The Big Gulp

Now three years into his stint at PepsiCo, Trainer says he accepted the job because IT globally required transformation as part of a broader business transformation. ("You know, the typical business process harmonization/transformation, new supply chain, new go-to-market, new international strategy, the whole bit, enabled by an IT organization that really had not been invested in for several years," he says.)

PepsiCo had been built on acquisitions and mergers, and had many custom interfaces for hundreds of applications when Trainer joined in May 2003, not to mention multiple supply chain systems and instances of Oracle. (The company had 8300 custom interfaces for 900 applications, plus 49 supply chain systems, four instances of Oracle and "it was spreadsheet city", he says.)

"Suffice to say that going into this effort we essentially had what had been acquired by multiple divisions over a period of years," Trainer says. "And since they were not integrated in an architectural sense, they were basically replete with interfaces to databases and each other and so on. So it was an architecture whose time had come."

PepsiCo, in 1999, created the Texas-based PepsiCo Business Solutions Group as a central IT organization. Five years later, the company still had a fragmented technology infrastructure.

"PepsiCo, like most of our big competitors, had been acquiring for 20 years and hadn't really integrated anybody's system, so they had a lot of IT products that were hardwired into various businesses," Trainer says. "It was time to fix it because the company has aspirations of going a whole lot further and they realized they needed to standardize processes where possible, and standardize and develop a shared organization of IT, whereas before I arrived it had been vertically integrated into the various business units.

"So I inherited five organizations essentially: the IT organizations for Quaker and Frito and Pepsi and Tropicana and Gatorade. We had five architectures that were bolted together and worked beautifully thanks to the terrific IT people at PepsiCo, but there wasn't anything that looked like an integrated architecture.

"There is no single culture within PepsiCo and within its divisions," Trainer says. "Frito-Lay is very, very strongly execution oriented, the best at what they do by far, and has a truly dominant market position in just about all of its products.

"The challenge of process harmonization was to harmonize how the various divisions achieve what they do that could be done in a similar manner but also acknowledging those parts of it that are just germane to their particular part of the business or the industry."

To succeed in this kind of mission, organizations must achieve agreement between IT and the business on the governance structure, which Trainer says is becoming the defining difference between IT shops, particularly those subject to Sarbanes-Oxley controls. Sarbanes-Oxley, he says, although it has proved "a thorough pain in the neck and a hog of resources for the first couple of years", has proved a great gift to IT organizations suffering a lack of documentation or controls, or sufficient controls.

"I think it's only a matter of months before your friendly local IBM-er or whoever - whoever your vendor of choice is - is going to be offering to IT executives and business executives the latest, greatest course, which is all about business technology management. Teaching them together on how to manage this stuff," he says.

The BTM Institute says the right way to approach BTM implementation is iteratively. An enterprise must determine where it is in order to focus on specific priorities, design and implement specific capabilities against those priorities, and then execute and continuously improve. The BTM Maturity Model identifies areas most in need of improvement, fixes the starting point for the enterprise, and specifies the path for change.

"Business technology management is a management science applied to business technology that unifies and improves decision making," the book notes. "BTM provides a structured approach that lets enterprises align, synchronize and even converge business technology and business management, thus ensuring better execution, risk control and profitability. BTM investments are investments related to the creation and realization of BTM capabilities.

"A business technology management capability is a specific competency defined by four critical dimensions: each capability is ordered by repeatable processes, executed through appropriate organizational structures, and enabled by the right information and technology," the book says. Enter the BTM Standard: a set of guiding principles that create a seamless management approach that begins with board- and CEO-level issues and connects all the way through technology investment and implementation. The standard identifies 17 essential capabilities grouped into four functional areas: Governance and Organization, Managing Technology Investments, Strategy and Planning, and Strategic Enterprise Architecture.

Trainer says the BTM Institute, comprising "an astonishing array of well-known and influential people in business around the world", has recognized that fulfilling this vision means first plugging the major holes in the training received by computer graduates required to address the needs of the business. Once that is achieved, expect a quantum leap forward in technology management.