Intel CIO Doug Busch explains how his team is dealing with the latest IT advances, regulatory changes and privacy issues

IT Week: Does being chief information officer at a technology firm such as Intel present the same problems as being the IT leader of a non-technology company?

Doug Busch: I spend a lot of time talking to other chief information officers. Like them, we at Intel have very strong budget pressures and are being asked for ways to do more for less.

Does Intel's business model force your department to make certain technology decisions, for example in favour of a fat client approach?

Our first priority is to deliver great operational characteristics and I have to make decisions in the best interest of Intel. We did a lot of path-finding on thin-client architectures. We want to have a balanced approach and some of our applications are browser-based.

Many IT directors feel that the days of keeping pace with Intel's latest chips and Microsoft's latest operating systems are gone because the business case is too difficult to justify...

I hear that a lot, but when you drill down you get a slightly different story. We moved our core ledger and financials to a new decision-support system and data warehouse. One of the things we did was upgrade the client workstations to take full advantage of the data. Also, we are very focused on staying up to date on security, so operating systems and directory services are new.

How do you interact with members of the Intel board?

We have got really good relationships within the senior management team. It provides a lot of insight into where the market is going. I am very involved in the decision-making of the executive company. The board functions as an external governance body.

How have new corporate governance rules, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US, affected Intel and its IT team?

I have been very involved with systems providing internal controls for Sarbanes-Oxley and European privacy. In the vast majority of cases we are already doing more than [the regulations require], but I am heavily involved in the process.

Has Intel appointed a chief privacy officer, as many US blue chips such as IBM, American Express and General Motors have, to protect against data abuse?

We have not put a chief privacy officer in place but we have a very strong focus on this area. We have a code of conduct on behaviour and a strong policy of protecting the privacy of suppliers' and partners' data. I helped write the internet and intranet policy based on the "cubicle wall" theory. That is, do not look at anything on the internet you would not feel comfortable about having on your office cubicle wall.

From your position as chief information officer, how do you influence Intel's broader product strategy?

The major thing I have been advocating is that Intel really needs to address the cost-of-ownership equation. We need to make products less expensive to own [for example by] trying to figure out what happened when something breaks. We need to make systems simpler and more self-sustaining.

After the Millennium Bug and the dot-com boom, a lot of people cast doubt on the value of IT. How do technology providers get around that attitude?

I do not think we are paying enough attention to the value [organisations are] getting from IT. We need to ask, what would it cost me to run [my firm] without IT? One [solution] is to engage aggressively with non-IT executives. The aftermath of dot-com was not down to a technology failure, it was that the investment community was credulous. [IT investments] have paid off incredibly well in many cases.

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ABOUT DOUG BUSCH
Doug Busch is vice president and chief information officer of Intel.

Busch joined the firm in 1987 and has held technical and management positions in manufacturing, logistics and IT, including director of IT.

Previously, he managed research and development projects at the Battelle Memorial Institute, including automation programmes for the aerospace and nuclear industries.