Archive for the ‘modular software’ Category

Will The Web 2.0 Be Your Downfall When You Are CIO?

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
Image Credit Web 2.0 Is All The Rage, But Will It Help You Be A Better CIO?

Web 2.0 Is All The Rage, But Will It Help You Be A Better CIO?

Just What Is This Web 2.0 Thing & Why Should You Care?

Just when you think that you’ve got this Internet thing figured out, it goes and changes on you. When you become CIO the Internet is going to be both your best friend (always on connectivity) and your worst enemy (security). However, just like everything else in life the Internet keeps changing – now we’re using the Web 2.0. There are some fantastic tools out there for you, but will you know what to do with them when you are the CIO?

It’s Not Going Away, Now What Are You Going To Do?

Now I know that you’re bright and smart because you are reading this article. However, let’s take just a quick moment and make sure that we’re all on the same page here. When the Internet first showed up, it was all about allowing you to “get somewhere”. You could go to AOL, CNN, Yahoo, etc. and see what content they had for you. This was all and good and businesses all opened up their own web sites and everyone pretty much knew what was going on.

Well apparently that wasn’t good enough. Things moved on and a whole new set of tools were invented that built on the original Internet and made it even more user friendly – say hello to the Web 2.0. The tools that make up the Web 2.0 ecosystem are all about allowing people who are using the Web to connect with each other – it’s all about “connectedness”.

When you become CIO this is going to matter because everyone is now expecting more from your company. It’s no longer enough to be a destination, now you are going to have to work with your IT department to make sure that you are a player in the Web 2.0 world.

Why Doing Nothing Is Not An Option

Guess what – even if when you became CIO you put your foot down and said “Balderdash, we’re not going to get involved with this Web 2.0 foolishness” it wouldn’t work. The world is becoming filled with blogs (including one very popular one called The Accidental Successful CIO), wikis, mashups, and so on. Your employees will be using them even if you chose not to do so.

Instead of being a stuck-in-the-mud CIO, you will have an opportunity to do more and move faster than the CIOs who came before you. That is because the Web 2.0 tools are changing the way that corporate software applications are developed. Instead of being these big stand-alone application, now they are becoming sleeker Web Services that use what’s already on the Internet to perform functions as well as playing nicely with other applications.

If you turn out to be a really clever CIO, you’ll have one of those break-through moments that can define a career. What you’ll realize is that what the Web 2.0 tools really allow your IT department to do is to enable the company’s customers to do a lot work for themselves. Things that used to require somebody in the company to do (selecting product options, checking on the status of an order, paying a bill) can now be done online and with Web 2.0 tools they can be done much easier than ever before.

The clever CIO will be able to reduce the company’s required headcount while at the same time improving customer satisfaction. What’s even better is that you’ll be able to do this with the IT department that you currently have – you won’t need lots of additional staff.

What All Of This Means For You

The Web 2.0 has arrived and you need to be ready to deal with it when you become CIO. It has the potential to both help and hinder the tasks that you will need to do as CIO.

The Web 2.0 is a set of tools that transforms the web from a set of places that we go to a way to connect with other people. You will need to work with your IT department in order to harness these tools. Your goal should be to harness the power of the new tools and create ways for your company’s customers to do more by themselves.

If you can figure out how to do this, then you’ll end up saving your company both time and money. You had better hurry up, the Web 3.0 can’t be that far away…

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

Question For You: Of all the different Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, Ajax, etc.) which do you think is the most valuable to a CIO?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you want to be a CIOs, then there’s no need for me to tell you that we are living in troubling times We are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and find ways to move up the corporate ladder. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

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Breakthrough IT Strategy: Take A New "Path" To Success

Monday, July 21st, 2008

Shinsei Bank Used Paths To Implement Successful Enterprise IT Projects

Businesses today spent roughly 5% of their gross revenue on IT and end up with very little to show for it. A couple of very bright guys over at the Harvard Business School (David Upton and Bradley Staats) have come up with a new approach to Enterprise IT Projects. They started their research from Eric Raymond‘s (programmer / open source champion) point-of-view: most IT projects are built using the Cathedral Approach:

  • they cost a lot,
  • they take a really long time to create,
  • and they only start to deliver any value after they are all done.

The Harvard guys believe that they have come up with a different approach that slashes costs while at the same time boosting the existing business and even making it easier to launch new ones. Sound interesting? Read on!

The new IT strategy is called the “path” approach. It assumes that there is no way that you can define all of a system’s specifications at the start of a project and so instead you just focus on laying out a path for the system to be further developed over time.

As a proof that this approach works, they studied the Shinsei Bank which is a a Japanese bank. In 1998 Shinsei was in a bad spot: it had had gone bust and (due to bad loans — sound familiar?) sold to the U.S. private equity firm Ripplewood Holdings. The very smart guys at Ripplewood got Masamoto Yashiro (former chairman of Citigroup Japan) to be the CEO of this struggling bank. Yashiro decided that Sinsei needed to compete based on a strong IT department. Here’s how they used a path-based approach to do it:

  1. Instead of implementing a new “big bang” set of business software, they took a different approach. They build a modular infrastructure that would allow them to put pieces in as needed.

  2. They build new systems that mimicked the old existing systems that the bank was already using. This allowed them to switch folks over to the new system and then make gradual improvements without requiring extensive retraining.
  3. They helped to ensure that the IT department was integrated with Sinsei’s business strategy by having the CIO report directly to the CEO. Note that this is different from many U.S. firms where the CIO reports to the CFO and is effectively “hidden” from the CEO.
  4. The Sinsei business unit heads spend a lot of time learning to “talk IT”. This helps to break down internal communication barriers.
  5. Sinsei IT application development projects start by focusing on the foreseeable business objectives — not the existing business environment. In other words, they think about how they want things to work, not about how they can automate how things currently work. The IT strategy is then built to meet this forecasted future.
  6. This is key: the Sinsei business folks tell IT what they need. IT creates prototypes and has the business side use them. This causes feedback and new possible solutions are identified.

Finally, the Harvard boys identified three characteristics of a path based IT solution that will allow it to succeed:

  • Use a minimal set of standards: pick a few and stay with them. This will reduce costs and simplify the entire project.

  • Create Simple Reusable Solutions: This can be as simple as taking each IT problem, breaking it down as far as it can possibly go, and then implementing solutions to those individual problems. When the low-level problems are connected together you’ll have a flexible solution that can be easily adjusted if any component changes.
  • Create Solutions With Modularity, Not Just Modules: Getting back to the original definition of modules, this simply means that you can tinker inside of one module without impacting any of the other modules that make up a complete solution. A good example of this is to create a solution that can be rolled out in phases. This limits your risk, allows users to get used to the new business software, and allows time for changes to be made.

The Harvard boys conclude their study with one final note of caution: if you want to build on what you’ve accomplished with an IT project, then you need to ensure that you have the committed involvement of your end-users. Otherwise you can expect to fail. In the end, the Shinsei bank is doing quite well due in part to its strong IT department. The realization that most large IT projects end up failing due to internal resistance instead of any technology issues, the path based approach to IT projects has allowed Shinsei to completely re-invent itself.

Tags: enterprise systems, IT, Shinsei Bank, modular software, CIO

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