Mississippi native Ehrlich has been with Chevron his entire career. He joined the company as a programmer analyst in New Orleans in 1981 and moved steadily up the technology ranks, holding 16 different jobs at the company before being named global CIO in 2008. Ehrlich is also an accomplished country singer/songwriter whose sound has been likened to James Taylor and Vince Gill. He says his true love is music and he released his first CD in 1998.

• A native of Pascagoula, Mississippi
• Earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1981, and a M.B.A. degree from Houston Baptist University in 1995
• Chevron
  ­ Programmer Analyst, New Orleans, Louisiana (1981)
  ­ Multiple technology positions, increasing scope and import
  ­ Manager, Central Information Services, Upstream Technology Company
  ­ Manager, Organization Renewal, Upstream Technology Company
  ­ Member, Corporation's IT Vision Team, Chevron's Global Information Link
  ­ Service Manager, Chevron Information Technology Company
  ­ CIO, Chevron Downstream Marketing business (2000)
  ­ CIO and GM, North America Products Company Information Technology, ChevronTexaco Corporation (2001)
  ­ CIO, Global Downstream (2004)
  ­ VP and CIO, Services and Strategy, Chevron Global Downstream (2006)
  ­ CIO & President, Information Technology Co. unit (-present)
  

• Chairman, CIO Executive Summit
• Member, Board of Advisors, CIO Executive Council
• Member, Board of Advisors, Lawrence Hall of Science
• Member, Board of CIO, Leadership Forum
• Member, Advisory Council, Research Board
• Former chair, General Committee on Information Management and Technology, API

• Drive the business: Chevron is positioning itself as a technology company that happens to be in the energy business and as a result, IT is part of every facet of Chevron's operations. Ehrlich's mission is to channel more IT resources toward growth-oriented change and innovation. He is a frequent speaker in CIO circles about the imperative to align with the business, noting that "some CIOs, with all this economic pressure these days, kinda punt for a while on the value-add and spend a lot of time rationalizing the environment to get to the point where you can start to think about how you can switch money from one to the other. Our approach is to do both simultaneously...We're at about 65% on run and 30% to 35% on change," he said. "I'd like that to be better because you always want to free up more toward adding value to the company."
• Data center consolidation: As part of his effort to lower IT costs and increase IT efficiency, Ehrlich and team are in the midst of consolidating 100 global data centers down to 50, as well as reducing the number of applications running across those data centers and virtualizing hundreds of servers. Noting that the data center consolidation project will also lower costs for real estate, energy, security, and administration, Ehrlich said that "...where that data center consolidation will really help is...giving us the funds necessary to pursue vital new projects...We're going to reduce our application portfolio by 20% and cut our vendors and suppliers by half over the next three years."
• Enterprisewide IT portfolio management: Ehrlich is taking a holistic approach to IT strategy and focusing on fewer things overall-but more of the things that add the most value to Chevron. The company is striving to cut the number of concurrent projects by 20% and is looking to concentrate its IT investments in three areas: accelerating business insight; automating, optimizing and integrating Chevron's business operations; and connecting people, processes and businesses. "What we want to do enterprisewide is put the most money into things that are going to make the most money for Chevron, guided by those three strategic areas.
• Virtual worlds pilot: Chevron is piloting a Second Life training program for refinery employees. "You're using simulation models so that they're not out in the refinery," says Ehrlich. "It's a much safer way of training people, but it's also a way in which you can repeat the training in a consistent way and even save the experience. I see it going beyond just training...You're doing things you just can't do in the real world. It's a way to bring in expertise from all around the world tied with real-time models."
• Desktop infrastructure refresh: Chevron is in the midst of a "major refresh" of its 100,000 desktops around the world. The company is deploying Vista worldwide. When asked why he would decide to upgrade to Vista now, when Windows 7 is so close, Ehrlich said, "We have to. We're at the end of life cycle of that asset base. The things we've had to do with application integration are the same things you have to do with Windows 7. I view Windows 7 as an upgrade from Vista. We're talking 100,000 machines. It's an 18-month deployment. So when we get there, we'll take a look [at Windows 7]."

• Wringing value out of data: Ehrlich said in 2009 that Chevron refineries create 4TB of new data per day. "Every second, 60,000 valves are controlled by IT, and information is created about that. The trick is, how do you make sense out of that data in a way that's going to add value to the company? We're trying to make sense out of things you can't see, so understanding the subsurface is critical. It's also just the amount of data that we have. We have this seismic information that we use to make a lot of decisions and to understand the subsurface. We've managed 50-plus 3-D seismic projects. If you put them on CDs and stacked them flat, they would be 652 miles high. That gives you a sense of how dense the data is...Data is just hugely important to us, and we're going to put energy toward getting clear from an enterprise perspective what are the top 10 data types that make the most money for Chevron, and then understand the quality of those and relentlessly pursue improving the quality of those to something that's world-class over the next three years."
• Prioritizing across the company: Ehrlich said in 2009, "Our business is hugely complex. It requires massive investment in technology that is pervasive to everything we do...The opportunity is to think across Chevron, prioritize on what adds the most value to the company -- that's the tightening up. And the way we're doing that is getting clear on where we think IT investments can add the most value to the company."

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http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/336491/The_Grill_Louie_Ehrlich?taxonomyId=14&pageNumber=1

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219300010&pgno=1&queryText=&isPrev=

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