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Motorola CIO Patricia Morrison is focused on improving visibility of the supply chain as the company expands. This mission critical information is delivered on Motorola’s own technology, the Q. Morrison talks about this and more in a CIO Vision Series interview with Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of silicon.com's sister site ZDNet.

Dan Farber: Now you’ve had a long career in IT, with stints at Proctor and Gamble, at Office Depot, and now you’re in Motorola, you’ve been there since July 2005. What are some of the big projects you’re working on to affect change?

Patricia Morrison: A couple of areas. Supply chain is a great example, we’re doing a lot to consolidate our supply chain, work with our suppliers more effectively, just to keep up with our growth, the number of units we’re producing on the mobile device side, changes in consolidation in our networks and enterprise business, and a lot of our time and attention is focused on enabling the supply chain activities.

DF: When you talk about enabling supply chain activities, how much of that is a technology problem, how much is it a business process issue?

PM: Well every IT problem starts with the process business, but just as an example, we use a lot of EMS and 3PLs on the supply side as part of our manufacturing process and in the past if we wanted to bring in a new supplier, it could take us, sometimes, up to three or four months to get them integrated in and have visibility into our supply chain. We’ve been able to use service oriented architectures and web services to reduce that to two to three weeks to bring on a new supplier. And that’s just an example of how technology can help you grow very rapidly and add that kind of capability into your process.

DF: And again what are some of the other areas that you’ve been innovating in?

PM: Another area for us is just getting better visibility to supply and demand. When you have the kind of growth we have, for example, in the third quarter we produced 53.7 million units, and that’s more than we did in all of 2005, in one quarter. And we’re growing so fast it’s very, very important to know what demand you have, what supply you have, and so we make it possible to see, every single morning at 6:30 am, what our demand and what our supply is on a global basis, for our mobile device leadership, and now we’re doing that in our connected home and in our networks and enterprise business. And it is mission critical to running the business every day. We happen to deliver that on the Q, and so Ron Garriques is our biggest Q user, he’s the president of our mobile device business, and that’s because he’s relying on that information to run his business every day.

DF: So is this a case that as you develop products you’re eating your own dog food?

PM: Oh absolutely. We use a lot of Motorola technology. Part of what’s happening in the world is, as the internet goes to the air, and the possibility for seamless mobility gives us capability that we can have our people closer to our customers all the time, and actually just be more efficient through mobility. So we use a lot of Motorola product in order to make that happen. Anywhere from the Q, obviously, but even our WiMAX technologies that enable us to bring up a new facility really quickly by putting a canopy on it for connectivity.

DF: Now, Motorola is in a very competitive industry, especially in the cell phone marketplace, and certainly IT is part of the equation about how you compete, so what can you tell me about how IT and innovations in IT have you really helped you stay ahead, or at least up with your competitors?

PM: Well, for example in our cell phone market, reach to the customers is extremely important, and historically the market - even if you look particularly at the US it’s still this way - has gone through carriers. And as we reach individual consumers through retail channels, distribution/trading partners, as we grow in countries like China and India, our ability to distribute into those channels, track, make sure we don’t have out of stocks, the inventory management, all of those factors become IT-enabled problems to solve. So we’ve done a lot of work, particularly in North Asia and China, in supporting opening a store every day. We just opened a flagship store in Moscow. How we change the information that we supply to “feet on the street” for doing assisted selling. All those things are critical for us to compete with all of our competitors, and that’s some of the work that IT’s doing to make that happen.

DF: And would identify some of the core technologies that you’re using to enable you to be more competitive, and to, let’s say, out-innovate your competitors?

PM: We use a lot of different technologies. We have an ERP suite of applications that we work with.

DF: And which ERP flavor are you using?

PM: We happen to be an Oracle shop and we have a very close strategic relationship with Oracle. And part of what we do is work with them on mobility applications. It’s not about taking an existing application and making it fit a smaller screen to fit a mobile device for example; it’s about thinking how business processes and transactions happen in a mobile world, and making the processes more effective and the software to support those processes more effective. So we have to have close relationships with our software providers and we work with companies like Amberpoint who is helping us on the SOA side, where you know we really do believe in the importance of rapid IT and how we can reuse – and we even use technology to support IT like Amberpoint, believe it or not. IT is a big function in most enterprises and needs in IT support, staff just like finance, HR, legal, supply chain, marketing all do. So, we’re cobbler’s children that wear shoes, when it comes to using IT to make us more effective.

DF: Do you have a group that looks at new technologies, whether it’s from large companies or small companies that could give you an edge, or could provide some capability that is unique to what you need to do?

PM: Absolutely. And I invest in that, and I protect it. When you’re fighting over every budget dollar, it’s important to protect it. They do have a dedicated organisation that focuses on architecture, integration, data, and new technologies. My lab’s even used for Motorola engineers who want to put new technology that could be used in an enterprise into a production environment so we can test that and give them feedback. And we’re very, very aggressive around that. One of the things that’s great about working at a company like Motorola is IT can be bleeding-edge, we’re not always just a fast follower, we’re really pushing the envelope on new technology all the time. And we do a lot with our new ventures group, we actually invest in start-up companies, and we spend a lot of time with those companies. We have a part of our labs organisation that does early stage accelerator type of work that we collaborate with. And then we reach out within the venture capital community, the start up community all the time to find the best ideas. And we make that a part of our process all the time.

DF: Now can you give me an example of something you’ve done recently that’s been bleeding-edge?

PM: You know I’ll give you an example in using the Q. The Q was launched with Verizon in June of 2006. We had a thousand Qs deployed by the end of 2005. And part of the bleeding edge of the Q is you’re looking at the hardware itself, the operating system, ours happens to be with Microsoft Mobile 5.0, and the synchronisation capability for the wireless synchronisation, and we were able to get these Qs deployed to meet very specific business problems, like the one I mentioned earlier, but also to really learn about the challenges of traditional provisioning and management of the devices. Frankly, we had a lot of influence in the decision to acquire Good because we think that it adds into our enterprise mix a lot of capability that will make the Q that much more powerful as an enterprise tool.