Posts Tagged ‘IT projects’

« Older Entries

CIO’s In The Wild: A Field Report

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Image CreditCIO Lindsey Jarrell Was Observed Doing What CIOs Do

CIO Lindsey Jarrell Was Observed Doing What CIOs Do

One of life’s great mysteries is “just exactly what do CIOs do” I’m pretty sure that we all think that we know what they do, but do we REALLY know? In order to prepare you for your future job as a CIO, I have undertaken a dangerous field study in order to observe the wild CIO in their natural habitat and I’m now prepared to make my report back to you. Listen and learn.

The Subject

Our subject in this case was Mr. Lindsey Jarrell who is currently the CIO of BayCare Health System. BayCare is a community-based health care system in the Tampa Bay, Florida, area. They connect patients to a complete range of services through their not-for-profit hospitals, outpatient and imaging facilities, and other regional services that reach beyond the Bay area.

These observations were made as part of my attending a healthcare conference that was being held in the Tampa area. Lindsey had been invited to give a talk about how BayCare has been using IT as a part of its operations.

Overall Knowledge

In order to judge how a CIO is doing his job, you have to take a careful look at just what he says. This is truly a case where words may speak even louder than actions.

Lindsey showed that a CIO needs to know about more than just IT issues. The key to being a successful CIO appears to have a good understanding of where the company is trying to go and how the IT department can help it get there:

  • IT Vision: The goal of BayCare’s IT department is to understand how physicians think.
  • Relationships: The CIO has to have a good relationship with the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO). This required Lindsey to get over his need to always be in control.
  • Extra Knowledge: Things that the BayCare CIO needs to know about that are not IT related include how doctors work and a lot about vendor contracts.
  • Who Owns Quality?: A company’s quality project is not an IT project, instead it is a company-wide transformation project.
  • Deep Knowledge: Lindsey was able to quote off the top of his head the incoming call volume that his help desk was currently fielding.

IT Projects

IT is all about projects: we start them, we run them, and hopefully the company is made better by them in the end. It was clear that Lindsey had spent a lot of time trying to find the best way to do IT projects and here’s what he had to say about that:

  • Where?: Lindsey was able to admit some of the functionality of the large-scale project did not have to be located in the IT department.
  • Keeping The Right Focus: He believes that his project teams needed to be out in the field in front of the doctors. One of the reasons for this is that inside of BayCare they have a completely different focus: they deal with an in-patient environment whereas doctors are focused on people who come to their offices (out-patient care).
  • Dates: He believes that for large IT projects you need to avoid announcing a “go live” date until AFTER you are either weeks or months into the project and have a good understanding of what it’s really going to take.
  • Project Management: The CIO came to understand that vendors really only care about getting to “live” (which is when they get paid). Realizing this, Lindsey hired his own project manager who is responsible for keeping track of the “big picture” for his projects.

What All Of This Means For You

This kind of observation of a real, live CIO is exactly the kind of information that you need to be considering as your career moves you closer and closer to the day that you’ll be named CIO. Hopefully my field notes have provided you with some insights into what a CIO really does.

Of special note should be the fact that Lindsey didn’t spend any time talking about servers, operating systems, development tools, networking, or security issues. These are all part-and-parcel of what an IT department deals with on a daily basis, but Lindsey realized that these are internal issues that nobody else cares about. CIO’s need to focus on what the rest of the business wants and keep the IT stuff inside the IT department.

Do you agree that IT vocabulary and IT specific issues should be kept inside of the IT department or should we share them with other departments?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, almost instantly everything that you know will quickly start to become out-of-date. Just to make things even worse, as the CIO one of your jobs is going to be to accurately predict the future. Just how are you going to go about doing this? It turns out that when you need insights into what the future of IT is going to look like, it helps to sit down and have a talk with the guys who are busy creating it…

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in CIO | No Comments »

HP Can’t Pay Its Salespeople – Another CIO Failure?

Monday, September 14th, 2009

HP's Sales People Have Not Been Getting Paid On Time <p> <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixieclipx/308927905/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=Being a salesperson is a hard job. More often than not they live from quarter to quarter and if you don’t make your numbers, then you end up getting shown to the door. Hewlett-Packard is a huge IT products and services company that lives and dies by the actions of its sales teams. Making sure that the sales teams get paid should be a simple task right? Think again…

The Problem With Pay At HP

HP’s CIO Randy Mott has a problem on his hands. Within HP, payments for the HP’s business-technology group sales teams are handled by a software application called Omega (which is sorta funny when you think about the fact that Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet – it sure doesn’t seem to have the last word on calculating pay).

Omega has been around for a long time. It was born back at Digital Equipment Corporation (anyone remember DEC?), got picked up and used by Compaq Computer Corporation, and then finally found its way into HP. It must either be a well designed program to have had that long of a life or else it’s so dang complex that nobody is willing to tinker with it.

The problem with Omega is that it is struggling to deal with HP’s growing amounts of sales data. It was never originally designed to deal with this much volume. What’s happening is that Omega is now malfunctioning. Some HP salespersons are not getting paid on time – they are ending up waiting up to seven months to get paid!

Fixing The Omega Problem

HP is aware of the problem and they’ve tried unsuccessfully to fix it. As a stopgap measure, HP has been automatically paying its salespeople 60% – 70% of what they should be getting for meeting their sales quotas. One suspects that this is being done in order to allow employees to meet house payments and keep food on the table.

In the past HP has tried to fix Omega by adding new software that was intended to smooth out the flow of sales data. However, back in November of 2008 when HP closed its books for the year, they discovered that some of the data in Omega was both incorrect and incomplete. Clearly the band-aid approach to dealing with the problem had not worked.

What Should HP Do?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that at a HP sales meeting in 2008, one of HP’s senior vice presidents of sales, Randy Runk, got up on stage and promised the sales teams that they would all be paid on time. Clearly that is not happening.

As CIO, Randy Mott (are all HP senior executives named Randy?) is responsible for fixing this problem – he’s already let it go on for far too long. Let’s say what HP is clearly not willing to say themselves: Omega’s time has come and gone and it must be replaced.

Mott needs to do two things immediately: he needs to campaign to have all HP sales reps who’s compensation is handled by Omega to be automatically paid at the level that they would be if they met their sales quotas. This should continue until the Omega issue is resolved. Any bonus will be calculated and paid with interest once the Omega issue has been resolved. Doing this will calm the sales forces and prevent them from leaving en-mass.

Next, Mott needs to start building a new replacement system for Omega. Why this has not been started already is beyond me. You would think that when HP took a look at the 6,500 that they were using and decided to slim it down to just a mere 1,500 systems, that Omega replacement would have been identified as being a high priority.

Based on the age of the Omega application, I’m willing to bet that its a single monolithic solution. Clearly a modular design is called for. I’m also willing to bet that HP doesn’t have a clear idea of all of the things that Omega does. No problem, if Mott and his IT team sits down with HP’s finance team they can come up with system requirements that may be much simpler than the twisted requirements that Omega now implements.

Final Thoughts

Randy Mott has been doing some amazing things at HP. However, somehow the way that he’s been prioritizing what his IT teams need to be working on skipped over the Omega problem. Clearly the prioritization of IT projects needs to be re-looked at.

Mott needs to take immediate steps to resolve the problems that this IT issue has created and then he needs to fix the problem once and for all by creating a replacement solution for the out-of-date and overworked Omega system. If he can do this quickly, then he will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Innovation, innovation, innovation – everyone wants it, but nobody seems know know how to get and keep it. CIOs are under a lot of pressure to do more with less these days and being able to nurture an environment of innovation sure would help. The trick is HOW to do this…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in crisis | No Comments »

Alternate Reality Games: Games That CIOs Know How To Play

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
Alternate Reality Games Offer IT Leaders A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

Alternate Reality Games Offer CIOs A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

As a CIO, you’ve got some challenges facing you. You’re managing a diverse and potentially distributed work force of highly skilled and talented IT professionals. You need to find a way to keep them challenged, and yet at the same time enable them to find ways to work together. Have you considered Alternate Reality Games?

Leave The Real World – Visit An Alternate Reality

CIOs have been taught that most problems can be solved with the application of some math and a whole bunch of data. However, they quickly have learned that the real world is much more complex than that – there are a number of IT problems that can’t be solved this way.

Jane McGonigal has been looking at big problems like this and she’s got a solution for us: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). ARGs are immersive games that provide a massively multi-player experience. What makes them unique (outside of their size) is that the game-play unfolds in the course of their players lives over time spans that can range from days, weeks, or even months. This isn’t your father’s Wii.

Tools Of The (Alternate Reality) Trade

Ok, I can hear you saying, so just how do you play one of these ARGs? Well, it turns out that you don’t really play it – it plays you! You already probably have some hard-core gamers working in your IT department, so why not? The folks running the ARG show, known affectionately as “puppet masters” are in charge of distributing potentially thousands of pieces of information that contribute to telling the story of the ARG. These pieces for the puzzle can be distributed via websites set up for the game, email, cell phone text messages, online audio podcasts and videos, etc.

The players in the game don’t play by themselves – there is no way that they could solve the puzzle if they did that. Instead, they need to collaborate in order to share and gain information. They do this by using social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), wikis, chat rooms, and blogs to talk about what clues they have and what they might mean. This interaction forms the narrative of the game.

Sounds Like An Effort – Why Bother?

Welcome to the 21st Century. McGonigal points out that ARGs are an excellent way for companies (and IT teams) to master those difficult collaboration skills that CEOs (and CIOs) want them to learn. Two of the skills that can be developed that she points out are cooperation radar – the ability to identify who can best help you, and protovation - the ability to prototype and test solutions quickly.

Oh, and by the way: ARGs are a lot of fun for everyone that is involved. Although they may be working through a simulation of a business problem that your firm is facing, it doesn’t seem that way – it feels like a game.

Final Thoughts

When a CIOs firm  is faced with a BIG challenge that doesn’t have an obvious solution, playing an ARG may be just what the CEO ordered. Although they are not easy to set up, an ARG may offer the best way to quickly test out different scenarios in real world circumstances.

Above and beyond the business benefits that ARGs offer, by using this innovative way to stimulate and engage your department you 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

Have you ever used any form of game playing to help your department sort through difficult IT problems? Do any of your department members play massive online games like “World Of Warcraft”? Would your business environment support part of the IT department playing a game to solve a business problem? Do you think that your IT department members get along well enough to work together in order to solve a complex puzzle? 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

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. CIOs have been slow to take advantage of all that the Web 2.0 had to offer, will they lag behind again when the Web 3.0 shows up?

For More Information

  • Check out the “World Without Oil” simulation that used an ARG to simulate a complex problem with no easy solutions.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in business alignment | 3 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.

Click here to get automatic updates when
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…

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

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.

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

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…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in communication | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries