Newsmaker: At Motorola, giving IT a reality check

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But Motorola has grown since then, and you can't just get there and not reinvest. So now, we are reinvesting in value creation, not consolidating data centers or reducing head counts, though it's an important step you have to go through. Now, we're going through major business process transformations, such as creating world-class supply chain and procurement capability.

As a CIO, how do you separate technology that's just marketing hype from those that really fit your needs?
Morrison: There are a couple of ways in which I differentiate whether it's hype or not. One, if it's a hardware vendor, I want to know the applications they provide. This may sound like a strong statement, but I don't care about the hardware, I only care about how it's used. If you're selling hardware for the sake of hardware, and you can't tell me what applications are going to run on it, then you're probably not going to get very far. Because the applications that solve business problems are what I'm really interested in. It will make things more real, if they can give me examples of how they're solving problems at other companies, which makes a difference to whether I think a technology is real or hype.

This may sound like a strong statement, but I don't care about the hardware, I only care about how it's used.

In particular, I look at a lot of architecture fundamentals, because we are very prominent in driving a service-oriented architecture (SOA) at Motorola. We have one of the largest SOA libraries for reuse and deployment across the organization. If an application vendor builds a product that targets specific business processes in a very proprietary manner and isn't open, then I'm probably going to be least interested in it.

We do take chances with some vendors if they've got something that's very powerful. But you can't overwhelm them. You can take a small vendor and put it out of business with Motorola's scale. You have to be careful that you don't overwhelm them, because they're too small to support the kind of scale that we need in deploying technology.

So has Motorola burnt itself by taking those risks?
Morrison: Absolutely. Most companies are burdened with software--of which they've no source code to--from vendors that are out of business. And that software is sitting in some mission-critical system somewhere. We actually go after each of these scenarios in a process called Business Life 365, where we try to harden not only the infrastructure assets but also application assets of the company.

The consolidation wave is one culprit that has put some vendors out of business. How do you feel about all these mergers and acquisitions going on lately, particularly with Oracle?
Morrison: Whether Oracle buys PeopleSoft, Retek or Siebel (Systems) is no different from me facing Oracle 12.0, or their next phase of development. As a CIO, one of the things I have to make the business understand is that when you make an investment in an ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform, it is not a one-time thing. You always have to upgrade, it's just part of the change process. I don't view it as being positive or negative.

I do see a trend with consolidation happening, and that is toward multisourcing. For many years, the big theory is to reduce the number of suppliers you have and pick a single source.

I think the pendulum is swinging back to multisourcing. It doesn't mean going from one vendor to 30 vendors, but just two. It could be having two infrastructure vendors, and two to three application development vendors augmenting what you may have.

I have Oracle application development resources sitting in an outsourcing company in India today. And I'm augmenting that with some capability in Tianjin, China, because that's where my manufacturing facility is, and I need to have the ground support there.  

Aaron Tan of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.

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