The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is simplifying its global applications infrastructure, which has become overly complex as a result of its various acquisitions.

"The clock has already begun to count down, and people are becoming a little nervous," said Sun CIO Bob Worrall. "That's typical in such large programs."

But as massive as the project is, the team is on schedule to meet its first milestone on Jul. 23, 2007, he said.

The long-serving Sun employee of 20 years said such big-scale projects require an experienced team with the necessary project management skills, and that is something Sun has, he added.

Good talent with the right balance of technology skills and business acumen is in short supply, and Worrall wishes more universities would incorporate project and financial management in the curriculum so as to better prepare its students for a career in IT.

ZDNet Asia caught up with the Sun CIO during his recent visit to Singapore, and asked for a progress report on the Oracle project. The industry veteran also shared his view of the IT organization of the future, and gave CIOs in Asia a compelling reason for adopting eco-friendly technology.

Q. Someone once described the CIO as chief information octopus because his role is multifaceted. What do you think?
Worrall: That's a great line. I'd have to use that; I've never really heard anyone describe it like that. It's a difficult job in that you have to balance the needs of your internal customers with managing costs. Obviously our customers would want the fastest systems, all the toys and technologies, but part of my job is to balance those needs with costs and risk, and where security is certainly another component of that. So it is like in the sense--to use that analogy--an octopus.

Name Bob Worrall Job title CIO, Sun Microsystems Work experience Bob Worrall was appointed CIO of Sun Microsystems in July 2006, and is currently responsible for all aspects of Sun's global IT infrastructure and line-of-business application development, support and maintenance, including information service delivery and security. With 25 years of technical and IT management experience, Worrall has held various roles at Sun. Prior to Sun, Worrall was with toy company Worlds of Wonder where he was head of the company's IT organization. The CIO holds an MBA from California State University Hayward, and serves as an advisor to several engineering and business colleges throughout the Bay Area. About Sun Microsystems Founded in 1982, Sun sells servers, storage, software and services to a cross-section of industries, including manufacturing, financial services, government and telecommunications.

There are many roles, many components of the job. We actually describe the role internally as not only chief information officer, but also chief productivity officer. It's an important subtlety, but what we're trying to drive home is that my role is as much about providing technology as it is to ensure our users are productive. So we're spending a lot of time internally talking about how each of our initiatives impacts the productivity of our users.

Does the word "productivity" scare people off, especially since it brings to mind things like KPIs (key performance indicators)?
I think it could scare people off, but what we try to do instead is not to focus so much on the KPI terminology but to look at our customers' daily activities, and to share with them technologies that will make them more productive--whether they may be on the road, using their cell phones or PDAs, or working from home.

Can you give an example of mapping IT to productivity?
Virtually all of the programs and initiatives we're working on are mapped on a four-quadrant scale. It's like a traditional scale, where one axis is cost and the other is the impact on productivity. So for any initiative that we've got going, we can judge the relative impact on productivity against the cost, and we use that as a mechanism to determine which are the best initiatives to work on.

The ones with greatest impact on cost and, of course, productivity against cost, are the most simple things to go to. So we started with those, and now we're working on those that have significant impact on productivity but perhaps more significant on cost as well. But in that matrix we've created, it ranges from providing improved laptop support for customers to moving more applications out to the edge so that people can get to them through the Internet. We're experimenting with things like Skype and wireless accounts for some of our engineering clients. We're looking at the entire work environment differently, so Sun is fairly progressive in our use of "hoteling" or office reservations. We're extending that out to the home now, to make people work more effectively from home with things like thin-client technologies. So it's really across a gamut of different productivity areas, and we use the quadrants to map those activities.

Is aligning business and IT more of an art or a science?
It's definitely an art. Most IT people are in IT because they like the technology, but we've gone out of our way in the last several years to create a dedicated organization called the Business Engagement Organization, and the role of this team is to do just that--to engage the business. We've hired people with soft skills like communication skills and business knowledge. And it's their job to understand the role of the business, to understand the priorities, and then to translate those priorities back to the requirements on IT. A lot of IT organizations have a similar role, but often the same person who is doing that is the same person doing the code or what have you. So we separated the roles to have these dedicated, focused individuals who have different backgrounds and roles, and it's a constant challenge to walk that line between what the business wants, what's cost-effective and what can be done from a technology perspective.

Do you have a guidepost, or another company that you look to, to benchmark how well Sun is doing?
Sun uses different sources, whether it be the Gartners or the Forresters of the world, but there are a number of industry organizations we're associated with, and one of them is the Corporate Executive Board. We also do our own industry benchmarking with other companies in California like the Ciscos. So it's a combination of formal benchmarking through the normal channels as well as through some informal channels and communications with peer organizations.

You've been in this industry for a long time. How has the IT organization evolved till today, and looking ahead in five years, what would a typical IT organization look like?
I think it's an interesting time in history, so to speak, with regard to the IT industry. Most recently it has been traditionally focused on data center services, IT technologies and applications development, and all those things. I think what's happening today is that technology is becoming much more consumer-oriented, and so in that context it is also becoming a bit more commoditized, simpler if you will. This means the expertise that was once required to write and run those systems are becoming slightly easier, and I think that has put pressure on the IT organization to focus less on the development of technologies, because we just buy off-the-shelf and focus on topics like business engagement and IT alignment, as well as the more traditional aspects of security including legislative compliance which is a big issue in the United States.

So that's where I think we're today, and I think going forward the role of IT will continue to evolve, and more and more IT will become an organization focused on business engagement, vendor management, compliance and security. The very traditional role of application developers and coders, or even database administrators and data center operators, will also begin to fade away and become a commodity that will generally be provided by a third-party of some sort.

So for example in Sun's case, we've outsourced most of our activity to partners who can do it better, faster and cheaper than we can, and with the people we've left, we're focused on all those things like--again--business engagement and so on. So I think it's an interesting time, but for people in the IT industry, it is a little unsettling to see the industry changing. If you like to develop applications or you like to run systems in a data center, I think in the future, your career path will be with those large service providers as opposed to individual IT organizations.

Is outsourcing for everyone?  

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