5 Top CIOs Weigh in on How to Speed up Delivery and Deployment

Clint Boulton reported from the CIO 100 Symposium last week, where a number of top CIOs spoke during a panel about how agile and continuous delivery have caused a cultural shift for IT in their organizations.

Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco Systems

“I believe that this is no less than a complete cultural shift for IT,” says Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco Systems “What’s required is moving at exponential speed compared to what we have done in the past.”

Jacoby, says the company’s IT department is delivering roughly 50 percent of its IT services in the continuous delivery model, using visualization software to demonstrate project “mock-ups” to business leaders. Her team used “cold, hard facts and data” to prove business leaders how continuous delivery saved Cisco time and money.

Chris Perretta, State Street

Prior to State Street’s adoption of agile development, the financial service provider developed isolated technology apart from the business, says CIO Chris Perretta. Now the company blends “people, process and technology” to architect new systems and software products for clients.

Steve Phillips, Avnet

To make agile work at Avnet, CIO Steve Phillips said the IT solutions provider has begun co-locating IT and business groups, commingling the separate groups. Co-location, he says, inspires collaboration and trust between disparate IT and business staff.

Ina Kamenz, Eli Lilly

Ina Kamenz, CIO of Eli Lilly, says her team has evolved from a culture of “building to last to building to adapt,” where iterative development is the new innovation engine for the pharmaceutical company. IT projects are introduced to the business in pilot mode and frequently adapted. This has forced the business to move faster to align with the IT department. “That’s a huge change for them,” she says.

Tom Peck, AECOM Technology

At engineering and construction company AECOM Technology, software development is comparable to how many companies build and upgrade mobile software. CIO Tom Peck says AECOM’s agile development spans between the U.S. and Europe, where IT and business leaders develop 80 percent of a solution, and improve it over time from versions 1.0, to 1.1, 1.2 to 2.0 and so on. “It’s all about trust and credibility” between IT and the business, Peck said.

These five companies are a small sample of corporations practicing agile methods. Gartner estimates that about 25 percent of Global 2000 companies are expected to adopt agile and DevOps methodologies by 2016, with tools to support the work becoming a $2.3 billion market by the end of this year.