Microsoft’s CIO interviewed by ZDNet’s Dan Farber (video)

Ron Markezich, CIO at Microsoft, is interviewed by ZDNet’s Dan Farber. (Video, 22 minutes

Markezich describes his role as an extension to the product development teams and explain what it’s like to be an Alpha to Release to Market (RTM) enterprise customer for Microsoft.

A few points from the interview:

  • Deployed SP2 six months before release
  • 60,000 employees
  • 2,000 employees within IT, plenty of outsourcing
  • Biggest challenge as CIO is finding the talent to get things done – extensive internship programme
  • 300,000 machines on the network
  • Monoculture – good or bad? Huge advatanges to standardization (not just on Microsoft, includes SAP for ERP and Siebel for CRM).
  • Challenged with providing 1 hour increased productvity per employee…What needs to be done?  “Outlook 2003”.
  • Receive 10 million external emails a day, 9 millions of which are spam (filtered)

[Via Alex Barnett blog]