CIO Sessions: Randy Spratt, McKesson Corp.
Randy Spratt heads up IT for McKesson, the $88 billion healthcare giant headquartered in San Francisco. In our video interview (transcript here) Spratt described one aspect of McKesson's business as the Amazon.com of healthcare. "We’ll do a billion and half dollars of pharmaceuticals every month through our online capabilities," he said. In terms of driving down costs to deliver services and focusing on innovation, Spratt said that the big initiatives on his plate include CPU virtualization, network convergence, datacenter automation and deploying collaboration and end-user experience tools to improve the ability of employees to work wherever and whenever.
Related to employees working wherever and whenever, Spratt believes that social networking is an important factor, although employees spending time on MySpace isn't the preferred activity. "As we move into more and more situations where we’re allowing people to work at home, and they lose the day-to-day, face-to-face interaction, we also see through surveys that they tend to become more dissatisfied with that job after a year or so because of the lack of social contact," he said. "The ones who stay in the job find ways to replace it with electronic social networking. So to that end, as I said, we’re investing in collaboration tools, and bandwidth to be able to support video networking, and network tools within our infrastructure that will allow people to communication more freely."
Spratt also discusses his views on Web 2.0, social networking in the workplace, RFID and on demand computing. You can watch the full 18 minute interview or selected clips.
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