Posts Tagged ‘business information’

Iran’s Twitter Revolution Holds Lessons For CIOs

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
CIOs Need To Plan On How To Deal With Twitter <br> (c) 2009

CIOs Need To Plan On How To Deal With Twitter (c) 2009

Politics is a fascinating subject and I’m sure that we all have our own opinions about the events that are currently unfolding over in Iran regarding their recent elections. However, this posting isn’t about the elections or who won. Rather it’s about the amazing flow of information that happened even in a heavily restricted / controlled environment. We live in the 21st Century and this unfolding story holds many lessons for modern CIOs…

What Does An Election In Iran Have To Do With Twitter?

Noam Cohen over at the New York Times has taken a look at how information has flowed since the unrest began. In all honesty, “twitter revolution” is probably an overstatement. Web sites, text messages, and simple person-to-person conversation probably did a better job of spreading news than Twitter did. However, Twitter did do an amazing job of getting information OUT of the country.

Remember that Twitter is only three years old. It’s impact is much greater than its age would lead a CIO to believe. Although you might not be dealing with a disputed election, Twitter could play a big role in your company’s future.

What Twitter Means To Your Firm

There will be times in the future that your senior management (CEO, Chairman, etc.) will want to control what information is released about your firm and have some control over what people are saying about your company. Twitter opens up a whole new channel for people to talk about your firm. Here are six lessons that the Iranian election have taught all of us about this powerful new communication tool:

  • Twitter Really Can’t Be Stopped: Twitter messages (“tweets”) are really a form of one-to-many communications. There is no centralized site that can be shut down or forced to remove information by court order. There is no stopping this beast.
  • There Is Power In Numbers: A single tweet probably doesn’t mean much. A couple of tweets won’t attract attention. However, a series of tweets about the same subject will start to create an ecosystem about an event or a viewpoint. This can attract attention and start to generate more conversations.
  • Buyer Beware: Remember, on the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog (a saying from the early years of the Internet). Since the people participating in Twitter have no real identity, you really can’t trust what they are saying until its been verified.
  • Home Of Bad Information: There are probably people trying to communicate truths using Twitter, but there are probably also people who are trying to spread lies using Twitter. Whether it’s to drive your stock price down (or up) or prevent / encourage a takeover, all sorts of people will use Twitter to spread completely made-up stories.
  • Twitter People Use Twitter: CIOs always have to keep in mind that the people using Twitter are generally tech savvy folks who are online a lot. This does not necessarily represent the public at large.
  • Twitter Is Connected To The Media: The popular media “gets” Twitter and they are listening in order to get leads on new stories and dig up sources. This means that almost any storyteller now has a potential direct line to a major media outlet.

Final Thoughts

Twitter is yet one more way for people to communicate. It takes a little getting used to for most of us as we struggle to understand why anyone would take the time to send 140 character messages to communicate when we have so many other tools that we can use. However Twitter (and all of its variants) are here to stay.

CIOs need to adapt to this new world. When future events affect your company (disasters, mergers, takeovers, product issues, etc.) Twitter will probably play a role in how information gets out to the world at large. Developing a communication strategy that includes Twitter is a critical CIO responsibility. Addressing this issue this will mean that CIOs will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

Are you using Twitter now? Is anyone discussing your firm on Twitter today? Have any of your competitors had discussions about them happen on Twitter? Does your communication strategy currently have a plan to include Twitter as a part of how you communicate information to the outside world? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the great things about working in the IT field is that whenever things start to get boring, we have the ability to create new buzzwords and make things interesting all over again. The arrival of “Cloud Computing” on the scene a couple of years ago showed that this cycle has not gone away. Maybe it would be worthwhile to take a step back and make sure that we’re all on the same page here – what is cloud computing and why should anyone care?

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Posted in communication | 4 Comments »

First-Mover Advantage: Complex-Event Processing Is What CIOs Need

Monday, June 22nd, 2009
CIOs Need To Get To Know Complex-Event Processing

CIOs Need To Get To Know Complex-Event Processing

The job of  a CIO and the IT department is to equip the rest of the company to move faster and do more. One of the ways that a CIO can do this is by staying on top of new and emerging technologies (ex. unified communications).

If such technologies can be implemented in a useful way BEFORE the company’s competitors can do the same, then the CIO will have done his/her job. Complex-Event Processing looks like it may be another one of those technologies.

What Is “Complex-Event Processing”?

In business, knowledge is power and power is profit. Every business has multiple streams of information flowing into it at all times. Information on sales, inventory, returns, web site clicks, weather conditions, bank balances, etc.

For years firms have been processing these information streams individually and in near-real-time. These are the core business applications that produce the reports that get sent to senior management each night for them to review the next day. This is better than nothing, but it’s not quite enough.

Neal Leavitt writing in the IEEE’s Computer magazine points out that today’s traditional databases are not up to the task of analyzing continuous streams of business data in real-time searching for complex events (events that require more than one data stream to detect).

What is now arriving on the IT scene are general-purpose platforms that provide an IT department with enough processing horsepower to analyze real-time business information simultaneously across multiple business applications.

What’s It Good For?

Complex-event processing gives a firm the ability to spot interconnected business trends and patterns in real-time and then combine this information into complex events that can trigger alerts that can be sent to people in the company.

Complex events can include such things as determining when to trade stocks, detecting fraud as it is happening, spotting inventory issues before they become a problem, network status monitoring, etc.

Are There Any Risks?

Of course – this is cutting edge technology, there are always risks with this stuff. The current limitations to this type of technology include:

  • Lack Of Standards: specifically for the event-pattern detection and rule-based languages for different vendor’s products.
  • Education: this is new technology and businesses don’t fully understand what the products can do nor all of the situations in which they can be applied.
  • Missing Benchmarks: No standardized benchmarks currently exist so it’s difficult to compare products.

Final Thoughts

Every great business break-through starts with a dream. What could your firm do if you could analyze all of your business data streams in real-time? If the benefit is compelling enough, then perhaps it’s time to start looking into how you could apply complex-event processing to as a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Additional Resources

If you’re interested, here are links to several vendors who have products in the complex-event processing. I have no relationship with any of them so there is no order to the list:

Questions For You

Does your firm have multiple streams of real time data flowing into it? What do you do with these streams today?  What kind of delay is there from when the data arrives to when staff can take action on it? What could you do with the ability to analyze this data in real-time? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you could be running the IT department for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to IT staff problems…

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Posted in technologies | 3 Comments »

Hey IT – Forget ITIL, Say Hello To BDIM!

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

There's A New IT Management Process In Town - BDIM

There's A New IT Management Process In Town - BDIM

The world of IT is changing once again, are you ready? We have evolved a great deal in the last thirty years and it looks like we’re getting ready to make another great leap forward. This time around we have a name for what’s going to happen and it’s called business-driven IT management (BDIM)!

Antão Moura and Claudio Bartolini have been looking at how IT is managed and they’ve discovered that we’re getting ready for another change. Back at the end of the 1980′s IT management was all about tracking boxes and routers. This was the era of IT infrastructure management.

Stability and control were the key drivers behind this effort. IT acted as a technology provider – IT folks were technical experts and their goal was to minimize down time.

In the past few years this style of IT management has changed. Now IT looks less at the infrastructure and more at the end user. IT now practices what is called IT Service Management (ITSM). The thinking is that IT services use groups of IT infrastructure components to help corporate users (and customers) to do business with the firm.

Viewed this way, IT has become a service provider. The downfall of this is that IT is still viewed as being separate from the rest of the business. The rest of the business believes that IT is mainly concerned with expense control. This has caused one of the firm’s greatest concerns to become the issue of business-IT alignment.

We’ve come up with a whole bunch of technical ways to keep track of how the IT infrastructure is performing in order to ensure that our services are meeting their performance levels. These tools include quality of service (QoS), service level agreements (SLAs), and when you combine both of these you get service level objectives (SLOs).

The arrival of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of best practice standards has provided a way to deliver IT governance which seeks to ensure that IT risks are mitigated, IT is aligned with the rest of the firm, and that the expected results are achieved.

The problem with all of this is that the best practices, such as ITIL, are very useful, but they just don’t go far enough toward providing concrete solutions.

This has led to the creation of the business-driven IT management (BDIM) approach to IT management. The goal of BDIM is to move IT one step further and start to use a full business perspective to mange IT. This means that we would need to stop using technical metrics measured at the IT level.

This can get a bit difficult to grasp, so here are a few IT management questions posed in BDIM format:

  • Of all the IT incidents that are occurring RIGHT NOW, which is impacting the business the most and thus should be worked on now?
  • Which services should we invest in to improve business results?
  • How many standby servers should we have for our e-commerce site?

Since I know some you may still be struggling, here is a formal definition of BDIM:

“BDIM is the application of a set of models, practices, techniques, and tools to map and to quantitatively evaluate interdependencies between business performance and IT solutions – and using the quantified evaluation – to improve the IT  solutions’ quality of service and related business results”

BDIM is still in the development stages. Models have to be created, how it related to the ITIL processes will have to be worked out, and creating BDIM decision support related tools will have to be done. However, yet another IT management change is almost upon us – and it’s name is BDIM.

Does your IT shop still use the IT infrastructure management approach or have you moved on to the IT Service Management approach? Is your IT shop seen as separate from the rest of the business or do you think that you’ve achieved business alignment? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in alignment | 5 Comments »

When Giving IT Information, More Is Better

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Providing Data About Data Can Make Data Even More Valuable To A Company

Providing Data About Data Can Make Data Even More Valuable To A Company

So just what is the job of an IT department once you get past the keeping the network up and applications running stuff? I think that we can all agree that it must have something to do with the company’s data, but exactly what does that mean?

Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries. They realize that IT is the source for countless reports – our job is to turn data into information that the company can take action on. However, they’ve discovered that it can be just as important that we share with the rest of the company HOW we’ve come to know something as well as WHAT we know.

Now this is the tricky part: IT needs to find ways to tell our audience the answers to their questions AND we need to tell them how we got the data and what, if any, strengths and weakness there are with that data.

If you want to get all fancy about this the word to use would be that we need to provide “metadata” with our reports. A good example of this would come from the Royal Bank of Canada.

A few years ago the bank implemented a system that when a customer was overdrawn on a check, the system would do some credit / overdraft history checking in order to determine if a courtesy overdraft should be granted.

The information on the system and the data that it used was distributed in the bank and an ATM product manger happened to read it. He realized that a similar system could be created to provide overdrafts for ATM customers. The bank spent about $100,000 to implement this new service and since then has made millions off of it.

Allowing staff to not only see the output of an IT department, but also the information on the data that was used to create that output allows more people to find ways to reapply the data in ways that you may have never thought of.

When your IT department produces reports, do they include any information on the data that they used to create the report? Has anyone ever been able to use this “metadata” to identify a new use for the data? Was that new use valuable to the company? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in information | 2 Comments »

Do You Have An IT Dictionary?

Monday, March 30th, 2009
IT Departments Need To Create A Dictionary So Everyone Can Speak The Same Language

IT Departments Need To Create A Dictionary So Everyone Can Speak The Same Language

In IT we often get accused of willy-nilly making up new acronyms on the fly. In all honesty, yes we do do this sometimes. However, there is a more subtle word problem that has been creeping around the edges of IT for a long time that nobody’s been brave enough to bring up: we have no idea what we are saying.

Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries. Specifically, they’ve discovered that we all seem to THINK that we are talking about the same thing when in many cases we really aren’t.

In most companies the IT department serves multiple business units or departments. In order to meet the needs of those internal customers, the IT department is always creating new and different ways to present the information that has been collected. However, since nobody talks to anyone else in the company, we’ve been creating a million different ways to present (and talk about) the same data.

What’s been missing from IT’s output is some sort of dictionary. We need to standardize how we talk about the company’s data and how we describe the results of the processing that we do on that data.

Over at Best Buy, Robert Willett who is their CIO said that when he first showed up they 400 to 500 different ways to measure things. What this meant is that measurements done for one customer could not be interpreted by another customer so they had to do the processing all over again.

Robert spent over 10 months and drove to a point where they had single definitions for everything. It was only after this type of IT dictionary had been created that Best Buy started to get some value for all of its efforts.

Does your IT shop have a single set of definitions for the information that you collect and the results that you produce? Have you ever had a situation where two individuals or departments were trying to compare two things but couldn’t because they didn’t use the same words? How have you tried to solve this problem? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in alignment | No Comments »