Red Hat Information Technology Objectives

The Red Hat fiscal year (FY10) has just started and as I’ve done in the past, I’d like to share our Information Technology objectives for the coming year. In many ways, they are similar to those we set for last year. As a general theme, we are focusing on a smaller number of objectives in recognition that this will be a year of constrained resources. We’ll also be building on a number of successes from the past year.

Our Vision remains unchanged: to become a world-class technology organization and to be a beacon for the effective implementation of open source solutions. In pursuit of this vision, I am particularly proud of the progress we’ve made in migrating to JBoss middleware, migrating to Zimbra for email, and the many process improvements we’ve implemented.

Our objectives for FY10 are grouped in three categories: Enable the Business, Grow our Capabilities, and Improve Process Discipline.

Enable the Business

As in every IT organization I’ve been a part of, one of our primary objectives is to deliver committed projects on time and on budget. We will continue the work of defining target architectures for each of our businesses after making good progress last year. We’ll extend our enterprise data model and build depth in specific domains. And, building on the success of our Zimbra implementation, we will further improve our collaboration solutions.

Grow Our Capabilities

We’ve had remarkable demand for our Business Intelligence solutions in recent months, so a key objective will be to enhance those solutions and the processes that support them. We will establish formal vendor management processes in recognition of our increasing reliance on vendor partners. Information Security is critical for Red Hat and we will continue to improve our implementation of the provisions of our Information Security Policy. We’ll work to evolve our workforce plan to insure the right balance between internal and external resources and the right balance of resources among our global locations.

Improve Process Discipline

Last year, our ITIL work focused on Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management. This year, we will add ITIL Release Management, Configuration Management and Asset Management to our formal IT processes. We’ll also focus on increased adoption of formal business change management processes and we’ll consolidate our reporting into an IT management dashboard.

Other Objectives

In addition to addressing our objectives, I expect to focus on refining our Information Technology strategy, improving our partnerships with our internal business customers, and interacting with Red Hat’s customers to share our experiences and to better understand their needs.

I recently shared these objectives with the IT team. We are excited about FY10 and looking forward to continuing Red Hat’s growth through the solutions we provide. We are very cognizant of the economic environment faced by our firm and by our customers, and thus will focus on obtaining maximum business value for the investments we make.