How Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon is propelling data driven change at open source firm

Red Hat CIO tells Computing how analytics and cloud are changing the way the company thinks about IT and IT staff

Red Hat is one of the world's best-known providers of open source software products for the enterprise, with more than 6,500 employees across the globe, including 300 full-time IT staff and around 80 contractors.

The IT department is led by CIO Lee Congdon, who is on a mission to make "the organisation more data driven" in a bid to improve productivity and decision-making in all areas, including products, support, marketing and sales.

"We've had a traditional business intelligence (BI) environment for some time. We spent the last year recrafting that and are now focusing more on data and analytics, rather than the term business intelligence," says Congdon.

"Our approach has shifted from creating what we hoped to be a pristine data warehouse and then providing access to it through reporting tools, to capturing more and more data and giving our users tools to examine it with a variety of mechanisms, whether it's QlikView, Amazon Redshift or other tools," he says.

Congdon says cloud providers such as Amazon are now playing a "huge role" in data analysis and delivery at Red Hat.

"Historically, we'd run these analyses on site; we're now finding we can do them 10 times faster and cheaper by using public cloud technology," he says, adding that while Amazon is a prominent cloud partner "we're not by any means limited to that solution".

Since embarking on the this cloud-based analytics strategy, Red Hat has been able to refine the way it develops and markets its technology.

"We know more about how our customers use and consume our products, so we can make better product decisions in terms of how we package them," says Congdon.

"On the marketing side, we can see which investments provide the best payback, while on the sales side we can identify customers who are ready to renew and hopefully upsell, as well as identifying prospects we haven't identified in the past. Those are areas where we're currently focused but I expect there will be many others as well."

But in order to fully take advantage of data analysis, a company needs good data scientists, but Congdon says recruiting people with the right data science skills is not easy.

"It's difficult to find data scientists; we think we've got some good ones, but we've developed them internally," he says.

"We started with people with the right BI background, the right analytical skills. Certainly we bring in people from outside the organisation as well and partner with firms who have the capability - SAS, for example."

Congdon believes the education system in the US has been slow to respond to the rapid increase in demand from business for data science skills.

"As we shift to an information-driven economy, the need for every firm - regardless of what product or service they sell - to have data analysis capabilities is growing," he says.

"The education system hasn't responded yet; folks haven't chosen this as a career path and have instead started to develop the skillsets themselves after they've joined an organisation."

Away from analytics, Congdon is also looking to boost productivity through a combination of BYOD and self-service support.

"We're focused on ensuring that we have, in ServiceNow and in other places, the appropriate self-help information, so that if a new Android phone hits, we've got documentation on how to sort it out on our network and use it productively for business," says Congdon.

"We're moving people to a self-help model with the expectation that all of our services are available on an Android or iOS device and on a browser," he adds. "It then becomes the associate's responsibility over time to have a computer with a working browser and they can access our applications generically but securely from a variety of devices."

To support this model, Red Hat uses cloud services from the likes of ServiceNow, Jive and Google that enable staff to work productively from home, the office or elsewhere. These services are delivered to employees through its Customer One Programme, which is based on what Congdon calls an "open hybrid cloud" that allows organisations to access a variety of cloud services hosted by a mix or providers, "all linked together, we hope, with our own technology".

"About 70 per cent of our applications are web based," explains Congdon. "We've gone with consumer-based applications like Google, Jive, ServiceNow, Salesforce, that work outside the firewall and allow our associates seamless access through a single sign-on mechanism that we developed using Red Hat technology.

"Our folks sign on in the morning with a single sign-on that they can use in all those cloud providers," he adds.

The advantage of using third-party services, Congdon says, is "resilience, as well as the ability to scale and provide global services more readily than we could out of our own internal data centres".

This shift to cloud has led to a change in the way many of Red Hat's IT staff work, reveals Congdon.

"They're going to be orchestrating resources and solutions provided over the cloud or by vendor partners as well as within the organisation," he says. "IT folks are going to need to understand the business problem and be able to bring a solution to the table, not force their business partners into a two-year development cycle."

Red Hat also provides another career path for IT staff, one where they can move sideways into coding software products.

"We've become a bit of a talent factory as people in IT get familiar with our products and choose to go into coding as a career," he says.

"It's good for the organisation because we keep people within it, and it's good for the product division because they've got folks with real-world implementing skills, and it's good for us in IT because we can point to our associates that they can develop in that direction as a career path."

Congdon says the service orchestrating and coding roles complement each other and help to make his department one that can add real value to the business as well as fix IT problems.

"For most organisations, when the website's down or the email server isn't up, IT is a problem and so you need to run the engine and keep the lights on in order to be successful in IT," he says.

"But where you really add value is by identifying new customers or by going to the product team and identifying areas for new products, or helping the organisation and reducing cost," he adds.

"In most organisations, the finance team doesn't get credit for having money in the bank to make payroll, but it's a requirement of the job and if it isn't done successfully, there's a problem. Similarly, IT needs to keep email available, the website up and so on and if they don't there's a problem.

"But finance and IT can deliver more to the organisation than mundane tasks, they can identify opportunities to grow the business."

"So I think that IT requires two different sets of skills and focus. One is you need to be successful in running the engine and driving out cost and continuing to renew your resources so you an be efficient going forward.

"But at the same time, you need to be identifying business opportunities to drive revenue or reduce cost, so IT needs to do both of those things. The part that's going to be more visible to the business is the latter," Congdon concludes.