Posts Tagged ‘business plans’

Three Big IT Transformation Mistakes That HP Made

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
HP's IT Department Made Some BIG Mistakes During Their Transformation

HP's IT Department Made Some BIG Mistakes During Their Transformation

If you made three costly IT mistakes would you admit it? I think that most of us would probably say “no” – we’d run and hide our mistakes under a rock somewhere. However, thankfully over at HP they’ve decided to come clean about a few of the mistakes that they’ve made during their multi-year IT transformation project. We can all learn from their mistakes.

HP’s CIO Randy Mott decided to remake HP’s IT department when he came on board a few years ago. In order to kick the project off, they needed to make some assumptions about how things were operating and move forward.

Chris Murphy over at InformationWeek had a chance to sit down with Randy and ask some questions about where HP’s assumptions were just flat out wrong. What he’s learned holds a lot of information for all of us. Here are the big three:

  1. The Secret World Of IT: When HP decided to remake their world of IT, they had to start the process by finding out how big the IT operations were. They grossly undercounted. Going in they thought that HP was using 3,500 applications to run the business. It turns out that they were using more like 6,000. They knew for sure that they had 85 data centers being used by the business. Ultimately, they ended up discovering more than 400 locations where they had massed computing infrastructure.
    Lesson Learned: take the time to do a complete inventory BEFORE you ever start any sort of IT transformation.
  2. Plan For Growth: It sure would be nice if we could freeze time, make changes to our IT departments, and then start things back up again. HP seems to have thought that they could do this because they didn’t remember to plan for acquisitions to occur during the project. Well, you know how this story goes – HP kept buying up other firms and since there was no IT incorporation plan, it caused big headaches for the IT team that was trying to transform IT.
    Lesson Learned: Create a solid process for bringing in new IT departments to any ongoing projects.
  3. Beware Of Success: Once again, the business keeps moving while IT works on its projects. In this case, HP shot past their growth projections. What this ended up doing was pushing the IT transformation project off of its tracks – data centers that were to be consolidated were suddenly needed because they were supporting unplanned for growth.
    Lesson Learned: Make sure that you have a backup plan that tells you what you are going to do if sales projections change from what has been forecasted.

In the end, HP was successful with their IT transformation and they ended up reducing those 6,000 applications down to about 1,500, reducing those 400 data centers down to 6, etc. However, because of the three mistakes that they made, this difficult job was made just that much harder. Now you know – don’t repeat this mistakes!

Have you ever been surprised to discover that there is a whole “shadow IT” department operating in your business that nobody has ever counted? Has a merger or acquisition ever screwed up one of you IT project’s schedule? Has your IT department ever been surprised by unexpected growth? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking?

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Posted in process | 1 Comment »

Wicked, Wicked IT Strategy Problems

Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Some IT problems can't be solved - these are wicked problems.

Some IT problems can't be solved - these are wicked problems.

Some problems just can’t be solved. As an IT guy with an engineering background, I find this hard to believe – it goes against my grain. I mean, back in school I encountered lots of problems that at first blush appeared to be impossible to solve. However, once I had gotten a little deeper into whatever class I was taking at the time things started to become more clear. New tools that I had learned could be used to solve what had previously appeared to be unsolvable problems. In the world of IT, the IT department can even help keep a company out of an economic stall and so I though that there was no problem that an IT department couldn’t solve. It turns out that real life is not nearly so neat.

Dr. John Camillus has spent the past 15 years studying how companies create their own strategies. During this time he has uncovered what he likes to call “wicked” business problems – strategy issues that are difficult because our traditional processes for solving problems just can’t resolve them. IT departments face these types of problems internally as well as facing them as part of a company’s overall strategy planning process. Wicked problems can be especially trying for IT departments because they seem to resist being solved by our standard techniques of gathering more metrics, revisiting the core issues and creating a more detailed definition of them, or even the time honored technique of breaking the big problems that we can’t solve down into smaller problems that we hope that we can solve. Dr. Camillus says that not only do our traditional ways of dealing with problems not work on wicked problems, but they can also make things far worse.

Dr. Camillus recently wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed wicked business problems. In it he stated that organizations, like an IT department, will most likely encounter a wicked problem when they are facing either a period of constant change or have encountered challenges that are bigger then they have ever seen before. Within an IT department, it won’t just be the technological complexity that make a problem a wicked problem, but rather all of the social issues that come along with it that will turn it into a wicked problem.

How can you tell if your problem is a wicked problem? It would be nice if wicked problems came labeled as such. However, they don’t. Having the ability to identify a wicked IT problem early on can save any IT leader a significant amount of time and grief. You won’t be able to tell just by looking at the problem itself, but rather you have to take a look at what surrounds the problem. Specifically, if a problem is causing confusion, discord among your IT team, and there has been a distinct lack of progress in creating a solution for it so far, then there is a good chance that you are looking at a wicked problem.

Just to make sure that you really do have a wicked problem and not one of those more common really, really hard IT problems, there are some additional criteria that you need to check before you can call an IT problems a wicked problem:

  1. Too Many People Are Involved: A problem that has too many people who are impacted by it starts to look like a wicked problem very quickly. Each person who has a different vested interest and is working on a different set of priorities will contribute to making a difficult problem into an unsolvable wicked one.
  2. The Cause Of The Problem Is Not Clear: There is no single cause for the IT issue that you are dealing with. Generally there are multiple sources that have fed the problem including competition, issues with employees & staffing, company strengths that have become decrements, and a traditional domestic vs. international focus can also compound the problem.
  3. The Problem Is Shaped Like A Blob: This is an especially tricky characteristic to deal with – the problem seems to change shape everytime you try to deal with it. This makes it hard to “get a grip” on the problem and so you may not have any idea as to where to start.
  4. You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before: How can you solve a problem that doesn’t look like any other problem that you’ve ever seen before? When you face a problem that you’ve never seen before, the question of what tools or techniques to use to solve it becomes even more critical.
  5. There Are No Signs Showing You The Right Direction: Most problems come with some sort of indication of what the correct next thing to do in order to solve it is. However, wicked problems have no such indicators. You are truly on you own here.

So what’s an IT leader to do once he/she has spotted a wicked problem? One key thing that Dr Camillus has learned is that wicked IT problems can not be solved. Instead, you need to find ways to mange them. How to do that is what we’ll talk about next time…

Have you encountered any wicked IT problems? Did you know it was going to be a wicked problem right off the bat or did it take awhile to discover this? What did you do about it? Were you ever able to solve it or does this problem still exist? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in strategy | 8 Comments »

Stall Alert! How An IT Department Can Help

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Four IT Practices To Avoid A Company Stall

Four IT Practices To Avoid A Company Stall


We’ve talked about how companies can get blindsided by entering an economic stall that they never saw coming. Now let’s wrap this discussion up with a quick overview of some steps that an IT department can take in order to help prevent the company from coming to grief.

We’ll be talking about four different strategies that have been used by management teams in the past. The first two are designed to make a company’s strategic assumptions explicit to everyone. The next two are designed to test those assumptions in order to determine if they are still accurate and relevant. Here they are:

  • Create an IT Core-Belief Inquisition Squad: Since how the IT department operates has such a significant impact on the overall health of the company, create a cross-functional team to go on a fact-finding mission to collect the department’s most closely held beliefs about itself and the firm that it is supporting. The shorter the tenure of the members of the team, the better because it will help to avoid too much belief in how things are currently done. The goal of the team would be to raise the issues that no one wants to talk about and to challenge the beliefs that everyone takes for granted: what industry is the company in? Who are IT’s customers? What are 10 things that you would never hear our customers say about IT? Are our competitors’ IT departments more valuable than us?
  • Invent A Pre-Mortum Strategic Analysis: This activity consists of an off site meeting where participants image what the future will be like in 5 years and how the IT department will have contributed to the success or failure of the company as a whole. The key to this exercise is to identify the issues and factors that various success/failure scenarios have in common. Once this is known, then the IT leaders can identify a set of core IT beliefs and take the time to both examine and monitor them.
  • Create A Shadow CIO & IT Team: This is the most dangerous of the four practices. If you want to be able to get a different view of the same information, create a “B-Team” of high-potential IT mangers who will eventually be promoted. Have the briefings that will be given to the CIO and his direct reports given to them the day before and have the shadow team discuss the issues and search for answers. Have a scribe attend and note the flow of the discussion, the issues raised, and the conclusions reached. The two benefits that this brings are that it prepares the next wave of IT leaders before they are promoted and it provides a fresh perspective on how issues and solutions can be viewed.
  • Bring A Venture Capitalist To The Table: The challenge here is that someone needs to find a venture capitalist with some time to spare. However, if you can do that, then they can be a huge asset in probing the IT strategy for weaknesses. A VC will challenge any and all IT positions and will be able to provide a very practical, payback focused view of the IT strategy.  The VC views the world in terms of making each decision to fund optional – additional funding is only provided if specific milestones have already been met.

Why bother with these four practices – after all they sure seem like a lot of effort? The simple fact is that once an economic stall hits a company, the data shows that the longer the stall exists, the better the probability that the company will never recover. As the world of business continues to speed up. researchers believe that there will be an increase in the number of firms that enter into a stall in the future. The tools that we’ve discussed here provide the IT department with a way to help the company detect and then avoid a stall.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »