“Invest time early on to learn the business and build relationships across the board”

ANDREA SIMONE
CIO
NBTY

Andrea Simone joined NBTY as Chief Information Officer in 2011. In this role, he is responsible for creating a worldwide, world-class IT architecture that provides a competitive advantage in NBTY’s continuous drive for profitable growth. His favorite NBTY supplements include the MET-Rx 180 program, Pure Protein bars and shakes and Fish Oil.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

Today’s enterprises need technology to become a revenue generator, in addition to the more traditional role focused on driving efficiency and cost savings. From a technology partner standpoint, I believe enterprises are looking for 2 main themes:

1. Deliver superior user/customer experience wherever, whenever: this requires ultimate integration between today’s fragmented technology platforms and extension of enterprise and customer-facing solutions to mobile and social platforms.

2. Enable real-time decision-making via relevant, analytics-driven insights: this involves all the old and new technology platforms, from BI to big data, but it’s not just a technology issue: a major success driver here is the ability to embed the insights into the enterprise decision-making process in a timely manner.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

There are two tactical pain points that I’m experiencing that I think have a broad application. We are currently running a portfolio of programs aiming at replacing our old legacy platforms with modern solutions in some of the core enterprise processes, like ERP. In this context, I feel that technology companies could help enterprises to accelerate implementations and reduce costs in a couple of ways:

1. Tighter built-in integration: every implementation requires multiple modules, often from the same provider, but too often a lot of effort is spent to re-build integration between modules that must have been built for other customers in previous projects.

2. Prescriptive implementation project approaches and templates: in the same spirit, technology vendors could provide specific guidance and project accelerators as part of their products, so enterprises can choose an accelerated implementation path, with lower flexibility, but also lower cost and time to market.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

As I mentioned earlier, we are paying specific attention at the confluence of mobile and social and how we can leverage them both internally for our enterprise as well as externally with our customers. In addition to that, we intend to gain significant value by improving our decision-making processes with timely and relevant analytics-driven insights, so we follow with high interest the evolutions in analytics and big data.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

As technology becomes more pervasive and more accessible, with lower barriers to entry, many roles in the organization are able to engage in technology decisions and at the same time, CIOs are becoming more savvy business leaders and they are more able to engage in business decisions. At NBTY, the CIO office leads also the corporate business process improvement program. This allows every project to be run as a good blend of process improvement and technology implementation, and we always include the business process change management as part of our scope.

Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you

As I entered this job tasked to drive a significant IT-driven transformation, the biggest challenges I faced were (1) to fight the urge to do too much and instead prioritize the opportunities, in order to drive the biggest value to the company and (2) to pace the amount change with the organization capability building. Three suggestions I would offer to a new CIO are:

1. Invest time early on to learn the business and build relationships across the board

2. Invest in your people’s professional development

3. Invest in yourself and focus on your personal wellness