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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.

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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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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.
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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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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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Post tags: cloud computing, digital economy, IT initiatives, mobile devices, processes, social media, standardize processes, streamline, transform the business

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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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Post tags: automatically generated, discounts, expense reports, negotiate discounts, T&E, travel booking, travel expense reporting, travel patterns, travel policy compliance, travel reservation systems, volume-based discounts

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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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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2011. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alignment, increasing the pace of production, innovative thinking, operational speed, slowing down, speed gap, speeding up, strategic speed, time to reflect and learn

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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:

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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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: annual revenue, Business Value In IT, end-to-end integrated framework, IT Capability Maturity Framework, IT-CMF, macroprocesses, Managing IT like a business

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The New XBRL Requirements Open The Door For IT To Help The Rest Of The Business

The Opportunity

I believe that one of the reasons that it is so hard for a CIO to get the IT department to align with the rest of the business is that finding the correct opportunities where alignment is possible can be a big challenge. Well I’ve got some good news for you: it looks like such an opportunity is getting ready to show up and it’s called XBRL.

The Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC) passed a ruling last year that made adding the XBRL reporting tags to a company’s 10-Q and 10-F financial filings mandatory last year. The door of opportunity has opened for CIOs because the reporting company XBRL Cloud reports that 70% of the companies that made their filings using the XBRL tags had some sort of error.

Currently this is no big deal – however, by the time that you become CIO it could well be be a very big deal. The SEC has agreed to limited liability for the next three years. After that, everyone had better be getting it right.

What Is The XBRL?

The extendable business reporting language (XBRL) is a series of custom XML tags that firms need to start to insert into their financial records that they file with the SEC. The goal is to make it easier for the SEC and financial analysts to pull out the information that they are looking for (and to compare it to other firms).

The SEC’s rules stated that large companies had to start filing using it in July, 2009. Over the next three years all pubic companies will have to start using it. Clearly this is important and this type of work lends itself to exactly what the IT department does best.

XBRL consists of interactive data tags that will allow financial analysts to better process a company’s financial numbers. Currently these tags only need to be placed at certain places in the body of the filing. However, next year detailed tags have to added to a company’s footnotes and MD&A parts of the annual report

How Are Companies Solving This Problem Now?

In order to meet the SEC’s requirements, there are two ways that companies are working to update their filings. The first way is to purchase software that allows the company to insert the tags into the filing themselves. The second way is to outsource the whole process and have their financial printer do it.

Outsourcing the work seems to be the most popular way to solve this problem right now. RR Donnelley reported that 100% of its 141 customers who were required to report using XBRL outsourced it to them to take care of.

The downside to outsourcing is that it doesn’t come cheap. One financial printer charged $24,995 per year to cover XBRL filings. To make things even worse, outsourcing is expected to become more expensive when detailed footnote tagging becomes part of the package. On the other hand, software to do this task in-house costs roughly $5,000.

Where Is The IT Department’s Opportunity?

Clearly the arrival of the XBRL requirement provides a great opportunity for a company’s IT department to better align itself with the rest of the business. The key question that you will have to ask yourself once you become CIO is how to do this?

The #1 rule for IT here will be to make sure that you get the IT department involved in the process as far in advance of the due date as possible. The reason for this is because the SEC continues to issue constant revisions to the XBRL taxonomy and this can require additional effort by the IT department right up until the last minute.

The good news for the IT department is that the software that will allow you do perform this tagging in-house is constantly getting better. However, no matter how good it becomes, IT will always have to work with the rest of the company in order to validate the data once its been tagged using XBRL notation.

The overall goal here is to make sure that the XBRL tagged data matches the company’s 10-Q or 10-K filing. If for some reason it doesn’t, then the SEC may reject the filing and this will mean bad publicity for the company and a black eye for the IT department.

What All Of This Means For You

The new SEC XBRL rules are a much bigger deal than just a new financial reporting structure. Once the XBRL tags are in place, then the SEC is going to be able to use XBRL to quickly discover non-XBRL problems.

This is going to be the real opportunity for the CIO to have the IT department align with the rest of the business. IT needs to step in and help solve the XBRL reporting issue and then stay engaged in order to help validate the tagged document and detect the issues that the SEC will find long before they do.

We’ve been talking about the challenges associated with aligning IT with the rest of the business. The arrival of the XBRL requirement show how IT / Business alignment is truly going to happen and it’s going to take strong leadership from the CIO to make it happen.

How should the CIO approach the finance people in order to ask if IT can help out with the XBRL tagging?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, you’re going to be faced with the challenge of picking your friends. No, I’m not talking about being nice to the CEO and CFO – let’s hope that they are already your friends. What I’m talking about is the collection of outside firms that provide your IT department with goods and services. They can’t all be your best friend, so you’ve got some decisions to make…

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Post tags: 10-K, 10-Q, constant revisions to taxonomy, extensible business requirements language, limited legal liability, outsource to financial printer, self-tagging, technical errors in financial filings, XBRL

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A CIOs Personality Often Rubs Other Departments The Wrong Way

Forget the whole alignment thing, is it possible that a CIO’s behavior is the root of the problem that the IT side of the house and the business side of the house have never been able to get along? Could it be that this is the secret as to why there has always been such a gap between these groups?

What Drives CIOs?

You may not be a CIO just yet, but I’m willing to bet that you share all of the bad personality characteristics that your CIO has. Perhaps if we take a moment and uncover just what is holding the IT department back from being all that it can be, we’ll also be able to uncover a way to solve this problem.

IT by its very nature likes to focus on things like technology and processes. However, it’s that “people dimension” that turns out to really be the most important thing. It’s how people interact that either allows IT and the business to align – or keeps them apart.

Studies of CIOs have revealed that they have two personality characteristics that help them be good CIOs, but which are probably dooming their ability to interact well with other departments. Wonder if you share these traits?

What Makes A CIO Good & Bad At The Same Time

A recent personality study of more than 500 CIOs, managers, and IT staffers have uncovered two personality traits that appear to be crucial to doing well in IT while impeding interactions with other departments.

The first of these personality traits is the need to do things right and to do them perfectly. I’m sure that we can all agree that we share this characteristic in some manner. When the CIO has this personality “feature” , it has a habit of being adopted by the entire IT department.

The problem with this trait is that it means that IT can be very slow to change how it does business. CIOs won’t want to make changes until they can be assured that the change has been tested and that it will work correctly in every situation. Needless to say, if the rest of the company is dynamically changing in order to adapt to the market, then IT will come to be seen as a drag on the rest of the company.

The other trait that CIOs share is a deep set need to do things correctly and to find ways to continuously improve what they are doing. We’ve all seen both of these characteristics show up in countless internal IT improvement programs. This is something that can help an IT department get more done, but it’s going to hinder working with other parts of the business.

The problem with this trait is that when other departments show up and ask the CIO to do something quickly or to do a job only partially in order to quickly react to a changing market situation, CIOs often balk.

When the rest of the company encounters resistance to their requests from the CIO, they are not pleased. This kind of internal roadblock is dealt with by the rest of the business by either complaining to the CEO that IT is not being responsive or else (and we’ll all seen this before) the business ends up going around the IT department in order to solve their problem.

How To Fix These Personality Flaws

These personality flaws are a challenge for any CIO to deal with and will remain that way when you become CIO. The issue is that you need to have these personality features when you are performing IT functions, but you need to find a way to deal with them when you are interacting with people from other departments.

Knowing that these two personality traits are a hindrance to aligning the IT department with the rest of the business is the first step in finding a solution to this problem. The next step is to realize that you need to consciously work to “turn them off” when you are working with other departments. This can be done by forcing yourself to step into their shoes and working to see the world the way that they do, not how IT sees it. Not easy, but doable.

What All This Means For You

When you become CIO, there probably still won’t be true alignment between the IT department and the rest of the business. This means that it will fall on your shoulders to finally solve this problem.

Knowing that one of the root causes of this problem lies in the very personality traits that will make you a good CIO is the first step in finding a way to deal with this issue. Your focus then needs to be on finding ways to turn these traits on when you are dealing with IT issues and off when you are dealing with business issues.

You may feel as though this will require you to become sorta of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde type of CIO. Perhaps this is true, but if it allows alignment to happen then go ahead and drink the potion…!

Do you think that you already have these two personality characteristics that could make it difficult to get along with the rest of the business?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, vendors will enter your life and they just won’t leave. What this means is that they’ll be a constant pain in your neck, always wanting your time and attention. However, on the flip side, they will be a valuable resource that can provide you and your team with information and guidance that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Don’t do what too many new CIOs do and stop talking with vendors after the deal is signed…

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: continuously improving, people issues, people management, perfection, personality, personality traits, relationships

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You Can

A quick quiz for you: what has been the #1 task on every CIO’s to-do list for the better part of the past 20 years? If you guessed “aligning IT with the rest of the business” then you are correct. This has been an IT goal for the past 20 years? What’s up with that? When you become CIO what are you going to do to solve this problem. Can it even be solved?

It’s All About Communication

Why has something that sounds so simple when we talk about it been so hard for CIOs to do? Tony Kontzer over at CIO Insight has taken a look at what’s been holding CIOs back and he’s come up with one answer: communication.

I’m pretty sure that we all know where this one is going. The non-IT business folks like to spend their time talking in business terms and we over on the IT side of the house seem to be only able to communicate using IT jargon. The results of this inability to communicate can be disastrous.

The Tower Of Babel — IT Style

When the business side of the house and the IT side of the house find it hard to communicate, what happens is that they simply stop communicating. When this happens, each side goes off and starts to do its own thing.

I can’t tell you how many firms that I’ve worked for where I’ve seen this happen. When communication breaks down between IT and the rest of the business is when you start to see the multiplying factor start to show up: multiple email systems, multiple ERP applications, etc.

From a CIO perspective, this is the worst thing in the world that can happen. The reason is that every IT system that gets added to the company means that there is one more system that needs to supported forever and that boosts the cost of having the IT department do work that does nothing to help the company’s bottom line.

The Big 6

When you become CIO, how will you be able to measure how well the IT department and the rest of the company are doing in trying to align themselves? Well, you’ll have to fall back on what everyone in IT loves the most: metrics. The trick is knowing what needs to be measured. Here are the top six alignment metrics as recommended by the Society for Information Management (SIM):

1. Communication Channels: Have effective communications channels been established between the IT department and the other departments in the firm? Are these channels being used?
2. Metrics: are metrics in place and are they being measured in order to determine where the firm stands in it’s efforts to align how the business processes operate and what the IT department spends its time working on?
3. Governance: are there processes in place that will ensure that what IT works on lines up with what the company’s true business needs are?
4. Partnership: is there a partnership between IT and the rest of the departments where each is taking actions to make the other more successful?
5. HR: does the HR department understand what the company is trying to align and are they taking action to attract and retain the talent that will be needed to make this happen?
6. Technology: are the right tools in place and available to be used in order to drive the changes that will be needed to transform how business is done once the alignment has occurred?

What All Of This Means To You

For way too long CIOs have been looking for ways to try to align what IT does with what the rest of the business needs. So far they have not been successful.

The primary stumbling block has been the simple fact that there exists an enormous two-way communications gap between the IT department and the rest of the firm. IT communicates using technical terms that nobody else knows about while the rest of the firm communicates using business terms that make no sense to the IT staff.

A first step in finally bridging this gap is to implement the six alignment process metrics that we’ve identified. When you become CIO these will provide you with a way to measure your progress in finally getting the IT department to become a meaningful part of the firm. Nobody ever said that this was going to be easy, but at least now you have a plan for how you can accomplish the impossible.

What do you think is the biggest barrier stopping the IT department from working more effectively with the rest of the company?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, you’ll probably have all of the technical skills that you need to stay on top of today’s cutting edge IT issues such as storage, bandwidth, cloud computing, etc.  However, there is one thing that you may have forgotten to get: a law degree…

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alignment, communications, communications channels, communications problem, HR, it alignment, it governance, metrics, partnership, technical jargon, technical speak, technologies

Executing A Single Business / Technology Strategy Leads To Success

In the end, it all comes down to execution. No, not chopping heads off, but rather how you go about having your IT department perform the tasks that the business needs them to do. How hard could this possibly be?

What’s The Goal?

The power term “alignment” is tossed around a lot these days. I think that it’s gotten used so much that a lot of us have forgotten just exactly what it means. In its simplest form, when a company is truly aligned then it is able to mange both its business and its technology together.

As simple as this may seem, too few companies are able to achieve this goal. The reasons are many: differing personalities, budgets that are unrelated, lack of accountability for business results, etc.

Fredric Fishman has spent some time  thinking about this and he’s come to the realization that in order for a a company to commit to managing both its business and its technology together, then it needs to do three things well:

• Provide a clear vision for the organization
• Create a well-defined roadmap that shows how to get to the future
• Measure outcomes against predefined criteria

One Strategy For Both Business And Technology

If you have any hopes of bringing your business and technology activities together, then you’re going to have to make sure that the firm has a living business strategy. The world changes and your business strategy needs to be able to change with it. One way to accomplish this is to implement processes that will allow feedback on the business strategy to be collected and used to make adjustments.

The next step is to make sure that everyone understand just exactly how technology is going to be used to achieve each one of your business objectives. Finally, don’t just hope for the best – make sure that you have criteria in place to judge success before you start any IT project.

Strategic Imperative: Talk & Spend

A company’s goals are no good if nobody knows about them. Make sure that any planned investment in technology has a direct link to a business objective. This kind of decision making won’t happen overnight. You’re going to have to take the time to create internal processes that will allow your staff to learn how to make the correct investment decisions.

Once again, good communication is at the heart of any well run organization. You need to make sure that EVERYONE knows what the expected outcomes are and what the expected business results are. This will establish a sense of ownership and will make sure that everyone has “skin in the game”.

Measure, Measure, Measure

The best IT programs in the world don’t amount for much if you can’t determine what their impact was. You need to monitor the outcomes of each IT investment decision so that your decision making process just keeps getting better.

This is where IT folks can really shine: collect those metrics, stats, and usage data and use these numbers to measure impacts and report results.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, the steps that we need to take to align technology and business are pretty straightforward. The challenge is that this calls out not for a technology solution, but rather for a human-to-human solution. Within IT we’re great at writing code and hooking up new systems, now we just have to do a better job of talking and communicating with the rest of the company.

Questions For You

Within your firm, do you feel that you have a clear vision or is it just a piece of paper on the wall? Do you know how the company is going to achieve its stated goals? Are there effective ways to measure your IT results in place today? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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         The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

Coming Up Next Time

HP’s CIO Randy Mott has done some fantastic things in helping to turn the company around. However, now things are starting to get tricky and it’s not clear that the company is going to be able to continue to be successful…

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: align it, alignment, business, business alignment, business it alignment, business objectives, business process, business strategy, CIO, communication, criteria, execution, goal, information technology, IT, it alignment, IT project, it strategy, leadership, measure, metrics, monitor, roadmap, strategy, technology, vision