't want to lose control of it. And when you tell them you're consolidating it, they immediately think that's it's going to be stored out of reach.
George: I call those people "data-hoarders." In the old days, the hoarding of information meant power and importance: a control factor. But information availability is the key to success these days. It is imperative to get as much critical information to the decision makers as fast as possible. We don't deny people information access. Instead, I facilitate data delivery by building repositories for them such as data warehouses or datamarts with the critical business indices that they define and then provide access to it on a real-time basis. We advertise that we can provide our customers with the ability to retrieve and process this information instead of locking it away. Yes, we have consolidated our information to leverage our resources and as a result of this, EMC has allowed us reduce our cost of doing business. At the same time we have satisfied our customers' business needs while managing our information more efficiently.
ACCESS: You've got data that you're trying to centralize, but because there's a lot of different platforms and different operating systems, sometimes it's not easy to get the information from where it's stored to the desktop where it's needed the most. Has this — what one survey calls the "information gap" — been an issue for you?
George: There will always be "information gaps". But it's my job to bridge them and provide the essential information needed by our customers. In order to do this there are several items that must be addressed: What is critical? What is the business need? What is to be solved? Where does the information reside? Answer those questions, and I guarantee that we can provide access to it. It's my job to manage the "information gap" and get critical business information to the folks who need it. With the help of EMC we have consolidated our data. Using EMC along with the enhanced technologies found in our midrange platforms, relational databases and the various software technology tools that we have employed today, we are continually closing the gap.
ACCESS: You talked about the criticality of information, its strategic purpose and so forth. In recent years, it seems like a lot of people like yourself are talking about information as a strategic asset. What happened? Why did information go from being mere data to a strategic asset?
George: Let's use an analogy. Years ago, if you wondered how much money you contributed to Social Security, you had to send them a letter and six months later, you'd get a letter back. Today, there's a web site, and you can enter the information and they guarantee a 24 hour turnaround. Now, that's managing information. We are certainly a technology-empowered society and information is power. The information has always been there, but we as enablers have leveraged technology to deliver this information: thus providing power verses controlling it.
ACCESS: In your industry there's a drive to get closer to the customer, too, right?
George: Yes, it has always been my belief that understanding your customer is key to your business success. Embrace your customers. Find out all you can about your customers: where they live, their spending habits, marital status, their educational backgroundŠthe more you understand about your customers the better you can service them. You want to build a relationship with them, because loyalty is everything today.
ACCESS: The flip side of that is that you can gather a lot of information, but now you've got to decide how to store and manage it.
George: Correct, as well as how to analyze and disseminate it.
ACCESS: How are you coping with this massive amount of information?
George: We're buying a lot of storage! [laughter] I could keep companies like EMC in business just by storing everything out there. But we're going through a very large re-engineering project right now at MCI involving our financial systems. We have legacy-based mainframe systems that are 15 to 17 years old. These systems store huge, huge amounts of data. We are currently re-engineering these systems, using the SAP R3. Guess what? We estimate that only 60% of that data is essential to our business today. When we first started the project, people said, "Let's just take all the old data, port it over into the SAP system and decide what we need to keep later." I said "No, no, no, no!" I forced the user community to do data clean-up, looking at what is really critical to the business and this is what is being stored.
ACCESS: Analysts say that corporate data storage requirements are doubling every 18 months. Do you buy that?
George: Yes.
ACCESS: Do you have storage acquisition strategies? I mean, is that something you can strategize?
George: It's based on supply and demand.
ACCESS: Supply and demand?
George: Yes. I hate to admit it but I don't use a scientific method for growth projections. I can't say, "I average X-amount of storage a year." I'm comfortable in saying that I'll probably buy 30% more storage next year just based on some initiatives that I have up on the drawing board. The plain and simple fact is, I have to store critical information not only to support our merger with World Com but new products that we plan to launch.
ACCESS: A lot of companies are moving mission-critical kinds of applications — decision support, data warehousing and all that — on to NT. They're doing these mainframe-like jobs, but not necessarily with all the supporting infrastructure that you would get with mainframes — like the ability to manage, protect and share information. Are you doing mission-critical work on NT and are you also consolidating NT-based information as an overall part of the project?
George: Yes. But I wouldn't say that I'm doing everything on NT. It depends upon the scope of the project/system. If the system was going to support 55,000 users, then I'm surely not going to put it on an NT machine. You have to leverage the proper technology to solve a business problem. Don't just implement technology for technology's sake, because you will back yourself into a corner. You want to leverage technology and use it to solve the business challenges.
ACCESS: When you make these improvements or when you take these initiatives, can you measure what you're doing? And if you can, how do you measure the benefits?
George: Almost everything we process starts on the mainframe and I don't want 55,000 employees attacking the mainframe every day. We would never get anything done. I could ask, "How many less jobs are being run on the mainframe? How much DASD on the mainframe is being used? How much of the mainframe resources are we utilizing?" Or, "How am I leveraging our resources, both staff and technology? Is my staff leveraging technology and are they reducing costs and increasing productivity across the enterprise?" The metrics I use to measure the benefit of our efforts is our ability to do the same amount of work for less, whether it's the cost of people or company resources. In order to reap these benefits you have to take your critical information and push it down into the hands of the decision makers. We have done this by developing in a multi-tier environment — the right platform for the right job — be it mainframe/mid-range/file servers or the end user's desktop. Our overall goal is to provide our customers with the necessary information using friendly tools, and then measure productivity on both sides of the application — IT staff and end user.
ACCESS: Can you measure whether you've become more responsive to your user population?
George: Sure. Your customer should be able to state: "You have expedited information delivery. You delivered exactly what I asked for. You automated the process and enabled me to retrieve the information I need, reducing my dependency on your organization and increasing my productivity." In doing this we assume the responsibility of delivering the information to the customer accurately and on-time. Every time a project is initiated, I always ask, "How can we measure the project's success and it's benefit?" I look to my customers for their feedback as well as measuring our ROI. I've spent a lot of money on development and support, but what does it mean for the customer? It means by getting the information to them and understanding their needs, we get closer to our customers. My people are much more than IT professionals. They are also business smart people, which means they can function in both worlds. By better understanding our customers, the company profits, because we are more productive and responsive.
ACCESS: Let's switch gears here. Are you coping with a distance limitation in moving data from one place to another?
George: Yes and no. This is a major issue for the industry; for all those that process in a distributed environment. We have recognized this challenge and are currently designing several solutions that will minimize our risk of data latency. In the past we have used bulk data transfers or even tapes shipped via air carriers. Today we are getting ready to implement EMC's product SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) between our processing centers, providing us with remote mirrored copies real-time. Ok, so it has a data latency of a second or two. We are also leveraging EMC's TimeFinder product to do real-time mirroring, which will allow us to do point-in-time backups — without any impact to production processing, as well as providing us a production copy real-time for testing. TimeFinder will allow us to run backup copies, 7 X 24. Now, I call that a very impressive backup window as well as a major innovation for quasi-production testing. Subsequently, you're not backing up or mirroring in a real-time instance, but, I can copy and distribute data in less than a few seconds. I think that's pretty good, and I am able to sleep nights with that.
ACCESS: Have you had to get personally involved with the year 2000?
George: Oh yes, and it is a huge effort not just for my organization but for MCI as a whole. For the company as a whole it is an estimated $400 to $500 million initiative, with my organization's efforts costing approximately $47 million of the total.
ACCESS: How have you been testing? Are you pushing stuff over to a separate storage box and then testing it over there?
George: Again, we're using EMC's TimeFinder. It allows us to create a triple mirror of our production environment without any impact to our production processing. We can and have replicated our production environment for Year 2000 testing without putting our production systems in jeopardy. TimeFinder is a great product; my folks gambled that it would work and it really has amazed us. Quite frequently vendors sell you a product and it's only 50% there and the rest is still in beta. But TimeFinder is solid and has saved us hundreds of man hours. Our gamble has paid off in spades. We have been able to accelerate our Y2K testing, putting us ahead of schedule in most of our midrange compliance scenarios. Thank you EMC, for TimeFinder and your staff's technical assistance.
ACCESS: How about euro conversion testing?
George: Our systems are going to be able to handle the euro issue. One thing we're doing here at MCI is implementing SAP. It is one of the few systems that can handle the currency conversion. The systems that I have ownership of will be able to deal with the euro conversion issue.
ACCESS: What do you see as your challenges in the near future? How are things going to change for you, do you suppose?
George: On the brink of the World Com/MCI merger, we are faced with the challenge of melding the two companies' data components into one common set of data elements. Think of the implications of that! You may or may not know it, but World Com/MCI is not just two companies: it's really five different entities. The merging of multi-company disciplines requires more critical information to be stored and accessed. This will take data modeling out to the Nth degree. There will be a whole new set of data requirements and elements spawned by this consolidation, or at least a spider webbed cross-section data view. At the same time this data fusion is taking place, one must also address the technology curve and what is coming over the horizon. With that all said, I believe that our biggest challenge will be merging the many product offerings that our companies have, and providing our customers with newly integrated product selections. The industry as a whole is still selling telephone service as long distance, but the Internet, cellular and cable TV segment provide us with some huge opportunities. The company that understands and puts together an integrated solution, meeting the individual needs of a customer, will be the one that sets the precedent not only for the nation, but the world.
ACCESS: In addition to talking to guys like me, what's your biggest headache?
George: My biggest headache is dealing with delivery schedule, or what I should really say is that I have a problem managing my own expectations when it comes to system delivery time frames. By nature — and I think it goes back to being competitive — I want resolution quickly. To be able to respond in a timely manner and meet the expectations of my customers — that's what I want.
|
