'IT is the central nervous system of the company'

CIO John N Johnson oversees an IT department of more than 5,500 staff in over 50 countries who support some 80,000 employees across the company - and all of them working for one of the biggest technology companies in the world, Intel.

Johnson originally arrived at the chip giant in 1981 and joined the IT department in 1999 before becoming CIO in 2005. His team is responsible for developing enterprise applications used across all of Intel's departments as well as running the company's data and voice networks and datacentre operations.

silicon.com caught up with Johnson to talk about the company's big projects, the magic of wireless and Gen Y.

What have been the major projects that you've overseen since becoming CIO?
In 2006 and 2007 Intel itself went through a pretty detailed and in-depth examination of how we operate and really driving efficiency into the company. I think we were fortunate that we chose to do that then because it's really helped us going into the current economic environment.

For IT specifically, we went through quite a right-sizing and re-shaping as well as a number of efficiency activities we're still actually working on. So we reduced headcount by a substantial amount, we reduced capital spending, we launched a long-term datacentre efficiency programme, we launched a re-engineering of our ERP which we're quite a way through.

What has the datacentre consolidation and virtualisation work involved?
We went from 125 or 130 datacentres down to around 75 over the last three years, [and] we have consolidated down to a couple of enterprise datacentres, so our enterprise applications are now consolidated into two centres. We have factory, manufacturing datacentres that are typically with each factory as a dedicated datacentre and you probably don't want to change that model. The rest of the datacentres we have are in support of our design and engineering space. In that area we have been very aggressive with virtualisation capabilities – it's a cloud computing model that's quite sophisticated that supports the design community.

I think in 2007 we stripped out 2,000 servers and something like $7m in savings by removing those 2,000 servers and retiring them, consolidating applications onto other servers, that sort of thing. It's a slow process but it's a steady process that you can really push down your operating costs down with.

What else is taking up your time?
The ERP re-platform effort continues to be our core applications effort. We're also starting to… do some foundational work to be able to drive a much lower-cost supply chain. As we get [the ERP programme] wrapped up, we can start to really look how can we work with our manufacturing and business side and really drive a less expensive supply chain model, so that's important.

There's also a PC refresh effort under way. We're really trying to stick with about a three-and-a-half-year refresh rate on our mobile clients so we're pushing that through. We looked at it and said, well, economically it's really a challenging time, but we decided we needed to go in and make that investment, principally because of the productivity value it has for the employees. People with the older PCs really benefit when we're able to get a newer machine in front of them. So we're pushing that.

What about collaboration and social networking?
We're starting to really drive a little bit more investment in collaboration - videoconferencing, both high-end as well as PC-based videoconferencing. That helps employees interact without having to jump on an airplane as much as they have in the past.

There's also some investment in social networking capabilities that provide more collaboration capabilities for employees. We're trying to enable folks to be able to still get their work done in the way they want to but work with less travel.

[Social networking is] still kind of a nascent effort for us. The discussions with employees around the company are that they see value for the business side from these consumer-based capabilities. We're still trying to understand what's the right strategy in this space...