Posts Tagged ‘data’

3 Questions That Every CIO Should Be Asking About Clouds

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
Image Credit Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Cloud computing has almost become a part of the definition of information technology. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how a CIO can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

How Much Will This Save Me?

A lot of the excitement about cloud computing comes from the simple fact that most CIOs view the cloud as a way to reduce the cost of running an IT department. However, before visions of cash savings start dancing in your head, you need to answer some questions first.

Roger Cheng over at the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at where the expenses in running an IT department come from. What he’s discovered is that servers run about $2000 – $6,000. This capital expense can be avoided if instead of buying more servers a CIO simply subscribes to more cloud computing resources when it’s time to expand the company’s IT infrastructure.

In addition to saving on buying more servers, there are potentially other savings that a CIO can realize by moving to the cloud. Buying more servers would require more IT staff to act as systems administrators – no servers means no hiring of additional administrators.

Are Cloud Services Reliable Enough?

It seems as though every other month or so there is another story in the paper about some cloud provider having an outage. One time it’s Amazon, the next it’s Google. Given the importance of information technology, as a CIO you need to be asking yourself if this cloud computing stuff is really reliable enough for you to be trusting your company’s IT infrastructure to.

It turns out that the analysts have taken a look at the overall reliability of the clouds that are being provided and they are as, if not more, reliable than most company’s IT infrastructure. One reason for this is that providing a cloud is all that the providers do and so they hire and staff in order to ensure the reliability of their product.

What Don’t I Know About Clouds?

The wise CIO knows to ask “what don’t I know enough to ask about?” One key issue has to do with your company’s most precious asset – its corporate data. When you move this data to a cloud, you are asking another company to take care of it. Are you comfortable doing this?

Is your company really going to save money by moving to the cloud? Not every company will – it all depends on how your IT department is set up now and what it’s going to look like in the future. You have other options for saving money – virtualizing the servers that you have today is one way to accomplish this.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing is all the rage these days in the IT sector. CIOs are getting more and more pressure to introduce cloud computing into their IT departments. Before they take this step, they need to get some questions answered.

The promise of cloud computing is that it will save the IT department money. Do you know where these savings will come from? How does the reliability of the cloud compare to your IT department’s current level of reliability? Finally, what other options besides cloud computing do you have for boosting your IT department’s performance?

Cloud computing appears to be here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that every CIO should race out and jump into the cloud today. Take your time and get the answers to the important questions and your next step will become clear to you.

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

Question For You: Do you think that the company’s finance department should be involved in determining if the savings of moving into the cloud would be worth the effort?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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CIOs Need To Know Who Is Implementing The Company’s Digital Strategy

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Image Credit Which Way Should Your Company Be Going On The Digital Highway?

Which Way Should Your Company Be Going On The Digital Highway?

As a CIO it can be all too easy to feel overwhelmed by the decisions that you have to make: mobile devices, clouds, security, arrrgh! The CIOs that I’m working with are looking for clear directions on what they should be spending their time on. My advice to them is that they need to pick a few key questions that are closely tied to the overall business. Once they can answer these questions, everything else will take care of itself. The key is to know what questions to spend your time answering…

Who Is Implementing The Company’s Digital Strategy?

It’s not that the company doesn’t know that it needs to use the IT department to become more competitive. It’s just that it really doesn’t know HOW to use its IT department.

Firms often like to pull together teams to address issues. Situations such as delayed product development, missed deliveries, or even increased competition are all reasons for doing some internal brainstorming – nothing wrong here.

However, where things can go wrong is if a firm allows the IT team that they used to identify the solution to a particular company problem to implement that solution. The reason that this can cause problems is actually very simple: most IT managers have a scope that is limited to a single department or business unit. They simply don’t know how to implement an IT solution that extends across the entire company.

This is where the CIO needs to step in and assign a single owner to this type of project. That owner needs to have enough seniority that they’ll be able to get the respect of all of the various departments in the company that will need to cooperate in order to successfully implement the company-wide IT change.

Is Digital Data Making The Company More Or Less Productive?

If there is one thing that the IT sector has done for businesses over the past few years, it is to provide them with more data. Data on products, sales, customers, prices, returns, etc. Now that all of this data exists, CIOs need to step in and help everyone understand what to do with the data.

One of the key questions that the CIO needs to help a company’s senior leadership to answer is who should be using the mountain of data that the IT department is collecting? The two choices are for senior management to use it to make decisions which will then be communicated down to the rank & file workers or to push the data out to the front-line employees and allow them to use it to make day-to-day decisions.

Both solutions work. Empowering the individual workers to use the data collected by the IT department turns out to be the more powerful of the two approaches. Additionally, it can result in greater worker involvement in their job and this can lead to higher employee retention.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs know the importance of information technology. However, they don’t always know how to go about making sure that their company gets the most out of the technologies that can help them the most.

The staff in an IT department who provide the definition of information technology solutions for the company are not necessarily the ones who should be assigned to implement it. The farther the reach of an IT solution (across departments or across functions) the more challenging it will be for IT staff who work within those groups to implement a good solution.

Likewise, IT departments collect a great deal of information for their companies. It’s what the IT departments allow to be done with this data that really counts: is it pushed down to the workers who can best use it?

CIOs are not only responsible for managing the IT department so that the company can move faster, but they are also responsible for making sure that IT solutions are implemented correctly and that data gets to where it can do the most good. By focusing on just a few key questions, CIOs can maximize their impact on the rest of the company.

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

Question For You: What do you think is the best way to implement IT solutions that will impact the entire company?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If there is one thing that CIOs hate it’s red tape – bureaucratic roadblocks that keep the IT department from doing what it is supposed to be doing. The very definition of information technology is that it moves fast and adapts to dynamic situations – exactly what a company’s bureaucratic processes and barriers to success seem to be designed to prevent. What CIOs need is a good role model for how to make this problem go away, it turns out that an American car company may be just the one to provide this…

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Unified Communications Is An Opportunity For CIOs To Show Their Value

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
The Arrival Of Unified Communication Solutions Is An Opportunity For CIOs To Shine

The Arrival Of Unified Communication Solutions Is An Opportunity For CIOs To Shine

The role of a  CIO in any organization is to find ways to enable the company to be more successful. This can include introducing new products quicker, reacting to changes in the marketplace faster, or even lowering the cost of doing business.

Underlying all of these different ways to assist the business there is one area that every CIO must master first: providing great internal communications. An opportunity to radically transform how a firm’s employees communicate has arrived and it’s time for CIOs to step up and lead the charge.

Just What Is Unified Communications?

“Unified Communications” (UC) is starting to take on all the characteristics of a high-tech buzzword and in the process folks are losing track of just what it really means. If you boil it down to its bare essence, unified communications is all about moving all of your voice, video, and data business communications to a single network. Instead of having a phone network, a LAN, and the Internet, you combine all three of these into a single unified (get it?) network that carries all business communication.

Is This Really The Right Time To Be Talking About This?

Hey, there’s a recession going on – right? Despite the current economic problems that the world is facing, CIOs still have a job to do and studying and implementing a unified communications solution is a key part of this. The world markets will recover and if the company is left behind while its competition zooms ahead because they didn’t stop innovating then there’s going to be an opening for a new CIO.

Nicholas Hoover over at InformationWeek has been asking around and he’s found out that:

  • 57% of companies have not gotten past the pilot stage
  • 86% say that they can make a good business case for it
  • 55% admit that their company is confused about the value of UC

What Global Crossing Did

Just in case you need some more motivation to look into what unified communication can do for your firm, how about if we take a look at what the communication company Global Crossing did.

Global Crossing has embraced unified communications in a big way. Their chief operations officer uses it to hold weekly global staff meetings with his 16 direct reports. They use the video conferencing capabilities that they now have. The savings of using a unified communications solution for this type of meeting can be calculated in terms of savings on conferencing services, long distance calls, and even travel costs.

Global Crossing has taken unified communications one step further. They’ve discovered that the real hidden value to this new service is what is called “presence awareness” – who’s currently there for you to communicate with? They’ve integrated this functionality into their day-to-day business applications so that people using them will know who they can contact if something goes wrong.

Final Thoughts

All too rarely does an opportunity like this come along that will allow CIOs to clearly demonstrate their value to the firm. As existing PBXs and data network components start to become obsolete, there has never been a better time to start to analyze WHEN will be the right time to upgrade to a unified communications solution. Your company needs you now…

Questions For You

Is there a driver that you can use to start to build a business case for upgrading to a unified communications system? What features does your firm need most urgently: voice features, instant messaging, location awareness, video conferencing, etc.? Who do you think will be your biggest booster in the firm? Who will be your greatest challenge? Why? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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 technologie. One such technology is called Complex-Event Processing…

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How IT Can Help Uncover New Products

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

IT Departments Have The Data Needed To Uncover New Products

IT Departments Have The Data Needed To Uncover New Products

“Alignment”, “Innovation” – arrgh! Who in the world of IT is not sick of hearing these two words used over and over again? Yes we’d like to be able to help out the rest of the business, but our IT budgets are being slashed left and right. We don’t have either the staff or the budget to launch a big new program to collect whatever data is needed in order to tell the company which direction it should go in. Or do we?

It is in the nature of any IT department to collect data on our customers. We already have disk pack after disk pack of historical data about everyone who ever showed even the slightest interest in one of our company’s offerings let alone how much information we have on our existing customers.

In that data lies the secret to how IT departments can help the rest of the company uncover new products. Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries.

Harrah’s is an owner of several casinos. Their IT department has historically collected reams of data on their customers in order to support targeted direct mail campaigns and attempts to increase customer loyalty.

However, it was not until the IT department took a closer look at the data that they had already captured about their big spenders (“whales” in casino speak) that they realized that they had the answers that they needed in order to redesign their casinos in order to position games where they would get these customers to play even more.

The Royal Bank of Canada faced a problem – its consumer credit division  needed to have more customers. The IT department went back and took a look at the credit card applications that they had rejected in the past. What they discovered is that many of these people had improved their credit scores since being rejected. This gave the bank a great set of potential card holders to go after.

Clearly all IT departments are sitting on more customer data than anyone ever believed. Now we just have to figure out how to make that data work for us. It turns out that there are three principles that provide the core for doing this correctly. We’ll talk about them next time…

Does your IT department store enough information on your customers? Have you ever gone back and tried to put that data to use? Were you successful? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in alignment | 2 Comments »