Tyco Fixes Won't Include 'Mother Of All ERPs'Tyco Fixes Won't Include 'Mother Of All ERPs'

On Aug. 1, Dana Deasy became Tyco International Ltd.'s first-ever corporate-level CIO, a challenging job even if the company hadn't been through a whirl of controversy including allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud. The company says it's also going to have to restate financials dating back to 1998.

Deasy was previously VP and CIO of Siemens AG's Americas business, where he oversaw 20 CIOs and an annual IT budget of more than $600 million. Prior to that, he was CIO of GM's $2 billion locomotive group. information editor Larry Greenemeier sat down with Deasy after two weeks on the job to talk about setting up IT standards, winning back investor confidence, and why the Tyco job offer appealed to him.

information: What made you decide to step into such a high-profile role with a company that spent the last year healing from such intense public scrutiny?

Deasy: Let's look at this first from a personal standpoint and then I'll tell you a little about the Tyco. If you look at my career, this was the next logical step. I've gone from business unit CIO at GM to a large regional CIO at Siemens, and my aspirations have always been for a global leadership position, which Tyco presented to me. My goodness, where do I ever start to talk about why one would want to come to Tyco? This is a $36 billion turnaround-in-progress with product, services, and support businesses that are No. 1 and No. 2 two in all their industries. On top of that, because a [corporate-level] CIO never existed, this is a greenfield opportunity to take my best practices from General Motors and Siemens and apply them--this was just too irresistible to turn down.

information: How can business technology help Tyco drive efficiency and productivity gains, especially in a company that's built through acquisitions? Is your thinking that you'd like to see a consistent set of technologies implemented across the different business units, or that department-level CIOs will have more discretion in terms of what they would like to use?

Deasy: There's going to be little time and little debate spent on whether we're going to standardize. We absolutely need to. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit and opportunities for standardization of our networks--wide area, local area--as well as purchasing and vendor management. We frankly need to take our buying power and our economies of scale and drive those across all the operating units. People like to ask me the question, "Are we going to put the mother of all ERP systems in here," and the answer is absolutely not. Am I going to be looking for the CIOs to drive standardization where they can at the business-segment level? You betcha. Do we need every business unit running its own CRM, SCM, PLM, ERP, the alphabet soup of the day? No.

information: What role does business technology play in helping companies deliver clean financials and win the confidence of investors?

Deasy: Financial controls are based on having the right data in place for the right people at the right time, with the right content, and making sure that data is truly valid. Everything I just said requires IT systems, IT technology, IT processes to bring that about. I've been asked this question more than once on what is the role of IT when it comes to financial controls. I don't want to be so presumptuous as to think it's self evident, but it's fairly obvious that good financial controls require the right information, the right data, and it has to be aggregated in the right way, and it has to be secured in the right way.

information: Will this come through individual software packages, or do you think it's more a matter of corporate policy? How much can technology do for you?

Deasy: I see technology as definitely being a supporting role, not the leadership role here. This means that the business organizations--corporate governance, financial, treasury, and internal audit--need to define what it is as a company that has to be collected, aggregated, and made available. IT then is there to help put in the enabling technology and solutions.

information: What are the top projects on your radar?

Deasy: I like to use the 60-30-10 rule right now. Sixty percent of what I'm trying to address right now is operational excellence. Where can I put standards in place? Where can I better drive vendor management? We're also looking at telecom sourcing solutions for voice and data. Then there's this 30% side that says, let's face it, the real value in the long run of any organization is where you start to enable the company to do new things. There are definitely some great opportunities we have in the intranet space, in the employee portal space. And then, frankly, the last 10% is building out a leadership team and putting in place the global processes and methodologies that are needed to have a world class CIO organization. You're looking at employee No. 1.

Photo of Dana Deasy by Ken Schles

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