Business
Manpower CIO Rick Davidson: Balancing global and local
As part of our ongoing CIO Sessions series to find out what's on the minds of CIOs, I interviewed Rick Davidson, senior vice president and CIO at Manpower, the $16 billion global staffing service. The podcast interview can be delivered directly to your desktop or MP3 player if you're subscribed to our podcasts (See ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in), or you can just download the MP3.
Play audio version
Davidson talked about Manpower's unique IT challenges, which include managing the placement of more than two million temporary workers per year and optimizing IT usage in 4,200 offices in 72 countries. Most of Manpower's business is local, and requires degrees of autonomy in local markets, but Davidson is deploying common infrastructure and consolidating the 600 applications in use today. I also get his take on buzzwords and trends, such as SOA, RFID, open source and utility computing.
The podcast was recorded at the Niku 2005 Global User Conference in San Francisco on November 7. We also have a podcast of Davidson's presentation on IT governance, which was delivered at the Niku conference.