Posts Tagged ‘CRM’

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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 »

IT vs Sales: The YouTube Version

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Yeah, so I’m really impressed with how I write. But this time around I’m more than willing to admit that I’ve been out classed by a video that’s up on YouTube: “The Great Office War”.

This video is very appropriate for work (no problems if the boss catches you watching it). We’ve talked here a great deal about how best to get IT to work with the rest of the company. This video pretty much shows just what can happen if you aren’t successful!

Enjoy!

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Posted in alignment | 1 Comment »

10 Ways That IT Can Solve Real-World Business Problems

Thursday, October 16th, 2008
When IT Understands The Business, Then They Can Provide Assistance

When IT Understands The Business, Then They Can Provide Assistance

My favorite word is “alignment”. This describes the situation that happens when an IT department gets it act together and focuses on solving problems for the business. This is actually different from what an IT department normally spends its time doing: keeping the network up and providing help desk support for end users. The folks over at eWeek found out that a number of IT departments have actually been listening to what the rest of the business has been asking for and they are now starting to create custom solutions that solve real-world business problems.

The IT departments have been starting with the single app that has the most valuable information in it, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, and then extending it to do useful work. How about if we take a look at 10 of these applications:

  1. Where’s My Trash (Truck): An Atlanta based company called Trash-It has combined their Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live tool with the Tom-Tom Work application, a GPS navigation tool. This now allows the business side of the house to see where all of their trash trucks are at any time and better manage and control the fleet. Instead of guessing if they have too many or too few trucks, now they know!
  2. Helping Out The Homeless: San Francisco’s Family Service Agency has the nearly impossible task of running six major helping centers with over 250 staff members. On a yearly basis, they are able to help 8,000 clients. They had a huge problem: how could they tell who they had served and where they had served them? If they knew this, then they could better coordinate their services and make the best use of their limited funding. Their IT department used Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform to build a single integrated record for each client. This allowed the business side of the house, six different agencies, to view each customer’s single record of service.
  3. Conserve More: The U.S. Department of Agriculture does a lot of conservation work. Until now, different systems had been used to track different conservation projects. Their IT department used Microsoft’s Dynamic CRM 4.0 to build a conservation work tracking application. Now the rest of the department is able to view all of the conservation efforts in a single place.
  4. Is There A Doctor Here?: The good folks at the Schumacher Group are responsible for providing both doctors and operating teams to over 140 hospitals that are spread out over multiple states. This works out ok if everything is going fine; however, in the event of a natural disaster it can become very difficult to find doctors and get them to where they are most urgently needed. The IT team used Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform to create a hurricane tracking app that integrates doctor location information. This allows the business side of the house to swing into action when disaster strikes and make sure that the right resources are sent to the right locations.
  5. Geek Map: The Geeks On The Way service found that business was just a little bit too good. Their employees were spending way too much time trying to map service calls so that they could provide the most efficient service to their spread out customer base. Their IT department (yes, Geeks need an IT department also) used the SugarCRM app to create an application that automatically linked with the open source Asterisk PBX phone system and map out routes for their techs to use for service calls.
  6. Super Bowl Story: The company Total Structures has what I consider to be a fun job – they are in the business of building custom structures. Where this story gets interesting is when you realize that they won the job to build the halftime stage that was used at this year’s Super Bowl (yep, we all saw it for about 30 minutes, but I’ll bet none of us can remember what it looked like!) You can imagine just how complex building a structure that has to magically show up, be used, and then vanish must be. Their IT department used Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live to come up with an application that they could use to track the building of the stage. Now how’s that for stretching the definition of a CRM application!
  7. HIPPA-Hurray, HIPPA-Hurray!: The Department of Human Services out in Oregon had a real problem on their hands. They were trying to manage Medicaid claims that they were receiving from over 35,000 health care providers in the state. This meant that they were dealing with 60,000 paper-based claims each month. Oh, and the new HIPPA rules were coming into effect. Their IT department used the SugarCRM app to move to electronic forms. As a nice side-benefit, they became HIPPA compliant along the way.
  8. It’s All About Politics: No matter what side of the political fence you sit on, you’ve got to admire former presidential candidate Mitt Rommney’s campaign team. Their IT folks used Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform to create an app that allowed volunteers to get info out to those who needed it while at the same time using emails to ask for campaign funds. How successful was this app? Well by using it Mitt Rommney was able to raise $20M for his bid. He lost, but still that’s a lot of money!
  9. You Are In Germany: The Kassel region over in Germany decided to use the SugarCRM app to get more folks to visit them. They designed a social networking platform that was designed to attract all sorts of people: tourists, businesses, and even people who might want to move to Kassel.
  10. Tracking School Days: So this last one doesn’t really involve an IT department; however, it still struck me as being a very cool app. The Bronx Lab School wanted to be able to both measure and track individual student performance. They decided to use Salesforce.com’s Force.com app to build a tool that would let them track student performance. The very cool part is that it delivers daily updates on each student to advisers, teachers, and (of course) parents.

What I hope that you take away from this short list of novel applications is that it is possible for an IT shop to get a seat at a company’s strategic planning table. All it takes is some careful thinking about what the business is trying to accomplish and the focused application of good ‘ol IT skills to solve those business problems.

Has your IT department ever build an application just to solve a specific business problem? Did you make the app from scratch or did you build it on top of an existing application? Are you currently using your CRM application for anything more than a customer database? What else do you think that you could do with your customer data? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in align | No Comments »

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