Archive for October, 2008

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5 Skills Of The CIO Of The Future

Monday, October 27th, 2008
The CIO Of Tomorrow Is Going To Have To Have Some Super Skills

The CIO Of Tomorrow Is Going To Have To Have Some Super Skills

Psst – would you like a peek into the future? Sorry, I can’t tell you when the financial markets are going to bottom out, when house prices will snap back, or even what lottery numbers would be a sure thing. However, I can tell you what the CIO of tomorrow is going to look like and he/she isn’t going to look like the one that you’ve got right now!

As Rodeney Dangerfield said so elegantly, “I can’t get no respect”. This seems like it could almost be a mantra for CIOs. A survey of CIOs that Information Week is working on is starting to show some big problems up at the top of the IT career ladder. Specifically, outside of IT the other C-level executives aren’t seeing the CIO as being all that useful and therefore the importance of the CIO has actually decreased over the past year. Oh, oh – this spells trouble for the rest of us.

So what’s going on here? CIOs are falling down in several areas. Either they are going to have to find ways to fix their performance in these areas or they are going to have to step aside and let someone else take the wheel of the IT shop. Here’s a list of what today’s CIOs need to fix in order to start getting some respect:

  1. Spend Money The Right Way: One of the biggest gripes that the rest of the company has about CIOs is that they are too caught up in performing support tasks. This means that too much of a CIOs budget is being spent on the wrong stuff: support, not innovation. Right now the split seems to be 70% being spent on support and 30% being spent on new initiatives. What does the rest of the company want? How about a 20% / 80% split? I don’t want to hear that that’s impossible – get cracking CIO!
  2. Know Your Technology: It sure seems like there is no shortage of new technology constantly cropping up. The rest of the company wants the CIO to be on top of all of this technology stuff, sort through it, and tell them what’s important and what’s not. The CIO needs to be a technology visionary that the rest of the company can turn to in order to find out what’s real and what’s not. Case in point: the converged network (voice, video, and data on one network instead of three separate networks) was big a few years ago. Your CIO should have been all over that. Right now Cloud Computing appears to be the next big thing in whatever form it ends up taking. Your CIO should be leading the charge to find out what this will eventually mean for your company.
  3. Talk The Talk (of Business): This is one that’s been hanging around for awhile, but it just won’t go away. CIOs need to stop talking tech with other C-levels and start to talk about solving business problems. It is the responsibility of the CIO to translate technology into business terms and use that to talk with other business executives.
  4. Execute, Execute, Execute: Quick – think of two words that describe your IT department. Did you pick “expensive” and “slow”? If not, then perhaps you should have because that is how everyone else thinks of you. The ability to deliver on promises made by the IT department is a key part of any CIOs job. The CIO of tomorrow needs to ensure that if the IT department says that it’s going to do something, then it follows through and delivers what it promised on time.
  5. It’s All About The Processes: Ultimately the rest of the company is looking to the CIO in order to get help in further automating the way that the business operates. Nobody really cares if you’re going to use Web 2.0 technologies, SaaS, SOA, etc. What matters is that what once was done manually and took a long time can now be done automatically and takes much less time.

Does your CIO look like the CIO of today or the CIO of tomorrow? Do you agree with my list of what new skills a CIO must have or did I leave something off? Which one of these new skills do you think is the most important for a CIO to have? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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No Bubble Here: IT Spending Going Up Next Year!

Friday, October 24th, 2008
The Market Downturn Will Impact IT Spending, But Not Too Much!

The Market Downturn Will Impact IT Spending, But Not Too Much!

As the rest of the world seems to be going through some sort of complete meltdown, the IT industry is in the  process of holding its breath. 2001 was not all that long ago and we can remember what happened back then all too well: days of unlimited spending, lots of travel, and lavish celebrations came to a screeching halt almost overnight as the banks cut off credit and the IT bubble popped. Reading the newspapers and watching TV one would be lead to believe that the same sort of doom and gloom seems to be settling over all industries right now. Is another bubble popping what they mean by Internet 2.0?

Well the folks over at Gartner have some (basically) good news for you. They’ve been talking with everyone and their mother’s brother and what they have found out is that YES, IT spending is going to get cut back because of all of the financial turmoil that is currently going on. However, we’re not going to see the massive cutbacks that came after the dot.com bust.

Before the subprime fueled meltdown of the financial markets started to happen, Gartner had been predicting that spending on IT for next year was going to increase at a healthy 5.8%. To put this in perspective, you’ve got to realize that during the dot.com era, IT spending lived in the middle double digits. However, after the bust happened, IT spending descended into the basement of low single digit growth (less than inflation!) and remained there for several years. Gartner’s new guess for IT spending next year is (drum roll please) 2.3%.

Peter Sondergaard is Gartner’s global head of research. He believes that IT spending generally lags behind the general econonmy by at least two quarters, so the current meltdown won’t impact IT spending until roughly mid next year.

What’s going to get cut? Sondergaard says that hardware spending is an easy hit – it will probably get curtailed earlier and harder than either software or IT services. Spending on those IT services should probably focus on off-shore outsourcing. What’s interesting is that they aren’t predicting any more really big, big deals. Instead you should expect to see a collection of smaller outsourcing deals.

The folks in the software industry have cleverly thought to set up sorta of a “safety net” for themselves should this kind of contraction occur. Most software vendors (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc.) have gotten their customers to sign up for long term support contacts so they may be able to dance by any general market slowdown with minimal impacts.

In IT it generally takes us about 10 years to adopt a new technology. This time around, the experts are thinking that the downturn may cause everyone to adopt new technology faster because it will result in big cost savings just when they are needed the most. Expect Software As A Service (SaaS) and so-called Cloud Computing services to be among the early winners from this situation.

What do you plan on doing differently within your IT department during this downturn? Do you believe that your budget will or will not be impacted by what’s going on in the market right now? Do you offer any long-term support contracts to your customers and if so, will they help you if things get tight? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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CIO Lessons From The War In Iraq

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
CIOs Can Learn From How U.S. Forces Were Finally Successful In Iraq

CIOs Can Learn From How U.S. Forces Were Finally Successful In Iraq

First off, this post has nothing to do with politics. It really does not matter how you feel about the war in Iraq – this post will still contain valuable information for you. I’ve just gotten done reading the book The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and The Endgame In Iraq by Bing West. It’s a great book and I highly recommend that you read it. If, just for a moment, we can step away from all of the emotion that talking about this war causes, then we just might be able to realize that this conflict has the opportunity to show CIOs how to run their departments better. Don’t believe me? Then read on…

The war in Iraq has pitted a large successful country (the U.S.) against a collection of small, scrappy forces that included Shia, Sunnis, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and probably a bunch of other folks. For a variety of reasons, this conflict has dragged on for over 5 years and only now is the U.S. starting to emerge as the clear victor.

From a CIO perspective, the feeling that one is involved in a conflict with other firms that seem to morph and change shape on a daily basis should feel very familiar. Traditionally IT departments have been able to go toe-to-toe with their competition and either out-spend them on the latest technology or out-hire them in order to get the best talent. In doing this, they could then go to their customers and “prove” that they were the best IT department around.

Now that we are living in the 21st Century, things are not so simple any more. The U.S. forces have the challenge of trying to protect the Iraqi people while fighting the insurgents. IT departments have a similar challenge in that they are trying to serve both their internal and external customers while trying to fight off the threat of being completely outsourced or losing customers to competitors. The U.S. forces can’t always tell if the people that they are trying to protect are grateful for the help or so resentful that they are the ones who are taking shots at them. Likewise, a CIO can’t be sure if the customers that he’s trying to service are working with him or if they are actively trying to replace either him or his entire department!

In Bing West’s book, he points out the interesting fact that how to win the war in Iraq was known by the U.S. military based on their experience in Vietnam over 40 years ago. It just took them 5 years to relearn what they already knew. Bing writes that in order to secure Iraq, the U.S. forces needed to follow a seize, secure, rebuild process. This meant that U.S. forces would move into a hostile area, take it over, stay there and provide protection for the locals, and then start to rebuild the area in order to show the locals that the U.S. forces were the good guys. This was a difficult lesson for a force that had been trained to take territory and kill enemies to learn.

Today’s CIOs can learn a lot from this hard won information. Specifically, they too need to follow a process of seize, secure, and rebuild in order to make their IT departments successful. Two types of territory can be seized: internal and external. Internal territory is controlled by departments and the more departments that IT interacts with, the more territory it can “seize”. Once IT becomes responsible for new tasks / territories, then the real work begins – securing it. This means that the IT department needs to become so good at handling this area and resolving issues quickly that nobody can imagine anyone else handling this task. Additionally, external territory is controlled by customers. If IT can interact with a customer and forge a positive partnership with them, then additional territory will have been seized. Once again, by forming a strong bond between the external customer and the IT department this territory will have been secured.

The final step, rebuilding, is the most important. The U.S. forces found that if they didn’t rebuild the territory that they had seized, then the locals would continue to help the bad guys. However, if rebuilding was done, then the locals shunned the bad guys and sided with the Americans.

Having secured new territory, a CIO has to quickly start rebuilding their IT environment. This can be as simple as upgrading their hardware or as complex as creating and delivering a completely new application. The CIO needs to spend time in the new territory finding out what his new customer’s needs are. He then needs to solve those needs and make sure that the customer agrees that the problems have been solved. By doing this he will show the customer that the IT department is committed to making their life better.

Seize, secure, and rebuild. How much more simple can this possibly be? Today’s CIO has a very clear roadmap to follow in order to be successful.

Have you reciently captured any “territory”? Have you been working to sercure it? What plans do you have when you start to rebuild it? How do you believe that you can start to rebuild it? Leave a comment and let me know how you feel.

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10 Ways That IT Can Solve Real-World Business Problems

Thursday, October 16th, 2008
When IT Understands The Business, Then They Can Provide Assistance

When IT Understands The Business, Then They Can Provide Assistance

My favorite word is “alignment”. This describes the situation that happens when an IT department gets it act together and focuses on solving problems for the business. This is actually different from what an IT department normally spends its time doing: keeping the network up and providing help desk support for end users. The folks over at eWeek found out that a number of IT departments have actually been listening to what the rest of the business has been asking for and they are now starting to create custom solutions that solve real-world business problems.

The IT departments have been starting with the single app that has the most valuable information in it, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, and then extending it to do useful work. How about if we take a look at 10 of these applications:

  1. Where’s My Trash (Truck): An Atlanta based company called Trash-It has combined their Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live tool with the Tom-Tom Work application, a GPS navigation tool. This now allows the business side of the house to see where all of their trash trucks are at any time and better manage and control the fleet. Instead of guessing if they have too many or too few trucks, now they know!
  2. Helping Out The Homeless: San Francisco’s Family Service Agency has the nearly impossible task of running six major helping centers with over 250 staff members. On a yearly basis, they are able to help 8,000 clients. They had a huge problem: how could they tell who they had served and where they had served them? If they knew this, then they could better coordinate their services and make the best use of their limited funding. Their IT department used Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform to build a single integrated record for each client. This allowed the business side of the house, six different agencies, to view each customer’s single record of service.
  3. Conserve More: The U.S. Department of Agriculture does a lot of conservation work. Until now, different systems had been used to track different conservation projects. Their IT department used Microsoft’s Dynamic CRM 4.0 to build a conservation work tracking application. Now the rest of the department is able to view all of the conservation efforts in a single place.
  4. Is There A Doctor Here?: The good folks at the Schumacher Group are responsible for providing both doctors and operating teams to over 140 hospitals that are spread out over multiple states. This works out ok if everything is going fine; however, in the event of a natural disaster it can become very difficult to find doctors and get them to where they are most urgently needed. The IT team used Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform to create a hurricane tracking app that integrates doctor location information. This allows the business side of the house to swing into action when disaster strikes and make sure that the right resources are sent to the right locations.
  5. Geek Map: The Geeks On The Way service found that business was just a little bit too good. Their employees were spending way too much time trying to map service calls so that they could provide the most efficient service to their spread out customer base. Their IT department (yes, Geeks need an IT department also) used the SugarCRM app to create an application that automatically linked with the open source Asterisk PBX phone system and map out routes for their techs to use for service calls.
  6. Super Bowl Story: The company Total Structures has what I consider to be a fun job – they are in the business of building custom structures. Where this story gets interesting is when you realize that they won the job to build the halftime stage that was used at this year’s Super Bowl (yep, we all saw it for about 30 minutes, but I’ll bet none of us can remember what it looked like!) You can imagine just how complex building a structure that has to magically show up, be used, and then vanish must be. Their IT department used Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live to come up with an application that they could use to track the building of the stage. Now how’s that for stretching the definition of a CRM application!
  7. HIPPA-Hurray, HIPPA-Hurray!: The Department of Human Services out in Oregon had a real problem on their hands. They were trying to manage Medicaid claims that they were receiving from over 35,000 health care providers in the state. This meant that they were dealing with 60,000 paper-based claims each month. Oh, and the new HIPPA rules were coming into effect. Their IT department used the SugarCRM app to move to electronic forms. As a nice side-benefit, they became HIPPA compliant along the way.
  8. It’s All About Politics: No matter what side of the political fence you sit on, you’ve got to admire former presidential candidate Mitt Rommney’s campaign team. Their IT folks used Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform to create an app that allowed volunteers to get info out to those who needed it while at the same time using emails to ask for campaign funds. How successful was this app? Well by using it Mitt Rommney was able to raise $20M for his bid. He lost, but still that’s a lot of money!
  9. You Are In Germany: The Kassel region over in Germany decided to use the SugarCRM app to get more folks to visit them. They designed a social networking platform that was designed to attract all sorts of people: tourists, businesses, and even people who might want to move to Kassel.
  10. Tracking School Days: So this last one doesn’t really involve an IT department; however, it still struck me as being a very cool app. The Bronx Lab School wanted to be able to both measure and track individual student performance. They decided to use Salesforce.com’s Force.com app to build a tool that would let them track student performance. The very cool part is that it delivers daily updates on each student to advisers, teachers, and (of course) parents.

What I hope that you take away from this short list of novel applications is that it is possible for an IT shop to get a seat at a company’s strategic planning table. All it takes is some careful thinking about what the business is trying to accomplish and the focused application of good ‘ol IT skills to solve those business problems.

Has your IT department ever build an application just to solve a specific business problem? Did you make the app from scratch or did you build it on top of an existing application? Are you currently using your CRM application for anything more than a customer database? What else do you think that you could do with your customer data? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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So You Wanna Be A CIO? Here’s What They Look Like…

Monday, October 13th, 2008
What Does A CIO Make? What Does A CIO Do?

What Does A CIO Make? What Does A CIO Do?

If your career plans call for you to one day to become a CIO (or if you all ready are), then it would be most helpful if you knew what a CIO looked like. I mean goodness gracious, if you walked into a room of IT professionals, wouldn’t you want to be able to pick out the CIOs from the crowd?

If you know what a CIO looks like, then (if you’re not one already) you will now have a clear action plan on what you need to do to transform yourself into one. If by chance you are already a CIO, then this is going to give you a great snapshot of what all of your peers look like. If you measure up, then great – you should be sitting pretty. If you don’t, then oh, oh – now you know where you have some work to do. The numbers that we’re going to be talking about all come from the 2008 Ziff-Davis Enterprise CIO Role Survey so you know the data is fresh and probably fairly close to the truth.

Money, Money, Money: Let’s start by talking about what everyone wants to know first – how much can I expect to be pulling in for all the grief that I’m going to have to put up with when I’m CIO? In base salary, you should be expecting to be taking home about $170,000. Not too bad, eh? Well it gets even better when you figure in your bonus that you’ll be earning for completing that big ERP project on time and keeping the IT budget under control. You should be expecting a bonus of about $41,000 this year. That means that you’ll be pocketing right around $211,000 this year.

Details, Details, Details: Job satisfaction is all in the details, and this is no different for CIOs. First, let’s ask the question – who’s your boss? For 56% of CIOs the answer is the CEO (not bad; however, this means that 44% are NOT reporting to the big man…) What is your real job CIO? For 43% of you cost cutting is something that you consider to be your primary role. This is really bad news because there are a lot of other C-level executives that do this job much better than a CIO. Do you need an MBA to speak the language of business? Well, 31% of you thought that you did and so these folks went out and got themselves one of those MBA things. Finally, is this an all-boys club? Basically, yes. It turns out that only about 10% of CIOs are women. Ouch!

Purse Power: So it sounds rather girlish, but purse power is something that even the most manly of CIOs desperately wants more of. Each year a company launches many different projects. The CIO only has purse power control over a few of these projects so they are the most important to him/her. The two types of projects that a CIO is most likely to have control over are cross-functional process improvement projects (60% of CIOs have control over these) and technology adoption projects (90% of CIOs have control over these).

What Do You Do All Day?: The answer to this question turns out to really depend on what type of company you are CIO at. If you are a CIO at a big enterprise company, your top three roles are as follows:

  1. Be an adviser on how to improve business processes.
  2. Enable and execute business strategy
  3. Coach other IT executives

Now if instead, you are working at a mid-market firm, then your top three roles will be different. Here’s what they will look like for you:

  1. Be an adviser on how to improve business processes.
  2. Be a technology visionary – know what’s coming and what it means to the firm.
  3. Ensure that the company’s existing technology works and keeps working correctly.

There you have it, a CIO’s job defined in a nutshell. Now that doesn’t seem so hard now does it?

What do you think is missing from my list of what a CIO makes and does? Do you think that CIOs are getting paid enough for what they do? Do you agree with what CIOs think should be on their list of top three priorities? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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