Brian Franz oversees IT operations at Diageo,
the international drinks company, and believes that an IT
operation needs to combine the economies of scale and efficiencies
of a single system with the flexibility to allows local business
units to use the right technology for them.
At the same time, Franz believes that IT needs
to simplify the business and business processes.
CIOs can only be successful, he suggests, if
they make the effort to understand how the business operates and
how IT can replace repetitive tasks that add little or no value and
is able to explain that to the board.
Diageo operates in 180 countries, but runs the
majority of its infrastructure from one, single ERP
system.