Archive for June, 2010

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Open Source: Godsend Or Highway To Somewhere Else…?

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
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Is Using Open Source Software A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing?

Is Using Open Source Software A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing?

What if software was free? Every CIO has to stop and ask themselves this question every once in awhile. With the cost of ERP and database systems constantly increasing, software costs can quickly become a significant expense for any IT department. The “Open Source” software movement, born in the days when Napster was giving away commercial music for free, is one way the IT departments can get high quality software for free. But should they?

The Many Flavors Of Open Source

There isn’t enough space in this article to list all of the open source projects and applications that are out there. Some of the more famous include the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python) . In my business I use WordPress to blog and vTiger for CRM; however, there is also the Movable Type platform and SugarCRM to choose from.

A healthy open source project has lots of programmers contributing changes and new features to it. It needs strong central management in order to do good project management: what goes into the next release, who tests it, and when it’s available for general release.

Why CIOs Should Use Open Source

When a CIO considers using open source applications as a part of a firm’s IT infrastructure, support is the first thought that springs to mind. In the world of Linux this issue has been solved by the arrival of multiple firms that provide professional support for given flavors of Linux distro (Redhat, etc.).

If an open source package is popular, there will be a firm out there that can provide support for it. However, one of the unique aspects of the open source movement is that there is a very large unofficial support group for virtually every application. On countless web sites and support boards, IT staffers who run into a problem with an open source application can post their issues. Eager users and volunteer programmers will more often than not spring into action and provide quick suggestions on how to solve the problem.

One additional benefit of using open source is that it gives a CIO a way to motivate and retain staff. Allowing your staff to work on an open source project and to contribute new features that they develop to the overall project can be a fantastic motivational tool. This allows the IT staff to feel that they are contributing to a worthwhile cause. Happy workers don’t go seeking other jobs.

Why CIOs Should Not Use Open Source

You’d think that the case for using open source was open and shut, right? I mean after all it’s free. However, before you leap you may want to double think taking that plunge.

For one thing, the road to today is littered with open source projects that were born, flourished for awhile, and then died due to lack of interest. It truly does take a village to keep one of these things going and if you’ve based a mission critical process on an open source app that dies, then you may be left high and dry.

Support is another issue. The concept of having “one throat to choke” is one thing that helps CIOs sleep well at night. If you are using open source, then there may be no responsible party for you to reach out to if all of a sudden things stop working.

Your specific IT configuration may no longer be supported at some point in time: if the rest of the world moves on to the next version of an operating system and it’s not yet time for you to do so, your open source apps may stop working.

Finally, the more time that your IT staff spends working on open source apps, the more transferable their job skills may become. They may decide to pick up and move on after they’ve gained the knowledge that you paid them to learn.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, the world of open source software will be even larger and more established than it is today. You are going to have to make some hard decisions as to just how far into the open source pond you are willing to wade.

Open source often comes with little or no formal support. However, the sheer number of people working on a project can fill in the gaps. Allowing your IT staff to work on open source projects can be a double edged sword: they’ll have more job satisfaction, but they might end up leaving.

The price of open source software really isn’t free – you’ll have to make an investment in it if you want to use it. Pick wisely and you just might become know as the open CIO.

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

Question For You: When you become CIO, what pieces of open source software will you start to use first?

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

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Posted in software | 3 Comments »

CIOs Need To Use Lessons Learned During The Dot-Com Crash To Do Well Now

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
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Cisco Has Some Lessons For How CIOs Need To Exit The Recession

Cisco Has Some Lessons For How CIOs Need To Exit The Recession

When you become a CIO, you will have the chance to be leading the IT department when the next global recession hits. I don’t care if you’ve got a list of Cisco technical certifications as long as your arm after your title and the fanciest MBA degree available, there’s no training for how to deal with this. Good news: the folks over at Cisco are in the process of blazing a trail that will show CIOs how to deal with this type of situation.

What Cisco Did During The Dot-Com Disaster

Everyone knows that Cisco is a huge company that is now and has been quite successful. What we’re interested in is how they’ve been able to survive the past two dramatic industry recessions – the dot.com event and the 2009-2009 global recession.

The fact that they made it through the dot.com technology downturn means that Cisco came into the most recent downturn with a lot of experience. It’s what they did back then that can help CIOs figure out what they need to be doing today.

Back in 2001, Cisco’s leadership made the difficult decisions early on. In March of 2001 they decided to roll off 18% of their workforce. Because they made such a big cut early on, Cisco didn’t have to make any additional cuts during the entire dot.com crash. There’s something for CIOs to learn from this.

When the dot.com crash had passed through its darkest days and a small glimmer of a recovery started to become visible, Cisco got aggressive. What they did was to start to make investments in new businesses that they thought would be significant markets.

Although as CIO you might not be buying up other companies, the idea of starting early on projects that are going to make the company stronger as you come out of the recession is something that can make or break your CIO career.

What Cisco Is Doing At The End Of The Current Recession

Cisco says that the #1 thing that they learned from the dot.com downturn that they are applying today is that they need to move quickly. They say that back then they spent too much time looking at how dismal the current market was and not enough time looking forward at how the market was going to be in the future.

For CIOs this is a key piece of advice. Since you’ll be rubbing shoulders with the CEO and CFO in your CIO position, you’ll be getting a lot of negative vibes during the recession. It will be your job as the company’s technology leader to rise above the doom & gloom and set your sights on what’s coming your way once the recession is over.

There are tactical things that you’ll be able to do also. Hopefully it goes without saying that if you are able to keep your IT team together, then having an experienced team on board will make getting through a recession that much easier. At Cisco they’ve been able to keep 45 of the 65 executives who were with the company during the dot com days still on board.

Additionally, freezing hiring early on will make it that much easier in the event that you need to do some downsizing – there will be fewer heads that need to be cut.

What All Of This Means For You

If the world was perfect, then when you became CIO the company would have nothing but smooth sailing ahead of it. Clearly this is not the world that we live in.

There will be another recession and with a little luck you’ll be a CIO by then. In order to make it out of the recession stronger than when you went into it, you’re going to need to take action. This means doing the right size downsizing and knowing when to start the projects that will position the company to be successful when the recession is over.

It is possible to hold on to your CIO job even when the global economy is not doing well. The folks over at Cisco seem to have come up with an approach that CIOs would be well advised to follow!

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

Question For You: Do you think that laying off large amounts of your IT staff just once early on is better or worse than multiple smaller cuts over time?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What if software was free? Every CIO has to stop and ask themselves this question every once in awhile. With the cost of ERP and database systems constantly increasing, software costs can quickly become a significant expense for any IT department. The “Open Source” software movement, born in the days when Napster was giving away commercial music for free, is one way the IT departments can get high quality software for free. But should they?

CIOs have a difficult decision to make when it comes to using open source software: do they risk using software with no formal support in order to cut IT costs

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Don’t Think That There’s Business Value In IT? Try The IT-CMF…

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Image Credit The IT-CMF Is A New Way Of Locating How IT Provides Business Value

The IT-CMF Is A New Way Of Locating How IT Provides Business Value

As though running an IT department wasn’t enough, now CIOs are being asked to become more valuable to the business – to start thinking about the company’s bottom line. What part of running a company’s cost center are they missing? It sure seems as though the pressure on CIOs to deliver more business value isn’t going to go away anytime soon. If only there was some methodology that we could use to unlock all of that business value that we know is within the IT department. Oh wait, there is: it’s called the IT-CMF.

What Is The IT-CMF?

A consortium of industry and academic players have gotten together and created what they are calling the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). The thinking behind this new model for operating the different parts of an IT department is that CIOs need an end-to-end integrated framework to help them boost their department’s IT capabilities while at the same time providing them with a way to show the rest of the company that IT can deliver bottom line value.

IT Investment: Not A Pretty Story

It turns out that most companies end up spending roughly 1% to 5% of their annual revenue (note that that’s revenue [a big number], not profit [a smaller number]) on their IT activities. However, there’s never really been a way for firms to do a good job of either measuring or maximizing the return that they’ve been getting on this investment.

You might think that IT departments would like this state of affairs: no measurement means no oversight. However, that’s not the case. Despite having become more strategically important to a company’s success, IT departments have been stuck as a cost center. What’s been missing has been some way to align what CIOs do with the business results that they produce.

How Does It All Work?

Clearly, trying to operate any part of an IT department can be a big challenge. The IT-CMF framework tries to simplify this by breaking a big problem up into several smaller pieces.

At a high level, The IT-CMF breaks an IT department down into four main macroprocesses:

  • Managing IT like a business: this requires an IT Leader to shift their focus from the technology of IT over to both customers and services.
  • Managing the IT budget: keeping track of where the money goes in order to make sure that the company gets the best performance and value for their investment.
  • Managing the IT capability: this consists of making sure that you have the IT assets where you need them as well as ensuring that you are developing the competencies that the company will need in order to succeed.
  • Managing IT for business value: clearly showing how investments in the IT department tie back to clear benefits for the business.

    • How To Use The IT-CMF

    Each of the four major areas of IT operations is then further broken down in the IT-CMF model. It identifies a total of 36 different categories that are then distributed among the four major macroprocesses. This is where the IT-CMF can show an IT Leader where their team fits into the overall IT department.

    The IT-CMF classifies everything that an IT department does up into five different stages of maturity. We all do the things that are needed, we just don’t always do them as well as we should be doing them.

    Once you’ve taken the time to classify your IT operations using the IT-CMF model, you can then benchmark your team against other companies in order to find any process maturity gaps.

    What All Of This Means For You

    It’s never been easy to be a CIO and the current global economic troubles certainly haven’t made it any easier. More and more CIOs are being asked to focus on how the actions of IT can leveraged to boost the company’s bottom line.

    In order to justify the company’s ongoing investment in the IT department CIOs need a framework that will allow them to demonstrate the value of IT. The IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) provides the framework that CIOs can use to identify IT process maturity gaps.

    Moving what your IT department does from being a cost center to becoming a value center has always been the goal of CIOs. The IT-CMF now provides CIOs with the tools that they need to accomplish this. Now is the time for CIOs to use these tools to show the rest of the company the value of the IT department.

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

    Question For You: Who in a company outside of the IT department do you think would have to champion the use of the IT-CMF in order for it to be successful?

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

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    When you become a CIO, you will have the chance to be leading the IT department when the next global recession hits. I don’t care if you’ve got a list of Cisco technical certifications as long as your arm after your title and the fanciest MBA degree available, there’s no training for how to deal with this. Good news: the folks over at Cisco are in the process of blazing a trail that will show CIOs how to deal with this type of situation.

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    Posted in alignment | 3 Comments »

    Just For You: The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

    Friday, June 11th, 2010

    Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

    Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter

    It is with a great deal of pride that I am finally able to announce that free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available!

    Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter now: Click Here!

    Why A Newsletter? Why Now?

    You might be asking why I felt the need to create a newsletter – isn’t this blog enough? Well in all honesty, I thought that it was; however, a bunch of the 400+ folks who read the blog didn’t and they let me know about it.

    For the past year or so I’ve been getting a steady stream of emails asking all sorts of questions about just exactly what steps you need to take if you want to develop the leadership skills that every successful CIO must have. Some were simple like “do I need an MBA?” (no), to the more difficult “what should a CIO’s career goal be?” (it depends). It’s pretty clear that most of us know what we want to achieve; however, we’re just not quite sure how to get there. Ultimately everyone seems to be looking for some solid career guidance – mentoring if you will.

    That’s the purpose that motivated me to create the newsletter. In the blog we cover a wide range of topics – nothing’s off limits. The newsletter will have a laser-like focus on you and your plan to become a CIO. We’ll talk about the skills and tools that you’ll need in order to be successful, how best to manage your time in order to get the most important things done, etc. This is the kind of information that you desperately need to get your hands on, and now you can.

    Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter now: Click Here!

    Do I Really Have Time To Read This?

    Careful – if you never become the CIO, you’ll have plenty of time to read it. Think about how much training you’ve received this year so far – I’m betting not much. Your career is your responsibility, nobody else’s. No matter if you are a party of one or if you are supporting a family of 5, you need to keep improving your skills so that you be ready to step into the CIO spot when your time comes.

    Take just a moment and click on the “Subscribe Now!” link. All I need is a name and an email address and you’ll be ready to get the first issue of The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter. Because it’s the right thing for you to do…

    Subscribe to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter now: Click Here!

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    Posted in CIO | No Comments »

    CIO’s With No Time Find An Alternative To An MBA

    Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
    Image CreditIf You Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time, Maybe There’s Another Way…

    If You Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time, Maybe There’s Another Way…

    As CIO wanna-be’s who live in troubling times we are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and be more successful. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Well that’s all great and fine if you’ve got four or five years to burn, don’t need to do anything else at night, oh and have a big chunk of cash sitting around that you had no other plans for. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

    Say Hello To The Alternative To The MBA

    Before you decide to either quit your IT job and go back to school in order to get an MBA (really, really expensive) or start going to night school to get an MBA (just really expensive), maybe you should take a moment and consider all of your options. Maybe what you really want is a specialized Master’s degree.

    Yeah, yeah – I know what you are thinking. We’ve all been drinking the “get an MBA” Kool-Aid for so long that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. However, depending on what you want to do with your life, this might actually be a better solution for you.

    If having spent time being on the IT side of the company has gotten you interested in what goes on over on the business side, then getting an advanced business degree of some sort is probably a good idea. However, one of the things that keeps us from doing this is often the time involved to get the degree.

    The Appeal Of Specializing

    Business schools and online universities are starting to get the message. They are beginning to offer more and more specialized business programs that are only 12 months long. In the 2008-2009 school year there were 645 programs offered. This is up from the 614 programs that had been offered just two years earlier.

    What these types of degrees offer are parts of the typical MBA curriculum, but they are often more technical in nature and generally spend less time on general management skills.

    Here in lies the rub: these types of specialty business degrees are not designed to get you promoted to eventually become the CEO. Rather what they are designed to do is to sharpen your business skills in a narrow area and make you more valuable to the company in your current job. Since we’re interested in becoming the CIO, not the CEO, this might be just what we’re looking for.

    This type of continuing education especially appeals to nre IT professionals: those who don’t have the five years of work experience that most MBA programs require for entrance. No matter if this is your case, or if you’ve just found some part of the company’s business side that you are really drawn to, a narrowly focused master’s degree might be just the ticket for you.

    What To Do With Your New Degree

    Ok, so let’s say that you bite the bullet and run off and skip the MBA and instead get a very focused master’s degree in marketing, finance, or some other business discipline. What then?

    It turns out that taking this path, might feel like the right thing for you to do, but as they like to say on TV, your results may vary. Since specialty master’s degrees are not as well known as MBA’s you’re going to have to deal with some lack of recognition issues.

    Although it may change in the future, right now MBA students still seem to get the best deal when it comes to getting the economic benefits from going through the effort of getting an advanced degree. The people who design the GMAT test that everyone takes to get admitted to graduate programs are reporting that MBA students are saying that they get a 73% increase in salary after graduating while students with specialty master’s degrees are only reporting a 26% increase.

    What All Of This Means For You

    In the end the decision rests with you. We all know that continuing our education is an important thing for every up-and-coming almost CIO to do. Going back to school almost seems like a no-brainer until you realize that you need to spend some time thinking about just what you want to get out of doing so.

    A specialty master’s degree offers IT professionals who have been working for less than five years or who found one particular part of the job most interesting with a new option. By investing 12 months of study, they can walk away with both another degree as well as a deep understanding of one area of business.

    The value of taking this educational route will really depend on the career that you want for yourself. If you are comfortable working inside of the business instead of running it, then a specialty master’s degree might be the right way to go for you!

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

    Question For You: Do you think that specialty master’s degree will become more or less valuable in the future?

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

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    As though running an IT department wasn’t enough, now CIOs are being asked to become more valuable to the business – to start thinking about the company’s bottom line. If only there was some methodology that we could use to unlock all of that business value that we know is within the IT department. Oh wait, there is: it’s called the IT-CMF.

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    Posted in career | 4 Comments »

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