"Organizations are only as good as their people –invest in your professionals and inspire them to  share the mantra."

SCOTT KAHN
CIO
VP of Illumina

Scott joined Illumina in April 2005 and is the VP and CIO. Scott has over a decade of experience in  computational chemistry and has guided commercial development of some of the world's most  widely used simulation products. His record includes involvement in the development of analysis  tools for medicinal chemistry and the creation of commercial modeling packages. Scott received a  Ph.D. in theoretical organic chemistry from the University of California. He is a former assistant  professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

Some of the biggest challenges facing our organization involves the ability to *securely* access corporate information anytime, anywhere, and in the manner desired. This has encouraged us to adopt a mobile platform and to fully embrace BYOD as long as a set of security policies can be enforced on the device. Backing the client-side needs is an investment in our back office capabilities; mostly focused on improving business processes but also on the enterprise systems that implement these processes. Increasingly we are looking to acquire enterprise capabilities as services rather than as software that we implement on-premise.

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

Information security is an ongoing challenge, especially as one seeks to empower professionals with the ability to control their own environments while ensuring that attacks can be blunted or at least detected and quarantined. A second pain point consists of technology that is well worn albeit the cause of countless hours of lost productivity. Like many companies we rely on cross-site teams to accomplish tasks and these teams rely on conferencing to meet on a regular basis. Despite investments in training and in surveying all possible vendors, it is surprising how much time is lost at the beginning of meetings due to technical difficulties!

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

One of the largest technological trends has been the move towards Cloud infrastructure and the ability to procure services that move up the value chain. Increasingly one is able to purchase whole Business Functions as a Service rather than buying the constituent pieces and shouldering the integration costs and complexities. This trend towards higher level IT capabilities as a Service will continue or accelerate in the years ahead. A future trend that will have enormous impact on how we run our business and how we define our business is Big Data. While not as well developed as Cloud, Big Data holds promise to create value through analysis of aggregated information on a grand scale.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

My role as CIO involves a balancing between supporting the business and participating in the business. My experiences in supporting the business are similar to most CIOs that comment on the need to deeply partner; to develop your organization’s people and capabilities to support deep collaboration, and to stay abreast of where technological advance can reduce cost or improve the enterprise user’s experience. Looking ahead my role as CIO will be to help participate in the business by extending our product offerings into informational offerings and a more thoroughly integrated user experience.

Lessons learned as a CIO

Organizations are only as good as their people – invest in your professionals and inspire them to share the mantra. With this investment in people, also invest in the tools that they use to be successful and the processes that allow them to scale their impact across an organization. Don’t forget the little things that compromise productivity as they become a headwind that eats away at all of the strong advances that one might make.