Posts Tagged ‘business intelligence’

5 Ways For CIOs To Become (Much) More Important

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Image Credit It's Not Easy To Get To The Top Of IT!

It's Not Easy To Get To The Top Of IT!

Once you become the CIO you’d think that you’ve have it made. Now that you are living at the top of the IT pyramid, life should be grand – the long, hard struggle to reach this position is now over. Actually, the job is just beginning. What you need to do now is to find ways to make sure that the CIO becomes a (more) important part of your company’s success. Here are some suggestions for how you can make this happen.

It’s All About The Cloud

Just as much as the next guy, I hate to jump on the “what’s trendy in IT” bandwagon; however, it’s really starting to look as though this cloud computing thing is here to stay. Looks like you’re going to have to come up with ways to work it into your IT department’s strategy.

The key thing for you to do is to understand why it’s so important. Cloud computing offers the CIO the ability to kill two birds with one stone: you have the ability to reduce your IT costs while at the same time allowing the company to expand its IT footprint. Opportunities like this don’t come along often enough and so you had better jump on it while it’s available to you.

Flipping the 80/20 Rule

When you become the CIO, one of the first things that you’re going to discover is just how little money you have to spend. Oh, your IT budget might be huge and it may be growing larger every year, but the size of the funds that are actually available to you to spend on new projects and new initiatives is probably quite small by comparison.

So where’s all the money going? In a nutshell, most of your IT budget is going to be spent just keeping the lights on – maintenance on all of those embedded applications that run the company today. This has got to change.

As CIO you are going to have to get your sharp budget knife out and start making cuts. Any IT support functions that don’t contribute to moving the company forward need to be moved from the inside to the outside. Free up more IT budget for transformation projects and everyone will view you as the best CIO ever.

Growing The Business / Growing The Customer

Although you don’t often hear about the CIO being talked about in the same sentence that revenue growth is mentioned, this is what you need to make happen. The reason the business exists is to generate more money, the IT department has to play a role in this or it becomes unnecessary.

Make sure that you don’t do what some CIOs have done and go out and start selling your own products. The role of IT is to support what the company does. IT’s contribution to the company’s top line revenue should be a result of how it helps other departments become more efficient.

Following Business Processes From End-To-End

The role of CIO is unique in the company: you actually have very few restrictions on what you are permitted to do. This is a fantastic gift that you need to take advantage of.

With the ability to follow a process from where it starts in the company to where it ends, a CIO can find things that nobody else can: waste, miscommunications, opportunities for automation, etc.

Introducing Business Intelligence

Most businesses do a good job of collecting lots of data on how the business is running. Very few businesses do a good job of using the data that they’ve collected.

The CIO has an opportunity to implement business intelligence solutions that can provide the rest of the company with new insights. This type of value add is exactly what the rest of the company needs their CIO to do for them.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, the real work is just starting. You are going to have to be constantly looking for ways to add value to the rest of the company.

There are many ways for you to do this. Some rely on technology such as how best to use cloud computing or implementing business intelligence solutions. However, more of them have to do with the business side of IT: maximizing your IT budget and improving the company’s end-to-end business processes.

CIOs that focus on improving the company’s revenues will be spending their time wisely. By doing so, they’ll create an opportunity to hang around and do even greater things in the future…

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

Question For You: How do you think that a CIO can discover what the company’s end-to-end business processes are?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The time has never been better to make an impact in the success of your company as the CIO. However, there are a lot of different things that can conspire to distract you from tacking the tasks that really need your attention. Here’s a list of 5 items that should be on every CIO’s to-do list…

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Posted in leadership training | 1 Comment »

Is Life Easier If You Are A CIO Who Works For The U.S. Government?

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Image Credit Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

You want to become a CIO. You probably want to become a CIO in the private sector – you know, those companies that have owners or stockholders that they always have to work to keep happy. Why haven’t you spent any time thinking about becoming a CIO who works for the biggest employer out there: the U.S. Federal government?

Big Changes Coming

The U.S. Federal government (the one that runs the country, not the states) employs over 300 CIOs that manage all of the different parts of the operation. You would think that federal CIOs would have it easier: I mean they don’t really have to worry about keeping shareholders happy or anything like that, do they?

You need to keep in mind that although a federal CIO doesn’t have to worry about the same things as a private sector CIO, they have a whole bunch of different issues that occupy their time. One big issue is that every four years they may have a completely new boss what with the presidential elections and all that.

As the U.S. experiences the effects of the global recession just like everyone else, federal CIOs are feeling the pressure to show that their IT departments can deliver a solid return on investment (ROI) .

It’s becoming pretty clear that there is a lot of IT funding for the things that you would expect a federal CIO to be working on: things like wireless projects and public safety projects. However, this doesn’t leave a lot left over for all the other things that an IT department is supposed to be working on,

What Are A Federal CIO’s Biggest Priorities?

One of the key ways to tell if being a federal CIO is any different from being a private sector CIO is by taking a look at what’s on their list of projects. Federal CIOs always have to be nimble enough to adjust to a new administration’s priorities which may differ from the last administration’s. This can cause a big change in what the IT department spends their time working on.

Right now the federal CIOs are reporting that the key programs that their departments are working on include:

How Are They Going To Be Successful?

So if you were a federal CIO right now, how would you go about pulling off all of these initiatives while dealing with the tightest budgets in years? As you might be able to guess, there is no one magic answer to this question.

In a survey done by InformationWeek magazine, 21% of federal CIOs said that they were using Lean Six Sigma. 29% reported that they were using ITIL. Even within the military there was no one way to go: the U.S. Army is using Lean Six Sigma while the Navy is planning on using ITIL.

What All Of This Means For You

In your future, there is actually a good chance that you might at some time become a federal CIO – there sure are a lot of them out there. You might have thought that this was an easy route to take – no pressure from owners / shareholders. Think again.

Federal CIOs have to deal with a great deal of upheaval in their upper management structure on a cyclic basis. On top of that even during difficult economic times they need to find ways to push forward on important IT programs that will transform their organizations.

If you do become a federal CIO, I sure hope that you like change. You’ll have your own set of issues to worry about, but at least things won’t be boring!

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

Question For You: Do you think that it would be easier or harder to be a Federal CIO than being a private sector CIO?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I hope that you wore your good clothes to work today, because there’s a pretty fair chance that you might end up on video sometime during the day. The arrival of low-cost video cameras and high quality video processing software has effectively made it ridiculously easy to create multimedia content. This has got to affect what a CIO does, but how?

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Posted in CIO | No Comments »

What CIOs Need To Know About Performance Management

Monday, April 13th, 2009
Companies Don't Need Business Intelligence Without Performance Management

Companies Don't Need Business Intelligence Without Performance Management

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past couple of years, you’ve probably had a chance to read about the Business Intelligence (BI) fad that seem to have taken over the IT market.

The basic idea is pretty simple: use an application to crunch all of that complicated data that you’ve been gathering and present a simple dashboard to the CEO or whomever is making decisions. If the light on the dashboard is green, then the business is doing well. If its red, then he / she needs to make some changes. As with all such things in life, cool tools often turn out to have a downside.

It turns out that BI tools and the reports that they generate are IT centric. This means that the rest of the company agrees that they look cool, but they don’t find them as useful as we would like them to. It turns out that what they’d really like to have is performance management (PM) tools.

Performance management is defined by business needs and it provides the business’ decision makers with the data that they require in order to make the right moves in order to execute the business’ strategy.

PM shows up in a bunch of different places inside of the company. You’ll see it in the budgeting & financial processes (there it’s called “corporate” or “financial” PM). You can also find it on the operational side of the house. This is where BI is used to get more insights into supply chains, sales, customer service, etc.

I guess the easiest way to communicate the difference is to point out that BI is often about dashboards and scorecards. BI has been based on things that can be collected and measured. Where PM differs, is that it’s based on where the company WANTS to go.

This means that PM tools have to be created by consolidating  disparate data that is often stored in planning / budgeting spreadsheets. Then these planning activities and strategies then need to be transformed by both the business and IT into scorecards and key performance indicators (KPI).

The thing that sets PM apart from BI is that the information that IT collects to support a PM process is tied to a model or a framework for measuring performance. In finance, this model is the company’s budget. However, once you move outside of finance then IT and the business need to work together to create a budget that they can both live with.

Does your company currently use BI tools? Are they useful or are they just a set of pretty dashboards that sit around? Do you make use of performance management? Does your IT department work with the business to create performance management processes? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in business alignment | 1 Comment »

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.

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Posted in it strategy | 12 Comments »