Roger Gurnani
Executive Vice President and CIO, Verizon

Roger Gurnani is Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Verizon Communication Inc., where he is responsible for information technology strategy, systems development, and operations. Before being named to his current position in October 2010, Gurnani was Senior Vice President of New Product Development for Verizon Wireless and was responsible for the innovation, development, and commercialization of consumer and business products.

Gurnani is one of the founding officers of Verizon Wireless. Until 2005 he served as Vice President and Chief Information Officer, helping to oversee and complete the integration of the domestic wireless operations of Bell Atlantic, Vodafone AirTouch, and GTE at the company’s inception in 2000. He previously served as Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Bell Atlantic Mobile.

Ed Yourdon: So, why don’t we start with the background? People do seem to be curious as to how a CIO gets into his or her position, because you obviously weren’t born into it.

Roger Gurnani: Right, right.

Yourdon: Is this your first position as a CIO, at Verizon?

Gurnani: Uhh, no. So, you know, I was the CIO at Bell Atlantic Mobile. So, most of my career, I grew up in IT, and then…

Yourdon: Starting as a [systems] analyst, as you said earlier?

Gurnani: Yeah, yeah. I was telling you about CASE tools back in the ’80s, and you worked on many different projects. I was with the Williams Companies. They had moved into telecommunications by laying out fiber optics. So that’s how my telecom career from an IT perspective started, when we started laying fiber optic cables. So I got an early start with a startup business, if you will. But then I joined Bell Atlantic, and after a couple of years I became the CIO of Bell Atlantic Mobile, which was a very small wireless operation at that time in the mid-’90s. Today it’s grown in the last 15 years, so I was fortunate to grow with that business as the CIO. And then the last six years I did other stuff. I ran Sales and Operations. I ran the Western Division of Verizon Wireless for a few years. Then I did new product development for Verizon Wireless, which gave me some other opportunities. My current role as the CIO for Verizon Communications, which is the corporate—I’ve been in this role for about five months now. So that’s been my path to CIO.

Yourdon: One of the other things people seem to be quite interested in is the whole question about role models. Was there anybody that inspired you earlier in your career?

Gurnani: You know, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of different people. Through my career, I have had many different bosses. It seems like I’ve learned some things from every boss I’ve had. But here in the last, I would say, 10 or 11 years, I would say I’ve certainly learned a lot from our CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, and our COO, Lowell McAdam. I’ve worked with them and watched them and learned from them, the last ten years or so. And I guess there’s been just so much change in our industry.

Yourdon: That certainly is true.

Gurnani: And, there’s been an opportunity to interact with a lot of different players—new players, you know, entering into our industry, so it’s been an opportunity to learn from those guys as well.

Yourdon: I can imagine. Did you have any special training? Does one go to CIO School to learn how to become a CIO?

Gurnani: I don’t think there’s training per se, but it’s really on the job, you know. I guess a couple of things helped me. One, my first job getting out of college was working for a German manufacturing company that had hired me and put me in a fast-start program.

Yourdon: Ahh, okay.

Gurnani: So the first six, eight months, I did like three weeks in the Sales department, a month in Manufacturing, maybe a few weeks in Accounting/Finance department, a few weeks in IT working on very quick projects, working on a sales proposal or sales bid or a quick design program for IT or whatever. And that gave me a very good, broad perspective on how businesses work.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Gurnani: I think that was probably foundational, learning in my career. That’s really helped me. The next thing that happened was when Williams Companies started WilTel, the telecommunications business. We probably did like 20 acquisitions in 5 or 6 years. And I got the opportunity to integrate these smaller organizations —and integrate the IT portfolios, the systems and streamline not only the IT side of things, but also the business side of things. So that came in very handy when Bell Atlantic Mobile merged with Nynex Mobile and then when we formed Verizon Wireless, which was bringing in lots of different companies together. So that experience in a small scale came in very handy about eight, ten years later.

Yourdon: Sure.

Gurnani: We were putting together the largest wireless operations in the country, right?

Yourdon: That’s an interesting point that I’ve not heard from any of the other CIOs that I’ve interviewed, but I certainly have seen it, especially in the Wall Street area. When these enormous financial services companies merge, they’ve got enormous systems that have got to be consolidated or they have to just pick one and turn the other one off or lots of variations, so you get to see quite a variety of things. That is interesting. Certainly, the one theme that I’ve been hearing quite a lot is the value of a broad educational background, not only in university, but also in the first few assignments after. As you say, you get to see a wide spectrum of things going on.

Gurnani: Right.

Yourdon: Because I’m sure once you get into your current position, and obviously you have to interact with the business peers in all different parts of the company.

Gurnani: Right.

Yourdon: So that is handy. What about your current position as a CIO now? If you had to summarize your role in helping to make Verizon more successful, what would it be?

Gurnani: So my role right now—I have business unit CIOs, so we’re organized in consumer telecom business, enterprise business, wireless business, shared services, wholesale, etc. So, each one of these business units has a CIO. And then we have a team that runs all our IT infrastructure.

Yourdon: Ahh, okay.

Gurnani: So that’s how my function is organized. But what I spend a lot of my own time on is IT strategy: how do we drive IT forward? A lot of time on alignment, making sure IT is very well aligned with the business objectives, with the business goals.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Gurnani: With the business leaders, looking at our business objectives and seeing what change needs to happen to achieve those objectives, both from a business standpoint as well as from a business process standpoint. Obviously, you try to look at things from the customers’ viewpoint: what do our customers want? And I tell you, what’s really helped me is the five, six years that I spent outside of IT.

Yourdon: Ahh, okay.

Gurnani: So the three years that I spent running all of our sales channels and operations, running the western part of Verizon Wireless, and then for two years doing new product development. So either thinking that, “Well, okay, 4G is coming. How do we take advantage of that? What would customers benefit from?” Working with others in the company as well, particularly marketing, but taking new products from concept to commercialization.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Gurnani: So that experience really helped me a lot. Having grown up in IT and then spending six years and then doing other jobs, I think has given me new perspectives on how to better leverage IT.

Yourdon: I can imagine. I remember visiting a telephone company in Phoenix. This was about 1991 and they were showing me kind of the next generation of technology, and I’d never heard of call forwarding and call waiting and caller ID and all these things. That was pretty mind-boggling. And I have to imagine that kind of process continues on—there’s going to be another generation of mobile technology next year or next week or the next decade.

Gurnani: Yeah. You know, mobile technology has obviously become mainstream. It is only about 20 years old. But this has become mainstream. Now people spend more time interacting with their mobile devices than they do with their computers and stuff.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Gurnani: If you think about personal computing, that’s not that old either. It’s only in the early ’80s when personal computing came about. And it is shifting very rapidly. I think the traditional personal computer, the desktop computer, is now obsolete. New phone factors, tablets, and so on. So, that’s happening. The devices, the people they track with, there’s a lot of innovation that’s going on there. There’s a lot of innovation that’s going on with networks. From a wireless perspective, we’ve gone from a 2G to 3G to 4G now. And you’re talking about tenfold improvements in terms of throughput capabilities.

Yourdon: With each one of those?

Gurnani: With each one of those.

Yourdon: Wow.

Gurnani: And then obviously we rolled out fiber to customers’ homes with our FiOS¹ product. The capabilities that we have with FiOS are unprecedented. So, that’s happening. The other thing that’s happening is digitization of content.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Gurnani: Whether it’s pictures, multimedia, music. You know, you’re talking about this [interview] is going to get recorded as an MP3 file. So everything is getting digitized with the amount of information and data that people want to consume. Now people want to watch movies and TV, download it through the Internet. So, we’re seeing exponential growth with data consumption. And if you put all these things together, it creates huge new opportunities to create new innovative products and services, so … we just announced the launch of our 4G smartphone, which is in the U.S. the first LTE, long-term evolution technology-based smartphone. And some of the capabilities it has are very high-end games, attractive games that you can play with people that are literally across the country. It’s just amazing.

Yourdon: Now, it raises an interesting question, and I’ll give you a couple of examples, because I’d be curious about your take on it, as to the CIO’s role in helping shape or support information-based products. When I interviewed the CIO of Google, I asked him, “Are you in charge of Google apps?” And he said, “Oh, no, no, no.”

__________

Gurnani: That’s a product role.

Yourdon: “That’s a product. That’s somebody else’s job.” He said, “I keep the lights on here inside the company and do a whole bunch of other things.” And when I talked to the CIO of Microsoft, I asked him a similar question, and he said, “Well, we’re the first in line in terms of dogfooding,” as he put it. “You know, we interact a lot with the product people.”

Gurnani: Tony Scott.

Yourdon: Tony Scott, exactly. Yes. “But we’re the first people who actually try it out.” So is there a similar kind of situation for you?

Gurnani: No. I would say for, for our company, IT is a bit more involved with product development, product realization. Let me give you a couple of examples. So IT does the normal things that you would expect. We enable all the back-office operations, you know, all our ERP systems. The financials.

Yourdon: I refer to that as “keeping the lights on,” running the factory in the background. Back office.

Gurnani: Well, there’s more to the back office in our business, because we’re a service-oriented company, so keeping the lights on is making sure all the customer-touching channels are running as well, okay? So all our retail stores, all our centers, telesales, all our online touchpoints. You know, more than half our customer transactions, customer interactions happen with online mechanisms, or through cell phones, and so on. So that is keeping the lights on.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: So, definitely, IT has to be central to enabling that. But as it relates to new products, as we roll out new interactive capabilities on our televisions through FiOS—like recently we’ve rolled out, a product which is called “FlexView.” It allows you to consume content from multiple screens and you can browse, purchase or rent, watch, archive, share, depending on the content, from your big-screen TV, from your computer in the house, from your smartphones and tablets, no matter where you are connected to the Internet.

Yourdon: Actually, I did see a commercial of a similar or an allegedly similar capability from Time Warner on TV last night, so I have a sense of it.

Gurnani: So, making sure the product itself works … obviously it’s a collaborative effort. There are technology groups within the company, people that build and operate our networks. Those teams are involved. Our marketing folks are involved: how we create demand for it, how do we price it, etc. And then IT has to not only be part of the product realization, from product enablement, but also operationalize the product. Make sure our sales channels can sell the product.

Yourdon: I see.

Gurnani: Make sure our customer support channels online and human-based customer support channels can support the product. Make sure we can bill and collect revenue for the products. Make sure we can collect a product, etc. So I would say 80 percent of products we roll out have to be supported by our central IT systems.

Yourdon: Interesting. That raises another related question that I’ve asked just about every CIO about, which has to do with the kind of role and influence that you have on your business peers. As you’ve been saying, you’ve got people in marketing and various product groups, and so forth, and they’re all obviously very successful people because (a) they’re smart, and (b) they have very strong personalities—and yet I’m sure you’ve seen situations where you’re worried that they’re going off in the wrong direction or they’ve not seen some opportunities that they could be taking advantage of. But, on the other hand, they don’t work for you, so you can’t order them. You can order people in your own organization, but certainly not your peers. How do you go about influencing people in terms of the technology that you think should either be used or not be used?

Gurnani: Yeah. So I think that it comes down to building those relationships. So now you’ve touched on—you know, a lot of people ask me, “So, what does it take to run IT?” And people obviously think IT is all about technology.

[both laughing]

Gurnani: And you know this very well: IT is more about people and relationships. So you can have the best engineers, technically speaking, but they are not totally aligned with the business objectives, no matter how good a technical system or product they create, it doesn’t create business results, you know? It doesn’t create the business benefits.

Yourdon: Right.

Gurnani: So making sure IT is totally lock-step aligned with the rest of the business, whether it’s marketing or finance or customer support, operations, etc., is in my view just the most important factor that measures how successful the business is in leveraging IT.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: So it comes down to relationships and interaction and I spend a lot of time in that regard. I encourage my people to spend a lot of time in that regard. And I think this thing doesn’t happen overnight. You have to build credibility, have that working rapport over an extended period of time. So once you get a couple of successful projects or a couple of successful laps, with your peers, whether it’s marketing or business unit presidents or operations or finance people, then it becomes easy, right?

Yourdon: Yeah. And I’ve heard similar responses from other CIOs, who say, “You need to look for opportunities where you can achieve some demonstrable success, because when you get a track record of several of those, then they start to trust you more.”

Gurnani: Yeah, and I think that over my 30 years—I’m rounding it to 30 years of my professional life—I have seen this become better, easier, simply because today’s business environment, today’s personal environment, in our personal life, everything is so technology-dependent and technology-interwoven. You know, we’re so dependent on our PDAs and smartphones and so dependent on all the entertainment is now in some form of digital interaction. All our productivity tools and what we do around the house now are all very technology-driven. As a human being, you interact with probably 30, 40 different companies.

Yourdon: That’s true.

Gurnani: There’s so much technology that comes into play and we’re so accustomed to it that it seems natural—so there’s far greater recognition that technology is a key part of running the business today than it was twenty, thirty years ago. At least, that’s been my experience.

Yourdon: Well, as you say, now it’s a pervasive part of life in general. But certainly, if you’re running a technology company, any kind of information company in the broader sense of the term, you’re more likely to have business executives who have a higher level of understanding and appreciation and so forth than might be the case if you were a widget company. As you know, 30 years ago, there were a lot of business executives, vice president–level people who couldn’t even do e-mail. Obviously, that has changed for everybody to some extent, but especially in an information company, I would think. There’s, there’s another aspect that just occurred to me that I’d be curious about because of the news headlines every day. A lot of the companies I’ve spoken to have some degree of global presence, and the CIOs have said to me, “Basically, we’re on call 24 hours a day ’cause stuff happens around the world 24 hours a day.”

Gurnani: Right, whatever happens.

Yourdon: How does that affect you, or Verizon?

Gurnani: It does. You know, we are a global business as well. We have a global IP backbone. We carry about 30 percent of the Internet traffic globally.

Yourdon: Wow. Is that right?

Gurnani: We provide not only network services, connectivity services globally; we also provide IT solutions and now we’re getting into the cloud space as well. We provide those services globally.

Yourdon: Aha. Okay.

Gurnani: We have employees around the globe. Our IT organization is also global. That gives us a little bit of flexibility in terms of running a global around-the-clock operation. So we’ve got systems work, for example, going on around the clock. We’ve got people watching the stuff and doing stuff from different parts of the world. And then there’s a handoff, which is like the “follow the sun” model.

Yourdon: Ahh, okay.

Gurnani: Now, we haven’t perfected it, but we are maturing. We’re getting better and working out the kinks, but today’s business does require that type of a model for our customers.

Yourdon: Does that mean that you might get a phone call or an e-mail at three in the morning saying, “There’s been another earthquake someplace?”

Gurnani: Yeah. Having been in IT most of my career, I’ve been pretty used to that.

Yourdon: You mentioned a familiar buzzword a few moments ago, and it’s one of the next sections that I wanted to get into, which is new trends that might influence the industry in the future—cloud computing being one example. There’s a lot of debate about whether it really is new, but putting that aside, what kind of new technologies do you see really having a big impact on the Verizon kind of industry?

Gurnani: So, cloud is definitely a trend. What’s happening is more and more customers want a one-stop shop and they want not only the network services; they want the infrastructure, the software, the applications, all together and packaged, flexible, on-demand, right? So, more and more customers are adopting that model. This concept is not new, but the adoption is picking up speed, and this is a natural for small and medium-sized businesses, because they don’t have a large IT organization and it’s difficult for them to make an investment, support it themselves, and going to a cloud model lets you not have to worry about upgrades. As the technology evolves, they can be assured that they will be able to play … it’s more of a utility model if you will.

Yourdon: Right.

Gurnani: So it’s definitely penetrated the small to medium segment. The large enterprise customers are also interested in this model because the economics make a whole lot of sense. It’s a different economic model. We offer a full stack of cloud services and we’ve been pretty aggressive in expanding our capabilities in this area.

We acquired a couple or three years ago, Cybertrust Security practice, which is very well known, has done very well. Recently we acquired a Terramark, which runs a lot of data centers. We own lots of data centers around the globe. We obviously provide the network-based services, but we have been also providing the infrastructure services and now it’s the full cloud utility. So that’s a trend.

Mobility, there’s lots happening. Now enterprise customers are beginning to say, “Well, we provide our employees a computer and a smartphone or a tablet. Why can’t the employee do everything they need to do on one device?” Or, “How can we virtualize the device?”

Yourdon: Hmm.

Gurnani: “When they come to work, it’s a business device. When they go home, it becomes a personal device. How can you make it more secure?” All that stuff. So, the enterprises have their unique needs. The individual consumers have different needs, you know. The other trend that’s happening very fast is, in the ’80s, ’90s, information technology used to be created for, primarily for businesses and enterprises. But today what’s happening is, you know, a lot of technology is for consumers and then it’s being applied or practically pulled into the enterprise environment.

Yourdon: Well, to some extent that’s a form of what you were just talking about a moment ago with cloud computing, that it’s initially very attractive to the startup companies and then maybe somewhat later on that the Fortune 500 companies begin to say, “Hey, this is interesting.”

Gurnani: The Fortune 500 are also, you know, getting into it because from an economics standpoint, you don’t have to spend a lot of capital. So it makes a lot of economic sense.

Yourdon: Sure. But the general trend that you mentioned a second ago is one that Ben Fried of Google mentioned to me: “Instead of starting with enterprise-oriented apps and then seeing how we can push them down to the consumer, now it’s flipped around.”

Gurnani: It’s flipped around.

Yourdon: “And we’re starting off,” with Google being the classic example, with Google Mail and Google Apps. They start at the consumer level, and then they go up and make it more bulletproof and secure and so forth so that it has a market in the enterprise.”

Gurnani: You know, a lot of the devices, the consumer electronics devices—the phone you’re holding there, the tablets and so on—created for the consumer and then very quick, rapid adoption by businesses, right?

Yourdon: Right.

Gurnani: Whereas in the old days, it used to be we created a computer, what it was for the business, and then pushed it down.

Yourdon: Yeah. Now, part of what makes this interesting, is that some of these trends have been underway for 5, 10, 20, 30 years, and we imagine that they will continue on. Do you see any brand-new things that we basically didn’t have five or ten years ago that will become significant trends over the next decade?

Gurnani: We’re still in the early stages of those trends. So digitization of information—that trend, we’re still in the early days. Now you’re talking about digitizing healthcare records and other records. So the future is all about digitizing. It’s a digitized world, and I think we’re still in the early stages of life, and it’s only accelerating.

We talked about how, as the demand for information and data consumption continues to grow and people now are consuming and demanding lots more data, with lots of choice, flexibility, freedom. So they don’t want to buy the package, they want to buy a la carte: “I want to watch this show at this time at my convenience,” rather than when the show comes on.

Yourdon: Right.

Gurnani: So, I think that thread is only going to accelerate. I think it’s only going to accelerate—all the advances with networks, broadband networks, 4G networks, etc., advances in devices are going to enable virtual corporations, virtual enterprises. So, sometime in the future, you won’t need buildings like these to run a large business. People could be anywhere. That is happening. For example, we run our IT help desk with a lot of people that are in different places. Three days, four days, they can work from home. We have the ability to route the calls to their house. And the customers, the end users, don’t even know the difference. In fact, we’ve seen our user satisfaction scores go up, our productivity levels go up.

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.

Gurnani: And so that’s just a small example of what perhaps the future might hold.

Yourdon: One other thing you said earlier may shed some light on it. You were talking about the evolution of these networks, from 1G to 2G to 3G and so on, and saying that each one of them represented a ten-fold improvement. There’s an old saying that if you improve technology by 10 percent, it’s incremental and will kind of be ignored—but if you make it ten-fold, a factor of 10, that changes the very quality of the technology, the experience and so on.

People do things fundamentally differently if they have to drive 30 miles per hour versus getting in an airplane and flying 300 miles per hour. So if that continues—well, Moore’s Law, I think, is safe for another decade or so. So whatever we’ve got today is going to be 100 times faster, cheaper, smaller within a decade, which is pretty amazing. So that will probably create, as you were saying, new demands, new uses, things that we can’t even imagine right now.

Gurnani: So, people working from home—that’s happening. The other thing, how it’s manifesting itself in the business environment, its value is starting to shift at very fast speeds now. You have major businesses, like Netflix, for example, that didn’t exist a few years ago. Now it’s so big. So new business models shift in value. You know, innovation can come from anywhere, ’cause it’s a digital super-interconnected world.

Yourdon: Right. That’s an area that I’ve been trying to explore and I’ve had great trouble doing, but I’ll give you an example: I was hoping to be able to talk to the CIO of, let’s say, Avis or Hertz on one side and Zipcar on the other side—’cause there’s an example where technology has facilitated an entirely different business model. Do you see that kind of disruption taking place in the telecommunications industry?

Gurnani: Well, it has and I think we’ve already gone through a couple of waves of disruption. Mobile is huge, and you look at how the ecosystem continues to evolve and change. Like Apple was not in the mobile business until four years ago. Today they’re big. And they’ve created a nice spot for themselves. So, yes, there are a lot of disruptive forces in our ecosystem. However, our bedrock, our foundation is making sure that we build very reliable, state-of-the-art networks.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: Which takes a lot of expertise, a lot of capital, and people who need that at the end of the day. So, that’s the core part of our value chain if you will.

Yourdon: Interesting. How do you take into account the changing marketplace, attitudes, especially from one generation to the next? Notwithstanding the technology, I would not be willing to watch a movie on a tiny screen like my iPhone, but my kids will. I’m willing to read the newspaper on a Kindle, but my wife won’t. Do you build that into your planning as well?

Gurnani: I would say, in the last few years, yes, we have to build that into our planning because we, just like everybody else, we are realizing what’s happened, how fast things are changing. So there’s no doubt, the younger generation, they don’t want a wired phone, a telephone line to the house, apartment, or whatever. Wireless is good enough for them. We started seeing that trend several years ago.

Yourdon: Yes.

Gurnani: We are also seeing trends—as I mentioned to you before, people are spending more time in front of their mobile devices than they are in front of their stationery devices. We rolled out our service, which allows you to browse, purchase or rent and consume and share content on multiple screens, because we know customers want choice. They want flexibility. So that’s what it’s all about. It’s called “customer is king.” It means flexibility, and the younger generation demonstrate those traits. [laughter]

Yourdon: And how do you go about finding out what it is the younger generation wants or is thinking or dreaming about?

Gurnani: We hire the younger generation as well. [laughter]

Yourdon: And just watch them?

Gurnani: No, we talk to our younger-generation customers as well. We get feedback from our customers. That’s the other change that’s happened—getting feedback from customers, I think, over the years has become a lot easier.

Yourdon: That’s true. If they can just do something right on their mobile device and just send it in.

Gurnani: Or go online, blogs or customer forums, get feedback that way. You get feedback from a lot of different sources. So the online properties of Verizon.com, it’s become a very central customer-engagement channel for us.

Yourdon: Interesting. Now you mentioned the younger generation coming to work here, either in the IT department or anywhere else. Aside from their greater sense of comfort with technology or familiarity, do you notice any other changes with the younger generation of employees that are either good or bad?

Gurnani: I think it’s mostly good, but there are a few things. I think the social interaction and the face-to-face communications, interactions I think are still important. Maybe I’m from the older generation. I’m biased with my view. But in my opinion that face-to-face interaction and that teaming collaboration is still important. And I think the younger generation does not pay as much attention to that.

Yourdon: They’d rather just text you than just look you in the eye and tell you something.

Gurnani: Yes. But I think this is mostly positive, right? I wouldn’t say there’s anything that stands out that’s something that’s a big issue.

Yourdon: One of the answers I expected to get in this area, from CIOs in particular, since part of their job is protecting the information asset, one of the things I expected was that the younger generation has less regard for the traditional kind of…

Gurnani: See, in my notes, I wrote down “intellectual property rights.”

Yourdon: Ahh, okay.

Gurnani: But I didn’t know if you wanted to go down that trail or not—but you’re right. You’re right. We see some of our younger employees, they’re very comfortable going on Twitter, going on Facebook and talking, and sometimes they need to be guided a bit in terms of what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate, in terms of what gets put where.

Yourdon: Guidance certainly is quite understandable, but one of the things that I started seeing maybe three years ago, when the whole Web 2.0 world took off, was companies just completely outlawing blogs, saying that, “Basically, we just don’t trust our employees. We’re not going to let them blog because they might allow some of these intellectual property things to get out in the open.”

Gurnani: I think we’ve been through that phase.

Yourdon: That may be another example of things changing far more rapidly than they did when I was a young man.

Gurnani: And in my opinion, that doesn’t work, just completely blocking. So there are some controls that you have to put in place. But I think what’s more effective is training awareness, coaching, guiding employees, and making them understand the responsibility they have in protecting information assets and what’s the right business judgment versus not.

Yourdon: Sure. I agree. And I’ve always said to people, “You’ve had that same problem 20 years ago, that your employees could go out into the public and attend a technical conference or write an article for a magazine and the same issues applied.” Now it’s more instant. And sometimes people do act in kind of an impetuous fashion without thinking about what they’re doing.

Gurnani: So we have a code of business conduct. We do a lot of training and communicating what’s the right thing to do. Once in a while we have a violation, and we take appropriate actions. I think that’s something that you have to do all of the time. Sometimes you see even our older employees.

Yourdon: That’s a good point. It’s not just the young ones necessarily.

Gurnani: So I think it’s part of maturing and becoming a responsible employee. And I think the employers or the companies have to facilitate that.

Yourdon: There’s another aspect of younger employees that I’m curious about… a phenomenon of kids coming out of college and applying for jobs as a team. Have you seen that at all?

Gurnani: As a team?

Yourdon: As a team. “Hire all of us or none of us.”

Gurnani: No, we haven’t seen that.

Yourdon: Okay. Well, maybe that was an exception then. Because he was telling me about four kids who came out of MIT, and they studied together, worked together, learned software together, and they wanted to work together. And three of them got a job offer from some very good company, and the other one didn’t, so.

Gurnani: So they declined.

Yourdon: So they all turned it down.

Gurnani: Oh, wow. No, I haven’t heard that, but I have seen people from MIT seem to be connected and want to do things.

Yourdon: [laughter] I’m an MIT graduate, and we were loners when I went to school there. What about the degree of control you impose on new hires with regard to the personal devices that they either bring into the office with them or take home with them?

Gurnani: We have certain standards, and we have certain guidelines, okay? And, given that we sell a variety of devices to the consumers, our policies are quite open. And I often have this dialogue with the peer community, other CIOs—who want to restrict the devices. We can manage multiple devices as the security solutions work fairly well. So we practice and eat our own dog food there as well.

Yourdon: That’s a good opportunity that a lot of companies don’t have, I suppose.

Gurnani: Yeah, exactly right. Now, we also work with our partners, people who make these gadgets and make these operating systems and make the apps and services that run on these—we work with them as we see certain opportunities to improve and solidify, strengthen security aspects. But enterprises have to pay attention to security. You have to protect. You have an obligation to the customers, plus in many cases it’s the law. We have to abide by the law as well.

Yourdon: Yeah. So there may be security regulations. Yeah. Well, I’m getting a consistent theme from just about everybody on that score as well. Again, it was not too long ago that you would hear CIOs saying, “Our employees are only allowed to have a BlackBerry or only allowed to have a Windows PC or whatever. That’s it. Period.” And now they can’t impose that degree of control. They can certainly deal with guidelines and security policies and things of that sort, but not everybody has the variety of devices that you’re providing to the consumer marketplace. But almost all of the CIOs I’ve spoken to have backed off and have said, “Within some reasonable limits, you can bring any gadget you want into the office. As long as you behave with it properly.”

Gurnani: Right.

Yourdon: Okay. That is interesting. Now you mentioned a second ago comparing notes or chatting with other CIOs—and I’d like to pursue that for just a second. How important is that in your role as a CIO?

Gurnani: I think it’s very important. We obviously pick up different tips or ideas, suggestions. If one’s got a particular need, you can always bounce off different ideas to see if it helps there. Many times, our companies are trying to do business together and there is partnership, collaboration, between the business development executives, between the marketing, the sales executives. And if you strike up a conversation between the CIOs, that can further along the partnership or the collaboration.

Yourdon: It makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right.

Gurnani: So, I find that becoming a key part of that dialogue with the CIO community. It comes in very handy.

Yourdon: I would think that a CIO in any company is going to be dealing with vendors, whether it’s hardware vendors or software vendors or whatever—so connecting to the CIO of those vendor companies is a given. And I certainly have gotten the impression that there’s a fair amount of—it’s almost like a club, particularly because some CIOs do move around from one place to another, and there are annual conferences and so on, and after a while you get to know who you can call up and or e-mail to ask a question.

Gurnani: Yep, yep, yep.

Yourdon: What about the people who work with you as part of your own team? In your case, you said it was CIOs of the various business units and so forth. Are there particular skills or criteria that you look for to have somebody on your team? What things really matter to you in that area?

Gurnani: You know, I have a fairly seasoned team—which helps out a lot. To answer your question, it’s really focused on business results—but I wanted to get to one of your questions here. [sounds of looking through papers] Umm, here it is. You know, I think you were asking what would prevent my subordinates to do my job?

Yourdon: What weaknesses might prevent them from doing a good job as the CIO?

Gurnani: So, what I wanted to mention to you was two of my good subordinates are ready to do my job. And they’ve been with the business for a long time. And a couple of them I hired many years ago. I feel like I’ve been groomed for my job for the last many years. You got rotated into the business, worldwide sales, operations, global product development. But I think two things are important. It’s really focusing on business results.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: So getting an IT project done is not sufficient. Yeah, you have to get that done. That’s table stake. But then are you extracting or leveraging that IT capability to drive business results—so that’s what I, encourage my team to do. So I always tell them, “Big project. Long project. A lot of hard work. You got to get it done. It’s in production. Good job,” but that’s day one of that project.

[both laughing]

Yourdon: Right.

Gurnani: “Now we gotta make sure it’s really delivered, what we said we’d deliver.” So is it driving sales? Is it driving revenue growth? Or is it driving efficiencies or product acceptance? So that’s one. The other is really making sure you have very strong business relationship management, business alignment. So making sure IT is working on the right stuff that’s really going to matter for the business.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: As I said, I’ve been through like 60 mergers and acquisitions in my career, so I’ve worked with many different companies and had to integrate IT pieces and so on. A lot of times you see IT is working on stuff that’s really great stuff. But does it really matter for the business? You know, if you think about it from a business standpoint. So those are the two things that I think are the key points, where CIOs can make a huge, huge difference to a business.

Yourdon: Now how can we turn that into advice for the young IT professional who’s aspiring to become a CIO 20 years from now? What would you tell him or her?

Gurnani: So a couple of things there. One, learn the business.

Yourdon: Learn the business. Okay.

Gurnani: And the second thing is, you not only want to be an IT leader; you want to be a business leader. So I’ll tell you a story. This again goes back to the ’80s, you know, my early days. Within IT, you had midlevel managers, leaders, and the business people actually had to fund the projects, okay? And what that resulted in was, within IT, a lot of internal competition and politics and it was intended to create good alignment with the business, but what I saw was, it was actually hurting the IT to business objectives alignment. And I saw what was going on, and even though the business said, “Okay, this is what we want, and this is what we are funding,” within IT there were competitive forces where—someone would try to undermine the project for the other, because that’s the way the environment was.

I think that’s where I learned a few lessons about how important it is for IT and all the business functions to be totally aligned and all moving together. And if you can create an environment that does that, you just get the maximum leverage, maximum benefit in terms of IT.

Yourdon: Okay. Very interesting. I’ve got some questions about problems and concerns and issues. What is it that keeps you up at night—if there is anything that keeps you awake? [laughter] And I think I know the answer to this, but it’s one that I’ve asked all the CIOs.

Gurnani: I think your question was, “What political problems and issues do you face?” And, I would say—I’ve been with our company for a long time. I know all the business leaders, all the way from the top down and across very well. So if, if there’s a minor issue, I’m very easily able to work through that—and having said that, our business culture is such that there’s a lot of emphasis on teamwork and customer focus and results, so politics is not an issue per se. Your other question on problems, threats, issues, concerns over the next year or two: security—obviously, we talked quite a bit about that—is top of mine. And that’s because it’s such a large business. You know, hundreds of thousands of employees, millions of customers, global, and, you always have to keep that top of mind, not only in my mind, but everybody else’s.

You know, some other things I would say in that area is, our industry, our ecosystem, is going through some phenomenal changes. We talked about how value is shifting between players and if you look at what’s happened in the music industry and all that. So digitization is creating some great new trends. And as I also mentioned earlier, our bedrock foundation is making sure that we build very powerful and very reliable networks, because everybody at the end of the day is going to need networks and the ability to communicate, whether it’s wireless or through fiber or a global IP backbone.

Yourdon: Something you said earlier is relevant here. I would think that one of your possible concerns might be that the technology is changing so rapidly that you may not have enough time to amortize or to depreciate the capital investment you’ve been forced to make in these very expensive networks. When I was just getting out of college, the old story was that AT&T/Bell Labs built stuff that lasted for 40 years, and that gave them plenty of time to write it off. But if a whole new generation of technology comes along three years later and you’ve already sunk x billion dollars into the previous technology—maybe it doesn’t keep you, but the CFO awake at night.

Gurnani: No, that’s almost become a core competency of ours, okay? That’s what we do for a living. [laughter]

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: Okay, so going from 2G to 3G to 4G—our 4G program is a three-year program, a four-year program to build up, and our 2G is still going to be around for the next 10 years, 12 years, because we have still millions of customers that are still using it.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: Okay. So, an example I would give you is, in the early ’90s we built analog cellular networks. We just shut down analog about three, four years ago. So even though new technology had been overlaid on top of the old technology, it’s the same thing that happens with IT or a computer in your house. You don’t shut down your old computer the day you bring in your new computer. Either you give it to your kid or you keep it as a side computer, maybe for a special task or something. So all that gets factored into how we do our planning, technology planning each year.

Yourdon: Well, that’s a very good point. And the other software example, of course, is that we’re still running COBOL, in legacy apps, 50 years after they were written and probably will for another 50 years. Umm, I scribbled down another note that just occurred to me—I don’t know if it relates to your industry at all, but you had mentioned music before. You know, the whole music industry rested on the idea that people respected intellectual property. And now society obviously has begun looking at that entirely differently. IBM and Microsoft depended on the notion that proprietary software would always be a profitable venture, and now open-source software changes that quite a lot. Is there anything equivalent for the telecommunications world?

Gurnani: Not really because we are a distribution channel for the people who create the bits and bytes and stuff, right? So, we don’t necessarily get into the bits and bytes per se.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: But we connect the end points that the bits and bytes move between, whether it’s a movie or a video or a song or e-mail or a voice call or a voicemail. We don’t get involved with those. We’re the distribution channel. And the other thing that we do is facilitate the commerce that takes place—so billing customers, collecting customers, doing revenue sharing, or whatever the case may be. We will produce the bits to the people who consume the bits. So I don’t believe there’s something equivalent directly as it relates to telecom, but there’s no doubt as those things happen, they are massive value shifts that happen within the ecosystem.

Yourdon: Okay.

Gurnani: We are players, right? So we have to be agile enough to make sure that we recognize those value shifts and we don’t do anything stupid to get caught in the undercurrents.

Yourdon: Okay, one last question for you, and it’s kind of the obvious ending point: Where do you see yourself going next? What is life after CIO?

Gurnani: I don’t know. As I mentioned to you, I just got to this job five months ago, so I’m having fun. Intellectually, I find my job challenging. Professionally, it’s rewarding. There’s lots to be done here. We’ve got some challenges and some things to do, for the next two, three, four, five years, I’m busy.

But, a couple of things I will add. Throughout my career, I’ve done a lot of things, moved into different roles. As I said, I spent six years or so outside of IT, ran Sales, Operations when I was the West Area president for Verizon Wireless, in new product development. None of my moves throughout my career—and I know this sounds unbelievable—have been planned moves. They just seem to have happened.

Yourdon: I’ve heard that from at least one other person.

Gurnani: So my current job, I didn’t plan to be in this job. But I got the call. My previous job I wasn’t planning to be in, but I got the call. The previous job I wasn’t planning to be in. So I’ve not had to plan my moves throughout my career. It’s things have happened.

Yourdon: Opportunities have presented themselves.

Gurnani: Yes. So, so I don’t tend to worry about or think about, “Okay, what’s next?”

Yourdon: I, I had kind of expected when I started putting this together that an awful lot of CIOs would say, “I enjoy this, but the next step would be something up to the CEO level.” Almost nobody has said that.

Gurnani: So, three, three and a half years I was the West Area president for Verizon Wireless. I was running the business, I had all the sales channels, I had all the customer support operations, I had P&L responsibility, marketing, PR, etc. So it was not a CEO job, but it was close to that.

Yourdon: Pretty close.

Gurnani: Yeah. Pretty close. You know, I used to get involved with some state-level regulatory issues and stuff like that, so a lot of different dimensions. And I learned a lot, but I also realized that, “Okay, where I can create more value for a company and business is in the job I’m in.”

Yourdon: In the CIO job.

Gurnani: CIO. And I can definitely do that job, but all my experiences, 30 years or so, I would say have prepared me for this job better than they have prepared me for anything else.

Yourdon: I would think also part of the answer that anyone would give to a question like that would be based on your own belief about the future relevance or importance of the CIO position. And I gather that’s a common area of debate among CIOs when they get together or at the CIO.com conferences. Will there be a CIO ten years from now?

Gurnani: As we were talking earlier, IT, information technology, is now so central to running any business. It’s like making sure you’re managing your finances. You’ve got to manage your IT, you’ve got to manage it. It’s that central. And I think most businesses right now realize that.

Yourdon: The CIO of Detroit Energy, whom I spoke to, had the same answer. She said, “I’ve never planned my next position, but, you know, out of the blue the phone would ring, and lo and behold.”

Gurnani: Yeah.

Yourdon: She said she got really good at deciding what opportunities to turn down, but she never worried about whether something eventually would come along. Very, very interesting. Okay, well, I could go on all day, but I’m sure you’ve got tons of other things to do, so I think I will turn this off.