Posts Tagged ‘business software’

New Name For CIOs: Strategic Execution Officer

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
CIOs Need To Learn To Manage Wild IT Projects<p>(c) - 2007</p>

CIOs Need To Learn To Manage Wild IT Projects(c) - 2007

In order to complete in a global economy that is moving faster every day, more and more firms are committing to implementing those really BIG process digitization projects. More often than not the CIO will find himself / herself in charge of not only the implementation of the new software application, but also the overall success of the project. How do you go about doing that?

What Goes Wrong With Big IT Projects

We all know the statistics – most big IT projects are not successful. However, the key question is why? It turns out that all too often the issue is not with the new process automation technology that is being implemented, but rather with the management challenge that comes along with a project like this.

The reason that managing a large transformational IT project is so hard is because the CIO also needs to be finding ways to drive the new business process changes that will be required once the new systems have been installed. It turns out that nobody likes change!

What Doesn’t Work?

It seems as though IT departments have been trying since the beginning of time to find a way to tackle this two-headed IT project beast. One approach has been to give responsibility for the success of the project to an executive governance committee. It turns out that this type of committee does an excellent job of defining the strategy for implementing the changes that will be needed, but does a lousy job of executing it.

Another approach has been to create an IT task force to implement this type of change. They generally do a good job of getting the new application up and running, but they lack the wide-ranging authority to cause other parts of the company to change how they are doing their jobs.

What Does An IT Strategic Execution Officer Do?

If the CIO is willing to step up and tackle leading both sides of a major IT process automation project, just what do they have to do? There are three fundamental tasks that they will need to deal with:

  • The implementation of the process automation application(s).
  • Making sure that the new technology gets adopted by the rest of the company.
  • Making sure that the new processes that the project has implemented start to get used by everyone.

Ultimately, the CIO will be filling the management / leadership gap that exists between coming up with the process automation plan and actually changing the company to use the project once its been implemented.

Final Thoughts

No CIO wants to take on more work – there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done as it is. However, ensuring that big IT projects get implemented correctly and that the company transforms its processes in order to use the new tool is the key to the company’s long term success.

This is a clear example of where a CIO gets to practice for his / her next job: becoming CEO. Nobody else will be as well positioned to implement cross-company changes. CIOs who can pull this off will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The basic job of a CIO is to ensure that a company’s IT infrastructure operates smoothly and allows the company to conduct business. On Monday, August 3, 2009, PayPal’s CIO failed at this most basic of jobs…

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Posted in product managment | 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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The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

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 »

The Problem With Apple: Product Or Platform?

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
Apple Is Starting To Play A Bigger Role In Every IT Department - Are You Ready?

Apple Is Starting To Play A Bigger Role In Every IT Department - Are You Ready?

In the world of IT we deal with lots of different questions: what project to take on, how best to align with the business, how to improve processes. One thing that we don’t really spend much time thinking about is if our applications should run on Microsoft or Apple platforms. Hmm, has Apple missed the boat here?

I bring this up as a discussion point because, let’s face it, Apple makes some fantastic products. Starting with the Mac, they went on to produce the PowerBook, the Newton (come on, you remember that one), the iPod, the iPhone, etc. However, they’ve never really been a platform company.

I’m playing games with words here and perhaps I should better explain myself. Michael Cusumano over at the Communications of the ACM gave this some thought awhile back and I think that he was on to something. He defined a platform as being something that had open interfaces and for which further development was encouraged and licensed. Apple doesn’t do this.

From an IT perspective, this causes a number of problems. There’s no question that Apple products are “sexy” and easy to use. However, since there is all too often only one source for features and applications, an ecosystem comparable to that which developed around Microsoft products never arose.

No big deal you say – Apple products are only found in graphic design shops and educational environments. Well, up until the iPhone came out I would have agreed with you. However, the runaway success of the iPhone and the demand for iPhone apps from the Apple store is starting to make it look like a dominate mobile computing platform.

As more and more of your staff start showing up sporting Apple iPhones, you are going to start to feel pressure to come up with ways to iPhone enable your IT department’s apps. This can be done, it’s just that you’ll find that it’s not as easy as connecting a Microsoft PC to your network.

Times are changing and Apple still makes great products. However, since they are not in the business of making platforms you’ve got your work cut out for you…

Do you already have Apple products that people are trying to hook into your network? Have you started to support these products? Does your staff have iPhones? Do they want to use these iPhones to access your network? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in technologies | 10 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 »