David J McCue is responsible for the overall direction, strategic vision, and business management of CSCs global internal information technology environment. McCue has been with CSC since 1996, when he joined the company as part of the acquisition of American Practice Management, where he served as CIO since 1993. His assignments at CSC include being vice president of applications portfolio management, divisional chief information and resource officer for CSCs Healthcare Group and chairman of the Enterprise Architectural Review Board. His earlier career endeavors include various revenue production, operation and management roles at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). He started his career with Human Systems. McCue holds an MBA degree in finance from New York Universitys Stern Graduate School of Business Administration. He is a certified management consultant and holds the APICS CPIM designation.

How does CSC manage its information technology?
We handle IT for ourselves as we do for our customers. We use the outsourcing model to manage information technology for ourselves. CSC, the customer, uses CSC Global, the outsourcer, as its IT vendor. In that context, we use the same practices that we do for any of our customers around the world.

We have a CIO community across countries we operate. CSC IT is just one of the accounts out of several CSCs customer accounts. Rather than manage my own internal IT, I manage them just as my customers. We have a significant portion of our internal IT account team with individuals from around the world.

How should enterprises go about planning their green strategy? What should be the starting point?
The first thing for any enterprise is to understand the kind of setup they have. Whether the facility is owned or leased is also an important factor in planning green strategy. The next step would be to evaluate the relationship with the existing vendors who are providing green technologies. It boils down to efforts versus results.

David J McCue VP and CIO, Computer Sciences Corporation

If an enterprise has few facilities, it should plan its investments for long term to ensure that efforts to cut power consumption bear fruits. There has to be a prioritization of efforts versus results. One has to ensure that initial efforts do not require any cash investments. The next step is to map the type of equipment that an enterprise purchases to ensure that it has low heat signature and consumes less electricity.

It is more relevant in India, as the reliance on battery or UPS or diesel generation should be the target area and special attention should be paid to them. Even small changes in technologies can make a huge impact. These efforts should not be treated as add-ons but as a part of the whole system.

How challenging is managing the IT in the event of mergers and acquisitions?
All companies go through the phase of acquisitions. Considering that CSC does a lot of acquisitions, we take it more as a regular job, and not as a special project. We have a standard approach to start integration in terms of reviewing the assets of capabilities of that organization. We then decide how to work toward connectivity in various forms. We give VPN tokens to select people so that they can work with us quickly. Then, we work toward bringing the two organizations on the same cloud of data and voice communications. We make sure that we respect the value of the acquired company and need to preserve that value.

What are some challenges CIOs face in the light of the fast changing technology landscape?
The impact of new technology on enterprises depends on how big or small the company is. A small company, with less number of locations can afford a different type of risk about trying a new technology as opposed to the one that has several employees and multiple locations. The technology itself may be very attractive or may be incrementally better than what is currently available. Or it could be a disruptive technology that brings in something totally different.

What kind of impact will Web 2.0 have on enterprises?
We are in touch with some social networking providers to find out how best we can leverage that.

Within a closed company, social networking is designed to allow individuals to become aware of other people in large companies with similar interests or skillsets, so that they can draw upon the full knowledge base and capabilities of their peers. Many companies have done things in the past which can be called social networking. There were programs designed to connect individuals.

We also have communities within our organizations, and some of them are sponsored communities. People flock to these, interact, and use those resources. In many cases, these are people who have never physically met.

What do you think about the importance of a healthy CEO-CIO relationship?
CIOs are individuals who have to be aware of the business objectives of the organization, and they need to understand the revenue and business drivers of the companies they work for. CIOs cannot simply be techies. They have to be business-oriented individuals who are well versed in technologies as well as finance and organizational change. They are a key linkage between go to market and revenue portion of the business and the areas that give them the tools to be successful.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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