Motorola Shows Dramatic Savings in IT Operations Costs With 'ERP for IT' Tools

Updated: June 18, 2010

Murrah: We sat down with our business partners, top leadership on both sides -- our CIO and the business presidents and executive teams -- and talked through every business function. That's the place where we started and where we saw the magic unfold.

We looked at it on a scale of business competitiveness and how important that particular business function is to the business. Then, on the other axis, if you picture the famous 2×2 matrix, we looked at the complexity and cost of that business function.

We did that for every business function we have. We laid it out and then talked through where we would like those functions to move in the future. By mapping it out visually, it helped us to know that some areas were just costing more money than the value they brought to the business. When you see that, you put data on a piece of paper, and you have a visual, it is a very good way to align business and IT around a common goal.

... You don't really think too much about change and cost optimization being related, but we have had, over time, a very complex IT environment grow. We have thousands of systems in a company that has grown organically and through mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.

Just to give you an example, if we talk about engineering as a business function, to Motorola, which is a technology company, that's a critical competitive differentiator, very important, high on the scale of competitiveness. If we look at the complexity and cost of running that today, in Motorola, we have a lot of systems and it's a high-cost area.

We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,800 systems in the company. We manage about 1,000 projects per year that flow out of these decisions. We have about 1,500 employees in the IT organization and are very heavily outsourced in some of the functions. So, we have another few thousand folks who we consider a part of the team, and that's who have all made this happen.

In order to really be part of the business imperatives to move forward in next-generation business processes, it was too complex to make changes. So, we focused on reducing those systems and doing it in a way that was directly aligned to business change and the directions they would like to go into.

Cost optimization is top of mind

My role at Motorola IT is in what we call CIO Operations. I'm responsible for our project management office (PMO) portfolio, quality, communications, and other activities that support our IT operations. Cost optimization is on everybody's mind these days, especially with the economy the way it is, and with many business initiatives out there.

The only way we could have managed this is our implementation of one tool and one process, that's used across the whole Motorola IT environment -- HP's Project and Portfolio Management Center (PPM). It gives us one place where we contain our "source of truth" for our investment dollars, for the priorities of the business request coming through, and for the things that we've decided to work on.

In that tool, we have every one of our people resources named, as well as what they're working on, and we look at their utilization and movement to the most critical areas. We also manage our project execution to the timelines, schedules, and budgets that we commit to our business partners.

Dashboards and reporting

What's very important then is that all of this underlying data and management process that we use can be presented back to the business in very good dashboards and reporting, so that we all stay on top of where we are and can be proactive on change, if it's needed.

About a year ago we moved from a hosted environment, internal to Motorola, to the HP software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. It works like a charm. No issues with performance. We have had great responsiveness from HP. It does help reduce our support cost, somewhere around 40 to 50 percent.

Moving from hosted to SaaS didn't affect usability, adoption, or anything. That really was almost seamless. We were using the same application before and after.