{"id":12040,"date":"2009-06-10T12:41:35","date_gmt":"2009-06-10T11:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=908"},"modified":"2009-06-10T12:41:35","modified_gmt":"2009-06-10T11:41:35","slug":"saps-new-cio-on-the-power-of-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/saps-new-cio-on-the-power-of-information.html","title":{"rendered":"SAP\u2019s New CIO on The Power of Information"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"oliver SAP announced today<\/a> that Oliver Bussmann<\/a> will be taking over as CIO from September 1, 2009, reporting to the SAP COO Ernie Gunst<\/a>. Bussmann will be moving to Walldorf from the San Francisco Bay Area where has been working as the Regional CIO of Allianz for North America and Mexico. His prior roles include other posts within the Allianz Group in Germany and the United States, as well as at Deutsche Bank. He began his career at IBM in Germany.<\/p>\n

Bussmann is clearly a believer in the power of information, although it\u2019s not clear whether he has had much direct experience with the SAP BusinessObjects products (BusinessObjects is used within Dresdner Bank<\/a>, previously a subsidiary of Allianz, but the IBM Cognos web site features a success story for Allianz in Germany<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In the article On The Record With AZOA’s Oliver Bussmann<\/em><\/a> he says:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe insurance industry is heavily focused on managing data — the industry is dependent on IT, and IT can facilitate the flow and accessibility of data. We look for ways to leverage core and non-core parts of the business and how to enable new functionalities. This leads to competitive advantages in terms of both business effectiveness and efficiency. IT can enable the introduction of innovative products, bringing them to market more quickly, and improve customer service.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The related article Carrier Confidential: Allianz of America<\/em><\/a> gives a glimpse into Bussmann\u2019s management style, based on IT shared services and close ties with the business:<\/p>\n

\u201cOther features of Bussman’s approach to driving AZOA’s success through the IT shared-services model include collaborating toward buy-in on the part of the business; regulating change efforts through project management, communications and business partner relationship management; tracking benefits back to the business; and, perhaps most important, hiring an experienced leadership team.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He\u2019s also a strong believer in performance metrics and measurement:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of Bockelmann’s innovations was to implement performance metrics for all IT employees. “This was a challenge because individual tasks are often not automatically measured, [as are] those in a call center or business processing department,” he comments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAmong the results of what Bockelmann calls “a highly successful year for operational transformation” in 2007 were CMMI (capability maturity model integration) compliance rates of 98 percent (which is well above the goal of 80 percent), owing to a concerted ongoing education and mentoring program put in place by AZOA’s audit team; a reduction in problem-ticket backlog by 24 percent; an incidence of defects for deployed solutions of less than 2 percent against a goal of 10 percent or less; successful sunsetting of 104 percent of identified applications above a goal of 80 percent; and an increase in throughput by 63 percent, due to work done in CMMI, IBM optimization, application sunsetting and quality improvements, according to Bockelmann.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A presentation by Bussmann at a Global Services Conference<\/a> earlier this year called The Portfolio Approach to Global Sourcing: Managing Risk and Returns<\/em><\/a> shows that he takes IT vendor scorecards seriously:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

Finally, an SAP sponsored white paper from the Economist Intelligence Unit is available called Managing New Technology Realities<\/a> that details Bussmann\u2019s advice on managing complexity and the importance of communication in successful IT projects \u2013 advice that equally holds true for the successful implementation of business intelligence and management information systems:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a>\u201cIt is important that you have teams that understand the different business domains, and also the applications, from an enterprise perspective,\u201d he explains. \u201cThen, if a new project arises, you won\u2019t run into redundant development.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cHaving achieved buy-in initially from company leadership, IT must drive further communication to keep top management informed about ongoing developments and to brief all other stakeholders on the impact of changes. \u201cI have spent a great deal of time over the last two years setting up relationships with the business leaders, updating them on a regular basis,\u201d Mr Bussmann recounts. To reach the AZOA culture more broadly, his organisation has employed a variety of communication vehicles, including meetings, newsletters, workshops and advisory councils.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SAP announced today that Oliver Bussmann will be taking over as CIO. Bussmann is clearly a believer in the power of information, performance metrics, and measurement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[160,204,213,251,779,911],"class_list":["post-12040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bi","tag-business-intelligence","tag-businessobjects","tag-cio","tag-oliver-bussmann","tag-sap"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/oliverbussmann.jpg?fit=100%2C100&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-38c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}