In the second half our our interview with EMC's CIO, Sanjay Mirchandani offers his thoughts on IT staffing, Generation Y workers and the consumerization of IT.

SEE ALSO: EMC CIO on Private Cloud Transformation


Shifting to staffing, what were your top personnel concerns when you began this transformation?

To be absolutely honest, we didn’t realize that it would be this much of a change or an evolution. Like any other organization of our size, you have ITIL, you have methodologies and processes. Things are pretty well defined; You assume that the virtual pieces would fall into place just like any other technology would.

What ended up happening was, we quickly realized that we couldn’t use the standard conference room for three hours to figure out a problem. It was very nebulous—where the network began and security ended, and where security began and systems ended. It started getting more and more fuzzy—and that’s not even the application layer.

We needed to get people to build across things, or else they’d become very inefficient. So we experimented with cross-training people and realized that clearly this was going to be something of an evolution if it went all the way with its progress. Subsequently we got an upright spine and said, “If you had to do your job differently, how would you do it? If we had to align our operations team in the data center to handle a 100% virtual environment, what would it look like?” We’re making those cranks as we speak. Now our data center operations team has a full delivery stack we call the private cloud. It’s end to end, with storage, networks, components of security, etc. But we can’t stop there. We have to add applications, improved security, integrate everything. It’s a moving target, but we’ve got some massive opportunities for our people. It’s an evolution, but a fast-paced one.

What’s also a subtlety is that I don’t just flip a switch and go from physical to virtual. I’ve still got a physical environment co-existed with a virtual one. So we have to move people from one side to the other, while keeping a foot in each side. But the more commonality you have, the less variation you’ll see.

Plenty of CIOs have struggled to fund training programs and get their workers in line with the overall business strategy. How have you handled training with such drastic changes happening?

Like any other company, we’ve had to be more efficient in the last two years. We made some conscious tradeoffs. My leadership team and I firmly believed we had to give people access to more training so they could broaden their skill set. We didn’t cut our training budgets specifically over the last 24 months.

A lot of our training is online. But in some spaces, it’s broad awareness—what is the IT vision for private cloud? I’m not going to get ready-made training for that. So we took the social networking approach: We recorded perspectives of members of my leadership team, me and our architects and also wrote whitepapers, and I delivered them to each IT employee and told them to watch and read so they could get a better perspective about our journey to the private cloud. We also made them attend my keynote at EMC World so they got a better understanding. We have an internal certification program to help people, and a handful of our employees actually delivered the training. We’ve taken an explicit route to getting people to understand it all and evolve.

Regardless of the economic fine-tuning we’ve had to do over the last few years, we didn’t slow down our training at all. In times like that, you ought to give your best and brightest better skills so that they’re ready for the rebound.

How does the Millennial generation (Gen Y) fit into your staffing strategy?

We explicitly brought in a bunch of college graduates over the last 12 months. I believe that the consumerization of IT is captured squarely in the minds of this generation. They personify this change –they’ll walk around with their Mac and devices, and they’re overly critical of the corporate standard desktop environment. And I love that; it challenges the norm. This is what life is doing. When I’m not at work, I’m a consumer. So how do I transform the corporate environment into something that’s more relevant?

The second example is social networking. They take to it like fish to water—they’re active, they blog, they write, they work on the smartphones. They want the same experience they get on Facebook or Twitter. They challenge us with that.

I personally love it. I want us to harness it. I insert college grads into every organization I can so that there’s a little of that spark. I am a big, big supporter of that mix.

But if you don’t challenge them and give them an environment where they want to work, any organization will be challenged to keep them. We try to balance it between their expectations and our capabilities. We have a structured program to mentor them and build their careers, and we do it globally.

Many CIOs seem to recognize that Millennials bring great potential in helping them understand social networking. Do you see any other specific opportunities where younger workers can help educate the business and IT on what’s possible?

We have a very vibrant internal social networking platform—it’s global, and it’s not anonymous. We’ve had it in place for a while, and it’s been one of our greatest successes in recent time. A lot of our employees are younger, and they expect it, so it’s a given.

I was trying to do something light for a presentation. I met with my chief of staff, and she had in the room one of our recent colleges grads. One thing led to another in the conversation, and he pulled out a Flip camera and said, “Why are you building a PowerPoint for this? Why not just do a video?” I looked at him like he had two heads.

But we recorded the video and put it out there. It was phenomenally effective. It kept it light. It kept it real. He wrote me the script and handed it to me. It was a simple experience, but it told me that there were different ways to do things. There’s a lot of that going on, and, I think, for the better.

Another example: I didn’t have an iPad the day it came out, but we had 40 or 50 requests asking about our iPad policy. I said, “I won’t give you a policy until I have one!” But we had to turn around and support the iPad in rapid time. Five years ago, we’d want to bring them in, test them, secure them—now we have to move much faster. We got that out, and felt good about it, and then people start saying, “What about Android?” That’s all the more reason why we need to stop provisioning the device and start thinking more about the user experience. 


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