New CIO cleans up outsourced IT at Clorox

Sets new tech direction and re-establishes control lost to outsourcer

The $5.5 billion Clorox company brought in Ralph Loura as CIO last April because, among other things, it realized it wasn't getting what it wanted out of an extensive HP outsourcing deal. In quick order, Loura and his reformed leadership team fixed some outstanding tech issues and re-established internal control of the company's tech direction. Loura talked about what he found when he joined, what he has accomplished so far and what he's planning next with Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.

By way of background, Clorox is a 98-year-old company based in Oakland, Calif., that has 30-plus global brands. These brands include the namesake bleach and everything from Kingsford Charcoal to KC Masterpiece Barbeque Sauce, Glad bags, Hidden Valley Ranch Salad Dressing and Burt's Bees, a natural personal care product line. The company employs some 8,300 people, about half of which are plant-based, and has 120 people in IT. There are another 300 to 400 IT people working on the Clorox account at HP.

NW: You were brought in as CIO of Clorox to set a new direction in IT. Tell us about that.

The $5.5 billion Clorox company brought in Ralph Loura as CIO last April because, among other things, it realized it wasn't getting what it wanted out of an extensive HP outsourcing deal. In quick order, Loura and his reformed leadership team fixed some outstanding tech issues and re-established internal control of the company's tech direction. Loura talked about what he found when he joined, what he has accomplished so far and what he's planning next with Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.

By way of background, Clorox is a 98-year-old company based in Oakland, Calif., that has 30-plus global brands. These brands include the namesake bleach and everything from Kingsford Charcoal to KC Masterpiece Barbeque Sauce, Glad bags, Hidden Valley Ranch Salad Dressing and Burt's Bees, a natural personal care product line. The company employs some 8,300 people, about half of which are plant-based, and has 120 people in IT. There are another 300 to 400 IT people working on the Clorox account at HP.

NW: You were brought in as CIO of Clorox to set a new direction in IT. Tell us about that.

R: Clorox had essentially viewed IT as a cost center, a cost of doing business, and the last couple of CIOs had come from a finance or audit background. They were multiple years into an outsourcing relationship with HP and were a bit frustrated that the productivity improvements and efficiency gains they expected weren't materializing. What they came to realize is outsourcing is not a turnkey operation, that the business has to lead some of the value generation, so they went out looking for someone who had prior experience as a CIO leading business transformation and generating business value through the deployment of technology.

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NW: What did you find when you got there?

R: What I expected. An organization that had been under-invested in, both in terms of people, process and technology. For example, our desktop standard was Windows 2000. Most organizations had at least made the move to XP, if not to Vista. And some of the underlying systems, our ERP environment, our CRM environment, had become dated. Another example was e-mail messaging. We were a Lotus Notes shop and running a version of Notes that was several full releases behind.

Everything was in need of basic upgrades and maintenance to bring the environment from a dated state to a more current and more agile state. There had been this kind of, "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" view, which is contract behavior, right? You do the least amount necessary to maintain the SLA, with no idea that certain upgrades create value by unlocking productivity through the features in the solution.

NW: So you come in and find a bunch of old stuff, a lot of projects screaming for attention, how do you figure out what to do first?

R: Well, some of this is opportunistic. So clearly in the first 90 days you want to make an impact. And an impact doesn't mean starting a portfolio of multimillion dollar projects that will take three years to pay out. You need to move the needle. You have to triage what can be done quickly, what can be done with the highest impact and lowest risk. So one of the first things we did was start a project to off-load Windows 2000. And again, because we wanted to pursue both speed and low-risk, we actually moved to Vista. Some people questioned why we didn't go directly to Windows 7, but we looked at Vista as a tactical upgrade to buy us some time to make the real strategic transformation that's now in the pipeline.