NBCUniversal Redirects IT Focus to Innovation

Atish Banerjea, CIO at NBCUniversal, talks about his experience in improving IT’s image and performance at NBCUniversal.  Banerjea states that IT just played a back office role at NBCUniversal.  His goal was to move IT from the back office into business unit leadership.  The first hurdle was the lack of investment for IT.  Banerjea was able to gain support from Comcast, who recently acquired NBCU.  Comcast gave capital to allow IT to invest in infrastructure and IT talent.  He decided to make improvements where employees would notice changes.  This included increasing email capacity, upgrading mobile and desktop devices, and improving the help desk.  The most important move that Banerjea did was embedding CIO’s into the business units.  This has allowed IT to create support for business units, and offer value from a business perspective.

Do you think embedding CIOs into business units is a good model or do you think they should be a separate entity?

What else do you think Banerja could do to improve IT at NBCUniversal?