A: Two years ago, we completed an assessment of our IT capabilities and compared it with the best practices in the industry. Through this exercise, we identified certain functional areas that were not core to driving business value for our customers.  The study also highlighted process improvements across the global IT organisation that would enable significant business growth for us.  
For example, we discovered that outsourcing a portion of our own IT operations to strategic service providers, and leveraging our own managed security services practice made tremendous sense for us.   
We also formed a Symantec Services Group after integrating our IT department with our enterprise services and support teams.

A: We follow basic rules when it comes to acquisitions and the way we integrate technologies. Most of the time we try to see how our existing technology can be leveraged and in this process we do take the help and views of other teams in the enterprise. As changes occur in Symantec’s larger corporate strategy, IT will remain focused on supporting those needs.   
However, there are some initiatives that will remain a priority.  One example is Green IT. Businesses around the globe are concerned with issues related to energy consumption.   It is not just a concern at the departmental level, but it goes all the way up to someone in my role – the CIO.   
We took significant steps to deploy our own solutions to optimise our operations for energy efficiency and better environment performance.  For example, last year we completed a large datacentre consolidation project.  We closed our second largest datacentre located in Sunnyvale, California and consolidated that site into another location which resulted in 67 percent energy reduction. Moving forward, we would continue to focus on driving efficiencies across all of our datacentres globally though consolidation, virtualisation and standardisation processes for both software and hardware.
With enterprise CIO budgets put on hold or cut down across industries, how have you managed to run the show at Symantec? Also, what are your key IT initiatives lined up for the next year?
The IT team at Symantec achieved a significant milestone, and our most recent analysis showed a reduction in IT controllable spending to 5.3 percent from 6 percent before.  This marks a 12 percent reduction overall and exceeds the industry standards.  We will continue to maintain a strong focus on optimising our IT spend and other resources so that we can ultimately help the business meet customer demands.   
For the next year, we will be moving further into
developing platforms that offer customers greater choice in how they want to consume their products and services. We expect greater demand for our Software-as-a-Service model, managed services, and offerings that are delivered completely via the cloud computing model.  


What are the guidelines CIOs need to follow around risk management in view of recent economic and financial crisis?  
There are a number of steps that we take internally to ensure that we maintain a high risk posture.  We publish the Internet Security Threat Report, which we believe is the most comprehensive research available around information risk.  From an internal perspective, we also do regular risk assessments to understand our exposure to any risks. By conducting such regular risks assessments, we are continuously evaluating our own information security capabilities and determining where we can reduce our overall risk, and make improvements to meet business needs.

A: As business leaders we are constantly managing
priorities, regardless of shifting economic conditions.  My main goal is to ensure that our IT related projects align and support the larger business priorities for Symantec.  Even in a more challenging economy, I believe there is an opportunity to look inside the organisation and develop strategic initiatives.  This mindset keeps an emphasis on driving innovation and developing programs that will help us create long lasting customer loyalty and outperform our competition.n