Posts Tagged ‘it strategy’

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Can CIOs Drive Innovation & Boost Quality At The Same Time?

Monday, October 5th, 2009
How To Capture Innovation Without Going Broke

How To Capture Innovation Without Going Broke

How are you at walking and chewing gum at the same time? It’s sorta a classic challenge – do two different things simultaneously and do them well. CIOs are facing the challenge today – cut costs and simultaneously use IT to make the business more competitive. How hard can that be?

Say Hello To Six Sigma

If you’ve been to a book store recently and looked at any of the books in the business section, you may have been overwhelmed by the number of titles that had the words “Six Sigma” in them. Six Sigma is an approach to business that makes use of constant measurement and analysis in order to continue to optimize business operations.

Dr. Sara Beckman has researched this technique and points out that Six Sigma was invented at Motorola and popularized by Jack Welch at GE. If you apply it to how an IT shop goes about doing its work, it can be a great way to drive out costs and boost quality. However, it will do nothing to drive innovation.

Say Hello To Design Thinking

Design thinking is a new set of skills that are designed to drive innovative thinking. The starting point for design thinking is for solution designers (who else?) to start by focusing on what problems their customers are having on a daily basis. Once they understand the problems, the next step is to consider the wide universe of possible ways to solve these problems.

The Problem

Here in lies the problem. If you go out and talk to today’s CIOs you’ll find that they have generally implemented one of these two different solutions (Six Sigma is more popular because it’s easier to understand and measure).

This causes problems. It is possible to focus too much on driving out costs and then lose your way and not be able to provide the innovation in IT that is needed to keep the business competitive – this is the problem that HP is currently facing.

Likewise, if an IT department is too innovative and doesn’t watch the bottom line closely enough, then they can quickly drive themselves and the company out of business. The dot.com fiasco was a great example of this.

What’s The Correct Solution To This Problem?

You may have already guessed it, but the right way to solve this challenge is for CIOs to take the time to find a way to incorporate both the design thinking and the Six Sigma approaches into their IT departments.

The design thinking technique allows an IT department to find ways to explore new approaches to solving the problems that the business is facing. Six Sigma techniques allow an IT department to find ways to improve how they are currently doing things.

Final Thoughts

CIOs can’t allow their IT departments to become too focused on just one approach or they risk failing. Design thinking tries to find out what a good solution to a problem is while Six Sigma assumes that a solution is good and then goes about trying to make it even better.

CIOs who can find a way to reduce costs while at the same time driving IT innovation will be better at finding ways 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 times they are changing. Let’s take a moment and have a talk about one of a CIO’s key survival skills: the ability to successfully negotiate office politics. Specifically, if you could only have one best friend, who should it be: the CEO or the CFO?

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Posted in innovation | 3 Comments »

You Don’t Do A Good Job At Multitasking CIO, Get Over It

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
People Who Multitask Think That They Can Do It Well, But They Can't! (c) - 2009

People Who Multitask Think That They Can Do It Well, But They Can't! (c) - 2009

Too little time, too much to do. Does that adequately describe your CIO job? I don’t know about you, but often is the time that I’ve looked with envy at my peers who are great multitaskers and wished that I could be more like them. It turns out that I was wishing for the wrong thing – multitaskers actually do a lousy job at just about everything.

The Study

Ruth Pennenaker reports that some researchers at Stanford University have just completed a groundbreaking study on people who multitask. You know who you are – you’re talking on the phone even as you are answering emails and zipping off text messages on you iPhone all at the same time. Oh how I have so wanted to be you!

The researchers found that most persistent multitaskers actually performed badly in a variety of tasks that they were asked to do. As the researchers dove deeper to find out why the multitaskers were doing so badly, what they found was that they don’t do a very good job of focusing on what they are trying to do. This also means that they are much more likely to get distracted while they are trying to perform a task. On top of all this, the study showed that they are actually weaker than non-multitaskers at shifting between tasks and organizing the information that they collect.

Results Of The Study

My favorite part of the study is where the researchers discovered that people who are always multitasking are actually worse at multitasking than those of us who ordinarily don’t multitask!

When the study was started, the researchers started with the idea that multitaskers have some characteristic that makes them better at multitasking than regular folks. What they discovered is that multitaskers are just pretty much lousy at doing everything.

One of the researchers was quoted as saying “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”

However, doesn’t it LOOK like multitaskers are always busy? Shouldn’t that mean that they must be getting more done than the rest of us who just can’t do that much all at the same time? It turns out that high multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy“. Simply put, sure they are doing things, but what they are working on more often than not really doesn’t matter.

A Personal Multitasking (Failure) Story

I firmly fall into the “not a good multasker” camp and I should know it. However, every once in awhile I try my hand at multitasking, generally with disastrous results. Allow me to share my most recent story:

I was late for a doctor’s appointment and yet I had a conference call that I needed to participate in (not just listen to). I jumped into the car, programmed the Garmin GPS system with the doctor’s office address, stuck my Blackberry headset in my ear, and set the Garmin on “mute” so that it wouldn’t interfere with my conference call.

As I hurtled down the highway in the far left lane at about 70 mph jabbering away in an animated conversation on the conference call, I happened to look over at the Garmin and noticed that it was signaling that I needed to be taking the exit that I was just about to pass by (remember that I had been smart enough to mute it so I had no warning). Oh, oh.

A non-multitasking person would have realized that (1) I had already gone too far past the exit to make it, (2) I was in the wrong lane to try to make the exit, (3) I was going too fast to make the exit. In my multitasking state, I realized none of this and I attempted to go for it.

I didn’t make it. I was going to fast and I was too far past the exit to have ever had any chance of making it. What I ended up doing was plowing headfirst into the aluminum guardrails which were anchored to solid 4″x4″ chunks of wood. I probably hit them going a good 40 mph despite having tried to stand on the breaks once I realized what was going to happen.

Thanks to seatbelts and airbags, I walked away without a scratch. However, the car was a total loss. Oh, and I got a $100+ ticket from the police for basically being a bad driver. I say once again – I can’t multitask!

Final Thoughts

CIOs who multitask will perform at a lower level than those who focus on one task at a time. Although this seems to fly in the face of everything that we’ve seen in our workplace (don’t multitaskers get all of the promotions?), you can’t argue with research results.

Should you try to convince your friends and peers who are multitaskers to stop doing it because it just doesn’t work? No. The core of the problem is that not only do multitaskers think they’re great at what they do; they’ve also convinced everybody else they’re good at it too.

Ultimately those of us who are not multitaskers will be able to show better results for how we’ve spent our time. If we can make sure that the rules of the game that we’re playing are all about results and not appearances, then the non-multitaskers will win every time.

CIOs who can focus on one task at a time and do it well instead of trying to do multiple tasks at the same time poorly will be better at finding ways 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

How are you at walking and chewing gum at the same time? It’s sorta a classic challenge – do two different things simultaneously and do them well. CIOs are facing the challenge today – cut costs and simultaneously use IT to make the business more competitive. How hard can that be?

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Posted in balance | No 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.

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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…

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Posted in communication | 1 Comment »

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.

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         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…

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Posted in alignment | 5 Comments »

When Giving IT Information, More Is Better

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Providing Data About Data Can Make Data Even More Valuable To A Company

Providing Data About Data Can Make Data Even More Valuable To A Company

So just what is the job of an IT department once you get past the keeping the network up and applications running stuff? I think that we can all agree that it must have something to do with the company’s data, but exactly what does that mean?

Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries. They realize that IT is the source for countless reports – our job is to turn data into information that the company can take action on. However, they’ve discovered that it can be just as important that we share with the rest of the company HOW we’ve come to know something as well as WHAT we know.

Now this is the tricky part: IT needs to find ways to tell our audience the answers to their questions AND we need to tell them how we got the data and what, if any, strengths and weakness there are with that data.

If you want to get all fancy about this the word to use would be that we need to provide “metadata” with our reports. A good example of this would come from the Royal Bank of Canada.

A few years ago the bank implemented a system that when a customer was overdrawn on a check, the system would do some credit / overdraft history checking in order to determine if a courtesy overdraft should be granted.

The information on the system and the data that it used was distributed in the bank and an ATM product manger happened to read it. He realized that a similar system could be created to provide overdrafts for ATM customers. The bank spent about $100,000 to implement this new service and since then has made millions off of it.

Allowing staff to not only see the output of an IT department, but also the information on the data that was used to create that output allows more people to find ways to reapply the data in ways that you may have never thought of.

When your IT department produces reports, do they include any information on the data that they used to create the report? Has anyone ever been able to use this “metadata” to identify a new use for the data? Was that new use valuable to the company? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in information | 2 Comments »

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