Archive for March, 2009

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Do You Have An IT Dictionary?

Monday, March 30th, 2009
IT Departments Need To Create A Dictionary So Everyone Can Speak The Same Language

IT Departments Need To Create A Dictionary So Everyone Can Speak The Same Language

In IT we often get accused of willy-nilly making up new acronyms on the fly. In all honesty, yes we do do this sometimes. However, there is a more subtle word problem that has been creeping around the edges of IT for a long time that nobody’s been brave enough to bring up: we have no idea what we are saying.

Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries. Specifically, they’ve discovered that we all seem to THINK that we are talking about the same thing when in many cases we really aren’t.

In most companies the IT department serves multiple business units or departments. In order to meet the needs of those internal customers, the IT department is always creating new and different ways to present the information that has been collected. However, since nobody talks to anyone else in the company, we’ve been creating a million different ways to present (and talk about) the same data.

What’s been missing from IT’s output is some sort of dictionary. We need to standardize how we talk about the company’s data and how we describe the results of the processing that we do on that data.

Over at Best Buy, Robert Willett who is their CIO said that when he first showed up they 400 to 500 different ways to measure things. What this meant is that measurements done for one customer could not be interpreted by another customer so they had to do the processing all over again.

Robert spent over 10 months and drove to a point where they had single definitions for everything. It was only after this type of IT dictionary had been created that Best Buy started to get some value for all of its efforts.

Does your IT shop have a single set of definitions for the information that you collect and the results that you produce? Have you ever had a situation where two individuals or departments were trying to compare two things but couldn’t because they didn’t use the same words? How have you tried to solve this problem? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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IT Solutions: How To Build A Poor Man’s Netflix Entertainment System

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
A Poor Man's Netflix Viewing System

A Poor Man's Netflix Viewing System

Normally in this blog I try to cover issues that are facing CIOs and everyone who works for them. You know, things like aligning IT with the rest of the business, staffing and retaining the best talent, prioritizing IT projects, that sort of thing. But not today.

Instead, I’m going to take a break from such weighty matters and tell you about how a cheap bastard (me) built his own 21st Century entertainment system. Oh, and how you can too.

So here was my dilemma: I’ve been a loyal Netflix subscriber for a number of years now. I realize that times are changing and that Netflix’s model of shipping DVDs out to customers won’t last much longer. In fact, they realize it too. That’s why a number of Netflix movies are now available to be watched online (I think that the list is about 21,000 and growing).

Now a lot of these movies are trash – sorta like straight to DVD releases from back in the 80′s. But there are some gems among them: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, past Seasons of The Office, etc. I had spent some time watching these on my little laptop; however, there was a problem – the wife.

For some unexplained reason, she really, really did not like watching video on the little 13″ laptop screen. It might have been because I kept moving the screen so that I could see it, but I can’t say for sure. No matter what, if I was going to tap into all the video goodness that Internet held I was going to need to find a better solution.

Now the folks at Netflix had a bunch of different solutions for my problem: I could get an Xbox 360 and link to the Internet and Netflix though this. Or I could go out and get a Roku device that can link to the Internet and stream Netflix movies to the TV.  However, as always, there was a problem – both of these solutions cost money. Did I mention that I’m a cheap bastard?

One more small item added to my complications: my main TV is quite old. In fact I believe that I bought it back in 1991 just about when 35″ TVs became affordable. My heart is filled with lust for those big 50″ LCD systems that I see every time I go out to Best Buy, but the engineer in me refuses to buy one until OLED units become available / affordable. So I don’t have any of those fancy computer to fancy-TV hook up ports to use.

Poor Man's Analog TV Ports: Video, Left Sound, Right Sound

Poor Man's Analog TV Ports: Video, Left Sound, Right Sound

So what did I do? I went to Radio Shack, of course. I figured that there had to be some way to hook my very generic HP laptop up to my older TV. It turns out that there is! I needed to get two parts:

  1. A 6-Ft. S-Video to RCA Video Cable (Radio Shack part #15-3027)
  2. A 6-Ft (1.82m) Shielded Audio Cables – One 1/8″ stereo right-angle plug to two phono plugs (Radio Shack part #42-2483)

The (empty) boxes look like this:

Radio Shack Parts Boxes (Empty)

Radio Shack Parts Boxes (Empty)

After making my purchases, I hurried home to try out my Frankenstein video creation. To make a long story short, it worked. Here’s an ugly side view to show you what the hook up looks like:

The Final Ugly Poor Man's Netflix Solution

So there you have it: yet more proof that every technical problem has a cheapskate solution!

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How IT Can Help Uncover New Products

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

IT Departments Have The Data Needed To Uncover New Products

IT Departments Have The Data Needed To Uncover New Products

“Alignment”, “Innovation” – arrgh! Who in the world of IT is not sick of hearing these two words used over and over again? Yes we’d like to be able to help out the rest of the business, but our IT budgets are being slashed left and right. We don’t have either the staff or the budget to launch a big new program to collect whatever data is needed in order to tell the company which direction it should go in. Or do we?

It is in the nature of any IT department to collect data on our customers. We already have disk pack after disk pack of historical data about everyone who ever showed even the slightest interest in one of our company’s offerings let alone how much information we have on our existing customers.

In that data lies the secret to how IT departments can help the rest of the company uncover new products. Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries.

Harrah’s is an owner of several casinos. Their IT department has historically collected reams of data on their customers in order to support targeted direct mail campaigns and attempts to increase customer loyalty.

However, it was not until the IT department took a closer look at the data that they had already captured about their big spenders (“whales” in casino speak) that they realized that they had the answers that they needed in order to redesign their casinos in order to position games where they would get these customers to play even more.

The Royal Bank of Canada faced a problem – its consumer credit division  needed to have more customers. The IT department went back and took a look at the credit card applications that they had rejected in the past. What they discovered is that many of these people had improved their credit scores since being rejected. This gave the bank a great set of potential card holders to go after.

Clearly all IT departments are sitting on more customer data than anyone ever believed. Now we just have to figure out how to make that data work for us. It turns out that there are three principles that provide the core for doing this correctly. We’ll talk about them next time…

Does your IT department store enough information on your customers? Have you ever gone back and tried to put that data to use? Were you successful? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Is Allstate’s IT Department In Good Hands?

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
Allstate Is Doing Interesting Things To Ride Out The Recession

Allstate Is Doing Interesting Things To Ride Out The Recession

Awhile ago over at the Wall Street Journal they had a chance to sit down and have a talk with Catherine Brune who is the CIO over at the big insurance company Allstate. Catherine had some interesting things to say about how she is adapting Allstate’s IT operations and strategy to deal with the current recession.

First off, Catherine pointed out that she sees opportunity in the times that we are currently living in. Specifically, she noted that yes, everything will eventually recover, and firms need to make sure that they will be ready to seize the moment when this occurs. IT will play a major role in making sure that any firm is ready to do this.

Allstate is currently in the process of re-prioritizing all of its IT projects (no surprise there, eh?) The way that they are going about doing this is by taking a look at what the project would produce once it was completed. They then ask “is this something that customers are asking for?” If it isn’t, then that project get shelved.

It turns out that this is actually pretty hard to do because every project is related to other projects. That means that that shelving one project may result in a number of other projects also being shelved. The key to doing this right is to take the time up front and map out the dependencies between IT projects.

Allstate’s IT department realizes that they need to support the rest of the business. This means that they find themselves living in both the world of IT and the world of business. They do this by focusing on business processes and how IT can help. The key here, however, is to make sure that they don’t automate a bad business process.

Finally, Allstate has adopted the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) set of best practices in order to run their shop. This basically means that there is a form for just about everything that you’d want to do. This has simplified the routine parts of running the IT department.

Is your IT department currently reprioritizing your current projects? Have you created a dependency map? How involved in automating business processes are you? Does your IT shop use the ITIL practices? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Alignment 101: How To Do It

Monday, March 16th, 2009
alignment_m_m3

Knowing How To Align IT And The Business Is The Key To Success

Achieving alignment between the business side of the house and IT is one of those things that everyone likes to talk about when they are putting together the goals for the upcoming year, and then nothing ever seems to get done about it.

A survey that was done by the consulting firm Bain & Co. may contain the reason why we never seem to make any progress on this: we’ve been trying to do the wrong thing. The Bain crew believes that IT departments must first become efficient, and then worry about becoming aligned with the business.

Now the trick here is that you can’t just do one at a time. Karenann Terrell who is that CIO over at Baxter International says that “There is a complexity to doing both, but that’s the job.” Her point is that you can’t wait to become 100% efficient before you start to work on the alignment thing.

Let’s say that you get the efficiently thing up to a point where it’s good enough, what then? Too often CIOs view alignment as being a situation where IT stands ready to do the bidding of whatever the rest of the business needs. That’s not what the business wants. Instead, the business needs IT to participate in the strategic decision making process – help do the thinking for the rest of the business. Perhaps a better word here would be “integration”.

Finally, the alignment of IT with the rest of the business needs to be supported from the CEO on down. Without top-level support, it’s never going to succeed. Strong collaboration between the business and IT is what will make alignment work. Remember that alignment is a dynamic process and that it will always be changing along with your business.

Do you feel that your IT department is effective? Do you believe that it is aligned? What steps are you taking to make it more effective? Do you think that you need to bother to align it with the rest of the business?

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