Don Hopkins: Lessons Learned from Continuity to Cost-cutting

This is from the Dec. 12 update at EnterpriseLeadership.

Don Hopkins
CIO, SunGard Availability Services
and Former CIO, NCR Corp.

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When Don Hopkins retired as chief information officer at NCR, he decided to join SunGard Availability Services, a business unit of the $5 billion SunGard Corp. SunGard Availability Services provides the company's more than 10,000 customers in North American and in Europe with solutions that ensure uninterrupted access to mission-critical data and systems. By reporting to SunGard's CEO, Hopkins has insight into the company's strategic initiatives and, as a result, has the opportunity to understand what technologies would be good enablers to those strategic decisions.
 
In 1979, Hopkins joined NCR where he moved up the IT ranks from the director of general-purpose products to vice president of technology and infrastructure in NCR's IT services group, and to his last position as chief information officer. In fact, he played a leadership role in NCR's transformation and performance turnaround. In 2007, he successfully completed the very complex IT spin-off of Teradata as a separate company. Although this event happened during a very aggressive timeframe, Hopkins and the management team did it under planned budgets, both before and after the spin-off.
 
In this podcast, Hopkins talks about how he has translated his IT experiences at NCR and applied them as CIO at SunGard Availability Services. He also talks about NCR's strategy to cut its IT infrastructure costs and increase the company's profitability, its process for making investment decisions in technology, and its methodology for measuring the value of those investments.