Microsoft CIO Tony Scott on life on the vendor side

Tony Scott recently completed his first year as CIO at Microsoft, having arrived at the firm's Redmond, Washington HQ via IT management roles with a definitive list of iconic American corporations, including General Motors (GM) and Disney. After an illustrious career as an IT leader acquiring systems, Scott has found a new home in the software industry that allows him to release the inner product developer hidden in many CIOs.

Although Microsoft is embedded into our lives as the PC's default operating system, and through an increasingly large part of our mobile and entertainment worlds, it is easy to forget the sheer size of the corporation which for its last financial year had revenues of over $60bn (£43bn) and a headcount of over 91,000 - the company currently has a market cap of about $150bn (£107bn). As corporate vice president and CIO, Scott is responsible for 4000 IT staff around the world. "That's what it takes to support the headquarters and field organisations," he says.

"We do business in most countries in the world," he adds. By comparison, Disney, itself no dwarf in the business world, had an IT staff of about 800 under Scott's command.

Scott joined Microsoft in February 2008 in what many felt was a coup for the software behemoth, and 2009 has been a busy year for the broad-shouldered CIO.

"The biggest achievement is that we are further along a journey," he says. "Our cost efficiency efforts are significant improvements from where we were. All CIO roles are a journey; you inherit a bunch of things and you shape a few things. But the most exciting thing is the conversation we have had with the business on how we can shape where the business goes. If you are CIO, that is where you want to be."

Scott believes that as the software paradigm shifts, partially, away from programs delivered in shrink-wrapped boxes with great big release patterns and towards a service delivery model supported by the internet's infrastructure, the CIO and his team become increasingly important to the software industry. Microsoft has not been shy of late in admitting that it will have to embrace software-as-a-service models and Scott and his team are instrumental in this shift in business model.

"The digitisation of our business processes is a never ending journey," he says. "Some products at Microsoft are going from analogue to digital in delivery. Our products are now often software and a service. In other industries it is something [different] and a service."

Returning to his task of driving efficiencies through his department, Scott says that by July he will have taken $100m of costs out of the IT department. "Which is not easy to do," he says lightly, adding that he has achieved this through improvements to the reliability of key systems.

Comments