'You have to be masochist to exist an IT person': FedEx CIO

"Hurricane Rob" Carter shares tales of killing complexity

Contributing writer, Network World |

ORLANDO -- "You have to be a masochist to want to be an IT person,'' says Robert Carter. And he would know. Carter is the soft-spoken, difficult-driving CIO who has been fighting for the past 11 years to transform Information technology operations at FedEx, where "the planes don't fly and trucks don't roll without Information technology services.''

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Carter, executive vice president of information services and CIO at FedEx Corp., told attendees at the Gartner IT Symposium keynote Wed that when he arrived at FedEx, the IT department was a mess. After decades of incremental upgrades and corporate acquisitions, "mindnumbing complexity'' was threatening to bring the whole organisation crashing downward.

At that place was FedEx Air. There was FedEx Ground. There was the acquisition of Kinko'south. Systems were stitched together, but the seams were starting to show. "Customers were no longer willing to deal with the seams,'' he said.

The 51-twelvemonth-old Carter said the defining moment of his FedEx career came when he establish the challenge so daunting that he marched into legendary FedEx founder and CEO Fred Smith's office and announced that "we're going to run straight into a brick wall at 200 miles an hour'' unless we make radical changes to the IT section. "It's going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time, but we've got to make these investments,'' Carter said.

Smith, whose mantra has always been that the information about the package is equally important as the package itself, signed on, and Carter was off and running. The first thing he did internally was to "requite credit to the people working in silos,'' and the next thing was to blow up the silos. FedEx was going to "compete collectively,'' he said.

Carter knew that in lodge to make his instance internally he needed to use facts. So, he compiled detailed information on how many databases were running, how many HR systems, how many duplicates of the same application. "We created some ugly pictures that had an incredible resemblance to Hurricane Katrina,'' said Carter. After a while, he became known equally Hurricane Rob, just eventually he convinced people that "this complexity is non sustainable.''

The side by side step was trying to actually reduce complexity, which proved to be extremely difficult. "We ran into a buzzsaw,'' said Carter, every bit nobody wanted to surrender the app or system they were invested in. So, instead of "knocking heads,'' Carter spun up completely new cadre services, 22 in all, which worked across the entire company and which everybody migrated to.

He congenital a brand new data center from the basis upward, using what he calls the modernistic, common standards that have emerged afterward 35 years of trial and fault in the industry. Those include article x86 servers running VMware, 10Gig Ethernet throughout, the SaaS model and SOA. By edifice a new data heart from scratch, "nosotros bankrupt the epitome of people owning their own boxes,'' Carter said.

While the technical problems were daunting, Carter said the cultural challenges were the hardest, both internally and externally. Carter had to convince FedEx business partners that these changes were for the best. Education is the primal, Carter said. "We had to get them in the wheelhouse a trivial more.''

And internally, he had to convince IT to change. "Some people want to ride the Cobol jitney'' all the style to the end of their career, and there'due south a place for those people, Carter said. For others, there's a not bad opportunity to advance their careers in new and unlike ways. "It's not piece of cake. There'southward no silver bullet,'' Carter says. But he re-organized the Information technology department in a mode that provides plenty of choices for people to work at different levels.

Looking ahead, Carter said he'south excited about using sensor-based computing to create "smart packages." The thought is that FedEx would include a sensor inside a sensitive package. The sensor could report dorsum on everything from temperature to radioactivity level. So, for example, if the package contained food or medicine that needed to be stored beneath a sure temperature, the sensor could send an alert if the parcel were budgeted dangerous levels.

When it comes to the deject, Carter said he considers FedEx's Web-based services to be a private cloud. "We provide a robust prepare of Web services today and information technology'due south fundamentally the essence of the cloud.'' He says his information center architecture is substantially the aforementioned equally that of Amazon and Salesforce.com.

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Neal Weinberg is a freelance technology writer and editor.

Copyright © 2011 IDG Communications, Inc.