Posts Tagged ‘communication’

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.

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

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?

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in communication | 4 Comments »

3 Ways To Bring Business And IT Together

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Executing A Single Business / Technology Strategy Leads To Success

Executing A Single Business / Technology Strategy Leads To Success

In the end, it all comes down to execution. No, not chopping heads off, but rather how you go about having your IT department perform the tasks that the business needs them to do. How hard could this possibly be?

What’s The Goal?

The power term “alignment” is tossed around a lot these days. I think that it’s gotten used so much that a lot of us have forgotten just exactly what it means. In its simplest form, when a company is truly aligned then it is able to mange both its business and its technology together.

As simple as this may seem, too few companies are able to achieve this goal. The reasons are many: differing personalities, budgets that are unrelated, lack of accountability for business results, etc.

Fredric Fishman has spent some time  thinking about this and he’s come to the realization that in order for a a company to commit to managing both its business and its technology together, then it needs to do three things well:

  • Provide a clear vision for the organization
  • Create a well-defined roadmap that shows how to get to the future
  • Measure outcomes against predefined criteria

One Strategy For Both Business And Technology

If you have any hopes of bringing your business and technology activities together, then you’re going to have to make sure that the firm has a living business strategy. The world changes and your business strategy needs to be able to change with it. One way to accomplish this is to implement processes that will allow feedback on the business strategy to be collected and used to make adjustments.

The next step is to make sure that everyone understand just exactly how technology is going to be used to achieve each one of your business objectives. Finally, don’t just hope for the best – make sure that you have criteria in place to judge success before you start any IT project.

Strategic Imperative: Talk & Spend

A company’s goals are no good if nobody knows about them. Make sure that any planned investment in technology has a direct link to a business objective. This kind of decision making won’t happen overnight. You’re going to have to take the time to create internal processes that will allow your staff to learn how to make the correct investment decisions.

Once again, good communication is at the heart of any well run organization. You need to make sure that EVERYONE knows what the expected outcomes are and what the expected business results are. This will establish a sense of ownership and will make sure that everyone has “skin in the game”.

Measure, Measure, Measure

The best IT programs in the world don’t amount for much if you can’t determine what their impact was. You need to monitor the outcomes of each IT investment decision so that your decision making process just keeps getting better.

This is where IT folks can really shine: collect those metrics, stats, and usage data and use these numbers to measure impacts and report results.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, the steps that we need to take to align technology and business are pretty straightforward. The challenge is that this calls out not for a technology solution, but rather for a human-to-human solution. Within IT we’re great at writing code and hooking up new systems, now we just have to do a better job of talking and communicating with the rest of the company.

Questions For You

Within your firm, do you feel that you have a clear vision or is it just a piece of paper on the wall? Do you know how the company is going to achieve its stated goals? Are there effective ways to measure your IT results in place today? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

Coming Up Next Time

HP’s CIO Randy Mott has done some fantastic things in helping to turn the company around. However, now things are starting to get tricky and it’s not clear that the company is going to be able to continue to be successful…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in alignment | 5 Comments »

What Toyota Can Teach IT About Dealing With Change

Thursday, December 18th, 2008
Toyota Has Developed Three Ways Of Dealing With Growth And Change

Toyota Has Developed Three Ways Of Dealing With Growth And Change

It may seem odd to to be talking about growth during this time of economic downturn, but once this cycle is done you had better have a good plan for learning to deal with growth. IT has always been about change, but that doesn’t mean that IT leaders are any better than anyone else in dealing with constant change (and growth).

We’ve been talking about Toyota lately and interestingly enough they have a great deal that they can teach IT about how to deal with change and growth. They realize that as an organization becomes larger, communication is one of the first things that will start to deteriorate. After this, it starts to become more difficult to coordinate operations and projects that stretch across the entire company.

In order to deal with problems such as these, Toyota has implemented three separate “forces of integration” that have allowed Toyota’s IT department to be able to keep its focus on Toyota’s mission. These three forces are the founder’s original values, how they manage promotions, and their use of open communication. No high-tech stuff here, but perhaps they still have something to teach IT departments…

The values that have been handed down to Toyota by their founders include the famous kaizen (continuous improvement), respect for fellow employees and what they can accomplish, the power of teamwork, the spirit of humility, the importance of putting the customer first, and finally, just how important it is to see something with your own eyes.

Developing the next round of IT department leaders is done differently at every company. All too often, firms use the “up-or-out” approach – either you get promoted or you eventually get shown the door. This is not the way that Toyota runs their business.

Toyota actually still has a basic guarantee of lifetime employment for its workers. Employees who are under performing are not terminated, rather they have their capabilities upgraded through on the job training. At Toyota, IT workers are asked to think as if they were really operating at two levels above their current rank. This allows all employees to have more context added to their perspective.

Open communication is critical to everything that Toyota does. They have actually been able to accomplish what every IT department would like to do: have information flow freely both up and down the hierarchy as well as across both seniority and functional boundaries.

In the 21st Century, Toyota still feels that human to human networks are of the highest importance. Executives go to the lowest levels in the company and have discussions with the workers there in order to understand what is going on.

At Toyota it’s ok for IT workers to speak up when they disagree with what someone is saying – even if it’s their boss. The ultimate assignment for every employee is to do what they think is right – not just what the boss is telling them to do.

In the end, Toyota is a hard company for any IT department to try to emulate. The reason for this is because Toyota’s success does not just come from doing (or not doing) any one thing. Instead, it’s really about a culture that Toyota has created that allows all of its departments to be a success. Even though it may seem impossible to replicate this environment in your IT department, keep in mind that at Toyota they view trying as the greatest achievement and failure is just one step towards success.

Does your IT department have any values that it has inherited from past management? Do you work with employees that are not ready to be promoted in order to get them ready – or do you just let them go? Would you say that your IT department has open flows of communication? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in business advantage | 2 Comments »

5 Skills Of The CIO Of The Future

Monday, October 27th, 2008
The CIO Of Tomorrow Is Going To Have To Have Some Super Skills

The CIO Of Tomorrow Is Going To Have To Have Some Super Skills

Psst – would you like a peek into the future? Sorry, I can’t tell you when the financial markets are going to bottom out, when house prices will snap back, or even what lottery numbers would be a sure thing. However, I can tell you what the CIO of tomorrow is going to look like and he/she isn’t going to look like the one that you’ve got right now!

As Rodeney Dangerfield said so elegantly, “I can’t get no respect”. This seems like it could almost be a mantra for CIOs. A survey of CIOs that Information Week is working on is starting to show some big problems up at the top of the IT career ladder. Specifically, outside of IT the other C-level executives aren’t seeing the CIO as being all that useful and therefore the importance of the CIO has actually decreased over the past year. Oh, oh – this spells trouble for the rest of us.

So what’s going on here? CIOs are falling down in several areas. Either they are going to have to find ways to fix their performance in these areas or they are going to have to step aside and let someone else take the wheel of the IT shop. Here’s a list of what today’s CIOs need to fix in order to start getting some respect:

  1. Spend Money The Right Way: One of the biggest gripes that the rest of the company has about CIOs is that they are too caught up in performing support tasks. This means that too much of a CIOs budget is being spent on the wrong stuff: support, not innovation. Right now the split seems to be 70% being spent on support and 30% being spent on new initiatives. What does the rest of the company want? How about a 20% / 80% split? I don’t want to hear that that’s impossible – get cracking CIO!
  2. Know Your Technology: It sure seems like there is no shortage of new technology constantly cropping up. The rest of the company wants the CIO to be on top of all of this technology stuff, sort through it, and tell them what’s important and what’s not. The CIO needs to be a technology visionary that the rest of the company can turn to in order to find out what’s real and what’s not. Case in point: the converged network (voice, video, and data on one network instead of three separate networks) was big a few years ago. Your CIO should have been all over that. Right now Cloud Computing appears to be the next big thing in whatever form it ends up taking. Your CIO should be leading the charge to find out what this will eventually mean for your company.
  3. Talk The Talk (of Business): This is one that’s been hanging around for awhile, but it just won’t go away. CIOs need to stop talking tech with other C-levels and start to talk about solving business problems. It is the responsibility of the CIO to translate technology into business terms and use that to talk with other business executives.
  4. Execute, Execute, Execute: Quick – think of two words that describe your IT department. Did you pick “expensive” and “slow”? If not, then perhaps you should have because that is how everyone else thinks of you. The ability to deliver on promises made by the IT department is a key part of any CIOs job. The CIO of tomorrow needs to ensure that if the IT department says that it’s going to do something, then it follows through and delivers what it promised on time.
  5. It’s All About The Processes: Ultimately the rest of the company is looking to the CIO in order to get help in further automating the way that the business operates. Nobody really cares if you’re going to use Web 2.0 technologies, SaaS, SOA, etc. What matters is that what once was done manually and took a long time can now be done automatically and takes much less time.

Does your CIO look like the CIO of today or the CIO of tomorrow? Do you agree with my list of what new skills a CIO must have or did I leave something off? Which one of these new skills do you think is the most important for a CIO to have? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in CIO | 2 Comments »