3 Questions That Every CIO Should Be Asking About Clouds

January 18th, 2012
Image Credit Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Cloud computing has almost become a part of the definition of information technology. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how a CIO can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

How Much Will This Save Me?

A lot of the excitement about cloud computing comes from the simple fact that most CIOs view the cloud as a way to reduce the cost of running an IT department. However, before visions of cash savings start dancing in your head, you need to answer some questions first.

Roger Cheng over at the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at where the expenses in running an IT department come from. What he’s discovered is that servers run about $2000 – $6,000. This capital expense can be avoided if instead of buying more servers a CIO simply subscribes to more cloud computing resources when it’s time to expand the company’s IT infrastructure.

In addition to saving on buying more servers, there are potentially other savings that a CIO can realize by moving to the cloud. Buying more servers would require more IT staff to act as systems administrators – no servers means no hiring of additional administrators.

Are Cloud Services Reliable Enough?

It seems as though every other month or so there is another story in the paper about some cloud provider having an outage. One time it’s Amazon, the next it’s Google. Given the importance of information technology, as a CIO you need to be asking yourself if this cloud computing stuff is really reliable enough for you to be trusting your company’s IT infrastructure to.

It turns out that the analysts have taken a look at the overall reliability of the clouds that are being provided and they are as, if not more, reliable than most company’s IT infrastructure. One reason for this is that providing a cloud is all that the providers do and so they hire and staff in order to ensure the reliability of their product.

What Don’t I Know About Clouds?

The wise CIO knows to ask “what don’t I know enough to ask about?” One key issue has to do with your company’s most precious asset – its corporate data. When you move this data to a cloud, you are asking another company to take care of it. Are you comfortable doing this?

Is your company really going to save money by moving to the cloud? Not every company will – it all depends on how your IT department is set up now and what it’s going to look like in the future. You have other options for saving money – virtualizing the servers that you have today is one way to accomplish this.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing is all the rage these days in the IT sector. CIOs are getting more and more pressure to introduce cloud computing into their IT departments. Before they take this step, they need to get some questions answered.

The promise of cloud computing is that it will save the IT department money. Do you know where these savings will come from? How does the reliability of the cloud compare to your IT department’s current level of reliability? Finally, what other options besides cloud computing do you have for boosting your IT department’s performance?

Cloud computing appears to be here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that every CIO should race out and jump into the cloud today. Take your time and get the answers to the important questions and your next step will become clear to you.

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

Question For You: Do you think that the company’s finance department should be involved in determining if the savings of moving into the cloud would be worth the effort?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Video: Why Quiet IT Employees Should Make A CIO Nervous

January 16th, 2012

 

When your IT employees aren’t complaining, that means that you’re doing a good job as CIO, right? Actually, it turns out that the answer is no.

Dr. Anderson identifies why having quiet employees may be a bad thing for CIOs. He identifies who in your IT department is going to speak up first and who isn’t . Finally, Dr. Anderson shares his tips for how a CIO can get his or her employees to start talking to you!

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CIOs Want To Know Why IT Process Improvement Programs Fail

January 11th, 2012
Image Credit
They start out fine, but the ending is never pretty…

They start out fine, but the ending is never pretty…

It seems as though at least once a year CIOs get a bee in their bonnet and decide that the company’s IT department needs to knuckle down and improve its processes. This means that it’s time to implement one of those far-reaching process improvement programs. Oh, oh. No matter if it’s Six Sigma or some other flavor-of-the-week program, they all seem to end up the same way – having no lasting impact. Let’s take a look and see why this happens…

Process Improvement Programs Don’t Work

This type of discussion always seems to get off to a good start if I can share some interesting statistics with you. How about this one: 60% of all corporate Six Sigma programs fail to deliver the expected results. Ouch!

Clearly something has gone horribly wrong here. Those of us who work in IT know exactly what is going on. We’ve seen those big process improvement programs get announced with all sorts of excitement and then they always just seem to end up fading away.

When you’re CIO, this can’t happen. Your career is based on what kind of results you can deliver, and a successful process improvement program can be a big part of this. Let’s take a closer look and maybe we can find out where things are going off track.

Phase 1: The Good

Man, these big IT programs always seem to start on such a positive note. Everybody’s happy to be selected to be on the team and they are all committed to achieving the goal. Those teams are no small thing either – they can easily have 10-18 people on them because of course you want to have a representative from every possible impacted area.

Since the CIO has launched the program; the program has the attention and the support from the senior IT folks. This means that the low-level managers are clearly communicating to their folks who are involved in the project that working on the project is a top priority.

What’s even better than the launch, is what happens when the team reaches a goal – the CIO throws a party! Everyone celebrates the success and the people on the team get some sort of recognition and a reward. Everyone is happy.

Phase 2: The Bad

Time marches on. After the initial success, the process improvement program continues on. The problem is that it’s been going on for so long that now folks start to get distracted. Other tasks start to creep in around the edges and steal their time away.

The outside experts who were brought in to help the time implement the Six Sigma or whatever program now move on to other things. The team keeps moving on, but their way forward is no longer clear.

Managers are no longer so open to having their team members spend so much time on this other project. Instead, they start pushing to have their staff complete their “day job” before they spend time on the “special project”.

Phase 3: The Ugly

This is where it all falls apart. Basically what happens is that the folks who are working on the process improvement teams just stop doing the work. They no longer care about the program because it really has no bearing on their annual performance appraisal. Therefore they make the conscious decision to focus on what matters, their real job, and start to ignore the process improvement project.

What’s interesting is that this project failure is often hidden from the CIO. What happens is that the folks who are doing the reporting start to focus on the one or two teams who are actually able to keep moving forward, even if it’s just a bit, and they don’t report on the teams that aren’t making any progress.

Because they also start to report on what teams say that they are going to do in the future, this obscures what is really going on right now – nothing. This always eventually comes to the surface, but by then the damage is done and the CIO’s process improvement program has failed.

What All Of This Means For You

The very definition of information technology is that it’s a department built on processes. When CIOs decide that those processes need to be improved, they like to kick off a big process improvement program.

However, all too often in the IT sector these programs end up producing no long-term positive results. The reasons are many: over time there is less and less expert assistance, existing job responsibilities start to take over, and lack of senior IT management involvement all work to shift focus away from the project.

The importance of information technology means that IT processes really do need to be improved. CIOs can make sure that the time and effort that is poured into these process improvement programs yield results. Making expert resources available for longer times, making process improvement results a part of everyone’s performance appraisal, limiting team size, and ensuring IT executive involvement will all work to make your next IT process improvement program a success.

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

Question For You: How long do you think an IT process improvement program should go on?

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

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Cloud computing has almost become a part of the definition of information technology. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how a CIO can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

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Posted in IT project | 8 Comments »

Cloud Computing 101: Just Exactly What Is A Cloud?

January 4th, 2012
Image Credit CIOs need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

CIOs need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

So there I was the other day talking with one of my CIO customers and I was going on and on about how they could introduce cloud computing into their IT department. I had been working with this client for several years and we know each other very well so he felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence.

He said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

Say Hello To Cloud Services

So why are CIOs (and everyone else) struggling to get their hands around just exactly what cloud computing is? I believe that the cause of the confusion is simply that there are a bunch of different things that have been lumped together and are now being called “cloud computing”.

Let’s start with the most basic form: subscription services. In the old days, when an IT department purchased some software disks would arrive in the mail, get installed on servers, and you’d be up and running. That’s not the way that it works when you are using the cloud.

When you are using cloud computing, instead of having to physically touch hardware and software in order use an application, now all you have to do is to subscribe to it and you can access it over the Internet. No disks, no servers. Great examples of these types of subscription services include Google’s Gmail email service and Salesforce.com’s CRM application.

This is where things can start to get confusing. There’s more to cloud computing than just subscribing to someone else’s application. The company applications that are currently running on servers located in your data center can be moved “into the cloud”. What this means is that you can use servers and storage systems that are remotely located in a cloud provider’s data center to run your company’s applications. You would access your applications and data via your Internet connection.

How Much Is All Of This Going To Cost Me?

The fact that cloud computing is even an option is pretty cool. However, just being a shiny new technology is not enough – there has to be a solid business reason for moving your IT operations into the cloud.

Let’s take a look at costs. First, if you choose to not take advantage of cloud computing then you are still going to have IT costs — these costs come along with the very definition of information technology. In order to stand up new IT applications (and expand what you already have in order to meet growing user demand) you are going to have to buy and install more servers. As long as you are getting more servers, you’ll also have to get more storage. All of these new boxes will need to be maintained and so you’ll need to hire more staff to administer them.

In order to avoid these upfront IT costs, CIOs can make use of the cloud. If you are going to make use of cloud computing’s application subscription services, you need to be ready to pay per user, per month. Salesforce.com charges between $5-$25 per user per month. Google’s office suite of applications costs $50/user per year.

If you choose to run your existing IT applications in the cloud, then you’ll end up paying for how much computing horsepower and storage you use. One cloud computing firm charges six cents per processor per hour of usage.

Oh, and one more item. The way that you’ll connect to your applications in the cloud will be via your Internet connection. Given the importance of information technology, this connection that used to be important will have just become vital. This means that you’ll need to get a larger bandwidth connection and you’ll probably need to invest in a redundant connection in case your primary connection goes down.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing seems to have shown up almost overnight. CIOs might have initially thought that it was another one of the seemingly countless IT fads that have come along in the past few years and shrugged it off. However, for some compelling financial reasons, it’s starting to look like it’s taken hold in the IT sector and is here to stay.

Some of the reasons that cloud computing has caused so much confusion among CIOs is because it is so many different things. In its simplest form, cloud computing is a subscription service where software is delivered over the web. One step beyond this is using remotely located computing power (servers and storage) to execute company IT applications which are then accessed via the web.

All of this functionality comes at a cost, of course. CIOs can avoid the upfront costs of having to purchase IT hardware in order to launch a new application by using the same resources located in a cloud. However, they need to do some investigations in order to make sure that they’ll be comfortable with having their data and applications being stored someplace else.

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

Question For You: Do you think that CIOs should insist that their applications and data be stored in their own country?

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

It seems as though at least once a year CIOs get a bee in their bonnet and decide that the company’s IT department needs to knuckle down and improve its processes. This means that it’s time to implement one of those far-reaching process improvement programs. Oh, oh. No matter if it’s Six Sigma or some other flavor-of-the-week program, they all seem to end up the same way – having no lasting impact. Let’s take a look and see why this happens…

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in cloud computing | 2 Comments »

Merry Christmas – Take The Week Off!

December 28th, 2011
Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas season week is a great week for you – I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume after the holidays…

Everyone seems to celebrate something different this week, but I’m hoping that no matter how you choose to spend your time, you will enjoy yourself. The world can wait, let’s spend time with friends and family and we’ll get back to the madness when the new year begins…

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk again next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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