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CIO 1-on-1 Blonde and attractive, Cecilia Claudio would not look out of place inside the pages of a lifestyle magazine. Yet the 20-year IT veteran is really more at home commandeering Mercury Interactive's use of information technology worldwide.
Prior to coming onboard Mercury last October as the company CIO, Claudio sank her teeth into IT working with companies such as document management company Xerox, fashion chain The Gap, and office equipment maker Olivetti. She has also held positions as executive vice president and CIO of Zurich Financial Services, and more recently, as CIO and vice president of engineering at Align Technology.
Mercury is a maker of tools used to test and monitor business applications.
Not one to shy away from making tough calls, Claudio showed her mettle when in 1996, she reclaimed her then-company's outsourced IT--bringing it back in-house--when she grew dissatisfied with poor service levels and increasing costs.
She shares with ZDNet Asia her experiences, and reveals that thanks to her background as a user of technology, customers are more receptive to her testimony on the benefits of establishing proper IT governance implementation.
Born a Portuguese, Claudio holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and is married to Lars Rabbe, CIO of Yahoo.
Q: You've had a wealth of experience from working in different industries outside of IT. How has that helped you now that you're in the tech space?
A: One thing that I've come to realize is that regardless of industry and size of company, the IT biz is very similar. You leverage the knowledge of running the IT organization from company to company, and you use the same best practices regardless of where you are.
I've been a customer of Mercury for quite a long time. In most of my CIO roles, I've had Mercury products inside my organization. So coming to this company, I really felt that it gave me the opportunity to now see things from the inside-out. I can start relating to how the product gets developed, how the product actually taps into a need that exists in the marketplace, and how I can influence the set of features and functionalities that should be and could be built into the product. I'm able to do from having had the experience of running through the CIO roles that I've had in the different industries.
How much time do you spend on product development and managing the IT house at Mercury?
My first priority when I joined Mercury was running the IT organization and understanding what the issues were. Once I had a sense of what were the things that needed attention, and once I had created and put my team together, I then reached out... first to my key business customers, then the people in product and development, research engineering, and finance, marketing, sales, and so on.
| I think I add a lot of extra dimensions to the sales cycle by being able to speak of personal user experiences. |
They are coming to me to help them synthesize processes, work through what are the key items on the agenda that other CIOs worry about, and overall, help them test new product features and functionalities that they're developing first before the product gets into the marketplace.
You're saying that your customers feel more at ease knowing that you came from a similar background as them, and knowing the pain points that they have?
Absolutely. Some of the feedback that I'm getting from other CIOs is that, yes, they want to talk to sales and product development people inside Mercury, but ultimately, they want to talk to the CIO.
I recently participated in a sales cycle for a very large retailer in the United States. The retailer said to me: 'You know, it really helped us to hear how you're using the products. Yeah, we get to hear from sales, but I want to hear from you. It has really helped us to make our minds up if we heard from the CIO of Mercury.' I think I add a lot of extra dimensions to the sales cycle by being able to speak of personal user experiences.
Within Mercury, how do you achieve aligning IT better with business?
I have started using internally, and very diligently, the ITG (Mercury's IT Governance product) to govern all the requests coming from the business units to deliver projects, solutions, and enhancements to existing systems. So I have taken the way the tool works, and all of the surrounding practices and processes that the tools recommend, and have put in place my own 'board of directors".
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