Archive for May, 2009

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CIO Lessons From A Mouse

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
The Chairman Of Disney, Robert Iger, Has Lessons For CIOs

The Chairman Of Disney, Robert Iger, Has Lessons For CIOs

Robert Iger is the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. You know, the guys with the mouse. When you are in charge of a company that is that big, and that diverse, you need to have a special set of skills to keep everything together. Iger has a lot to teach CIOs who want to do their own management job better.

All About Bosses

Iger told the New York Times that he encountered his first boss when he accepted a job at ABC. To this day Iger remembers that once upon a time that boss told him that he “…was not promotable.” Clearly, this was not a good boss.

In thinking back over his other bosses Iger credits them with showing him how to be a perfectionist - teaching him how to do top-notch work every time, trust - especially when it comes to managing people, and creativity - in everything that you do.

The most important leadership lesson that his past bosses have taught him is that the ability to always have optimism is a very important part of being a successful leader. Keep in mind that some realism must come along with this or nobody will ever believe you. The flip side to this is to realize that nobody will every willingly follow a pessimist.

Advice To CIOs

Iger says that patience is extremely important. Too often people set goals for themselves and for their departments that are just flat out unrealistic. When you don’t achieve these goals, that’s when people get impatient and state to make poor career decisions. Clearly that is a big mistake to be avoided.

How About Time Management

Iger’s day starts at 4:30am. He’s a habitual multitasker and so he uses this quiet time to surf the net, watch TV, and exercise. He says that the key to having a successful day is to make sure that you stay focused all day. Even realizing that, Iger admits that during the course of a long day, he too starts to unravel at times.

When he needs to unwind, Iger unplugs and spends time playing Scrabble - he’s got a love for word games.

Questions For You

Do you think that you have the patience that it would take to run a company as large as Walt Disney? What do you remember about your worst boss? How about your best boss? How do you start  your day? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Coming Up Next Time…

Just what do CIOs spend their time doing? Many people thing that a CIOs time is spend pondering grand strategy decisons. However, the reality is that a great deal of a CIOs time is spent worrying about internal controls – not terribly glamorous, but critical if a CIO wants to keep his / her job. Just what controls need to be worried about is the key to long term CIO success…

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It’s Memorial Day – Take The Day Off

Monday, May 25th, 2009
Memorial Day Is A National Holiday To Honor Fallen Military Men And Women

Memorial Day Is A National Holiday To Honor Fallen Military Men And Women

In the U.S. it’s the Memorial Day national holiday – we commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military service.

Since just about all businesses are closed today, let’s take a day off from thinking about CIO stuff and instead spend it thinking about all that we have that allows us to worry about being a good CIO – security, freedom, family, friends, etc.

Enjoy your day off and we’ll pick this story up again on Wednesday.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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Practical IT Clouds: What To Do AFTER The Hype

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Cloud Computing Will Require A Whole Different Set Of IT Skills

Cloud Computing Will Require A Whole Different Set Of IT Skills

Talk about your latest buzz word overkill! Just when the “Web 2.0″ madness had just about hit its peak, along came “Cloud Computing” and took its crown. It’s looking like cloud computing is here to stay, so what’s an IT department to do once they get done studying the whole thing?

Your IT department will eventually use cloud computing. There, I’ve said it. If you don’t believe me, then go back and read those words to yourself out-loud several times until you do. It’s coming and there’s nothing that you can do to stop it. Just like outsourcing, it makes good economic sense and so all other objections will be worked out over time.

The idea that organizations can increase their computing power without having to buy, install, maintain, power, and cool more and more boxes is just too attractive to the bean counters to ignore. This puts IT in a tricky spot: our world is getting ready to be turned upside down – are you ready?

Here’s the problem: a lot of the support jobs that IT does today will go away along with “the boxes”. What nobody seems to realize is that they will be replaced by new IT jobs. If you’re running an IT shop, you’d better be ready!

Here are the new Cloud Computing tasks that are coming your way that you’re going to have to find ways to staff:

  • Extend: you’re going to have to come up with ways to create bridges between your existing network environment and the cloud. Oh, and then you’re going to have staff to maintain those bridges.
  • Pick: you’re going to have to pick a couple of cloud service providers. Once you’re in bed with them, you are going to have to have staff to monitor how they are performing and to provide the human interface to fix the issues that always show up.
  • Monitor: forget outages, what about day-to-day issues? You are going to need staff to monitor and mange the apps that you have running “in the cloud”.
  • Identify: who on your staff is allowed to do what? Since the old rules about getting access to boxes no longer apply, you’re going to need new rules and new staff to enforce and update them.
  • Encrypt: since you are now going to be storing data off site and “out there”, encryption becomes more than a nice-to-have, now it’s a necessity. Somebody on your staff is going to have to be double checking everything all the time to make sure that it REALLY IS encrypted.
  • Plan: for the worst. Data link outages are going to be a much bigger deal then they ever used to be. How will you handle being disconnected from your cloud for an hour, a day, a week? Somebody had better be put in charge of solving this problem and keeping this solution updated.
  • Mange: your bandwidth. Now that the link between you and your cloud has become critical to how the business runs, you had better have someone on it at all times.

We’re looking at a brave new future. Do you have the right staff with the right set of skills in order to make the most of it?

Is your IT shop currently using cloud computing or just thinking about it? How does the rest of the business feel about this? Do you have any plans on retraining your staff to work in a cloud computing world? How do they feel about this? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Women In IT: What’s The Current Score?

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Women Are Making Progress In IT, But There Is Still Work To Be Done

Women Are Making Progress In IT, But There Is Still Work To Be Done

How many women work in your IT department? Is your CIO a woman? The answer to the first question is probably “not that many“, and the answer to the second is all too often “no“. We’ve been aware that this is an issue for awhile, how are we doing on addressing it?

How Do Women Feel About Working In IT?

One of the best places to start when we are trying to figure out where things currently stand, is to ask the women who are currently working in IT how it’s going. Rob Preston over at InformationWeek did some data collection and he discovered a study on this topic that was released by a women’s professional organization called Catalyst.

The study revealed that women working in the IT field were basically satisfied with both their jobs and where they worked. However, there are still big issues when it comes to how they interact with their bosses, how fair they think decision making is, and how much of an opportunity they have to participate in planning.

How Many Female CIOs Do We Have?

We’ve got more today than we had 5 years ago; however, there are only about 75 female CIOs in InformationWeek’s top 500 companies (that comes out to be about 15%). This list includes:

  • Kathy Owen – Unum
  • Marina Levinson – NetApp
  • Beth Perlman – Constellation Energy
  • Leslie Jones – Motorola

There’s been improvement, but there is still a long way to go.

What Tech Companies Do A Good Job Of Promoting Women?

This is where the rubber meets the road. Any company can talk a good line about how much they support diversity; however, promoting someone into the senior management ranks means that you think that they have the best chance of driving revenue. Here’s how the familiar tech names stack up:

  • HP – 21% of senior executives are women
  • Oracle – 18%
  • IBM – 13%
  • Google – 13%
  • Cisco – 11%
  • Microsoft – 11%
  • Dell – 0%

Oh my – did you see that Dell number? There is no excuse for that – women make up too much of the total IT workforce today for any company to be that unbalanced.

The Next Steps

So should IT departments start to institute mandatory gender based promotions so that 51% of their senior staff are female? No, that’s not the correct solution. In the end, what we all want is the best people leading the company independent of gender.

IT may always be just a bit “male heavy” because of the nature of the beast. However, for any company to succeed, you need to make sure that everyone has a chance at the top spots and you need to make sure that you have a bench of capable employees that is made up of all genders. That’s the secret to real long-term success.

Does your IT department have a balanced number of men and women leading it? Do you feel that women have an equal shot at senior management positions? What does your firm do to prepare workers to become senior managers? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in career | 1 Comment »

Three Big IT Transformation Mistakes That HP Made

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
HP's IT Department Made Some BIG Mistakes During Their Transformation

HP's IT Department Made Some BIG Mistakes During Their Transformation

If you made three costly IT mistakes would you admit it? I think that most of us would probably say “no” – we’d run and hide our mistakes under a rock somewhere. However, thankfully over at HP they’ve decided to come clean about a few of the mistakes that they’ve made during their multi-year IT transformation project. We can all learn from their mistakes.

HP’s CIO Randy Mott decided to remake HP’s IT department when he came on board a few years ago. In order to kick the project off, they needed to make some assumptions about how things were operating and move forward.

Chris Murphy over at InformationWeek had a chance to sit down with Randy and ask some questions about where HP’s assumptions were just flat out wrong. What he’s learned holds a lot of information for all of us. Here are the big three:

  1. The Secret World Of IT: When HP decided to remake their world of IT, they had to start the process by finding out how big the IT operations were. They grossly undercounted. Going in they thought that HP was using 3,500 applications to run the business. It turns out that they were using more like 6,000. They knew for sure that they had 85 data centers being used by the business. Ultimately, they ended up discovering more than 400 locations where they had massed computing infrastructure.
    Lesson Learned: take the time to do a complete inventory BEFORE you ever start any sort of IT transformation.
  2. Plan For Growth: It sure would be nice if we could freeze time, make changes to our IT departments, and then start things back up again. HP seems to have thought that they could do this because they didn’t remember to plan for acquisitions to occur during the project. Well, you know how this story goes – HP kept buying up other firms and since there was no IT incorporation plan, it caused big headaches for the IT team that was trying to transform IT.
    Lesson Learned: Create a solid process for bringing in new IT departments to any ongoing projects.
  3. Beware Of Success: Once again, the business keeps moving while IT works on its projects. In this case, HP shot past their growth projections. What this ended up doing was pushing the IT transformation project off of its tracks – data centers that were to be consolidated were suddenly needed because they were supporting unplanned for growth.
    Lesson Learned: Make sure that you have a backup plan that tells you what you are going to do if sales projections change from what has been forecasted.

In the end, HP was successful with their IT transformation and they ended up reducing those 6,000 applications down to about 1,500, reducing those 400 data centers down to 6, etc. However, because of the three mistakes that they made, this difficult job was made just that much harder. Now you know – don’t repeat this mistakes!

Have you ever been surprised to discover that there is a whole “shadow IT” department operating in your business that nobody has ever counted? Has a merger or acquisition ever screwed up one of you IT project’s schedule? Has your IT department ever been surprised by unexpected growth? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking?

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Posted in process | 1 Comment »

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