Posts Tagged ‘best practices’

Just How Good Is Your Company At That IT Stuff?

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
Image Credit What's Your Company's IT Grade?

What's Your Company's IT Grade?

You would think that since all of these computers, networks, and software things have been around for so long that most companies would be just about even in how they make use of them, right? A recent study reveals that this is not the case: some of us are using IT to move the company forward and some of us are slipping behind because of IT. Want to know more?

It’s All About The Data

One of the primary tasks that every company assigns to their IT department is the collection and processing of data. In a survey that was conducted by McKinsey & Co. and the MIT Center for Digital Business it was revealed that CIOs are generally doing a good job on the first part of this task and not so good on the second part.

What the study revealed was that of the 330 U.S. companies that they talked to, the ones who were able to collect the data, process it, and then make use of the results showed the highest profitability and productivity. Although you would think that every company would be doing this these days, the survey showed that many companies don’t view themselves as being driven by data.

Process, Process, Process

I can see you thinking to yourself, “well that data stuff can be tricky, the CIOs should at least have the basics down pat”. Once again, you’d be wrong.

The survey showed that the areas inside the company where there have been countless case studies showing the benefits of doing a good job of applying IT such as HR, procurement, etc. would surely be taken care of. Somewhat surprisingly this is not the case. The majority of the companies that participated in the survey reported that they had done an inconsistent job of applying IT technology in these areas.

One of the reasons that this is the case may relate back to the simple fact that most companies reported that they did not have a good IT governance methodologies in place. This means that they don’t do a good job of prioritizing what IT projects get funded and implemented. I think that we can all agree on this conclusion!

Finally, one area that should be a no-brainer for IT is the implementation of best-practices. However, once again companies reported that these have not been widely adapted by most firms.

If there is any good news to be had in these findings it’s that as CIO it should be very easy for you to be viewed as being successful. There is so much basic work that still needs to be done at most companies that just by focusing on these types of projects you can cause the company to become more successful.

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO it is your job to harness the power of IT in order to move the company forward. The MIT study shows that not all of us are being successful in doing this.

Where there seem to be gaps in how CIOs are using IT solutions to help the company do more are in the areas of making use of data and processes. Just collecting the data that a company generates is a good first step; however, CIOs need to create and apply the right tools that will allow the company to process the data and use the results. Implementing best practice processes will allow the company to streamline its operations and move ahead of the competition.

The great thing about IT is that the tools of IT, the computers, networks, and software are all available to everyone. What you need to do in order to succeed as a CIO is find ways to use these tools to make your company good at IT.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way for a CIO to convince your company to implement best practices?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Isn’t a global recession just great? For CIOs it has been: it pretty much got rid of one of their biggest headaches – having their star talent leave. Now that things are improving, a new challenge is starting to show up for CIOs: how to turn their Generation X workers into the IT leaders that the company is going to need for tomorrow…

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Posted in IT | No Comments »

CIO’s Know To Say “No” To Best Practices

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010
Image Credit CIOs Know That Following Others Won't Allow You To Get Ahead

CIOs Know That Following Others Won't Allow You To Get Ahead

Perhaps just for a moment we can consider the day-to-day activities of any IT department as being a sort of race. Collectively we are all running and trying to move out in front of the IT departments at the firms that our company is competing with. In this type of analogy, the CIO is running out in front of everyone else and is showing the department which way to go. But how does the CIO know where to go?

Best Practices Are Only So Good

The IT community is currently in love with the idea of “best practices”. This idea revolves around taking a look at the firms who compete in your market and identifying the one or two firms that seem to be doing the best job.

Once you’ve done this, then you take the time to learn how they go about accomplishing the tasks that they are doing so well. When this is known, you can then copy what they are doing and with a little luck you’ll be able to achieve the same results that they are getting.

Now this sound all fine and dandy, and in fact the wildly popular ITIL standards that were created by the British government to define IT best practices have been a run-away hit. However, there’s a problem with this approach.

Dr. C.K. Prahalad took a close look at the use of best practices and reached an interesting conclusion. Using best practices, an IT department can catch up with the IT departments that they are competing with. However, using this approach they’ll never be able to surpass them.

CIOs Need To Search For Breakthroughs

So what’s a CIO to do? Sure you can catch up to other IT departments, but that’s never going to be enough – you’ve got to pass them up. Great. Just how can a CIO go about doing this?

Dr. C. K. Prahalad believed that what a CIO needs to do is to go searching for breakthrough opportunities. These are the opportunities that will set the stage for your IT department to pull out ahead of other IT departments and bring your company along with it. In order to identify these breakthrough opportunities a CIO has to get it all started by asking yourself six important questions:

  1. Is the problem widely recognized?

  2. Does it affect other industries?

  3. Are radical innovations needed to tackle the problem?

  4. Can tackling it change the industry’s economics?

  5. Will addressing this issue give your firm a fresh source of competitive advantage?

  6. Would tackling this problem create a big opportunity for your firm?

What All Of This Means For You

If it turns out that being a CIO means that you are leading a race with your IT department, then you’re going to have to at least catch up with other IT departments that are running the same race. However, that won’t be enough to win the race: you’re going to have to find a way to pass them.

Passing other IT departments requires you as a CIO to uncover breakthrough opportunities. In order to do this, you are going to have to ask yourself the six questions that we’ve identified.

Best practices do have their place in a modern IT department. I mean, we should take the time to learn what works best from other IT departments. However, in order to be truly successful, the burden of finding that next breakthrough opportunity rests firmly on your shoulders CIO…

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

Question For You: What do you think the best way of discovering best practices in your industry are?

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

We’ve all been there, done that: pushed hard to accomplish some goal. This type of “acceleration” is something that every IT department ends up doing at some point in time or another. As CIO you’ve got to love the results of a “push” like this: everyone works harder and a lot gets accomplished in a short time. However, there’s a real danger that if you keep accelerating your IT department everyone’s going to burn out and you’re going to end up crashing…

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Posted in business processes | 6 Comments »

CIOs In Crisis: Do We Have A Problem Here?

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
Image Credit
What Is It Going To Save The Role Of The CIO?

What Is It Going To Save The Role Of The CIO?

What’s Happening To All Of The CIOs?

You and I both know that a well run IT department is what can make one company more successful than its competitors. That must mean that the IT department is important, and therefore the CIO must also be important, right? If that’s true, then why are some of the really big companies like News Corp, Harrah’s, ConocoPhillips, etc. getting rid of their CIO and then choosing to not replace him / her? What are they thinking?

What’s The Problem Here?

If firms feel comfortable getting rid of their head of IT (the CIO) and not replacing that person, then clearly there must be a crisis here. It sure looks like today’s CIOs have not done a good job of advertising just how valuable they are to the rest of the company’s executive leadership team.

This is pretty easy to understand. However, there’s a problem with this explanation. You would think that all of the upper management positions would be faced with this same challenge of conveying their value to the company. However, it seems like the CIO is the only position that companies feel comfortable leaving either open or in the hands of a less senior member of staff. You can’t say the same for operations, finance, human resources, etc.

What Could We Do To Solve This Problem?

Arthur Langer has been researching this issue and he believes that the problem that IT has is that we’re lacking support. If we worked in accounting, then we’d all be CPAs and everyone would agree on the way that things needed to be done.

IT has no equivalent accreditation system. Langer points out that the field of IT is lacking any sort of professional body that could provide its stamp of approval for how an IT department is run or what goals it chooses to focus on. Although such an organization may be a long way off, in the near term IT at least needs to do a better job of getting the message across to the CIO about IT actually does.

Langer makes a good point when he states that he believes that there is no question that CEOs value what an IT department does. It’s just that what we do is so far removed from what he understands, that CEOs really have no clear idea how to manage their IT resources.

Ultimately, this is what is currently missing: an IT best practices organization that can provide CEOs with this kind of management guidance. Sure we’ve got the ITIL standards, but those are far too detailed. What’s missing is that top-level “here’s how you run an IT department” type of guidance.

What All Of This Means For You

Even though you may not yet be a CIO, you need to start thinking about how you are going to effectively deal with this issue. The last thing that you want to have happen is for you to finally become the CIO only to lose your job because the job itself was seen as being not all that important.

As CIO what you are going to have to do is 1) do a good job of running your IT department, and 2) do a good job of educating your CEO on how to manage his / her IT assets. This means that you’re going to have to do a lot of different tasks: create IT best practices for your company, collect industry research and show it to your CEO, create management guides to instruct your CEO on what you need him / her to do for IT. Congratulations – when you become CIO, you also become a teacher!

Although this may seem like it would take up a lot of your precious CIO time that could be spent forging strategy and harnessing new technology, think again. Teaching your CEO how to manage the CIO and showing how to use IT to make the company more successful just might be the best thing that you’ve ever done – it could even save your job!

Do you think that at your company the CIO is necessary or do you think that someone lower down could do all the same things?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

At the end of the day, an IT department is simply a collection of projects. Some of these projects are short lived (“we’ve got an outage!”) and some are much longer (“let’s install a new ERP solution”). However, it turns out that today’s CIOs have been taking the wrong approach when it comes to scheduling these IT projects and it shows…

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Posted in career | 1 Comment »