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CIO Strategy Tips From Randy Mott

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
Image CreditRandy Mott is a CIO who knows a great deal about strategy

Randy Mott is a CIO who knows a great deal about strategy

You wouldn’t think that a CIO who just got fired from his job at HP would have a lot to teach us about IT strategy, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Randy Mott is a CIO who has been around the block a few times. He’s worked for Wal-Mart, Dell, and he was CIO at HP. When HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, got fired Randy had to go because he was too close to Mark. However, that all doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a thing or two from how Randy runs an IT department when he’s in charge…

IT Projects Have To Deliver Results

The IT department is a cost center, right? This belief is almost built in to everyone’s definition of information technology. It can’t be expected to actually “make” money can it? It turns out that if you make the effort, you can measure the money that the IT department brings in for the company. Mott believes that for the 12 months after an IT project goes live, the benefits of that project should be measured in both hard dollar and intangibles. How to measure the value of an IT project should be agreed to by the business unit leaders and their finance teams before the project is started so that there is buy-in on the numbers.

Technology moves fast. This means that new technology is always showing up and if the IT department isn’t careful, they’ll be seen as a roadblock that is standing between a new technology and the rest of the company.

IT needs to develop processes that allow it to get new technology out into end users hands as quickly as possible. It doesn’t have to be a company-wide rollout, a trial to evaluate the new technology will do. However, the IT department needs to clearly show that they are out in front of evaluating every new technology.

Finally, I think that all IT departments suffer from the same problem – we seem to try to take on too many tasks all at once. Randy Mott believes that this is a key reason why so many IT projects end up failing. His approach is to have an IT department work on fewer projects, but to have them finish them faster. While Randy was running the IT department at HP they were able to get their average IT project delivery time down to 6 months.

Time Can Be An IT Project’s Greatest Enemy

If you can think back to the last IT project that you worked on, at some point in time you probably wished that you had more time. I know that I have. It’s a good thing that we didn’t work for Mr. Mott. He believes that if you give an IT more time to complete a project, you won’t get any higher quality. He also believes that not delivering an IT project on time hurts IT’s credibility with the rest of the company.

Everyone in the company always wants the IT department to do everything all at once. This means that the CIO often has to make some painful decisions – what areas are going to take priority over the others? Randy took a bold path when it came to this: he moved forward in all areas at once. It was his belief that if he chose one area to focus on, he’d end up not meeting the IT department’s customer’s needs. A great deal of risk is associated with this decision, but if you can pull it off you’ll come away with everyone viewing you as a hero.

What All Of This Means For You

Randy Mott certainly has a great deal of experience at how to do the job of being a modern CIO. He seems to have a bit of difficulty hanging on to his job, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t teach the rest of us in the IT sector a thing or two about how to be a successful CIO.

Randy points out that IT does bring in revenue for the company, we just need to find out how to measure it. He believes that it is IT’s job to deploy new technology as quickly as possible and that this should be done by working on fewer simultaneous projects, but finishing them faster. Finally, Randy does not believe that having more time makes an IT project any better and he thinks that taking too much time to make a decision on what to work on can cost the company time and money.

No, you don’t necessarily have to agree with the way that Randy chooses to see the world. However, due to the importance of information technology I do think that we should all understand why he sees it that way. He’s been on the front line of this CIO thing and so he’s got a pretty good understanding of what the job requires. Give it some thought and then keep your eyes open – Randy might be working at your company next!

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

Question For You: Do you agree with Randy’s view that all IT projects should be worked on simultaneously or do you think that they should be done sequentially?

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

You wouldn’t think that a CIO who just got fired from his job at HP would have a lot to teach us about IT strategy, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Randy Mott is a CIO who has been around the block a few times. He’s worked for Wal-Mart, Dell, and he was CIO at HP. When HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, got fired Randy had to go because he was too close to Mark. However, that all doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a thing or two from how Randy runs an IT department when he’s in charge…

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Posted in CIO | No Comments »

Why FedEx’s CIO Has His Head In The Cloud

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
Image Credit
Why would a package delivery company care about cloud computing?

Why would a package delivery company care about cloud computing?

When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, who are you going to call? Probably FedEx, the package shipping company. What you might not know is that FedEx has an enormous IT infrastructure that they use to move all of those packages around. Why would they be thinking about messing with success and moving this mission critical support system into the cloud?

Building A Package Shipping Private Cloud

The situation that FedEx’s CIO Rob Carter found himself in will probably sound familiar to most of us. FedEx’s IT infrastructure was a collection of various technologies that had come and gone over the years. This included everything from mainframes to client server systems. This presented two problems: they were expensive to maintain and each system could only be used by a small set of applications that had been designed for it.

Along comes this cloud thing and all of a sudden Rob gets excited. Forget the hype, he sees this IT innovation for what it is: the arrival of general purpose computing (we may need to update the definition of information technology). In Rob’s own words, all of a sudden the company’s IT infrastructure has the ability to become “workload agnostic”.

If every computer that the IT department has looks like every other computer, then all of a sudden you can move applications around as needed and the machines that you do have will start to get used as efficiently as possible.

What FedEx is in the process of doing is building a private cloud. This new IT infrastructure is going to consist of a virtualized computing environment that’s not going to look anything like what came before it in today’s IT sector.

In FedEx’s case what they’ve done is to build a completely new data center to house new standardized hardware. They’ve also been able to go back and retrofit an existing data center and transform it into another standardized data center. What makes this story so compelling is that this was all done with a very nice return-on-investment (ROI).

Turns Out That It’s All About The Applications

Having standardized hardware is a great start when you are transforming your company’s IT infrastructure into a private cloud. However, it’s not enough. The benefit of any cloud, public or private, is that you can run your company’s applications on any box anywhere. In order to do this, there is some more work that is going to be required.

The applications that your company are running today are going to have to be rewritten. The way that you probably have things now is that you’ve got applications that are written in multiple languages, run on multiple types of processors, and use different types of databases. That’s going to be way too expensive to keep supporting as you move forward.

The goal of this kind of application re-write is do what FedEx is doing: make your applications portable. Once they use a services-based approach and use a common data source along with a common messaging infrastructure then you can run them anywhere.

CIOs need to look at the opportunity to transform their IT operations from the chaos that it is today into a uniform private cloud as being a once-in-a-career event. You’ll have a chance to actually consolidate your infrastructure. The end result should be that your limited IT budget dollars should be able to go much farther.

What All Of This Means For You

If Rob Carter the CIO at FedEx is getting excited about the arrival of cloud computing technology, then shouldn’t you? Cloud computing is a trendy buzz word and so we need to be careful that we’re not getting caught up in the hype.

What we can learn from Rob is why he’s interested in cloud computing. The ability to use this technology transition as an excuse to build a private cloud that consists of standardized components that has a great ROI is key. FedEx has also realized that their applications need to be rebuilt to work with the new private cloud.

Clearly the era of cloud computing has arrived and it looks like it’s going to boost the importance of information technology. Rob Carter is showing all of us the way. We need to take the time to listen to him and understand what he sees in this new approach to technology. Maybe we have all found a way to transform our company’s IT infrastructure overnight!

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

Question For You: Do you think that Rob is on to something or has he gotten wrapped up in the hype of cloud computing?

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

You wouldn’t think that a CIO who just got fired from his job at HP would have a lot to teach us about IT strategy, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Randy Mott is a CIO who has been around the block a few times. He’s worked for Wal-Mart, Dell, and he was CIO at HP. When HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, got fired Randy had to go because he was too close to Mark. However, that all doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a thing or two from how Randy runs an IT department when he’s in charge…

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Posted in cloud computing | No Comments »

CIO Lessons From Zynga: Don’t Manage Like They Do!

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
Image Credit Sure they are successful, but for how long?

Sure they are successful, but for how long?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and don’t know who Zynga is, they’re the online game company that has ridden Facebook’s coattails to success. They’ve created very, very popular games such as Farmville and Cityville and generated a great deal of money. However, it’s starting to become clear that Zynga is not very well run internally and this holds many lessons for CIOs…

What’s Wrong With Zynga

How would you like your staff to be describing your IT department in the following ways:

  • “Poor leadership and communication. Awful work-life balance.”
  • “Being told by my manager that if i am not at home sleeping, then i am here working. That is how i was welcomed to the team.”
  • “Long hours even when there is no real deadline.
    Insane micromanagement all the way from CEO down”

These are actual quotes from (supposedly) Zynga employees that have been posted at the workplace rating site glassdoor.com. Ouch! What’s wrong with Zynga?

It’s pretty clear that Zynga is experiencing a massive surge of growth and they’re not exactly sure how deal with it. As the company grows and grows, the folks who are running the show are desperately trying deal with all of the business issues and appear to be forgetting what makes a company succeed over the long haul: its people.

We’ve all see this happen in many IT departments. When the department was small, there were a few people working in it who developed a close working relationship. Everything could be handled by someone in the department and there was an understanding that everyone would do whatever it took in order to get things done.

Where things start to go off the track is when the department grows. It doesn’t matter if the growth is organic (the business grows so the IT department grows) or through acquisitions. When the rules and understanding that were in place for that small group of people is extended to cover a larger group, this starts to cause problems.

It’s pretty clear that the folks running Zynga’s IT shop haven’t taken the time to craft a new set of policies that meet the needs of their growing team. This could quickly come back and bite them in the future.

How A Good CIO Could Fix What’s Wrong At Zynga

It’s easy to throw rocks at any organization and especially easy when it’s growing as fast as Zynga is. Instead of doing that, how about if we step back for a moment and see if we can come up with a way that Zynga could fix the mess that they’ve made.

The first step would be to notify the staff that you’ve made a mistake. Letting everyone know that you’ve heard how unhappy they are and that you admit that you’ve screwed up is a huge thing to admit. By making this simple but hard to do gesture all of a sudden you’ll have everyone’s attention – normally nobody ever admits that they are wrong!

Next you’ve got to lay out some very clear goals for the Zynga teams to focus on. What’s most important? Right now it’s pretty clear that nobody quite knows. Is it being profitable? Is it having the most creative games? Is it reliability in the face of unheard of usage? There’s no wrong answer here, you just need to pick one.

Finally, you’ve got to work with the front line managers and come up with a standard set of rules for how the IT workers are going to be evaluated. What’s really important? Is it the quality of the products that folks are producing? Is it time spent in the office? Is it the quantity of the products that are being produced?

So much of Zynga’s problems seem to stem from poor communications from the top on down. This probably wasn’t necessary when the team was smaller. However, now that they’ve grown both how and what they communicate and good communication has become critically important.

What All Of This Means For You

What does this mess at Zynga mean for you? Although you probably don’t currently work at Zynga, you can learn from what’s going on there.

It’s pretty clear that the Zynga IT workers are experiencing some serious growing pains. The reasons for these pains are well understood: the use of outdated processes coupled with poor internal communication has resulted in the situation that Zynga now finds itself in.

Just realizing that there is a problem is not enough. Instead, you need to understand how a situation like this could be fixed. Taking three steps that included apologizing, creating goals, and setting performance measurements would move the organization in the right direction.

With a little luck the Zynga CIO will get the message. Hopefully, they’ll be able to make the changes that the company needs before it’s “game over” for Zynga.

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

Question For You: How could Zynga create a system to get feedback from it’s IT employees to find out if things are changing?

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

When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, who are you going to call? Probably FedEx, the package shipping company. What you might not know is that FedEx has an enormous IT infrastructure that they use to move all of those packages around. Why would they be thinking about messing with success and moving this mission critical support system into the cloud?

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Posted in communication | No Comments »

4 Steps CIOs Need To Take To Make Their Process Improvement Projects Successful

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
Image Credit
CIOs need to know how to keep process improvement projects going

CIOs need to know how to keep process improvement projects going

Pity the poor CIOs who gets the idea that what his IT department needs to do this year is to implement a process improvement project. It’s not that these types of projects are a bad thing to do, it’s just that all too often they don’t actually work out. Well, that was before we had a chance to talk about what CIOs need to do in order to make this a good use of everyone’s time…

Why Process Improvement Projects Don’t Work Most Of The Time

There are many reasons why IT process improvement programs that start off with such high hopes never seem to bear any fruit. There always seems to be a big kick off at which the CIO tells everyone just how important this project is to both the IT department as well as the company. It’s soon after that when things start to go downhill…

After a few initial success, the process improvement program continues on. The problem is that it will have been going on for so long that now folks start to get distracted. The very definition of information technology has to do with change and we all stop paying attention when something has been going on for too long. Other tasks start to creep in around the edges and steal their time away.

The outside experts whom the CIO brought in to help the team implement the Six Sigma or whatever program now move on to other things. The team keeps moving on, but their way forward is no longer clear because they now lack the expert guidance.

IT Managers are no longer so open to having their team members spend so much time on this other project. Instead, they start pushing to have their staff complete their “day job” before they spend time on the “special project”. When it becomes clear the process improvement work won’t be showing up on anyone’s year-end-evaluation, the game is pretty much over and the project dies a quiet death.

4 Steps CIOs Need To Take In Order To Have A Successful Process Improvement Project

Things don’t have to turn out this way. It actually is possible for an IT department to run a successful process improvement project – in fact the very importance of information technology means that we need to be able to keep getting better and this type of project is a great way to make that happen.

In order to make this type of project yield results, researcher Satya Chakravorty has uncovered four things that CIOs need to do to prevent a process improvement disaster from happening:

  1. Keep The Pros: No matter what methodology the CIO decides to use to implement the process improvement, outside experts are always brought in. This is a great move. However, all too often the outside experts are dismissed too early. This leaves the IT teams adrift and unsure how to continue. Keep the experts around until the project is completed.

  2. Make Everyone Responsible: a process improvement project will only succeed if everyone in the IT department is working on it. If you are going to ask everyone to spend that much time working on something, then you need to make sure that the project is a part of everyone’s performance appraisal otherwise you’ll be forcing them to make a decision about what to work on.

  3. Not Too Big, Not Too Long: Within IT we have a bad habit of creating large teams to tackle problems. This time around, don’t do that. Instead, limit the size of individual teams to only 6-9 members. Likewise, you need to limit how long each part of the project takes. A section should be able to be completed within 6-8 weeks.

  4. Be Involved: Senior IT executives are busy, but they need to make time to get involved in the process improvement program. Just “supporting” the program or sitting through status updates is not enough. They need to be contributing their suggestions based on their experiences.

What All Of This Means For You

Any IT process improvement program represents a significant investment of time, energy, and capital for a CIO. This means that as long as you are going to make the investment, then you had darn well better make sure that the project is going to be successful.

To make this happen, the IT sector requires that CIOs do the following things: improvement experts need to stay involved for extended periods of time. Project success needs to be a part of every IT member’s annual performance appraisal. Process improvement team sizes must be restricted to 6-9 members and timelines must be no longer than 8 weeks. Finally, direct IT executive involvement is required at all times.

Taking the time to do a process improvement project correctly can make all of the difference in the world. These are hard projects to do. A CIO that can complete one successfully will have finally shown the company what the true value of the IT department is.

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

Question For You: From start to finish, how long do you think a process improvement project should last?

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

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and don’t know who Zynga is, they’re the online game company that has ridden Facebook’s coattails to success. They’ve created very, very popular games such as Farmville and Cityville and generated a great deal of money. However, it’s starting to become clear that Zynga is not very well run internally and this holds many lessons for CIOs…

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Posted in IT project | No Comments »

CIOs Should Stop Sending Emails – Now!

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
Image Credit
CIOs need to learn when NOT to use email

CIOs need to learn when NOT to use email

Those cloning experiments sure seem to have only been able to create more sheep so far – and that’s not going to help overworked CIOs! It seems as though we have more things to do and less time than ever to get them done. Arguably the most important part of any CIOs job is to communicate with your staff. How you go about doing that can be critical to both your overall success and the success of your IT department. I’ve got news for you: if you’re using email to do this, then you’re doing it wrong.

Email Has No Feeling

I don’t care how much of a cold and impersonal CIO you are. Every time that you talk with someone, you include some level of emotions in what you are saying. You may be angry, you may be happy, not matter what – you are something.

The problem with email is that it’s nothing. Your emails are never happy, sad, or mad. The person that you’ve sent your email to can’t tell what you were feeling when you wrote your email.

What this means is that the possibility of a miscommunication skyrockets when we use email. Since we can’t properly let the reader of our email know how we were feeling when we wrote the email, the possibility of getting signals mixed up is very probable.

Email Creates Negative Responses

What do you do when you read an email that has been sent to you? I’m willing to bet that more often than not, you jot off a quick reply to the sender right then and there. Without giving it a lot of thought.

Things get even more tricky when we get negative emails – someone yelling at us or complaining about something. What happens is that we get bent out of shape and our anger wells up inside of us and then comes rushing out through our fingertips as we type out that heated email that we’re going to send back.

We all know what the right thing to do here is (even if we don’t always do it). When we get an email that makes us mad, we really need to stand up and walk away. Don’t reply to that email right off the bat. In fact, if at all possible, don’t reply to it today – wait a day. That will allow everything to cool down and you’ll be able to craft a reply that you won’t regret later on.

Email Creates Debates That Are Not Needed

Because of the anonymous nature of email and because we really can’t figure out what the other people are thinking, debates can go on and on. It’s very hard to stop a debate once it’s stated via email.

Miscommunication and the simple fact that it’s so easy to just flip another email back to the sender contribute to this problem. Even after the primary issue has been resolved, the discussion can go on and on as both parties continue to explore.

Debates are one of the key communication areas that are not well served by email. The back-and-forth nature of this type of communication along with the need to “see” what the other side really means results in the need for face-to-face contact.

What All Of This Means For You

Look, email is a great tool. I use it, you use it, everybody in the IT sector uses it. The use of email is probably included in definition of information technology. The key is to not over use it or use it in the wrong situations. CIOs need to be able to identify when and where the correct times to use emails are.

Email has three distinct problems associated with it. First, it does a lousy job of communicating emotion and this can lead to confusion on the part of the receiver of your email. Next it can cause people to become instantly angry – they don’t take the time to think about what they’ve read before they fire off a response. Finally, email makes it too easy to keep talking about an issue long after it should have been put to bed.

I’m not suggesting that CIOs stop using email. Far from it. Rather, I’d actually like to see CIOs use email as their communication technique of last resort. The importance of information technology is so great that you need to pick up the phone or walk over to someone’s office instead of firing off that next email. You just might end up being glad that you did!

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

Question For You: How do you think that a CIO can work accurate emotion into the emails that you do send?

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

Pity the poor CIOs who gets the idea that what his IT department needs to do this year is to implement a process improvement project. It’s not that these types of projects are a bad thing to do, it’s just that all too often they don’t actually work out. Well, that was before we had a chance to talk about what CIOs need to do in order to make this a good use of everyone’s time…

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Posted in communication | 2 Comments »

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