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CIO’s Know To Say “No” To Best Practices

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010
Image Credit CIOs Know That Following Others Won't Allow You To Get Ahead

CIOs Know That Following Others Won't Allow You To Get Ahead

Perhaps just for a moment we can consider the day-to-day activities of any IT department as being a sort of race. Collectively we are all running and trying to move out in front of the IT departments at the firms that our company is competing with. In this type of analogy, the CIO is running out in front of everyone else and is showing the department which way to go. But how does the CIO know where to go?

Best Practices Are Only So Good

The IT community is currently in love with the idea of “best practices”. This idea revolves around taking a look at the firms who compete in your market and identifying the one or two firms that seem to be doing the best job.

Once you’ve done this, then you take the time to learn how they go about accomplishing the tasks that they are doing so well. When this is known, you can then copy what they are doing and with a little luck you’ll be able to achieve the same results that they are getting.

Now this sound all fine and dandy, and in fact the wildly popular ITIL standards that were created by the British government to define IT best practices have been a run-away hit. However, there’s a problem with this approach.

Dr. C.K. Prahalad took a close look at the use of best practices and reached an interesting conclusion. Using best practices, an IT department can catch up with the IT departments that they are competing with. However, using this approach they’ll never be able to surpass them.

CIOs Need To Search For Breakthroughs

So what’s a CIO to do? Sure you can catch up to other IT departments, but that’s never going to be enough – you’ve got to pass them up. Great. Just how can a CIO go about doing this?

Dr. C. K. Prahalad believed that what a CIO needs to do is to go searching for breakthrough opportunities. These are the opportunities that will set the stage for your IT department to pull out ahead of other IT departments and bring your company along with it. In order to identify these breakthrough opportunities a CIO has to get it all started by asking yourself six important questions:

  1. Is the problem widely recognized?

  2. Does it affect other industries?

  3. Are radical innovations needed to tackle the problem?

  4. Can tackling it change the industry’s economics?

  5. Will addressing this issue give your firm a fresh source of competitive advantage?

  6. Would tackling this problem create a big opportunity for your firm?

What All Of This Means For You

If it turns out that being a CIO means that you are leading a race with your IT department, then you’re going to have to at least catch up with other IT departments that are running the same race. However, that won’t be enough to win the race: you’re going to have to find a way to pass them.

Passing other IT departments requires you as a CIO to uncover breakthrough opportunities. In order to do this, you are going to have to ask yourself the six questions that we’ve identified.

Best practices do have their place in a modern IT department. I mean, we should take the time to learn what works best from other IT departments. However, in order to be truly successful, the burden of finding that next breakthrough opportunity rests firmly on your shoulders CIO…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: What do you think the best way of discovering best practices in your industry are?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

We’ve all been there, done that: pushed hard to accomplish some goal. This type of “acceleration” is something that every IT department ends up doing at some point in time or another. As CIO you’ve got to love the results of a “push” like this: everyone works harder and a lot gets accomplished in a short time. However, there’s a real danger that if you keep accelerating your IT department everyone’s going to burn out and you’re going to end up crashing…

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Posted in business processes | 6 Comments »

3 Skills That Most CIOs Are Missing

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010
Image CreditYou Can't Be A Complete CIO Without These Skills

You Can't Be A Complete CIO Without These Skills

I’m guessing that you wouldn’t go to work naked. Then why-oh-why are you thinking about eventually becoming a CIO when you don’t have all of the skills that you’ll need to do the job correctly?

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most CIOs are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…

Can You Communicate?

All too often, IT folks assume that good communication skills mean that you have the ability to get up in front of a group of people and deliver a speech without bursting into flames. Yes, this is good skill to have, but a CIO has to have more.

Remember, communication is a two-way street and not only does a CIO need to be able to tell others what to do, but you are also going to have to be able to listen to what others are telling you.

No, we’re not talking about having the ability to sit there and listen when someone else is talking to you just waiting for them to pause so that you can start talking again. Instead, a CIO needs to be able to listen, process what has been said, and then ask good, pointed questions that will help get to the bottom of any discussion.

Just to round things out, a CIO also needs to have the communication skill that will allow them to “close” a discussion. This is when you ask a final question and then have the strength to keep you mouth closed and allow the other person to provide an answer. This is how you wrap things up cleanly.

Promote, Promote, Promote!

All too often CIOs seem to have a “build it and they will come” sort of attitude. They believe that if both the IT department and by extension themselves do a good job then the rest of the company will realize it and their value to the company will increase. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

What CIOs need to be doing is constantly promoting both themselves and the IT department. Now you have to be careful here, note that I didn’t say “bragging”. The difference is subtle, but important.

One way that a CIO can show the value of both his position as well as the IT department is to become the thought leader on all things technical. By researching new technologies and then taking the time to educate the rest of the company about what they mean and how they can be used by the business in order to be more successful, both the CIO and the IT department will become recognized as a valuable resource.

Make A Friend (or Two)

Within the world of IT, there is often a “loner” attitude that many of us hold: I can do it all by myself. When you become CIO, you need to stop thinking this way and start making as many contacts as you can.

A CIO is only as strong as his / her network and that means taking the time to develop real relationships with as many people as possible. Not all CIOs have this skill.

What All Of This Means For You

If you really want to eventually become the CIO, you’ve got some work to do. There are a set of skills that you’ll need to have developed before your big day comes.

In order to remain a CIO once you get there, you’re going to have to have the ability to be a good two-way communicator. You’ll have to learn to spend your time tirelessly promoting both the IT department and your value to the company. Finally, you are going to have to get good at that critical skill: networking.

None of these three skills are impossible to do. However, the key to being a successful CIO is to get good at doing all three at the same time…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Which of these three skills do you think is the most important for a CIO to have?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Perhaps just for a moment we can consider the day-to-day activities of any IT department as being a sort of race. Collectively we are all running and trying to move out in front of the IT departments at the firms that our company is competing with. In this type of analogy, the CIO is running out in front of everyone else and is showing the department which way to go. But how does the CIO know where to go?

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Posted in communication | 5 Comments »

Everything A CIO Needs To Know About Desktop Virtualization

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
Image Credit Can CIOs Virtualize Desktops That Look Like This?

Can CIOs Virtualize Desktops That Look Like This?

Darn that 80/20 rule. CIOs realize that they are spending way too much money just keeping the IT systems that they’ve already deployed up and running. If only this task didn’t cost so much: then they could spend that money on bold new initiatives that would benefit the entire company. One of the most expensive parts of any company’s IT infrastructure is all of those desktop systems that every employee is using. Hmm, maybe there’s something that we can do about those…

Welcome To The World Of Desktop Virtualization

Sure, by now every CIO is familiar with the idea of virtualizing servers. That’s where you use some fancy software to allow multiple “instances” of software to run on a single CPU. Within each of these instances you can run one or more applications and each application will believe that its running on its own dedicated server. In the end, this allows you to better utilize your underlying physical servers.

When it comes to virtualizing the desktops that are used within your company, pretty much the same concepts come into play. Matthew Sarrel has been looking into desktop virtualization and he has discovered that although there are a lot of advantages to doing it, there are also some downsides.

Can We Talk About Cost Savings?

When you virtualize a user’s desk top, what you are really doing is allowing their desktop operating system and their enterprise applications to run on a virtual machine that is located somewhere in the company’s data center. What this means for the user is that they can get away with using a so-called “thin client” – it no longer matters what type of computer they are physically using (PC / Apple / Linux) since the heavy lifting is being done in the data center.

By implementing such a system, the CIO is able to separate the software that your users are using from the hardware that they are running it on. This can greatly reduce your IT costs.

It is currently estimated that on average a single user’s desktop costs the company between $3,000 to $6,000 to manage and maintain each year. Hold on a moment: if you’re starting to picture $6,000 / user showing up in your budget if you virtualize everyone’s desktop, you’re wrong. Half of this cost comes out of the IT budget but the other half comes from the lost user productivity that physical desktop system maintenance causes.

Implementing virutalized desktops will reduce the costs of management updates and other IT tasks. The best guess right now is that moving to virtual desktops can reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) for your desktops by 15% – 35%.

The Downside To Desktop Virtualization

As with all things in IT, there are no silver bullets. The same is true when it comes to desktop virtualization – it does have its drawbacks.

The first challenge is that by virtualizing desktops you can slow down the end user’s experience. Since the applications that they are running are no longer local on their computer, all of the data transfer delays and remote storage loading issues can combine to significantly slow down how they interact with their applications.

In order to prevent (or at least minimize) the amount of delay that you end up introducing into everyone’s life, you are going to have to spend some big bucks to upgrade your enterprise networks. This will include boosting storage to support all of those desktop operating system / application images, upgrading the link between your storage area network (SAN) and the servers that use the data, as well as potentially upgrading the data pipe that comes into your data center.

What All Of This Means For You

Desktop virtualization is the next great frontier that CIOs will have to cross. The advantages are great: cost savings and less effort. However, there is a downside to using this technology.

Switching to virtual desktops poses the risk of introducing delay in how each user interacts with their applications. In order to minimize this, CIOs are going to have to spend to upgrade the corporate IT infrastructure.

Desktop virtualization is something that every CIO needs to keep an eye on. The time may not be right now to move in this direction right now, but the time is coming and you’ll want to be ready to make the leap when the time is right.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that slowing down user’s desktops would be worth the cost savings of desktop virtualization?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Posted in virtualization | 1 Comment »

IT Savvy: What Does It Mean And Do You Have It?

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
Image Credit Done Right, The IT Department Can Be A Strong Link In The Company's Chain…

Done Right, The IT Department Can Be A Strong Link In The Company's Chain…

Every modern company should have an IT department. Every company should have a smoothly running IT department that adds value to everything the company does. I’m betting that most companies have about 50% of what they need – they’ve got an IT department. What’s missing is a way to transform that IT department in to a savvy IT department. For that matter, what does a savvy IT department look like anyway?

What Do Savvy IT Departments Do?

If the key to the success for an IT department is for it to become “savvy”, then we’re going to need some help here to find out just exactly what that means. The good news is that Dr. Peter Weill up at MIT has just written a book called IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain. What he says is that a savvy IT department is one that knows how to transform information technology into a strategic asset that the company can use to compete better.

You might be saying to yourself “Isn’t this obvious?” However, it turns out that most IT departments aren’t run this way. Instead they operate in silos, they move slowly, and require lots of funding to just keep their heads above water.

This stands in stark contrast to what Dr. Weill says that savvy IT departments do. He says that they spend the bulk of their time standardizing and digitizing a company’s core processes. What they learn from doing this shows them the way to the next set of projects that they need to be working on.

Once a savvy IT department has been able to create a digital platform that can be used to run the company, the next step is to reach out. This means that they look for ways to digitally interface and connect with other companies and vendors.

Why Change?

Look, change in any form is both difficult and painful. Sure your IT department might not be the most savvy one out there, but does it really matter? Well, yes it does. It turns out that savvy IT departments have been found to be 21% more profitable than non savvy ones.

If that wasn’t enough, it turns out that savvy IT departments also move faster. They are able to get new products and services to market quicker and to produce add-ons to existing solutions.

The reason that they are able to do this is because of what they’ve already done. Dr. Weill calls this the “agility paradox” – once you’ve digitized and standardized your core business processes, then the company will be faster to market and in the end will end up getting more revenue from the new products that they introduce.

It’s All About IT Insights

Savvy IT departments have the ability to look at all of a company’s business processes and determine which ones should be shared across the business (and which ones should not be). Once this decision has been made, integration can occur.

Integration is when IT works to provide access to company data across the company and finds way to standardize the flow of information in order to reduce or eliminate variations in business processes.

Savvy IT departments have this ability. They can make a decision about which processes to integrate and stick with it. That’s what makes them savvy.

What All Of This Means For You

Every IT department has a choice to make: are they a loner or part of the company’s team? In order to be part of the company team, each IT department needs to become a savvy IT department.

In order for your IT department to become a savvy IT department they have to focus on what really counts. This means looking at the firm’s business processes and picking the ones that matter the most. Then those processes need to be standardized and digitized so that the information can be shared across the company.

The secret to becoming a savvy IT company is to stop doing each IT project as a one-off. Instead, each project needs to be viewed as one that has links to the projects that were done before. In this way your IT department can create a reusable platform for the entire company to use and they will have become a savvy IT department.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Who do you think is in the best position to decide what the company’s IT platform should look like / incorporate?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Darn that 80/20 rule. CIOs realize that they are spending way too much money just keeping the IT systems that they’ve already deployed up and running. If only this task didn’t cost so much: then they could spend that money on bold new initiatives that would benefit the entire company. One of the most expensive parts of any company’s IT infrastructure is all of those desktop systems that every employee is using. Hmm, maybe there’s something that we can do about those…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in business processes | 1 Comment »

The Reason That Innovation Isn’t Happening In Your IT Department

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
Image Credit Innovation Only Happens When IT Staff Feel That It's Wanted

Innovation Only Happens When IT Staff Feel That It's Wanted

How many times do you have to tell your IT department: it’s time to start innovating again? The global recession is over, if your company is going to start to grow and be successful, then the IT department is going to have to be out in front and leading the charge. Since budgets are still constrained, it’s going to take a great deal of innovation to find ways to do more with what you currently have. Why isn’t anyone doing this?

You Are Not Alone

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but as CIO (or as almost-CIO) you are not alone in this absence of innovation. Lots of firms are finding that their IT departments are missing that spark of innovation also.

What’s going on here? That’s the very question that two researchers, Feirong Yuan and Richard Woodman , set out to answer. They sent out surveys to 100′s of employees of companies and they covered everyone from the top of the pyramid to the folks working in the mailroom.

It’s All About Image

Their findings were actually quite interesting. What they discovered is that innovation in an IT department is being withheld because IT staff are concerned about the risk to their workplace image that being seen as being innovative would cause. The power of creating unfavorable social impressions with their coworkers is what is keeping their mouths shut.

A lot of this can be tied back to just exactly what a given IT worker’s job title is. If it doesn’t explicitly say “innovator” in their job description, then you’ve got a problem. IT workers who are not expected to be innovators feel that their coworkers will develop a negative impression of them if they start to suggest different ways of doing things.

This goes even one step further. The researchers discovered that many IT employees fear that too much innovation on their part will start to “provoke anger” among their fellow IT coworkers. This will be especially true with those workers who are happy with the way that things are – the “don’t rock the boat” mentality.

The Role Of The CIO

As the CIO, it’s going to be your job to make innovation happen in your IT department. If you don’t, then you won’t be CIO for very long. What you are going to have to communicate to the entire IT department is that the whole organization is behind the push for more innovation.

Showing that innovation is what is being expected will go a long way in setting the stage for your IT staff. Telling the department over and over again that you are looking for them to be innovative will serve to lower the perceived social risk of coming forward with innovative suggestions.

Your job as CIO is to create an IT workplace where your staff will feel comfortable in being innovative. This means that you are going to have to make everyone understand that individual differences are not only tolerated, but are actually critical in order to help the IT department look at problems in different ways.

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO you are going to have to make the most out of the resources that you have – funding will always be tight. This means that you are going to have to find ways to get your IT department’s staff to get creative and innovate. However, recent studies have shown that workers who are not expected to be innovative often worry about their image and don’t speak up.

In order to change this, as CIO you are going to have to clearly and repeatedly communicate to the IT department that innovation is not only encouraged, but it is also expected. You’re going to have to create an environment in which all workers feel comfortable speaking up and being innovative.

There is no one magic action that you can take to make your IT department be more innovative. However, given time and a consistent message from you that innovation is a good thing, you can convince everyone in your IT department to think hard and become the innovation engine that the company is going to need in order to both survive and thrive.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: What is the one thing that you think a CIO can do to make innovation happen in an IT department?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Every modern company should have an IT department. Every company should have a smoothly running IT department that adds value to everything the company does. I’m betting that most companies have about 50% of what they need – they’ve got an IT department. What’s missing is a way to transform that IT department in to a savvy IT department. For that matter, what does a savvy IT department look like anyway?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in innovation | 2 Comments »

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