Friday, January 25, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Big Data Profile: Mike Capone, ADP
We sat down with Mike Capone, senior VP and CIO at HR software provider ADP, to discuss career decisions, analytics trends and more.
Michael Capone, CIO, Automatic Data Processing
Name: Mike Capone
Tenure at current job: 4.5 years
Size of IT group: 8,000
Career accomplishment of which I'm most proud: When I took on the role [of CIO], it was highly decentralized, with a lot of the R&D functions pushed into the operating units. Over the last three or four years, I've been fortunate enough to be able to consolidate those organizations.
Decision I wish I could do over: I left IT for a while to run a large P&L. [Capone was senior vice president and general manager of ADP GlobalView, a multilingual, multicurrency human resources outsourcing solution.] I did that after 15 or 16 years in IT. I'd had a couple of other opportunities to do that earlier in my career, and I passed on them. And I wish I'd done it earlier. It was one of the greatest experiences I've had, and I don't think I could do the job I'm doing today without having had that experience.
Most important career influencer: My father was one of the very first people ever to hold the title of CIO. He started out an accountant at Standard Oil. They gave an aptitude test to see if he could be a programmer -- they'd bought this IBM mainframe and didn't know what to do with it. He scored really high, moved his way up as a programmer, and ultimately moved to J.C. Penney and became CIO there. When I was getting ready to go to college, he said, "You know what, you can major in whatever you want to major in, but I want you to get a computer science degree also. I think you'll be highly employable if you do that." I'd say that's about as good an influence as you can have.
Current top initiatives: Building social capabilities into our product set for our end users. Continuing the trend with mobility, ensuring all our new development is focused on mobile endpoints. [Big data] and mining analytics, not only to be more effective in our business and our processes, but also to provide value to our clients.
Most disruptive force in my industry: Big data and analytics. We've forever been the best transaction-processing company in our space. In the last couple of years, technology has evolved to where it's a lot easier to process a lot of unstructured data. Our clients, typically HR practitioners, are looking for metrics to drive their business at their fingertips and become more competitive. So we're seeing a lot of innovation in that space, and we obviously want to be out in front of that.
We've come to market with analytics in current products, visualization and dashboards to manage a workforce. What we're going to market with [beta testing in December and general availability this spring] is analyzing your HR data, but also benchmarks. Aggregated information across our base. Imagine your company with the ability to benchmark your company, your hiring practices, your compensation with other companies in your industry and your geography.
One thing I'm looking to do better: Agility. The market is moving faster and faster. The ability to drive agility, to bring products to market faster.
What I've learned about getting the most out of a team: You have to invest [them] in the outcome. My perspective changed and opened up when I was running a global outsourcing business. Clients like Intel, Cisco, JPMorgan, Microsoft and Apple -- obviously very innovative companies. When I got back to IT and product development, I noticed there wasn't an emotional connection to products or a first-hand view of the outcomes. So my team now is focused on living and breathing what the client's living and breathing. Everybody goes on sales calls, everybody listens to client service calls, everybody goes out and meets clients. That is the most motivating thing that we've ever done.
What I look for in an employee: We got away from narrow technology hiring and are now very much into hiring for aptitude, knowing that technologies shift.
Most common reason IT projects go wrong: Inspect what you expect. Very often management gets focused on project plans and paper reviews of things. In today's world, the market is moving so fast, what you start out building... you may not have a need for a year later. We've moved to six-week cycles. We look at touching and feeling the products every six weeks.
[And] you've got to be able to pull the plug. As long as you have a generally good track record, you should have the courage to go to the boss -- in my case, the CEO -- and say, "We have to stop spending good money after bad."
A promising technology: Open source has really taken hold, giving CIOs choices. With big data, you have traditional players but also open source. So you're not locked into one vendor.
Most overrated IT movement: Big data will solve a lot of problems. But the hype is kind of outpacing the actual impact.
What I want from tech vendors: There's a huge amount of inconsistency in vendor approaches. Price isn't out biggest driver. We actually pay more for certain products when we know that the vendor has the right approach. "Be part of our strategy," I tell vendors. "Structure your contracts in a way that your success is our success." If [we're] not successful, they shouldn't make tons of money off of us.
Mike Capone At A Glance
Education: Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from Dickinson College and an MBA in Finance from Pace University.
Person I'd most like to have lunch with: Thomas Jefferson.
First job: My first job was as a paperboy. My first paycheck was a
[summer] construction job at the World Financial center in New York
City, laying down steel so they could pour the concrete.
If I weren't involved in IT: I'm on the boards of four different nonprofits, two healthcare and two universities. I'd love to be the CEO of a nonprofit.
Why Indian IT companies are going slow on hiring
Times of India ||Posted By: reena sharma
The
software services industry whose frenetic hiring helped create a large
slice of India's middle class in less than two decades may be nearing
the end of a phase as the most prolific employer of college graduates,
industry professionals and analysts said.
Hiring by India's top software exporters has been trending downwards in the past few quarters, a development which has been attributed to unfavourable market conditions. But alongside the crimped demand, experts believe there is a structural shift in the offshore outsourcing business which will mean that companies such as Infosys and HCL Technologies will no longer add software engineers in the numbers we are used to witnessing.
"What you saw in terms of productivity gains in manufacturing is finding its way to services," said TK Kurien, the chief executive officer of Wipro, India's third-largest software company which employs 1.4 lakh professionals.
Some of the sluggishness in hiring may be explained by the slowdown in the $100 billion (Rs5.4 lakh crore) IT services sector, to about 11% anticipated in the year to March 2013 from 17% in the last financial year. The main reason that moderation in hiring is a sign of things to come is that more will be done by fewer people as the grunt work is left to machines.
Kurien compared it to the efficiency improvements that defined the manufacturing industry in the United States. From supporting about 85 million manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the sector has just about 17 million employees now. While part of it was because of work being outsourced to lower-cost destinations such as China, a lot of it was jobs eliminated because of productivity gains.
In India, the information technology sector supports nearly three million people directly and another nine million indirectly. While software services companies like TCS and Infosys may slow the pace of hiring, other technology companies, many of them startups, are likely to pick up the slack and provide employment opportunities for the more than one million engineers who graduate each year.
IT services firms have started automating routine and repeatable processes that does not necessarily need human effort. Initially, this is happening in areas such as software testing, where software code is tested for accuracy and error.
"Software testing, which was traditionally done manually, has moved to automated processes," said Vijay Sivaram, director for recruitment and staffing at Ikya Human Capital Solutions, which helps IT firms with hiring services. "Even in coding some firms are using software that takes care of the basic work."
Sanchit Vir Gogia, principal analyst at IDC, said that IT services firms are increasingly creating what he called solution accelerators.
"This is nothing but templatising and packaging the basic functions that go into a larger project implementation," Vir Gogia said. "Automation usually impacts the bottom of the pyramid in the service delivery, making it leaner." Companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant are going one step further to create intellectual property around such reusable components to give themselves a competitive edge.
The need for greater efficiency is driven by the changes in outsourcing market and intense competition for basic technology contracts for managing applications and IT infrastructure.
There have been instances in the recent past where companies have offered more than 10% discounts on existing contracts to win the deal - that means committing to deliver for $900 million a set of services on which the client used to spend $1 billion earlier.
"As more and more technology contracts are given out on outcome-based and fixed price models, service providers would be forced to adopt greater degree of automation in routine, repetitive tasks," said Sid Pai, president for the Asia-Pacific region at ISG Information Services Group.
The
software services industry whose frenetic hiring helped create a large
slice of India's middle class in less than two decades may be nearing
the end of a phase as the most prolific employer of college graduates,
industry professionals and analysts said.Hiring by India's top software exporters has been trending downwards in the past few quarters, a development which has been attributed to unfavourable market conditions. But alongside the crimped demand, experts believe there is a structural shift in the offshore outsourcing business which will mean that companies such as Infosys and HCL Technologies will no longer add software engineers in the numbers we are used to witnessing.
"What you saw in terms of productivity gains in manufacturing is finding its way to services," said TK Kurien, the chief executive officer of Wipro, India's third-largest software company which employs 1.4 lakh professionals.
Some of the sluggishness in hiring may be explained by the slowdown in the $100 billion (Rs5.4 lakh crore) IT services sector, to about 11% anticipated in the year to March 2013 from 17% in the last financial year. The main reason that moderation in hiring is a sign of things to come is that more will be done by fewer people as the grunt work is left to machines.
Kurien compared it to the efficiency improvements that defined the manufacturing industry in the United States. From supporting about 85 million manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the sector has just about 17 million employees now. While part of it was because of work being outsourced to lower-cost destinations such as China, a lot of it was jobs eliminated because of productivity gains.
In India, the information technology sector supports nearly three million people directly and another nine million indirectly. While software services companies like TCS and Infosys may slow the pace of hiring, other technology companies, many of them startups, are likely to pick up the slack and provide employment opportunities for the more than one million engineers who graduate each year.
IT services firms have started automating routine and repeatable processes that does not necessarily need human effort. Initially, this is happening in areas such as software testing, where software code is tested for accuracy and error.
"Software testing, which was traditionally done manually, has moved to automated processes," said Vijay Sivaram, director for recruitment and staffing at Ikya Human Capital Solutions, which helps IT firms with hiring services. "Even in coding some firms are using software that takes care of the basic work."
Sanchit Vir Gogia, principal analyst at IDC, said that IT services firms are increasingly creating what he called solution accelerators.
"This is nothing but templatising and packaging the basic functions that go into a larger project implementation," Vir Gogia said. "Automation usually impacts the bottom of the pyramid in the service delivery, making it leaner." Companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant are going one step further to create intellectual property around such reusable components to give themselves a competitive edge.
The need for greater efficiency is driven by the changes in outsourcing market and intense competition for basic technology contracts for managing applications and IT infrastructure.
There have been instances in the recent past where companies have offered more than 10% discounts on existing contracts to win the deal - that means committing to deliver for $900 million a set of services on which the client used to spend $1 billion earlier.
"As more and more technology contracts are given out on outcome-based and fixed price models, service providers would be forced to adopt greater degree of automation in routine, repetitive tasks," said Sid Pai, president for the Asia-Pacific region at ISG Information Services Group.
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