Rob Carter

FedEx's CIO talks about recession cleanups, a challenging customer base, and the promise of active RFID and sensor technologies.

How have you had to reprioritize IT projects because of budget considerations in this economy? While it's certainly tighter than average this year, that by no means implies that we're not investing. We've got a reasonable project plan for the year that does reflect the restrained spending, but at the same time, you have to make investments.

In hard times, it takes the most courage to invest and stay current. We also get the ability to clean up some things, frankly. When there's a lot of pullback in investing, sometimes it's a good time to go in and target areas that you've needed to get to but haven't.

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FedEx's CIO talks about recession cleanups, a challenging customer base, and the promise of active RFID and sensor technologies.

How have you had to reprioritize IT projects because of budget considerations in this economy? While it's certainly tighter than average this year, that by no means implies that we're not investing. We've got a reasonable project plan for the year that does reflect the restrained spending, but at the same time, you have to make investments.

In hard times, it takes the most courage to invest and stay current. We also get the ability to clean up some things, frankly. When there's a lot of pullback in investing, sometimes it's a good time to go in and target areas that you've needed to get to but haven't.

What are you cleaning up now? We're making a lot of infrastructure investments. The data center and network infrastructure build-out is where a lot of our focus is right now.

What new projects made the cut for the next 12 months? The focus tends to be around international, ease of use and customs clearance. We're making a lot of investments in the customer service [and interactive voice response] platforms around the world [and] in our mobile infrastructure. With FedEx Mobile, we've seen more than 500% growth year over year. We continue to invest in that.

What technologies did you deploy to develop that? We use Adobe Flex and AIR on the front end. We can run AIR applications, which are browserless applications that pull information from the Internet. Flex allowed us to rapidly build graphical interfaces that are animated. You get very clear depictions of what's going on.

On the back end, we have the same high-performance back end that we've had for some time. During a typical morning of package delivery and package movement, we're probably posting about 3,000 transactions per second. At the same time, we're handling 1,000 inquiries per second against that same database.

What are your biggest technology limitations or issues? The one that vexes us the most are the least common denominator technologies that our customers have. Some customers run on very old desktop machines with a dial-up connection. A big part of the challenge for us is making sure we offer low-bandwidth capabilities that match the needs of a customer's site and at the same time provide a rich, high-performance experience for people with new technologies, new handheld devices and broadband capabilities. It's running that gamut that's the most challenging limiter. We don't just get to move along the current edge of technology; we have to make sure we move along the tailing edge as well, or we will alienate a lot of customers.

What emerging technologies do you find most promising for your organization and why? The next generation of sensors and active RFID devices is going to really revolutionize the Internet and what is possible.

The connected Web has changed the way the world works and has been incredibly powerful. We're getting ready to shift to a new world where sensors are capable of being online and part of that connected space.

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