Archive for the ‘it strategy’ Category

What Can IT Become When It Grows Up?

Thursday, January 29th, 2009
IT Has A Lot Of Potential; However We Still Don't Know What We Want To Be When We Grow Up

IT Has A Lot Of Potential; However We Still Don't Know What We Want To Be When We Grow Up

So I love IT, and you love IT. We love the applications, the servers, the networks and, of course, the Internet. Whether it’s because we are closet control freaks or because we are fascinated by how all of the pieces fit together, we just love it. I’m not saying that love is a bad thing, but at the end of the day IT exists to help the company be successful ( = make more money).

Michael Vizard over at Ziff Davis has been thinking about our love life just a bit and he’s come up with some interesting thoughts about where we need to be taking this relationship.

In the end, it all revolves around data – or as we like to call it using fifty-cent words, information. By now, just about everybody realizes that there is no shortage of information (just take a look around your office: there are piles of information EVERYWHERE!) What is missing is knowledge – and the only way to get knowledge is to process all of that data and squeeze the knowledge out of it.

Michael believes that we in IT need to get our act together. The rest of the organization is waiting for us to provide them with the relevant knowledge that they need in order to make good decisions. This means that there are five IT developments that we need to do a good job of managing over the next few years in order to truely make IT valuable to the rest of the business:

  1. Locate A Good Search Tool: Just as we have too much information in our personal lives, so too do businesses have too much information stored in all of their different intranets. They may not be able to say it in so many words, but the rest of the business is desperately looking to IT to provide an enterprise search tool that will help them to find what they need.
  2. Smart Middleware: The days of logging into one application, entering data, and then logging into another application to enter the same data are soooo over. If I can upload my Microsoft Outlook email contact book into my new Gmail email account, then why can’t I load my product catalog into my marketing database just as easily? Smart middleware will allow all of a firm’s applications to share information and thereby will allow a complete view of the business to be provided.
  3. BI,BI Baby: Finally Business Intelligence tools have become powerful enough to mine those bloated databases and provide all sorts of different users with specific answers to detailed questions about what is working and what isn’t.
  4. The Blog Has Arrived: Remember all those fancy “knowledge management” applications that software firms tried to sell everyone back in the 90′s? It turns out that what we really needed was a good blogging platform and permission to  write our little hearts out. Once problems and solutions are blogged about, then the blogs can be mined by search tools and the information shared throughout the firm.
  5. Stop Repeating Yourself: If I worked for a storage company, these would be the best of times – everybody is storing everything. Deduplication software is only now starting to arrive which will allow us to just store one copy of everything and this should finally stop the storage madness.

Most firms now realize that IT will be a critical factor in their future success. It’s only by leveraging what IT can bring to the table that a firm can beat its competition while satisfying its customers. The challenge is that IT is going to have to find some way to bring all of these different technologies together in order to make the company successful. But that’s ok, because we love this stuff…

What enterprise search tool do you use today? How do you link your applications together (or do you)? Do you use BI tools? Is blogging permitted and supported in your department? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in it strategy | 12 Comments »

Can’t We All Just Get Along (In IT)?

Monday, January 26th, 2009
IT Departments Need To Work With Colleagues In Other Firms To Understand Technology

IT Departments Need To Work With Colleagues In Other Firms To Understand Technology

So there you are, manning the laptop, doing your utmost best to guide your IT department and, of course, your company on to greater glories. Do you really need to network with your colleagues at other firms? For that matter, do they really have anything to teach you?

Peter Whatnell over at Sunoco has some thoughts on this subject. Whatnell is a bright guy: he’ s been in charge of Sunoco’s IT operations since 2001 (remember the dot.com crash?) and he is now the president of the Society for Information Management. Ben Worthen over at the Wall Street Journal recently had a chance to sit down with Peter and have a chat about the importance of remembering to look outside the company for ideas.

Whatnell makes the good point that the colleagues that you network with don’t even have to be in the same industry as yourself. As an example, if you talk with someone who is working in IT for the construction industry and they start to mention how they are starting to use mobile devices to quickly distribute design changes, then you may have found an idea that you can use in your neck of the woods.

One of the big questions that we all deal with is “am I giving away competitive information if I talk shop with a colleague from another firm?” Whatnell makes the point that by now we should all be able to realize that what makes our firms competitive is not the underlying technology that we use. Talking about technology is not going to reveal any big company secrets.

What makes our firms competitive is how we go about using these pieces of technology in order to solve the problems that our firm is facing. This means that even if you and your competitor have access to the same technology, you’ll end up putting it together much differently.

Whatnell believes that the true source of a competitive advantage is knowing exactly how you can use IT to help make your business more successful. One interesting way to do this is to ask key executives how the firm makes money. If they don’t know, then this is an area that IT can help simplify.

In these tough times, it’s interesting to hear what Whatnell has to say about what his biggest challenge is. Sunoco is an oil company – it’s a commodity business that’s competing in a mature market. In order for Sunoco to be successful, the firm is going to have to find a way to become THE low cost provider.

What this means for IT is that we need to find ways to help the business side of the house cut expenses, reduce cycle times, and improve their overall agility. The goal should be to avoid having IT being told to just “cut your budget to help our bottom line.”

In the end, Whatnell says that an IT department needs to have earned its credibility within the company in order to be able to be able to contribute to helping the company reduce costs. The key here is that you need to have already earned this credibility.

Do you routinely meet and talk with colleagues that work outside of your firm? Do some of these colleagues work in different industries? Does your IT department have the ability to work with the rest of the business to trim costs? Do you feel that your IT department has the credibility that it will need to have these discussions with the rest of the business? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in it strategy | 3 Comments »

3 Secrets That Oil Companies Use To Run A Great IT Department

Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Peter Whatnell, CIO of Sunoco, Has Some Interesting Thoughts On How To Run A Successful IT Department

Peter Whatnell, CIO of Sunoco, Has Some Interesting Thoughts On How To Run A Successful IT Department

If you had to guess as to what the secret of running a great IT department is, what would you say? Peter Whatnell over at Sunoco has some thoughts on this subject. Peter breaks it down to three key items: knowing how your company makes money, choosing to not run against the company’s culture, and remembering to never fall in love with technology. How hard can that be?

Whatnell is a bright guy: he’ s been in charge of Sunoco’s IT operations since 2001 (remember the dot.com crash?) and he is now the president of the Society for Information Management. Ben Worthen over at the Wall Street Journal recently had a chance to sit down with Peter and have a chat about the role that an IT department plays in a company’s success.

Whatnell pointed out that the arrival of a global recession has caused all IT departments to take any plans that they had created prior to the end of August and basically throw them away. The big hit is going to be especially felt in new projects.

The difference between current events and the dot.com crash that happened back in 2001 is that that crash really only impacted the IT community. This time around, it’s really a global meltdown and it’s impacting the whole business.

IT is facing a significant challenge in that there is now a lot of easy-to-use IT technology that is available to consumers. Examples include the iPhone (of course!) and free on-line email accounts with virtually unlimited storage. What this means is that corporate users are now expecting to see similar products available to them while they are at work.

IT departments have some valid security and support issues for not diving headlong into offering such services internally. However, they do need to seriously consider how to offer their customers such services.

Whatnell stresses that we need to make sure that we don’t “…waste a good crisis.” What he means by this is that 2009 is going to be tough and it’s going to force every IT department to investigate nontraditional ways of delivering IT services.

Whatnell is somewhat famous for saying that he’d consider moving to a cheaper alternative, such as Google’s email system, if he could get 90% of the functionality for 10% of the cost. One of the reasons that he’s taken this stance is because he realizes that most users only scratch the surface of the functionality of the applications that they have available to them. Give the power users access to the fancy, expensive version of the apps and give everyone else the basic version.

Whatnell has some very specific thoughts when it comes to evaluating potential IT projects. He says that he evaluates projects based on what they do to support the company’s strategy, what the business case is, and finally, what the business risk is.

He points out that the more change that an IT project would cause to how business is conducted, the bigger the risk is. This does not mean that you don’t do the IT project, but that you need to be very careful and make sure that you give your full attention to all of the change management activities that would be required.

What do you think about what Peter has to say? Do you think that his view from inside an oil company is relevant to the rest of the IT industry? Which of his suggestions do you think is the most important? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in it strategy | 10 Comments »

What To Do When Everything That You Know Is Wrong

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

CIOs can be responsible for leading a company in to an economic stall
In most IT departments, everything is fine until it isn’t. Sometimes this is a result of actions that the IT department has either taken or not taken, sometimes it is a result of what’s going on in the company as a whole. No matter, everyone in IT is personally impacted when a previously successful company enters an economic stall and starts to streak towards the ground. How does an IT department end up in a situation like this and what can they do about it?

We’ve talked about some of reasons the companies and IT departments collude to enter a stall, things like being trapped by having a premium product, abandoning a core market segment too early, or just flat running out of good talent with which to lead the IT department. Some of you might be thinking that such strategic matters are beyond the scope of the IT department; however, I’d disagree. IT is an information collection and distribution organization and because of this we need to be the ones who fully participate in the company’s strategy discussions.

Studies done by researchers at The Executive Board, an executive think-thank, have shown that one of the leading causes of an IT department’s failure to notify a company of an impending revenue stall is IT management’s failure to align changes in the company’s external environment to the existing company strategy. This failure rests squarely on the CIO’s shoulders.

Just to drive this point home a bit more, it turns out that the assumptions that IT leadership teams have held for the longest period of time (or currently hold the most deeply), are the ones that are going to come back and bite them the hardest. One of the reasons that this happens is because during the annual review of the company’s strategic plan the CIO does not challenge the “assumptions and risk” section – he/she is willing to treat it as so much boilerplate and just let it go.

So what can a good CIO or IT manager do to help the company avoid an economic stall? It turns out that research in this area has reveled four best practices for detecting the red flags that signal that a stall might be coming up. We’ll talk about them next time…

Have you ever been working in an IT department where the CIO was an active player in planning the company’s strategy? How did the IT department support him/her as they did this – just collecting info or did you actually process it in order to turn the information into knowledge? Was the CIO accepted by the rest of the company or was he/she treated as an outcast? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: , , , , ,

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in business, ceo, CIO, it strategy, profit, revenue stall | No Comments »

A New CIO Job: Panning For Legal Gold

Monday, August 25th, 2008

A CIO who prepares for legal lawsuits before they happen is valuable indeed
One of the worst things that can happen to a modern company is to for it to get sued. Here in the 21st Century more often than not, lawsuits require that the firm being sued produce electronic documents early on in the whole messy legal process. Good examples of how tricky this can get are the White house’s attempt to retrieve firing emails, Intel’s fight with AMD, and Morgan Stanley’s issues with the SEC. As the Morgan Stanley case shows, if a firm can’t produce the email and electronic records that are asked for it can end up costing the company a lot ($10M in the case of Morgan Stanley). What does all of this legal stuff have to do with a CIO?

Michael Lunch is the CEO of Autonomy Corp. and he does a good job of describing how the search for electronic documents is currently done:

“The old-fashioned way of doing this was having a lot of lawyers doing a lot of simple things, you would literally have lawyers reading though things saying ‘there was chicken for lunch.’ You don’t need lawyers to know that it’s a lunch menu.”

Ouch – what kind of hourly rate does a firm have to pay to have lawyers read old email? This is exactly the type of situation that begs for the IT department to step in and lend a hand. Recognizing that this is an issue, the good folks at HP, Xerox, and IBM are getting ready to jump in and offer products and services.

This new reality of living in an electronic document lawsuit-happy world opens a unique door of opportunity for forward thinking CIOs. When a firm gets sued, everything has to shut down as it relates to documents while the requested material is searched for. If an enterprising CIO had already set up a system to track and categorize the firm’s electronic records, email included, then a lawsuit’s requests could be easily handled. Being able to produce the requested material the next day instead of weeks or months later and being able to do it for much less than a roomful of lawyers would cost would enhance the CIO’s standing among the company’s senior management.

Careful – there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about doing this. The wrong way is the classic IT way: I don’t need anyone else, I (and my department) can do this all by ourselves. Discovery of records as a part of a legal proceeding is really the domain of the company’s legal department. This is clearly a case where the IT team needs to work WITH the legal department. Since any sort of automated search process will be taking cash out of the pockets of outside law firms who traditionally supply the human resources to do information searches, the CIO is going to need to have the full support of his in-house legal team. The moment the lawsuit is filed, the outside firms will be whispering into the CEO’s ear that he/she really needs their pricey assistance. Without the support of the in-house legal team any IT created solution will be discarded in favor of going with a “sure thing”.

Having a solution in place before it is needed is the key to ensuring that the IT team looks good. If a CIO is running around after the event trying to find a solution, then expensive mistakes are going to be made. Finally we have found one area where a CIO can once and for all show the company the true value of the IT department.

Have you ever worked at a company that got hit with a lawsuit that required electronic documents to be produced? How did it go – was it quickly and easily handled or was it an ongoing nightmare? Did this event have any lasting impact on how the firm handled and tracked its electronic documents? Leave a comment and let me know what you think…

Tags: , , , , , ,

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in business, business alignment, ceo, CIO, document discovery, it strategy, lawsuit | 4 Comments »