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Interview: Mark Popolano, Senior Vice President and Global CIO for AIG |
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| Given the rapid change of technology and the role of IT Organizations within large corporations like AIG, how do you see your IT services partners playing a role in keeping you ahead or abreast of the technology curve? We look to focus on a strategic set of key relationships with IT services partners who can support AIG globally. Through our standards and architecture governance administered by my office, we focus our divisions on working with these key providers. By leveraging AIG’s buying power globally, we can obtain preferential pricing and discounts that would be unattainable by our individual sister companies, thus helping to keep IT costs competitive. Our key partners participate with us actively in our planning, enabling us to participate in their customer advisory groups, providing us an insight into their product development plans, and providing us with assistance in testing their new products to be fit as solutions for AIG. In your opinion, are Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) the way future Enterprise applications will be built/assembled? How will they enable corporations like AIG to do things faster and cheaper? Yes, to the extent that the services embedded in legacy systems can be made available as a service or when a brand new system is developed and designed with SOA in mind. It will however take time for this to evolve. Service Oriented Architecture will require companies like AIG to: |
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| Is adoption of open source software in your technology roadmap? How mature do you feel open source software is today to serve the needs of AIG? Whether we want to admit it or not, we have probably already adopted open source to a certain extent as it is embedded in many widely used commercial software and hardware products, from application servers to routers, than many companies including AIG use today. So, it is definitely on our roadmap. In our view not all “open source” is created equal. A few open source products are what AIG would consider mature production class software with available enterprise support, access to documentation and those which can be easily integrated into existing multi-vendor production environments. Some examples of what we consider “mature” open source are technologies like Linux, Apache, Samba or the XML parsers embedded in commercial products. There are still some business issues relating to open source licensing, copyright and patent risks, which need to be managed carefully. Just as the Internet created multiple levels of change in how the business interacts with its customers (internal and external), what do you see as the next technology that will cause disproportionate changes in the Enterprise? I think, wireless technology, particularly as the infrastructure in support of broadband wireless communication matures, will enable us to rethink our delivery of service models with customers and agents and change some of our business models for where work is done, freeing us from limitations of a particular physical location. Do you see a role for utility computing in the AIG environment? Are you considering it as a model for procuring future hardware or software-based services? In short, the answer is probably yes. However, for any enterprise to even consider the utility computing model, certain things need to be firmly in place such as data center standardization and appropriate charge-back models. Business Units will need to think in terms of requesting computing, storage and bandwidth instead of a server, a storage device and a T1 line. While hardware vendors have made great strides in making both on-demand processing and predictable utility pricing possible, software vendors have lagged. There are no utility licensing or cost models in place for software. Software vendors will have to catch up for utility computing to become a full-fledged reality. Do you foresee any threats to the model of global software development? Political unrest, strife and terrorism are threats that cannot be ignored, as the systems being outsourced are critical to the operations of our companies. Proper planning around the processes for disaster recovery and on how the development process is outsourced can help to mitigate this; however, large-scale geo-political unrest could threaten the pace of global software development. On a more tactical level, we believe there will continue to be a trend towards higher levels of abstraction in software development tools and as the need to "code" reduces over time and development tools, rules and inference engines, and other design techniques improve, a reduction in the traditional coding work that is done offshore could occur unless offshore vendors find a way to "move up the value chain". |
