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Oracle’s Board-Level CIO Mark Sunday Drives Innovation As The Company’s First Customer

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by Peter High, published on Forbes

8-3-2015

Mark Sunday has been the CIO of Oracle for ten years, and in that role, he has been the company’s first and best customer. As the CIO of a $38 billion company, his technology needs are quite complex, and he has been the first to use most of the company’s products and services over the past decade. As such, his team offers invaluable counsel to colleagues as to what works well, and what requires further refinement. Also Sunday has been an invaluable advisor to the company’s customers, many of whom are also CIOs. He speaks not as a sales person, but as a peer, and can offer a special depth of knowledge tying together CIOs’ needs with Oracle’s solutions.

Sunday has also joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, having been on the boards of multiple companies over the past decade and a half. He has found the experience invaluable, as it has pushed him to build skills as an advisor in addition to those as an operator in his day-job. He also has drawn insights from each board-level experience to develop innovations he can leverage within Oracle itself.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 14th article in the Board-Level CIO series. To read interviews with the CIOs of Cardinal Health, P&G, Kroger, and FedEx, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High:  Mark, you are the Chief Information Officer of Oracle, a company that needs very little introduction, certainly. But for those who may not be so familiar with the role that you specifically play within the organization, I wondered if you could talk about those areas that are under your purview within Oracle.

Mark Sunday:  I am responsible for the global competing infrastructure and networking infrastructure and how we service our end users in nearly 100 countries. My team is about 50 strong, supporting those folks around the world. Everything from end user services up through a variety of different things necessary for them to communicate, collaborate, and execute their jobs.

I am complemented by our Oracle’s development organization that also contributes to automating processes across the company as they deploy applications.  They have the responsibility to be the first implementer of many of the new products. So between what we do within my organization and my counterparts in development, we serve all of our 140,000+ end users.

High: Oracle is fundamentally a technology company. I can imagine that being the CIO of a technology company has its blessings and its challenges. On the one hand you never have to make the argument to your colleagues that technology ought to be thought of as strategic, but then, on the other hand, you are surrounded by engineers and people with deep technical expertise. Can you talk a bit about culturally what that is like to be within the milieu of a major technology organization running IT?

Sunday: Well, first of all I think it makes it very exciting for the team. So beyond the normal mission IT organizations have of making their organization function, whether it be public or private sector more effective and delivering value to their customers, we take on some additional roles.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes