Posts Tagged ‘management’

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 »

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.

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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.

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Posted in business alignment | 3 Comments »

Google’s Staffing Problems Have Much To Teach CIOs

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Google's Having A Common Staffing Problem - Will They Be Able To Fix It?

Google's Having A Common Staffing Problem - Will They Be Able To Fix It?

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…

Google’s Staffing Problem

Google is in the middle of what is often called a “brain drain” – some of its best and brightest workers are leaving the firm to go join other companies. In the past few weeks they’ve lost Tim Armstrong who was their advertising sales boss and they’ve lost David Rosenblatt who was in charge of their display advertising. Oh, and they are losing their top engineers to Twitter and Facebook…

What’s Google Going To Do?

Google’s plan to try to stem this exodus of talent is a typical Google solution – they’re going to try and solve it by crunching numbers. Unlike many IT firms, Google has both the data and the processing power to attempt this.

Google plans on using data that they’ve collected from surveys and peer reviews in order to discover which of its employees feel underused. This may sound a little far fetched, but Edward Lawler who works at the University of Southern California says that eventually all companies will be approaching HR issues this way.

What’s Gone Wrong At Google?

Using algorithms to find unsatisfied workers is clever and all that, but clearly there is something else going on here. Interviews with former Google employees reveal some interesting things about the day-to-day practical realities of working in this high-tech Shangri-La.

Former employees reveal that people are leaving because many employees don’t feel that their efforts will make the same amount of impact as the company matures from its startup days. Compounding the problem is the fact that Google does not appear to provide much in the way of formal career planning. Often these tasks would be addressed by a company’s Human Resources (HR) department, but it appears as though Google’s HR department is viewed by many as being quite impersonal.

So What Should Google Be Doing?

As amazing as it may seem, the answer to Google’s problems is actually very simple – hard to implement, but simple to describe. What they need to do is to put their customer first. By clearly communicating to the entire company that Google exists to serve their customers, a great deal of other staffing problems will fade away.

Final Thoughts

One of Google’s biggest problems is that they have not found a way to keep their employees engaged. This isn’t surprising because Google dominates its market and so it doesn’t have any big competitors to use as a rallying cry.

Making its customers first would allow Google to focus its staff on a single goal that would extend throughout the company All of a sudden every employee would have a way to measure the value of his/her work. Once again, this wouldn’t necessarily be easy to do, but it’s the right thing to do. If you can figure out how to do this with your IT department then you will have found another way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

Do you think that Google’s algorithm will be able to identify those employees who might leave? Do you think that it will make mistakes? Do you think that this type of algorithm would work at your company? Do you think a customer focus would solve Google’s staffing issues? 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

Didn’t we solve that whole outsourcing thing years ago? Specifically aren’t the IT and the Finance departments on the same page when it comes to not only IF we should outsource some of the IT work, but also HOW it should be outsourced? If this is true, than what does the Satyam scandle mean for your IT / Finance relationship?

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Posted in staffing | No Comments »

Hey IT – Forget ITIL, Say Hello To BDIM!

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

There's A New IT Management Process In Town - BDIM

There's A New IT Management Process In Town - BDIM

The world of IT is changing once again, are you ready? We have evolved a great deal in the last thirty years and it looks like we’re getting ready to make another great leap forward. This time around we have a name for what’s going to happen and it’s called business-driven IT management (BDIM)!

Antão Moura and Claudio Bartolini have been looking at how IT is managed and they’ve discovered that we’re getting ready for another change. Back at the end of the 1980’s IT management was all about tracking boxes and routers. This was the era of IT infrastructure management.

Stability and control were the key drivers behind this effort. IT acted as a technology provider – IT folks were technical experts and their goal was to minimize down time.

In the past few years this style of IT management has changed. Now IT looks less at the infrastructure and more at the end user. IT now practices what is called IT Service Management (ITSM). The thinking is that IT services use groups of IT infrastructure components to help corporate users (and customers) to do business with the firm.

Viewed this way, IT has become a service provider. The downfall of this is that IT is still viewed as being separate from the rest of the business. The rest of the business believes that IT is mainly concerned with expense control. This has caused one of the firm’s greatest concerns to become the issue of business-IT alignment.

We’ve come up with a whole bunch of technical ways to keep track of how the IT infrastructure is performing in order to ensure that our services are meeting their performance levels. These tools include quality of service (QoS), service level agreements (SLAs), and when you combine both of these you get service level objectives (SLOs).

The arrival of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of best practice standards has provided a way to deliver IT governance which seeks to ensure that IT risks are mitigated, IT is aligned with the rest of the firm, and that the expected results are achieved.

The problem with all of this is that the best practices, such as ITIL, are very useful, but they just don’t go far enough toward providing concrete solutions.

This has led to the creation of the business-driven IT management (BDIM) approach to IT management. The goal of BDIM is to move IT one step further and start to use a full business perspective to mange IT. This means that we would need to stop using technical metrics measured at the IT level.

This can get a bit difficult to grasp, so here are a few IT management questions posed in BDIM format:

  • Of all the IT incidents that are occurring RIGHT NOW, which is impacting the business the most and thus should be worked on now?
  • Which services should we invest in to improve business results?
  • How many standby servers should we have for our e-commerce site?

Since I know some you may still be struggling, here is a formal definition of BDIM:

“BDIM is the application of a set of models, practices, techniques, and tools to map and to quantitatively evaluate interdependencies between business performance and IT solutions – and using the quantified evaluation – to improve the IT  solutions’ quality of service and related business results”

BDIM is still in the development stages. Models have to be created, how it related to the ITIL processes will have to be worked out, and creating BDIM decision support related tools will have to be done. However, yet another IT management change is almost upon us – and it’s name is BDIM.

Does your IT shop still use the IT infrastructure management approach or have you moved on to the IT Service Management approach? Is your IT shop seen as separate from the rest of the business or do you think that you’ve achieved business alignment? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in alignment | 3 Comments »