Manufacturing Supplier

Vice president of Eco-Responsibility is a rather new job title in the industry. What prepared you for this job?

My interest in this whole space got started early in my career building supercomputers in Cambridge [Douglas received his bachelor of science and master of science degrees in computer science and electrical engineering at MIT]. We built some of the first air-cooled supercomputers back then. Then at Sun, I was really involved in getting into low-end server business, which was a similar process -- how to take these big mainframe servers and put them in people's offices and have low-power and low-noise solutions. It's something I've been hitting over and over and it became a theme for me in my career. On the personal side, I've been looking at my kids and the world where I'm raising them and thinking about things we enjoy doing as family. I've been thinking about how we make sure our kids have a great place to live in future.
Is the VP of eco-responsibility an evangelist, a manager or an engineer?

All of them. Some people who will be reporting to me will be running specific projects. But there is certainly a lot of evangelism both inside and outside the company trying to raise awareness. At Sun, I'll help get a lot of the various businesses moving in same direction.
Eco-responsibility is a broad concept. Where do you think you will be focusing most of your attention this year?

There are two broad areas. Some of it being set by outside players, like the [Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)], and the regulatory stuff happening in Europe. They kind of have a time frame of their own. Another big priority is internally working on our short-term and long-term road map. And there are tons and tons of other things to do, like "Bike to JavaOne." [During its annual Java developers' conference JavaOne on May 16 in San Francisco, Sun will encourage local attendees to ride bicycles to the conference. A local biking coalition will offer free bicycle valet service.]
Environmentalists see virtue in an eco-friendly computing initiative, but why is it good business for Sun and for your customers?

I think it's a really similar situation to why people are buying hybrid cars today. There is money savings to be had by paying attention to energy consumption. And doing more eco-friendly things, there is a class of people to whom it's personally important to do that. Toyota is seeing customers demand eco-friendly products, and we're seeing the same thing with Sun, demanding our CoolThread processors. People are saying, "You've really hit something important for me going forward."
When and how did you realize that eco-friendly computing was going to be an important issue?

It is kind of something that has sunk in over the last four or five years, just thinking about the energy that's consumed in the data center. And then on the flip side, watching our customers use our technology to try to solve eco-friendly problems, such as designing better cars, tightening up the supply chain. It's a yin-yang situation, [IT is] part of problem but it's also part of solution.
Where is Sun strongest in its commitment to eco-responsibility?

There are a lot of programs under way. With just three days on the job, what jumps out at me is the product leadership right now with the new processors and servers and our work with AMD on x86 compatible servers.
Where is it weakest?

I think it's a Sun problem and also a bigger industry problem. There's amazingly little data available that decision makers who want to factor power into their decision-making process can really turn to. We are not doing a good job at this at Sun. Nor is anyone else. One priority is to keep pushing to work with the EPA to get visible metrics out there so we can be up front and honest about what people can do. Data and transparency drive a lot of things in this country and the world overall just getting the facts out on the table can do a lot of good.
What can you tell us about the formal metric for measuring the miles-per-gallon equivalent for servers? Why is this metric important?

It's a process that started up with leadership from Sun, the EPA and others. The goal is to give people an up-front, visible way to make tradeoffs and understand what the long-term costs are going to be for various technology choices. Today you go in and talk to people setting up data centers, there are a lot of back envelope things and an overdesigning of things for cooling just in case. This is just a way to say this company is doing better than that company (with energy consumption). [People might say] 'This technology might get me where I'm going at a lower cost for power and cooling and that stuff.' If you give people facts they can make better decisions.
What is Sun doing to make its technology run cooler and more efficiently?

A lot of it starts down at the chip and processor level, very low-level engineering. You focus on how you do computing with less power. There's no magic. It's just been the focus for awhile. Sun took a particular leadership position with the multi-threaded and multi-core space. It re-thought processor design from ground up. We're doing a similar thing with AMD, who we use in our x86 systems.
Will you be Sun's point man on the Green Grid consortium?

Yes, I will certainly be very active and we've got other folks in company involved already. I think that's going be a nice piece of technology, particularly around interacting with broader population.

Why come back to Sun? A couple of reasons. There are still a lot great people here who I knew from last time here. And I'm very upbeat on the long-term business. And third, what I really want do -- what I felt like I wanted do in the eco-responsibility space, Sun already has some momentum. It has the engineering capability to really go and tackle these kinds of problems. If you look at Dell, for example, they have got to go get processors from someone else. We design our own processors. It's a big enough company and it's got a lot of horsepower to go and do some fundamental things.
CIOs dealing with out-of-control energy costs in the data center have been talking about eco-friendly computing for some time. But this week, Sun Microsystems Inc. has taken that idea one step closer to reality with the newly created position of vice president of eco-responsibility, naming industry veteran David Douglas to the post. Douglas will head Sun's environmental initiatives across the company, including advancements in energy efficiency and cooling technology, product recycling, clean manufacturing and improvements in Sun's day-to-day operations.

Douglas, who is returning to Sun after 5 1/2 years, co-founded in 2001 ConnecTerra Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup radio frequency identification middleware company, where he served as vice president of products and strategy. In 2005 Douglas became BEA Systems Inc.'s chief architect for WebLogic after San Jose, Calif.-based BEA acquired ConnecTerra. In his first interview as VP of eco-responsibility, Douglas talks to SearchCIO.com about how serious Sun is about eco-friendly computing and when CIOs can expect energy solutions from Sun.

Where did the idea of compliance officers come from?

The industry that developed compliance officers first was the defense industry. Back in the mid-1980s, a whole bunch of defense contractors got into trouble. There was fraud, waste and abuse in the news, and President Reagan, in order to stem the tide, asked Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard to form a commission. The Packard Commission recommended that clean up its own house.
I remember those overpriced toilet seats.

A funny aside, we had a vice president at United Technologies Corp., who was the first director of the office of federal procurement policy, but then went to work for us. He was asked to testify because of his prior position. They asked him what he thought about the $8,000 toilet seat, and his comment was, 'I don't want to take a position on that.' That's the only comment that made it into the news.

A whole bunch of CEOs got together after that and they developed what they called DII, the Defense Industry Initiatives, to write codes of ethics and develop programs. The outgrowth of that was having compliance officers to be responsible for developing those programs.
What's your view on the expense of compliance?

I would like to split out SOX [Sarbanes-Oxley Act] from general compliance. Prior to SOX, compliance programs consisted of things that were more than financial issues. Now along comes SOX, and what SOX says is your financials needs to be documented. How you handle your books and records needs to be documented. Some people might have said, 'Gee, weren't they documented before?' To a large extent they were, but over time some of those procedures changed, and the documentation wasn't changed. What became expensive was the interpretation of SOX, the testing, the requirement of having another set of auditors besides your independent auditors. So everybody is trying to do this thing completely right, and because this is a first-time effort, even companies that might have thought they were compliant prior to SOX, they are spending the money to make sure they are compliant.
There's a code of ethics that is kind of built into the military, where you worked previously, but there doesn't seem to be anything quite like that in the business world.

You're absolutely right.
The former CEO and other senior executives have been indicted on fraud charges. [CEO Sanjay Kumar and CA's former head of worldwide sales, Stephen Richards, have pleaded not guilty. Others have pleaded guilty to charges of securities fraud or obstruction of justice.] Do you think punishment is the only way to prevent misdeeds in business?

Wow. There are two answers. I don't know what else you can do with respect to misdeeds other than to punish. But I do know that if boards of directors and shareholders are not savvy to the fact that if there are individuals who have done the wrong thing, and the boards and shareholders haven't done the proper background checks in hiring those people later on, that is a huge mistake on the part of corporations -- to allow someone who has been punished for misdeeds, and then putting them back in the driver's seat should be a real negative in the business world.
Do you have to spend a lot of time reining in the tendency in people to win? Business is extremely competitive, and the desire to win at any cost, I think is pretty strong among very successful people.

No question about that. The desire to win is an important ingredient in business, and you really don't want to impede that desire to win. What you want to make sure is that everybody understands that the desire has to be measured with doing it the right way. I have to tell you that one of the things I talk to ethics officers about all the time is that you can sit there constantly and say no, no, no, you can't do this and you can't do that, and that may be one way to do your job. A better way to go about your job is to work with business and say, what is it that you're trying to accomplish and let's find the right way to do it.
Your job is not really to be a preacher, I guess.

If I end up being a preacher, I'm dead. People don't want to be lectured to. Most people feel they have good values to begin with. What they need is some guidance in solutions that are good, positive and workable and still help them meet their goals. I use an example with sales all the time. I say, if you come to me and say, 'I want to bribe, is that OK?' the answer is no, it's not OK. But that's really not the question you wanted to ask me. You want to tell me what your problem is and we want to find a solution.
Can you give me an example of a gray area where you have to come in and mediate?

Sure. You're out negotiating sales maybe in a foreign location. Someone comes to you -- a potential customer -- and says, 'I would really like to come visit your facility to see how your operation works.' This may not be a Computer Associates problem because we don't do a lot of manufacturing, but a lot of companies do. So, the answer is, of course, but the potential customer wants you to pay for it and the question is, 'Can we do that?' The answer in most instances is absolutely. But the gray area comes in when you ask how much entertaining you can do while you are there -- and are there any stop-offs, like to Orlando or to Las Vegas? Is there walking around money? Taking them out to dinner while they are there is certainly acceptable. Where you start to get uncomfortable is going beyond that and taking side trips, shopping trips.
We talked a little bit about SOX. Is SOX is a good thing?

Absolutely. I actually wrote a paper saying be happy for Sarbanes-Oxley. There are some unintended consequences of Sarbanes-Oxley that make my life and everybody else's difficult, and one of them is the huge cost associated with it. But how do you argue a provision in the law that says you must document your controls? How can you argue against a provision that says you need to have a mechanism where your employees can bring accounting irregularities up through the system and the board and the suit committee can act on it? I think most people will tell you that the law itself is a very proper one
Is there anything that CIOs should know about chief compliance officers?

The message I would want chief information officers to be aware of is that compliance officers and chief information officers should be working hand in glove. Some of the best controls that I am aware of are controls that are developed between the compliance organization and the chief information officer's organization. The more we can automate controls, the more we can take the human element out of it, the more reliance our employees and shareholders can have on the system. The chief compliance officer and the chief information officer should be married at the hip.
Patrick Gnazzo was appointed senior vice president of business practices and chief compliance officer (CCO) at Computer Associates International Inc. in January. A former chief trial lawyer for the U.S. Department of the Navy and a United Technologies Corp. CCO for 10 years, Gnazzo came to CA as part of a deal with the federal government in which the company agreed to pay $225 million in restitution to shareholders and improve its compliance and ethics practices. Gnazzo has until Dec. 31 to get a program up and running. A frequent lecturer on ethics and compliance, he spoke with SearchCIO.com about what compliance officers do and why.

Tony, you mentioned that you started looking at business and IT alignment about five years ago. Did the Y2K bug have anything to do with that?

That was one of the trigger events for me. We spent three or four leading years up to Y2K trying to make sure the process worked and that everyone could boot up come January 1. And it diverted a lot of our attention away from looking at the business. Since that time, two things have happened. As I mentioned, we tossed the IT plan. We also did a survey of our business managers, and that feedback wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear. But it showed that there was a gap. ... There were a couple of things that really helped turn that tide.
How do you get knowledge of the business side of the equation into your IT organization?

I think it starts with where IS falls within your organization. I think it makes sense in different places for different companies. For TRW, I report to the Chief Operating Officer. ... The management aligned IS as part of the operation. It's a business unit. It's not a corporate unit. It's not a standalone unit reporting to the CFO or CEO. We're right there in the ling of business. Having said that, from the very beginning, our team acted like we were part of the business.
How do you get knowledge of the business side of the equation into your IT organization?

One of the things that has actually helped AARP in this regard, is that we have an entire department within the IT organization that is sort of a designated to (business relationship management.) It does process management, it does what we call solutions management, works with business analysts, and project managment. Those are the most popular people in our organization. First of all we steal from other business units, so they don't have to have that technology background.
Is there any indication that IT people can understand the business, but business people might be a little more challenged to understand technology?

From my standpoint, I think that I've seen some successful cases of people coming to work from the business and having to learn the technology to perform. ... I haven't yet seen it at the CIO level. But I think that if those types of people surround themselves with trusted advisors that really understand technology, and they listen, they can still be successful.
What else can IT folks do to help learn the business?

I started ten or twelve years ago as a COBOL programmer writing mainframe applications for manufacturing. You talk about learning the business. ... Really learning the business means that you're out there side by side with guys who are building parts and shipping parts and dealing with the day by day issues. That's really knowing the business. That experience, being out there in the factory which is the core business of TRW, has helped me to understand what the connection is (between business and IT.)
What new roles does your IT organization have to create in order to really work with business the way you want to?

As John said, we've created a customer relationship group that really works within IT and focuses on our internal customers or internal clients.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Business and technology are more dependent upon each other than ever before. Today's CIOs need to lead IT departments in creating business advantage. Speaking during a keynote interview with analysts at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo, three high profile CIOs talked about the innovative tools and techniques they're using to accomplish the sometimes-elusive goal of business and IT alignment. Here is part 2 of that discussion with Joe Drouin, CIO of TRW Automotive, John Sullivan, CIO of AARP, and Tony Cicco, CIO of the General Accounting Office. Click here to read the first part of the interview.

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