Archive for the ‘alignment’ Category

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Successful CIOs Know What The CFO Really Wants

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
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The CIO Controls All The Money, It's Good To Have Him On Your Side

The CIO Controls All The Money, It's Good To Have Him On Your Side

In the classic Hollywood movie “All The President’s Men”, the heroes who are trying to unravel the web of corruption are told that they will be able to put the pieces together if they “… follow the money…”. It turns out that even though today’s CIOs are not trying to solve a crime, if they want their career to take off, they would do well to follow this same advice.

What CFOs Really Want

So if you are going to follow the money, then you are going to have to get on the good side of the company’s CFO. To do this you first need to understand what the CFO wants out of life. What you might find amusing is that CFOs face a lot of the same problems that CIOs face: they get niched, they get relegated to just dealing with one set of issues (money), and they yearn for a role in the bigger picture: setting the company’s strategy.

Now, CIOs want the same thing, but it turns out that if we take the time to help the CFO get what they want, then this can further our career also. However, first we need to really nail down what the CFO is looking for.

The first thing is that they want to become more deeply involved in setting the overall direction of the company. They feel that they understand the numbers will enough that they can contribute to this process.

What they really want to do here is to help the company come up with the appropriate types of measures that will allow it to correctly set its priorities – why do you want to spend money doing that and is there something better that we could do with that money?

Next, CFOs want to have a greater say over what the company spends its money on. Just like CIOs who think that they know better than the rest of the company what the company should be doing, it kills the CFO to see the company spend money on things that they feel aren’t going to generate a return.

What CIOs Can Do To Help CFOs Get What They Want

If you need any additional motivation to take the time to find ways to help your company’s CFO out, then how about this: more often than not your company’s next CEO comes from the CFO office. That’s the kind of friend you want to have on your side!

When it comes to helping your CFO become more integrated in the company’s strategic planning process, the CIO can easily play a bigger role. Ultimately making good strategy decisions is all about having the right data in front of you so that you can make good decisions. The IT sector has been built on data and within the company the CIO is the source of all data in the company. Taking the time to provide the CFO with the data that is needed is a good way to help the CFO position himself as a part of the company’s strategy team.

An important point that often gets overlooked is that before a CFO can start to spend more time on strategy, they need to make sure that the basic blocking and tackling financial activities are taken care of. The CIO can step in here and identify where additional automation can be used to reduce the time and effort that those actions take.

The final point, keeping track of how the company is spending its cash and the results that it is getting from those expenditures, is once again is a key area where the IT department can lend a hand. The challenge here is that that data that will be needed is spread across different parts of the company. This is a great opportunity to show off the importance of information technology – it’s going to take the efforts of the entire IT department to gather and process the needed financial data.

What All Of This Means For You

In the past few years there has been a lot of talk about IT / business alignment. Although this is still a goal that we should all be shooting for, it turns out that in the short term the CIO should make an IT department goal to find ways to better meet the needs of the company’s CFO.

CFOs are desperately looking for ways to play a more strategic role within the company. The importance of information technology in helping them achieve this can’t be overstated. The CIO is the person who can make this happen. By providing the financial data that the CFO needs in order to participate in creating strategy as well as helping to ensure that day-to-day financial activities are taken care of the CIO can be a great asset to the CFO.

In many firms the CFO is one of the prime candidates to move into the CEO position when it opens up. CIOs who have not allowed themselves to be confined by the definition of information technology and who have instead reached out to provide extra help to the CFO will be well situated when the CFO is promoted. It turns out that when you “…follow the money…” CIOs can end up in a very good place…

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

Question For You: What do you think is the best way for a CIO to find out exactly what data the company’s CFO is looking for?

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

Congratulations CIO – you’ve been asked to make a presentation to your company’s board of directors. Oh, oh. What are you going to have to do in order to make your career move forward due to this opportunity and not screw it up?

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CIOs Need To Know Who Is Implementing The Company’s Digital Strategy

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Image Credit Which Way Should Your Company Be Going On The Digital Highway?

Which Way Should Your Company Be Going On The Digital Highway?

As a CIO it can be all too easy to feel overwhelmed by the decisions that you have to make: mobile devices, clouds, security, arrrgh! The CIOs that I’m working with are looking for clear directions on what they should be spending their time on. My advice to them is that they need to pick a few key questions that are closely tied to the overall business. Once they can answer these questions, everything else will take care of itself. The key is to know what questions to spend your time answering…

Who Is Implementing The Company’s Digital Strategy?

It’s not that the company doesn’t know that it needs to use the IT department to become more competitive. It’s just that it really doesn’t know HOW to use its IT department.

Firms often like to pull together teams to address issues. Situations such as delayed product development, missed deliveries, or even increased competition are all reasons for doing some internal brainstorming – nothing wrong here.

However, where things can go wrong is if a firm allows the IT team that they used to identify the solution to a particular company problem to implement that solution. The reason that this can cause problems is actually very simple: most IT managers have a scope that is limited to a single department or business unit. They simply don’t know how to implement an IT solution that extends across the entire company.

This is where the CIO needs to step in and assign a single owner to this type of project. That owner needs to have enough seniority that they’ll be able to get the respect of all of the various departments in the company that will need to cooperate in order to successfully implement the company-wide IT change.

Is Digital Data Making The Company More Or Less Productive?

If there is one thing that the IT sector has done for businesses over the past few years, it is to provide them with more data. Data on products, sales, customers, prices, returns, etc. Now that all of this data exists, CIOs need to step in and help everyone understand what to do with the data.

One of the key questions that the CIO needs to help a company’s senior leadership to answer is who should be using the mountain of data that the IT department is collecting? The two choices are for senior management to use it to make decisions which will then be communicated down to the rank & file workers or to push the data out to the front-line employees and allow them to use it to make day-to-day decisions.

Both solutions work. Empowering the individual workers to use the data collected by the IT department turns out to be the more powerful of the two approaches. Additionally, it can result in greater worker involvement in their job and this can lead to higher employee retention.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs know the importance of information technology. However, they don’t always know how to go about making sure that their company gets the most out of the technologies that can help them the most.

The staff in an IT department who provide the definition of information technology solutions for the company are not necessarily the ones who should be assigned to implement it. The farther the reach of an IT solution (across departments or across functions) the more challenging it will be for IT staff who work within those groups to implement a good solution.

Likewise, IT departments collect a great deal of information for their companies. It’s what the IT departments allow to be done with this data that really counts: is it pushed down to the workers who can best use it?

CIOs are not only responsible for managing the IT department so that the company can move faster, but they are also responsible for making sure that IT solutions are implemented correctly and that data gets to where it can do the most good. By focusing on just a few key questions, CIOs can maximize their impact on the rest of the company.

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

Question For You: What do you think is the best way to implement IT solutions that will impact the entire company?

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

If there is one thing that CIOs hate it’s red tape – bureaucratic roadblocks that keep the IT department from doing what it is supposed to be doing. The very definition of information technology is that it moves fast and adapts to dynamic situations – exactly what a company’s bureaucratic processes and barriers to success seem to be designed to prevent. What CIOs need is a good role model for how to make this problem go away, it turns out that an American car company may be just the one to provide this…

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What Questions About The Business Should A CIO Be Asking?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
Image Credit To Get The Right Answers, You Have To Ask The Right Questions

To Get The Right Answers, You Have To Ask The Right Questions

As a CIO it can be all too easy to feel overwhelmed by the decisions that you have to make: mobile devices, clouds, security, arrrgh! The CIOs that I’m working with are looking for clear directions on what they should be spending their time on. My advice to them is that they need to pick a few key questions that are closely tied to the overall business. Once they can answer these questions, everything else will take care of itself. The key is to know what questions to spend your time answering…

Why Are You Using IT In Your Company?

Seems like a silly question for a CIO to be asking considering the importance of information technology, right? Turns out it’s not. What CIOs need to ask themselves is if their company is using IT technology to transform the business or if they are using IT to just add hi-tech bells & whistles to existing processes.

An example of this can be found in the rental car industry. The ability to drop a rental car off at an airport and be greeted by an employee who has the ability to print out a receipt for you on the spot used to be unique, but no longer is.

Using technology to provide this type of feature if you were the CIO for a rental car company would be viewed as being simply necessary – everyone else in the rental car industry’s IT sector is doing it.

As I tell my CIO clients, you need to take the time to not think about how to use technology in the business, but to rather think about how you can better serve the customer and then study how technology can help you do this. It’s this business level thinking that separates great CIOs from the just so-so ones.

In the rental car business, realizing that any sort of delay in picking up the car is time wasted for the client is a breakthrough thought. Using IT to have a car waiting for each customer with a GPS that was pre-loaded with where they wanted to go would be using technology to move the company forward faster.

Are You Ignoring Important Differences As You Standardize Processes?

One of the key initiatives at most companies for the last decade or so has been the standardization of processes. Trying to make as many of the company’s different products and services look the same within the company has been a goal. The motivation for this is that the more similar things look, the easier it is to streamline them and to reduce costs by combining various parts of the company to do the same tasks.

The problem with this approach is that not all products and services are the same. In fact, depending on where those products and services are being sold, the processes that are needed to support them may be very different.

CIOs in the IT sector have played a major role in the process standardization efforts. However, now that there is growing awareness of the importance in only standardizing the correct parts of the right processes, they need to use IT to do the right thing.

This includes taking the time to work with the rest of the business in order to determine what parts of each process are unique to the product or service that they support. The common parts that don’t add unique value can still be standardized, it’s only the special parts that will need customized IT support.

What All Of This Means For You

That whole IT / business alignment thing is so last year. Now CIOs need to be building on the importance of information technology and looking forward in order to find ways to help to move the company towards their goals.

This means that CIOs need to be the ones who are asking the tough questions. These questions include such things as is the company actually using IT technology to transform how they do business or are they just adding shiny bells and whistles to what is already there? Additionally, CIOs know that they need to help out in standardizing business process, but they need to be careful to not take this too far.

As I tell my CIO clients, you now need to be thinking like a businessman, not as a technology specialist. Find the right answers to these two questions and you’ll have found yet another way to show your value to the company.

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

Question For You: What questions can you ask to determine if an IT project is going to transform the company or just enhance it?

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

As a CIO it can be all too easy to feel overwhelmed by the decisions that you have to make: mobile devices, clouds, security, arrrgh! The CIOs that I’m working with are looking for clear directions on what they should be spending their time on. My advice to them is that they need to pick a few key questions that are closely tied to the overall business. Once they can answer these questions, everything else will take care of itself. The key is to know what questions to spend your time answering…

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CIO Case Study: How Much Are We Spending On Travel?

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011
Image CreditCIOs Have A Critical Role To Play In Containing Travel Expenses

CIOs Have A Critical Role To Play In Containing Travel Expenses

For CIOs, it’s all too easy for us to get caught up in, what else, the world of IT. We like to focus on things like servers, virtualization, networking, and making decisions about IP4 vs. IP6. It turns out that the rest of the company really doesn’t care about any of these things. They care about much more important things. Like, say, travel expenses.

The Problem With Travel Expense Reporting

It turns out that most companies have a problem with how they track and manage travel expenses. This isn’t just a problem, it turns out that it’s a big problem: a typical company spends 1-2% of their revenue on Travel & Entertainment (T&E). This can easily become a big expense.

Companies would like to have a better understanding of just how much they are spending (and what they are spending it on) so that they could do a better job of keeping a lid on costs. If they had this information, then they could use it to get volume based discounts from companies who supply travel and they could also crack the whip internally and steer employees to use these travel service providing companies.

What most companies are missing is an easy to use single view that shows a comparison between what employees booked for travel and what was expensed. A simple fact of life is that it is very difficult to track what a company’s employees do after they have left on a trip

How IT Can Solve The Travel Expense Problem

IT can play a major role in solving the problem of runaway T&E expenses. It turns out that by integrating travel systems, IT can provide the rest of the company with a very rich set of travel data to analyze. This can allow them to determine patterns, maximize the discounts that they get from their vendors, and ensure that employees are making the most of their travel discounts.

So with all of the other things that IT could be working on, why does it make sense for IT to spend time on something that seems to be as routine as tracking the company’s travel expenses? In a nutshell, this is a fantastic opportunity for IT to use their talents to help the company save money.

How much money can be saved you ask? Some firms have reported that they’ve been able to pare 3% off of their travel expenses simply by integrating their travel booking and travel accounting systems. Depending on how IT implements the solution, additional savings can be found.

Often when a combined solution is implemented, IT can add new functionality that wasn’t there before. This can include such things as having a traveler’s expense report automatically generated while they are still on the trip. This can be taken one step further and have the expense report audited for company policy compliance even while it is being created. Both of these activities can be augmented by mobile applications that allow the traveler to provide the applications with the data that they need from the road.

Travel reservation systems and expense reporting systems were originally developed by separate teams for different purposes. The time has come for IT to step in and bring these two separate worlds back together again.

What All Of This Means For You

The recent global recession has caused all companies to look for new ways to cut costs. Travel is an important part of conducting business; however, unfortunately it generates a great deal of expense. This is where IT can step in and show its value to the rest of the company.

In order to reduce the cost of travel expenses for a company, IT needs to integrate both the travel booking and the travel accounting IT systems. IT needs to go farther than just getting two existing IT application silos to work together, new functionality needs to be added. This can include support for mobile access and travel receipt filing as well as automated expense report creation.

IT exists to help the rest of the company run more smoothly. Identifying places where the company is spending money, such as on travel expense reporting, in a way that doesn’t help the company do a better job competing with other firms is critical. Once you as the CIO has identified this type of situation, you need to take action to correct it – and show the rest of 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: Do you think that additional functionality can be incorporated into a combined booking / reporting travel tool?

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

CIOs are currently being faced with making a decision that will impact their IT departments for years to come: should they move their IT operations into the cloud and if so, should it be a public cloud or a private cloud? There are a number of technical issues that can help drive this decision; however, the one factor that too many CIOs overlook is cost…

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Why CIOs Who Know How To Slow Down Do Better

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
Image Credit Careful! Going too fast can cause an IT department to crash…

Careful! Going too fast can cause an IT department to crash…

As CIO one of your most important jobs is to get as much out of your IT department as is humanly possible. You’d think that that best way to do this would be to always be pushing harder and harder. However, researchers who have been studying this very problem have come up with a different approach that they say can yield better results: go slower…

Why We Feel The Need For Speed

Researchers Jocelyn Davis and Tom Atkinson have been studying what they call the “speed gap” that can exist within companies and IT departments. The speed gap is the difference between how important everyone says that it is for the IT department to move fast and just exactly how fast the IT department is moving.

The reason that the speed gap is such a big deal in IT is because CIOs who become fearful of falling behind spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to close the gap.

Why Speed Is Bad

Once again, you’d think that simply by getting everyone to do more in less time would pretty much solve this problem, right? Well, you’d be wrong. What the researchers have found out is that IT departments that focused solely on moving faster actually ended up helping their companies achieve both lower sales and lower profits.

What’s even more interesting is that IT departments that did the opposite, those ones that slowed down did better. They were able to help their companies boost sales by 42% and raise profits by 52% within 3 years.

How Going Slow Can Be Very Good For An IT Department

If going fast isn’t the answer, then is going slow the way to go? It turns out that the answer is yes and for some fairly surprising reasons. When we talk about an IT department “going slow”, we don’t mean that everyone reduces the amount of work that they are doing.

The reason that going fast doesn’t work researchers tell us, is because there are actually two different things going on here. There is what’s called operational speed which has to do with moving quickly and this is what too many IT departments focus on. There is also strategic speed which has to do with finding ways to minimize the amount of time that is required in order to deliver value to your company’s customers.

IT departments that decided to go slower spent their time not trying to get more done in less time, but rather they spent their time aligning what the IT department was doing with the rest of the business. This involved a number of different things such as spending the time to do innovative thinking as well as studying what they were doing and trying to learn from it.

What All Of This Means For You

At the end of the day, CIOs get judged based on the results that they are able to deliver for their company. In order to get the maximum value out of their IT departments they need to decide if they want to focus on operational speed or strategic speed.

Operational speed does not yield the results that CIOs are looking for. Sure more gets done, but it’s generally of a lower quality and doesn’t meet internal and external customer’s needs. Boosting strategic speed can deliver clear results for both the IT department as well as the rest of the company.

CIOs who know when to slow things down in order to make sure that the IT department is on the right track will be more successful. Make sure that you take the time to move slowly when it is required. Remember that it was the turtle that won the race, not the rabbit!

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

Question For You: When in an IT project do you think it makes sense to slow things down and make sure that you are on the right track?

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

Poof! Now you’re the CIO. How are you going to get anything done? Are you some sort of superhero who can be everywhere at the same time? Do you have the ability to work 27 hours a day, 8 days a week? I’m guessing not, or at least not for very long. It looks like you are going to have to rely on the “M” word – “management”. What this really comes down to is simply that you’re going to have to get the right people in your IT department to step up and do the right things. I wonder who has the power to do those things right now…?

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