By Walter C. Ulrich, Vice President and Senior Director, Arthur D. Little, Inc. (Chair);
Anne F. Thomson Reed, CIO, U.S. Department of Agriculture (Panelist);
Dennis Benner, CIO, Fluor Corporation (Panelist);
and Alan Matula, CIO, Shell Chemicals Co. (Panelist)

The following is a transcription of the CIO Roundtable held April 28 at EMA’98 in Anaheim, California.

MR. ULRICH: For the past few years, the CIO panel has enabled senior business executives to discuss what they see happening in the world of messaging and what they look forward to as we approach this new millennium. It is these CIOs who ultimately have to make the hard calls about resources, staffing, promotions of people in their organizations, and the procurement of electronic messaging and e-commerce products and services.

The Department of Agriculture has over $1 billion budgeted for information resources and technology. When the Department of Agriculture established the position of Chief Information Officer, they went to a senior administrative executive from within the Department with lengthy government experience as their choice of the person to lead them into the new millennium. The person they selected was Anne Reed.

Fluor Corporation is one of the largest engineers and constructors in the world and currently involved with projects of $2 billion or more. In fact, they are pursuing a project that could be as large as $3 billion. When they wanted to streamline, energize, and become more productive and with higher return of their information investments, Fluor turned to a seasoned CIO from TRW and a person who had begun his career with IBM. They turned to Dennis Benner.

World Dutch Shell Group operates in 151 countries around the world. But Shell, probably for nearly 100 years, has been segmented outside the U.S. from the U.S. company, Shell Oil Company. As part of that, there has been a company called Shell Chemical Company. Shell has sold chemicals around the world in regional operations. When Shell Chemical followed the trend of the globalizing chemical business, they turned to the CIO of their U.S. company, and someone who had been a financial analyst with Shell Oil, and clearly on the fast track to success. The head of the CIO for Shell Global Chemicals is Alan Matula.

Thank you all for joining us. To get started this morning, each of our panelists will say just a few words about their current environment to give you a perspective of where they’re coming from. Then we’re going to have a conversation about the current state and the future of electronic messaging. Anne, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the USDA.

MS. REED: Thank you. The Department of Agriculture is something of a conglomerate. We have about 30 separate agencies right now. We have offices in just about every county in the United States, and 122 foreign countries. The work that we do involves production agriculture, which most people think of when they first think of Department of Agriculture. USDA also supports food stamps and the Women and Infant Children’s programs, and school lunch programs, so we’re heavily involved in nutrition issues. We also have the U.S. Forest Service, so we manage the largest public landmass in the United States, fighting forest fires, and promoting conservation. So we have a pretty broad mission. Because we have so many separate and distinct agencies that have traditionally acted independently, we have a technical infrastructure that is extraordinarily diverse. One of my challenges as the CIO is to begin to pull together some of these fragments so that we can, in fact, communicate more seamlessly.

MR. ULRICH: Great. Dennis.

MR. BENNER: Fluor Corporation has two major operating units: a massive coal company that is a low sulfur coal unit in the Appalachian area, and the better known and larger company, Fluor Daniel, an international engineering and construction company. Over half of our backlog now is to build projects outside the United States, and we typically are running about 2,000 projects in about 80 countries throughout the world.

We also are building facilities to deal with natural resources, and you can’t always pick the locations that are convenient to a city. In some cases the first thing we do is install telecommunications in those places, send drawings and communicate with the work that is being done there. It is an ongoing challenge. More and more, we find the need for expertise on these projects to be quite advanced, we find that we use several of our partners in engineering. So we might very well be engineering something in our Houston office, our Harlem office, our Manila office, and they need to all work together as one and support the client’s needs and those can be challenges for us.

MR. ULRICH: Terrific. Alan.

MR. MATULA: Shell Chemical is actually a group of associated companies that operate globally around the world in about 80 to 90 locations, all in different countries. We also have a whole host of joint ventures with other partners. Shell Chemical is about a $15 billion company and the IT budget is about $200 or so million.

Our greatest challenge is that in over the past 20 years or so, we’ve built an IT infrastructure, whether applications or computing platforms, based independently within each country or within each geographical region. The challenge that I face, which is a large challenge, is to take this disparate set of infrastructures and begin to pull them all together. Messaging becomes a critical component, not only to pull the infrastructure together, but also to pull people together and allow them to work globally instead of in local or regional dimensions.

MR. ULRICH: Alan, in that kind of environment, where you are globalizing and pulling the people together, how important is messaging? I mean, is it essential? Is it critical? Or is it just an enabler? Is it a back office kind of thing that nobody worries about?

MR. MATULA: You know, it’s really critical. It is like electricity and water, it has to be there and people actually take it for granted. I was telling somebody the other day that my executive group never comes to me on a daily basis and says, "Boy, Al, your mail system worked great today." Never happens.

But, I’ll tell you what, when it goes down or there is a problem, the noise is very loud. The problem with it also is that callers always tie it to e-mail, and in a lot of cases, it has nothing to do with e-mail. It has to do with the communication lines back to all the different countries, hardware, other software, bandwidth issues, and so it gets to be a very difficult problem to manage.

MR. ULRICH: You know Shell Oil, which has been the holding company for all the U.S. companies has watched as many joint ventures formed throughout the petrochemical and energy industries. Shell has, in fact, been a leader in creating some of those joint ventures. Shell recently had a strategic initiative team to look at how to really optimize maintaining all the strengths at the Shell family with joint ventures to which they may or may not be majority holders.

Alan was on that particular task force and played the role. It included the very most senior executives and the president of the holding company, Shell Oil. The president of Shell Chemical America’s was on it and all the equivalents in the other Shell companies. They came up with seven things they needed to do. One of the seven things we focused on was infrastructures and electronic mail. So from a strategic standpoint, there is a message about even communicating through joint venture partners.

MR. MATULA: Oh, definitely. I think that is a new challenge that has probably emerged in the last, let’s say, two to three years. Just pick up the Wall Street Journal and see how many joint ventures and how many companies are trying to do projects around the world with other partners. It used to be that messaging was kind of critical, but it was also secured and contained within your own company.

The world has changed dramatically. One of our issues is we can’t always depend on the company that we’re either partnering or going into a joint venture with being on the exact same infrastructure as us. So what becomes critical is how to interoperate so that you don’t lose the fidelity, attachments and that you’re able to tie applications together. That is the real challenge that I face going forward.

MR. ULRICH: At Fluor, is it equally as important?

MR. BENNER: Well, a few years ago when we started working with e-mail, it was a convenient resource to be able to use, and some of the people in the company used it. Some employees had their secretaries run e-mails for them and print them out so they could read them. It was a convenient computing type tool.

Well, over the last several years, e-mail changed from being viewed as a convenient computing tool to really more like an organism that needs oxygen. It has to work. As Alan said, executives don’t come around and pat you on the back saying e-mail worked well all month, but the first hour that there is a problem with it, there will be a variety of phone calls and comments about the need to have it work.

When we talk about e-mail being strategic or being helpful, it is hard for me to pick the appropriate adjective because we just simply couldn’t do business the same way without it. We too have joint venture partners. When we’re going to engineer something, we’ll have specialty expertise or specialty technology and it isn’t reasonable for us to own all the technology that we engineer and build things in. So we’ll have other companies that have that expertise that we can call on.

We can count on our partners using different technology than us. So the interoperability is a theme that you’ll certainly hear from all of us today as an important characteristic of what we’ve got to have for messaging in the millennium.

MR. ULRICH: Good. How about in the government? Do you live in a different kind of world than Alan and Dennis?

MS. REED: Actually, what they’re talking about sounds very familiar to me. We don’t call them joint ventures as you do, but we certainly have a lot of partners. There are many differing technical infrastructures that originated in each of the individual agencies. Across government, we have 28 major departments and 100 independent agencies, each one of which is organized much as the Department of Agriculture.

So we have a tremendous challenge in communicating with each other. In addition, we need to be able to communicate with every citizen in the United States, not to mention a number of foreign governments. So messaging capability has become tremendously important. We’re using it for day-to-day business, and I have exactly the same issues that you do. When it goes down, I hear about it real quick.

But we’re also using it to reach out to citizens in different ways. For example, the government has a rulemaking process where we establish a new rule for how an industry or area of public policy should be approached. We have a public comment period. In the past, that has been managed through publishing in the Congressional Record or something that is somewhat esoteric and not really connecting with most people. The interest groups know it is there and look for it, but most people don’t.

For example, recently in the Department of Agriculture, we published a rule on the standard for how to define the term "organic." Many items are labeled organic, but what does that really mean? We put that proposed rule up on the Internet—a different kind of messaging—we’ve now received over 100,000 responses from the public through that medium.

That is not something that we’ve ever been able to do in the past. I think the public is going to increasingly expect that kind of access and ability to exercise their democratic right to have input into the way we operate. So, yes, it is very critical to us.

MR. ULRICH: That is a terrific example. I guess that leads us into the easy question for each of you. What do you like about messaging? One of the things just said, is you like having the ability to access the public, that is something that is not futuristic—you’re doing it already. Is there anything else you can pick out that is particularly attractive about messaging?

MS. REED: We operate in a lot of different time zones and e-mail makes it a lot easier to do business round the clock. Now, when I’m sitting on my home computer at 2:00 a.m., sometimes I wonder if this really is what we had in mind. But the reality is it does facilitate doing business in real time, and that is something that people have come to expect as well.

MR. BENNER: Well, for us it is an important productivity tool. If we have a construction site where someone is having some sort of an engineering problem, in order to track somebody down and get a question answered, and deal with that the old-fashioned way, sometimes would take days. Now we can simply take a few pictures with a digital camera, and ship that over the line to the appropriate engineer, no matter where they are in the world. Within a short time, they can access the problem, create a new approach to it, solve it and keep the construction going. That had been a major issue. We’d have to put people on airplanes. When you do that, and you’re flying from the U.S. to some of the places in Asia, the Middle East, South Africa or other places that are long distances, that expert is not available for quite awhile. When traveling, a 12-hour airplane ride means that person is pretty well out of commission. I know the technology is improving in that area, but it is a challenge to get access to it. That has become something that has gone from being an advantage to something that we require and we depend on now for all the activities that we have under way.

MR. MATULA: A big theme for us is reach and there are kind of two dimensions to it. There is a dimension of global teaming, in which both the technology and messaging go a long way in getting people to collaborate and work together. But then there is the whole cultural side of it, which we’re now starting to address as well.

I think the place that we’ve really seen the value pop out is shortening the value chain and using messaging to shorten the distance between suppliers, our whole internal value chain and customers, and customers’ customers. So using messaging and some of the other functionality around messaging will begin to address how can we can shorten or virtualize the value chain all the way from suppliers to customers.

MR. ULRICH: What’s the other side of the coin, Alan? What don’t you like about messaging? What are the problem areas?

MR. MATULA: Well, we’ve talked about the big one—interoperability. I think the other one that we’re just now beginning to address is changing the way people behave around messaging. There are some bad behaviors that are growing up around messaging. However, tools such as how to manage inboxes, is getting better.

We are very bad, I think, internally at treating messaging the way we treated Profs or VIM messaging 10 or 15 years ago. I think the paradigm probably needs to shift a little. More importantly, when we get into the high bandwidth environments. I just fundamentally believe that today’s messaging is going to be very different than tomorrow’s messaging. We’ll be able to do a lot more tomorrow than we are today, once all the broad bandwidth kind of communication protocols get rolled out.

MR. BENNER: The things that I like about messaging have things that I don’t like. If we depend on it, it has to be reliable. It has to have the messages moving through at a predictable rate and the intelligence within the e-mail systems. There is a significant opportunity for improvement. The systems don’t help us much. They don’t give us much advice that is useful, and they require users to know a lot more than our users know today. Now maybe in 20 years, the users will grow up with computing, they’ll have the right behaviors and they will use the systems appropriately. But today, we need the tools to help with these things and to have those resources in the system.

When you call into the e-mail system if you’re on the road, all you know is that it got part way and stopped. You don’t know if it is your machine, or at the local hotel switchboard, or something between you and the connection, or something inside the computer. We need to have a lot better information from the e-mail system itself on how it is doing and where it needs attention or needs help.

MR. ULRICH: So one example is the non-delivery. A message isn’t delivered. What really happened? What are some other examples of things that are frustrations that you wish the system could help you with?

MR. BENNER: Well, I think it would be swell if it could figure out what to do with big messages. Our personal best is when we had one user attach a 2.1 gigabyte attachment to an e-mail. I’m not sure the term personal best fits there, but the system should have enough intelligence in there to say, whoops, let’s do this another way and to tell the operators or, in the ideal world, to tell the users don’t do it that way. Do it a different way.

Well, actually, in the millennium, we would hope that the system would make those decisions itself and would figure out what to do and would do it. But today it just grunts along and puts everybody else out of business, while it is trying its best to stagger through a huge attachment that generally doesn’t work. With our systems, it is hard to have that large message go through completely. So then a user will just try it again.

That can be your early warning system, instead of your executives coming into your office asking why the e-mails can’t get through. It would be nice if the system told you about those things instead of your executive users.

MR. ULRICH: So in a sense, it is almost a two-level thing. You really don’t know what happens and have to investigate it. What you’d like to have as a first step is not to have the system slow down and some message sent to somebody who then can make a management decision about what to do with the problem message. Perhaps signaling some kind of audit log, but just push ahead and allow your communications to continue. Anne, I know you were compiling kind of a top 10 list, and Dennis and Alan have covered a couple of the items.

MS. REED: One of my responsibilities as CIO at Department of Agriculture is to serve on the federal CIO Council. We’ve divided ourselves up into various committees to get some things done in a corporate way. I chair the interoperability committee, which as you can imagine, is something of a challenge in this environment.

Last fall, the CIOs came together and established a strategic plan for what we wanted to accomplish in the next year. Strategic issues such as how to approach capital planning and develop architectures were discussed. The one project that every one wanted to take on that was just purely pragmatic was e-mail. Every single one of our users drives us crazy because attachments don’t get through or they can’t read them. Error notices look like Greek characters. Users can’t figure out what to do and it becomes our problem.

So we put together a task force and created a group of postmasters from across the federal government. It is their top 10 list that I now share with you. So understand that this represents the frustrations of a large number of people.

Number one is the issue of attachments. If the industry can figure out a way to explain error messages, we would have many grateful people. How many of you thought about the fact that the error messages usually come through with some sort of a crazy code like C12S54. Every end user gets this and they have absolutely no choice but to call the help desk to figure out what the problem is. If the error message were in plain English, it might even be possible to tell the end-user what they themselves could do so that they wouldn’t have this problem again, instead of calling the help desk. It seems like a relatively simple thing to ask for.

Issues around authentication and being able to verify and validate what the source of the message is. It will become increasingly important as we use messaging as a business tool. Message disposition. Most of the time we get pretty good information. The mailer daemon lets me know when it doesn’t go through, but not all the time. That turns out to be a real source of frustration for people.

Directory services have become more and more of an issue for all of us as we reach out and contact more and more folks. It needs to be increasingly robust. Records retention is a particular issue in the federal government right now because of a recent court decision that requires that we maintain all e-mail. We are not allowed to delete anything. We have to maintain it. We have to store it, and we have to figure out how to access it when somebody from the public, or the press, or the court system, or whomever requests information that might be contained in this historic e-mail. We need a way to access it. Quite frankly, the tools simply aren’t there right now for us to honor this court mandate. So we’re scrambling and we desperately need the help of industry, and we need it pretty fast.

MR. ULRICH: Anne, so if I were to send you a message confirming that you’ll be speaking at this session at 8:30 in Anaheim, you would have to save that e-mail?

MS. REED: Absolutely. That leads you, by the way, into some questions. This is not on the list, but we’ve become more and more sensitive about privacy issues. As a practical matter, most people still think of e-mail as more like a telephone conversation, and they aren’t as cognizant that the information is and can be publicly available. So that is sort of an interesting thing that we’re dealing with.

Year 2000—can’t leave that one out. Folks are increasingly concerned that we are not yet fully cognizant of the impact of Year 2000 on our e-mail systems and the utilities. Finally, gateway queue management tools.

Those are the major issues that are on the minds of the federal postmasters and their customers. Hopefully by having this kind of discussion, we’ll be able to encourage vendors who are thinking about where to go, these are real things that would help us out.

MR. ULRICH: There is an alert in what Anne said. Many of us assume that the current slate of messaging products that have, in many ways, just been developed and upgraded over the last few years, are in fact Year 2000 compliant. But the warning there is to test those to make sure that they are in fact Year 2000 compliant. You may be surprised.

One of the issues that is very important to this audience, and something that the EMA has been working on since its very first meeting, has been the directory issue. Some of the things that you’ve talked about have touched on the directory issue. Could you give us some of your thoughts about directories? How can they help solve some of the problems that each of you have mentioned?

MR. MATULA: The directory is a huge problem, mainly because we’ve built this directory from archaic systems. It is kind of the residual of a whole bunch of projects over a series of 10 or 15 years. We’re actually in the process of trying to deal with pulling it together into a global common directory but where we can get the right authentication and deal with all of the security issues and also feed different systems. I might not have the same e-mail system with partners that I do with my internal company.

We actually got into a pretty interesting discussion on whether companies should own directories or whether there is actually a value creation activity out there that says, hey, you know, I’m really going to do business with Fluor. I’m going to do business with the government. I’m going to do business with lots of people. So why do we continue to have directories simply be, at least from a mail perspective, within a company’s domain? Why isn’t it more like the white pages or the yellow pages in the sense that if somebody else brokers that information and keeps it secure, keeps it reliable, so that the highway becomes a little freer to run down.

MR. BENNER: I think that’s a good idea. One of the challenges that we have, when I think of the difficulties with directories, is the 4,000 folks that travel with portables. That typically means they’re in a location where they have a relatively low speed connection. One of the other things I hear about is when we’re changing directories and upgrading them and somebody is sitting in a hotel room at 9600 baud, and we’re trying to send him a half a million byte update. That doesn’t make you real popular at the Christmas party when you do that. If they don’t have an accurate directory, then they can’t work at all because they try to send things and they don’t get through.

So the whole issue of how to deal with that and how to have some tools that will do the work for you without necessarily having to have huge directories on every single portable, would be a big step forward. That is a current challenge, and I don’t see much help on the horizon. Alan’s idea is a dandy one. If that were in place today, that would ease a lot of pressures. But we don’t see much movement in that area, at least not near term.

MS. REED: I would have to agree with both of you. I think the idea is terrific. We’d love to see something like that. I also have another concern that gets more at our business practices. How do you keep your directory clean? I started scanning our directory not too long ago and found a number of names of individuals who have long since left the organization. It is just another close-out procedure that we need to build into our business practices. That has some security implications for us, so there are a lot of different issues that we have to think about.

MR. ULRICH: You are dealing with 100,000 people, so updates and changes are high volume every day in terms of people coming and going and moving positions.

MS. REED: Right, and because we’re so highly decentralized, those are happening at lots of different levels.

MR. ULRICH: Plus you have a situation where you’re dealing with the Smithsonian Institute of e-mail hardware and software and equipment and desktops to boot.

MS. REED: You name it, we’ve got it.

MR. ULRICH: Wow. Yet the government is probably the last place they can say they would like to have one e-mail system. You would like to pick a vendor and buy one because of your enormous buying power.

MS. REED: I don’t think that that is what industry wants. If things don’t begin to change, it may drive in that direction. Not to mention the sheer cost of doing that and implementing it is staggering. You play that out across the whole federal government, and I genuinely don’t think that’s the right thing to do. Industry has simply got to step up to this one.

MR. ULRICH: Well, you know, you could either become a great friend or a great enemy of the Justice Department were you to make a choice.

MR. BENNER: You know, Walter, I don’t think that would solve the problem necessarily anyway because each of us have talked about our joint ventures, our other partners, people in other countries. As a services company, if we’re going to build a facility for our customer, we have to connect with that customer. So we have to be able to interoperate. So if they’re using something different than our standard, that’s what we’ll use. So, even if the Department of Agriculture or the government just had one, the states they deal with, the firms that they deal with would still mean you’ve got the interoperability problem.

MS. REED: Absolutely. Yes, and I think that is the piece that folks haven’t caught on to yet about where messaging has gone. It is no longer an internal communication tool. It is a business tool.

MR. MATULA: Right. I think that is also one of the points that I’d like to see some help with, and I know the industry is beginning to deal with it, is the unification of all these tools. I mean, I’m wired up on so many devices I can’t take any more devices—between beepers, and cellular phones, and two-ways, and e-mail, and the unification of not only messaging, but the kind of the groupware aspect around messaging, is going to be very, very important.

If you listen to us talk, the interoperability in messaging for the most part works. Right? At the text level and kind of at the address level, there has been a lot of good work done by this forum and other forums to lay standards in at the ground.

The problem is now that it is commoditizing. Right? It’s getting dial tone and the interoperability issues that we face are on the groupware side. Now it is the calendars. The industry probably needs to think about the standards at another level. It really becomes important when you get down to electronic commerce. If this reliability issue extends itself to electronic commerce, it is really going to be an issue for the industry.

MR. BENNER: I was reminded the other day of the immaturity of this technology when our senior executives were working on a press release, and it had people all over the world that were collaborating on this press release. We had a difficulty in one of the systems where there was a complex issue with interoperability. It got in a loop and started sending messages again and again and again. It is an interesting discussion when you try to explain to your senior executives why their system is tied up getting 77 copies of the same e-mail. That reminds you again that you really need to fix these things. You really need to deal not only with not having the thing not scrambled when it arrives, but the other things that can occur, like the horrible repeating e-mail problem that we had the other day.

MR. ULRICH: I had a personal example very similar to that. My office is in Houston, and I was sending an e-mail with a one megabyte file, which isn’t very big, from my office in Houston to one of the Shell offices three blocks away. I got a message that basically said it couldn’t be delivered. So I did some other things. I tried to resend it, and, again, I got the message it that couldn’t be delivered. Since the Shell office is only three blocks away, I got it there in a more traditional kind of way. When I called Charles over at Shell, and said sorry, we didn’t get this to you, would you like this other format? He said, no, that he had gotten the two messages. It was my certification that stated it had never gone out.

I’d like to ask two questions. The first question is, as you look ahead two or three years, this is not what you want, but what do you expect to be different about your messaging environment?

Feel free to focus on something in the way people use it, talk about something different in technology. Because as we get into the new millennium, what is your expectation? Realistically, what do you think will be different?

MS. REED: We haven’t even crested yet in terms of the number of people and number of applications for messaging. We need to realize that it is going to be an everyday communication tool for folks at home. My kids use it more often than they do the telephone right now just to talk to their neighbors.

Then in the office, we’re going to use it more and more for electronic commerce kinds of applications. It will become a global tool for making this world that we live in smaller and this global economy that we’re working in more robust. This is all the more reason why we need to be sensitive to the fine tuning that can be done now that will really give us opportunity in the future.

MR. BENNER: We’ve been tracking our e-mail traffic for about the last four years, and there are a couple of common threads. One is the proverbial march to the northeast corner. I mean, the volume is growing dramatically every year and we have yet to see any let up in sight. While that is happening, while the number of messages is growing dramatically, the size of the messages is growing dramatically

One change I see is that more of the users that are just starting to use e-mail and those that we’ve seen have their secretary print out their e-mails switch so that they are now using e-mail themselves.

MR. ULRICH: So legacy users are becoming real users.

MR. BENNER: Legacy users are actually lurching into the 1980s here and catching up. As we move forward, we’ll see those people using them more and more and more. Their expectation isn’t going to be that we come and say, now, when you have this size message, you do it this way. When you have this kind of attachment, you do it that way. They aren’t going to want to hear that. They’re going to want to just send the message and let the system figure out what to do with it. So while we’re going to have an enormous increase in the demand in our systems, we must have the supplier community build these tools so that we don’t have to have users be as expert as they are.

We need some of the more complex systems that can, first phase, tell you what to do differently. In second phase, once you have the rules in place, operate on those rules. Do it and make it easy for the users. That has got to happen over the next three years, or we’re going to continue to have reliability problems and continue to have the message that doesn’t get through again and again and again. It just pours gasoline on the fire when you have those things clogging up your system.

MR. MATULA: I think those are excellent points. You know, this mentality of everything has got to fit through, you know, one size fits all, is probably not going to be realistic for a global company. The expectation of bringing everybody’s bandwidth up to some minimal level is going to be difficult to sustain both financially and logistically, you’ve got to deal with a pretty diverse environment.

At the same time, my business executives would say we’ve done a good job at swapping out the old infrastructure for the new. At the end of the day they’ll complain about reliability, but they also see a huge productivity shift from the old world to the new world.

I think the thought on the top of their mind was, yes, let’s get the performance of this new world nailed down and automated. Let’s get some of the suppliers to help do that. Now they’re mindset is on, hey, I’ve pumped in all this money into this infrastructure. How do I get the next level of value? This is back to my earlier point about tying it to some of the broadband technology such as video conferencing to mail messages. I think the challenge for the industry now is how do we wrap value around this messaging backbone that we have and that we’ve paid for? How do we wrap the most amount of value around that? That is what I’d say my business executives have a lot of energy for.

MR. ULRICH: Yes. That’s an interesting point. CIO Magazine recently did a salary survey of CIOs. They also asked CIOs what issues were most important that they’re contributing. The CIOs who said that leveraging existing and coming information assets as their first priority also turned out to be the ones that made the most money. So what you say is very consistent with where top executives are thinking, because your compensation reflects the value that you add. In fact, for those of you in the audience, your compensation is the same way. If you’re on the user community side, by facilitating e-mail and messaging and electronic commerce in your organizations, you add real business value. If you’re on the vendor side, your compensation is figured by helping your customers harvest the values and through revenue. You get a portion of those rewards back that funds your own compensation. Alan, for people that are compensated in these kinds of ways, what advice would you give them if they wanted to do business with Shell Chemicals in the years to come?

MR. MATULA: Well, I think the challenge for us and the message to that group is, again, how do you demonstrate value on what we already have? We call it sweating the assets. How do we sweat the assets without moving to a platform in order to get value out of it? I think another real challenge and real mental model to decide on is investing in X.500, another layer of infrastructure around the directory. Are there different models that we can apply, instead of each one of us investing? Because if we all individually invest, my fear is that the interoperability issues won’t go away. So there is a different mental model around how to carve up this work.

MR. BENNER: We’ve reemphasized the interoperability and the robust and reliable, but playing off the point that Alan made, which I think is an excellent one, we’re no longer concerned about outsourcing, as perhaps the industry was some years ago. Indeed, we welcome it and embrace it if someone can truly come and add value and help us get more mileage out of the investments that we have and help us generate more value in the company.

If someone that can come in and truly add business value by having a more reliable system, or by offering a service more effectively in-house than we can offer for ourselves, it will enable us to spend our time on other things. Most of us don’t feel we need to generate our own electricity to run a business. Although if you did, we’ll build the plant for you.

We also don’t necessarily feel we need to deal with our own directories or have some of our own communications capabilities. So offer the service. Don’t just come in and talk bits and bytes, but come in and talk about a business outcome that will make our business more competitive, and will give us a better competitive position in the marketplace.

To just come in and say we can save you 10 percent or we can make something a bit easier to work with isn’t going to get the business. You need to solve a business problem, really sweat the asset and get us a more competitive advantage.

MS. REED: I agree that the theme of adding business value and understanding and genuinely responding to what the customers’ requirements and needs are. Understanding what the business is and then helping to translate what the technical support is that can help you achieve a whole new model of connections with people or a way to deliver service or product.

Interestingly, I think the Internet has given new tools so that we can learn a lot more about each other just by reading our web pages and use that information to help think through and strategize new models and then come talk to us about it. I would absolutely agree with what each of you have said.

MR. ULRICH: That’s terrific. This is in many ways, as diverse a group of CIOs that have ever come to this meeting. We have very different kinds of businesses and companies that operate fundamentally different with different technology architectures in their organizations, yet the themes are very common. Messaging is essential-like oxygen. Examples are the rulemaking at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is extending the benefits of our democracy to allowing the individual to be able to respond to what before was a very esoteric thing among special people in specialty areas. Reaching out and collaborating and working together.

In prior years, the CIO panel discussed solving the very basic bottom line nuts and bolts questions, the basic messaging stuff. That works. We can get text around. We can send messages. There may be the occasional glitch that all CIOs want to manage more effectively. However, the confidence is that the basic job is done. So I say to the audience, congratulations. It has been enormous progress. We did hear some frustration, but I also heard words like fine-tuning, which in past years I haven’t heard. The requests and demands have been major step changes that the technology really wasn’t ready for prime time in one way or another. Now I’m hearing refinements and a very much looking toward the future. What do you like about messaging? It shortens the value chain. When you can do that on the communications side of the value chain, that is a powerful strategic benefit.

What do the CIOs want? Well, it is some of the same things we’ve heard before. Interoperability, more work on people’s behavior as we go from, in 1979, when there were 100,000 users who were all very sophisticated to the new millennium where there are now 130 million users in the U.S. alone. Some of those users are not going to be very sophisticated, so we need to give them tools, but also need to give them training in how their behavior ought to be.

More intelligent management, dealing with attachments, records management and the unification of the tools are key themes. The technical work that many of the audience does provides the infrastructure that enables this to happen.

Advice to the audience: when a buy decision goes to CIOs, the business proposition has to be there, help them sweat their assets. The opportunity to provide a variety of new services and to continue to focus on the business outcome.