It’s the C-suite times two for Patty Hatter of McAfee. Hatter was named SVP of Operations at the security technology company in 2010 and then added CIO to her responsibilities one year later. For the latest in our continuing “IT Visionaries” series, Hatter shares with us how one role informs the other, the challenges of modernizing IT, plus her view of the current security space.

1. What was your first move as the SVP of Operations?

We were having some challenges at the company with moving projects forward. Things would get stuck. Different software purchases would be made but we could never seem to get the value out of them. To help change this, I started up a small business operations team to give methodology and project support to the different business functions. We also drove tight alignment across them. We got the leads from each organization to answer: What are we really trying to do? What are the most important things? What are the biggest challenges? How do we all rally our resources in that direction? At the time, IT didn’t have a “seat at the table,” so one of the business functions had to drive everybody together.

2. How did this then inform your role as CIO?

Having both the Operations and IT has been very helpful, especially in changing the relationship that IT has with each of the other functions. From my Operations team, I understood the challenges that we were having in working with IT. Also, it was easier for me to deliver the message that dramatically improving the relationship between IT and the other functions was only going to happen when both sides changed. I wasn’t just saying it was someone else’s fault. What ended up coming out of that was a common roadmap of the big transformational projects that collectively all of the business functions were going to tackle next. That was the biggest gift I received, because then for the first time IT really had some direction on what the priorities were. It sounds so simple, but we just hadn’t had that before. Until you have a common sense of priorities it’s amazing how much money and resources you can waste.

3. Tell us more about how you executed this massive transformation?

In the first year I had IT, we set out to change all the transactional systems across the company, all in one year. I’ve never seen a company attempt something this large before, but for a variety of reasons it was important that we made that big step forward in such a short time frame. Living through that raised the skills and confidence of the IT team, and dramatically improved collaboration across the organization. There was no way to do it without everybody on the same page. There was a lot of pain and pent up demand for change and I think that was critical in bringing the best and brightest to the table for that effort.

4. How else did you get IT to prove its value?

The engineering teams were spending a lot of their resources doing basic IT functions separately, which meant we were duplicating resources. A big piece of what IT had to do was rebuild our skillsets and reputation. Ultimately it’s about how do you speed up the development cycle, so you have faster time to market on new products. We’ve since put in governance that links together engineering and IT so we’re making decisions together. Architecturally, we have pulled together the data centers and other infrastructure so the engineering teams can leverage them in one place in IT.

5. Change can be tough, especially for IT. How do you think about it?

Something that is important, not just for CIOs, but for all leaders, is getting employees to be comfortable with the world changing. There will always be new technologies, customer expectations, competitors, etc. Every company and function within it needs to always be looking out for what is coming next, and then what needs to be done to get there. Finding folks who are ready and willing to accept change and be involved in creating the change, is a huge piece of building the right culture in your organization. There will always be new customer needs. Business is always evolving and we will always need to figure out new ways to create value. Meanwhile, budgets will always be squeezed.

6. What IT development methodology would you like to change most?

Waterfall development drives me crazy. The whole concept of a business team doing requirements and then sending that over the wall to IT is broken. There is very little chance that process is ever going to work. Every time we pull people together from the business, engineering, and IT, and get them in a room working together, very good things happen. As we’re trying to jointly collaborate on these transformation projects, we all have to be on the same page, and doing that sooner rather than later has been fundamental to all of our successful projects.
 

7. What are your thoughts on security and the cloud?

There is certainly a lot of innovation in the cloud space right now. It is such a powerful tool for IT organizations to use in order to both speed up infrastructure deployments and also control costs. The cloud space also opens up a world of different security considerations. So with the pace of cloud adoption, both public and private, security companies have an opportunity to step up and provide a security architecture that supports this rapidly expanding ecosystem.

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