Archive for February, 2009

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Where Is Your Next CIO Coming From?

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
Many Firms Don't Have A Plan For How They Would Replace Their Current CIO

Many Firms Don't Have A Plan For How They Would Replace Their Current CIO

So here’s the scenario: a previously unknown meteor comes streaking down to earth and somehow lands squarely on top of your CIO squashing him/her instantly. What do you do next? Where would your replacement CIO come from and do you know who that would be?

A study conducted by the equipment supply firm CDW has revealed that even at firms with 1,000 or more employees, 38% of them did not have a formal CIO succession plan. Ouch – watch out for those meteors!

Even if your CIO doesn’t spend a lot of time outside where there might be meteors, a good point to keep in mind is that the average tenure of a CIO is 3-5 years. When you start to think about who might replace your current CIO, one question comes to mind immediately: internal vs external.

It really doesn’t help matters that exactly what the qualifications to be CIO are can be quite subjective. In most cases it really depends on several factors including the size of your company, what industry you play in, and what the current expectations of the IT department are.

A study done by Information Week revealed that of 500 current CIOs, 58% of them were recruited from the outside. This means that choosing the outsider is not all that unusual.

When it comes down to deciding if you should be looking internally vs externally, company culture can play a big role. If your firm has a history of hiring from the outside, then getting your next CIO from their will feel much more natural.

Internal candidates can be a great way to go because they already know so much about the company. At the same time, they often find themselves in a situation in which they are in over their heads in responsibilities. External CIO candidates often have the experience to do the job; however, simply because they come from the outside expectations will be higher for them.

In the end make sure that you choose carefully from all of your potential sources – you’re going to need the best possible talent in your top IT spot.

Does your company have a CIO succession plan? Have you ever had to use it? Do you get your CIOs internally or externally? How long do they last? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Who Gets To Make Decisions In Your IT Shop?

Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Where IT Decisions Get Made And Who Makes Them Is Very Important

Where IT Decisions Get Made And Who Makes Them Is Very Important

A recent study of 89 senior IT executives in a wide range of industries was done in order to get the answer to a seemingly simple question: who’s in charge here?

In these days of reigned in IT spending, decisions about how much to spend and what to spend it on seem to have migrated even farther up the command ladder. It turns out that this is causing an IT credibility gap: others are making decisions that we then have to deliver on. Is this any way to run a company?

I’m hoping that we can all agree that having IT work hand-in-hand with the rest of the company has never been more important. This means that getting decision rights and accountability right is now critical to an IT department’s success.

If you boil it down, IT departments are responsible for not only hardware and software assets, but also for all customer and supplier data along with many automated business  processes. This means that if IT decision making is not properly placed, the impacts will be felt company wide.

There are two ways to get decision making wrong. The first is called a techocentric gap and this is when IT is in charge of all decisions. We’ve all see what this can do. The other is called a business gap – this is when all decision making is done outside of the IT department. Neither of these solutions is the right way to go.

In the end, there are really three types of IT decisions that need to be made. Technical decisions around IT infrastructure and architecture probably need to reside primarily within IT. IT investment and strategic decisions need to be made jointly by IT management and business top management. Finally, once again IT top management and business top management need to work together to make outsourcing decisions.

Where do IT decisions get made in your IT department? Is there a gap between IT and the business? Does IT get held responsible for decisions that they played no role in making? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Getting & Keeping IT Top Management’s Attention

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Getting Senior Management To Stay Involved In A Project Can Be Hard To Do

Getting Senior Management To Stay Involved In A Project Can Be Hard To Do

In my humble opinion, one of the key contributors to why so many IT projects fail is because of simple neglect. I guess the best analogy is if you were starting to drive down a highway road. When you started driving, you’d keep your hands on the steering wheel and make sure that the car was going in the correct direction and that it stayed on the road. However, if later on you took both of your hands off of the wheel, then the car would start to drift and would eventually plunge off of the road.

IT projects seem to follow this same path: when they are kicked off, everyone, including senior IT management, seems to have their hands on the steering wheel. However, as the days, weeks, months go on it sure seems like nobody is holding on to the wheel any more and the project tends to start to drift. All too often, more people are then thrown at the project or, worse yet, the schedule is reduced which causes the project to speed up. This just makes the eventual crash all that more spectacular.

So none of this discussion is news to us IT folks – we’ve seen it over and over again. What we need to find is a way to stop this from happening. Jesper Simonsen is a European professor who has spent some time studying this problem. He’s come up with some suggestions as to how we can go about fixing it.

Simonsen believes that the key to getting senior IT management involved in a project is to use participatory design so that they feel that they have contributed to the solution. The specific technique that he believes can be used to make this happen is called “problem mapping“.

Too many IT staffers solve problems by sitting in their cubes and dreaming up new ways to deal with old problems. Participatory design requires IT staffers to deal with a problem directly. They share their views on the problem and then they offer their suggestions as to how IT can be used to solve the problem.

In order to engage senior IT management, they need to be involved in this development of an answer to why IT needs to be involved in solving the problem. This is where problem mapping comes in.

Problem mapping is designed to allow the argument regarding if and how IT should be used to solve a problem to be evaluated. It provides a means by which the argument can be visualized and helps in seeing the structure of the argument.

When you use problem mapping, you create a table that has four columns with the following headers:

  • Problem / Need
  • Causes
  • Consequences
  • Solutions

The real power of using a problem map is that it will force all involved to talk about what they see as being the real problem. The link between what they are proposing as a solution and the original problem is very clearly shown.

The key point to make here is that by making the whole problem solving process so visible, you will actively engage the top management in the process. They will be given an opportunity to sit back and challenge, make changes to, and review the solution that is being created before their very eyes.

Once you’ve achieved this level of participation at the start of a project, the senior IT management will remain involved during the entire project because they will better understand what is being done and they will feel as though they have contributed to the solution.

Do you have problems keeping your senior management involved in projects after they get started? What have you tried to improve their involvement? Was it successful? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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How Can You Make Your IT Department Strategic?

Monday, February 16th, 2009
Lockheed Martin's IT Department Had A Problem: They Had No Strategy

Lockheed Martin's IT Department Had A Problem: They Had No Strategy

Isn’t that the goal of every IT department – to move from being viewed as a support organization to somehow becoming part of the company’s strategic core? Although we all know that this is what we want, for some reason it sure seems to be very hard to do. Good news – the folks over at Lockheed Martin have figured out how to do it…

Ed Meehan is the VP of operations at Lockheed Martin’s Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) and back in 2004 he discovered that he had a problem on his hands. In 1995, Lockheed and Martin Marietta had merged and Ed’s IT team had spent the next 10 years consolidating data centers (they actually got to be quite good at it). However, in 2004 they were done and they found themselves adrift – now what should they do?

EIS had neither a strategy nor a focus. Does any of this sound familiar to you? In order to have a strategy, you need to have a goal and since EIS is an internal IT organization they don’t have the normal measures of profit and loss. What’s an IT department to do?

What EIS had to do was identify a goal, create a strategy to reach that goal, and then sell the strategy to a spread out IT department that had never needed to have a strategy. How hard could that be?

Ed was smart enough to know that he needed to have his team pick the direction that they wanted to go in. He showed up at a meeting with three different popular business books that had three different business strategy goals: become a product leader, become the low-cost leader, or provide complete customer satisfaction. Pick one – you can’t do all three. Ed’s team picked providing complete customer satisfaction with the customer being Lockheed Martin’s internal employees.

So now what? Ed set up an 8-person team who had to map out the new strategy and then get the message out to the rest of the department. Their first step was to create a strategy map which showed how each part of the company would be measured against the goal of providing complete customer satisfaction.

Now the 8-person team couldn’t do this alone, so they asked each business unit to design their own strategy map with the thought that once they had this, EIS could then build a master map. You can imagine how well this went over – none of the business departments saw any value in adding strategy to their IT department and so they were, to say the least, reluctant to participate.

The 8-person team didn’t give up and they brought Ed in when needed. In the end, they got what they were looking for – a complete map of what it would take to fully satisfy the rest of the company.

Now came the hard part: selling the concept of thinking about the new strategy to the rest of the IT department. The biggest problem turned out to be the middle managers – they had “This To Shall Pass” syndrome. They figured that they could just wait things out and this “new idea” would go away just like all the other ones before it.

Well, they were wrong. It took a year to get the program off the ground and then it took another year to get the message out and train the staff. However, through relentless communication, they finally did it – everyone bought it.

Lockheed Martin has seen measurable improvements in their operations since this strategy was implemented. Internal customers have rated alignment between divisions as having improved by 160%. Probably the greatest payoff is that at Lockheed Martin, IT is now seen as being strategic.

Is your IT department considered to be a strategic part of your company? Does your IT department have a goal? Do you have a strategy to reach that goal? How are you doing in getting there? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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3 Ways To Fix An IT Department (Suggestions From Europe)

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

An European Consulting Company Has Some Ideas About How To Organize Your IT Department

An European Consulting Company Has Some Ideas About How To Organize Your IT Department

Kuppinger Cole + Partner (KCP) is a European consulting firm that specializes in identity management. So it goes without saying that they spend their time in and out of multiple IT departments on a daily basis. They know all of our dirty little secrets. One of their founders, Martin Kuppinger has been doing some thinking about how to fix IT departments…

Martin starts out his thinking with some pretty basic suggestions. Specifically, he thinks that IT should be limited in what tasks it performs: do what the company wants you to do and nothing else. Now he follows this up with some clarification: an IT department needs to be able to support new business initiatives, provide insights on how the company is running, and keep itself lean and mean.

I’m pretty much in agreement with Martin, except for one thing. IT is not like accounting: in IT things change and they have a tendency to change quickly. I believe that an IT department has a responsibility to always be pushing the envelope and trying out new things before the rest of the company does. How can you roll a Wiki service out to the company if the folks in IT have not played around with it for awhile in order to get to know its ins and outs?

Martin goes on to suggest that IT should be reorganized. He’s got some interesting thoughts here. He’s recommending that strategy be done in house by the IT department. Next he starts to whip out the acronyms like GRC (governance, risk management and compliance) when he says that part of IT needs to be keeping an eye on how the business is being run and providing reports to all who need them. Finally, he suggests that IT knowledge be decentralized and placed in the business organizations.

I’m going to go both ways here. I’m not sure if IT needs its own stand-alone strategy department. Instead, I believe that IT needs to participate in the strategy planning that is being done for the whole company. What I think is needed is an architecture department that the IT part of the strategy team reports to.

I’m all for having part of IT monitor the business and provide the business with the reports on how it is performing. This is a critical resource that too many businesses don’t know how to do well.

Finally, I think that Martin might be on to something when he suggests that parts of IT should be moved out and into the actual departments that we support. I’m always for getting closer to the customer. There are some tricky questions here about who these IT staffers would report to and how they would be evaluated at the end of the year.

Martin ends up talking about the need for a layer to exist between IT and the rest of the business. His thinking here is that what’s been missing from IT is some sort of business control by which IT can be managed.

Once again, I think that he’s got some interesting ideas here, but I think that he’s missing the mark. I always get nervous when I hear people talking about “layers” because that sure doesn’t seem like the best way to streamline an organization. I do agree that an effective way for IT and the rest of the business to communicate is needed.

My thinking on how best to do that is where Martin and I differ. I believe that he’s hoping that implementation of standardization will result in smooth communications. I beg to differ. At the end of the day, communication will only occur if the proper motivations are put in place to help it along.

I’m just about out of space here, but my thinking goes like this: I believe that IT should be judged on results – how did ITs actions help the rest of the business to succeed? Likewise, I think that part of the way that the rest of the business should be judged is on how well they used the tools and information that IT provided them with.

Do you believe that Martin Kuppinger has the right idea? Do you think that IT should only do what the business asks of it? How should IT be organized in order to make it more efficient? Got any thoughts on how IT staff could be successfully placed in other departments? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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