By Molly Rose Teuke
Safeguarding
Information
QUALCOMM CIO NORM FJELDHEIM CALLS
AGILE SOFTWARE CRITICAL FOR TRACKING
AND SECURING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.
JAMES ARONOVSK Y
Norm Fjeldheim, CIO and Senior
Vice President at Qualcomm
olding patents on technologies that facilitate wireless
communications makes protecting and managing intellectual property a challenge. For Norm Fjeldheim, CIO
and senior vice president at Qualcomm, security was the
underlying driver in the company’s 2001 decision to implement
Agile Product Lifecycle Management software. It was also why,
in 2002, the company completed an implementation across its
six business units, affecting 7,000 employees on six continents.
Today, 13,000 employees benefit from that implementation.
“Before the Agile software, we had a homegrown system that
was meeting our needs, except that it had a wide-open structure. You had access to everything or access to nothing,” says
Fjeldheim. “We needed a secure way to track engineering documents, product-related documents, anything to do with what we
call configuration management. The Agile software is critical for
us, because it’s our key repository for all engineering documents
and we’re an engineering company. We have hundreds of thousands of documents within the Agile system.”
Those documents span content on Qualcomm’s patent portfolio of groundbreaking advances in wireless communication,
which it licenses to more than 140 companies globally, to development standards for 3G and other next-generation wireless
technologies. Qualcomm’s more than 30,000 patents and patent
applications reflect the company’s position at the leading edge of
wireless technology and underscore its need for secure data management. Qualcomm is one of the wireless industry’s pioneers
of code division multiple access (CDMA), a technology used by
some of the world’s largest wireless operators to deliver mobile
voice and data services to hundreds of millions of subscribers
worldwide. For Fjeldheim, maintaining a secure environment
that protects Qualcomm’s technology innovations is paramount.
Although document security was the key factor in
Qualcomm’s decision to choose Agile Product Lifecycle
Management, it wasn’t the only benefit. Revision control gives
stakeholders the ability to look back in history to see how documents, and therefore products, progress. A product resource
center portal acts as a centralized user interface for real-time
