Running IT as a Business
An Interview with George Lin

In this CIO Q&A, we continue our discussion on running IT as a business from the viewpoint of a seasoned IT Leader, George Lin. George was CIO at Documentum, EMC Software and Advent Software. He is now CIO at Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco.

When I met up with George to interview him for this discussion, he was in the process of transitioning someone from his team at Advent Software into his role and moving down the street to Dolby as their new CIO.

Taos: First of all, congratulations on your appointment at Dolby. You have developed a reputation among IT Leaders in the Bay Area for the business management of IT. Can you tell us what you mean when you refer to running IT as a business?

George: Running IT as a business involves much more than just marketing IT or restructuring your internal customer-facing IT functions. It’s about planning and aligning IT within the larger context of the business and what it is trying to achieve. What does the business need in order to function well today, where is it headed, and what does IT need to be to support both of these states? All IT initiatives and projects must nest within these bigger concerns.

One question that I often ask is “what are the critical business processes that make this business thrive?” IT should enable business growth by optimizing, integrating, and automating key business processes end-to-end. IT’s role, to me, is not simply building the automation, it’s about linking functional groups together and encouraging collaboration in solving cross-functional business problems. We can also talk about some of the things that we can do to make sure IT runs like a business.

Taos: What would some of those things be?

George: Things like empowering the business to make its own decisions regarding IT investment priorities. When you run Taos as a consulting organization, you use your expertise, experience and objectivity to provide your customers with solution options. You also inform your customers about tradeoffs of various options. But who’s going to make that final decision? It’s your customer, not Taos. With the information that you provide during the engagement, your customer should be able to make a wise and informed decision. Likewise, IT shouldn’t be making decisions on behalf of the business. By IT acting as an internal consulting firm and engaging the business, the business should be able to confidently make even the most complicated IT investment decisions.

Taos: You touched on something that I hear often as a major focus in the IT leadership community – empowering the business to make its own IT decisions, using IT as a consultant to guide and facilitate the process. Would you say, in general, that running IT as a business from this context is something understood by your peer group?

George: Fortunately, the Bay Area has a progressive CIO community. I’m part of several CIO roundtables, and I’m always hearing people speak about the importance of empowering the business to make its own IT decisions. So I think at least in the Bay Area, this concept is well understood by my peers.

Taos: What would you consider to be the essential top three areas of focus for success in running IT as a business?

George: I would say, first, the CIO as the change agent should instill a new mindset in IT as well as in the business that IT is an internal consulting and services company. We need that mindset to change how IT behaves and how the business perceives the new IT organization.

Second, this IT organization, like any business, needs a viable business plan that include things like vision, mission, core values, operating principles and strategies, a catalog of work products and services, internal go-to-market plans, business systems roadmap, IT governance and business engagement models, etc. This document should help our internal customers clearly understand what IT is about and how best to leverage our capabilities and services.

Third, it’s the relentless focus on the execution of this IT business plan. Unless we can put the plan into action, it’s just a bunch of hollow words.

Taos: We hear a lot these days about IT governance. You mentioned that it is one of the elements of your IT business plan. Can you relate these concepts to the overall success of the IT function for us?

George: IT Governance at its simplest is a process to ensure that we do the right IT projects and also to ensure that we do IT projects right. It’s about how IT engages the business in prioritizing and funding IT investments, tracking projects and ensuring that these IT investments realize their promised returns. It’s fundamental to the success of any IT organization regardless of whether we choose to run IT like a business or not.

Taos: Switching gears, what approaches do you use to attract, retain and develop people in your organization?

George: I try hard to ensure that people are working on what interests them. That’s my goal as a manager. If they are interested in what they are doing and are motivated, you have to pry them away from their projects! When I come into a new organization, I make sure that I have quality one-on-one time with everyone in IT so that I can understand people’s personal goals and interests. And I continue to have these skip-level conversations periodically to ensure that people are generally working on projects that interest them.

Taos: How do you find your key internal business-facing employees?

George: It’s simple. I look for them within the business. There are often bright, intelligent, savvy people in functional business roles that have a keen interest in business processes in their part of the operation and are concerned about how technology supports them. They may also have an interest in having a bigger role in terms of being a change agent. These are the business analyst-type that I’m looking for and I actively seek out these hidden gems. When I find them, I work with their managers to move them into IT so that they can make a greater contribution to the business. By infusing IT with business people, I can be assured that whenever IT works on a new project, we will think first about the business needs and the associated process improvements and less about technology. I think technology is the easy part. The hard part is getting people on the same page and working out a business solution. We need business people in IT to do that.

Taos: Early in our conversation you mentioned marketing as a component of running IT as a business, what have you done to market IT to your internal customer base?

George: We try to get the word out about IT in a variety of ways. For example, at Advent we distributed to everyone a mouse pad which has our Helpdesk contact information printed on it. So there was no confusion in how to use the Helpdesk service. We also established a quarterly IT newsletter and used it to help instill a sense of cross-functional collaboration. If we knew a big project was coming up that required cross-functional participation, we would feature it in our IT newsletter to share with the rest of the company what we were doing, why it was important, and how various functions were coming together around it. We started the IT Newsletter to publicize what IT is up to (including providing project status). We worked hard to make sure our internal customers understood our capabilities and could leverage those capabilities.

Taos: Those are great ideas. How many of your peers have an internal marketing initiative within IT?

George: Actually, I am not aware of anyone who has a formal program, but I’m sure that they all think about marketing. I believe in using a variety of ways to connect with your internal customers.

Taos: What does this internal marketing campaign buy you?

George: It buys you a level of understanding. Sometimes IT can feel like a black box to our customers. Let’s do a thought exercise. If IT is a real business and our customers don’t quite know our capabilities and how to leverage them, would this IT business be very successful? Probably not! One of the CIO’s goals should be to promote a better understanding of IT so that our internal customers can take full advantage of our services. This means reaching out not just to the executives but to the “masses.”

Taos: Speaking of newsletters, as we wrap up this one, are there any closing thoughts you’d like to leave our readers with?

George: Have a great sense of humility and take the time to understand and appreciate all the subtleties of the company that we work for. It’s more than just business requirements or even business processes as they relate to IT. We should understand company culture, maturity, readiness. I think the CIO role can be quite challenging. Most executives only need to work with their upstream and downstream partners, while a CIO has to work across the organization. It is vital that the CIO can understand the business as a whole – aspirations, priorities, culture, politics, and so forth, and be a facilitator and enabler for business success.

Taos: George, it’s always a pleasure talking with you. Good luck at Dolby.

George: Thank you.

George Lin
Vice President & Chief Information Officer

George Lin is Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Dolby Laboratories. He is responsible for Dolby’s worldwide IT organization and leads global business process optimization, integration, and automation efforts for the company. Before joining Dolby, Mr. Lin was CIO of Advent Software, a financial services company. Prior to Advent, he managed the consolidated IT organization of EMC Software, a division of EMC Corporation, the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions. Before it was acquired by EMC, Mr. Lin was CIO of Documentum, a provider of enterprise content management solutions.

Named a Premier 100 IT Leader by Computerworld magazine in 2003, Mr. Lin won CIO Decisions magazine’s prestigious Mid-Market Leadership Award in 2006. He is a contributing author of the Prentice Hall PTR book CIO Wisdom: Best Practices from Silicon Valley’s Leading IT Experts. He serves on the advisory boards of the Fisher IT Center at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business and Tablus, a leading content security solutions provider. Mr. Lin graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley.