Posts Tagged ‘new profit’

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 »

What 2008 Meant For IT – And Your Career

Monday, January 12th, 2009
2008 Is Now History, But Its Impact On Your Career Will Last

2008 Is Now History, But Its Impact On Your Career Will Last

So 2008 is now done and finished. You can clear off your desk, add a couple of “2008 stuff” files to your folders and consider the year to be all wrapped up. Well, not exactly.

What happened in IT during 2008 lays the foundation for what is going to happen in IT during 2009. Sure, considering how the global economy tanked during 2008, we’d like to be all done and finished with it, but that would be a mistake.

The trick here is to sift through everything that happened over the past year and try to figure out what is going to matter for the upcoming year. It can be a challenge to remember each and every event that occurred during the past 12 months.

That’s why I’m thankful that the staff over at eWeek magazine have done all of the heavy lifting for me on this on. Having sorted through their list of what happened during the past year, here is my list of what IT events you need to remember from 2008:

  1. The Global Financial Meltdown: Ok, so this is an easy one to pick – it started to affected all of IT last year and the pain is going to extend into this year. The good news is that IT has become such an important part of how a business is run that its budget can’t be shrunk too far – but growing the IT budget will be more iffy.
  2. Time To Get “Cloud-y”: 2008 was the year that the discussion around how best to use on-demand off-site computing resources really started to get lively. Yes, there are still a lot of unanswered questions that revolve around reliability and security; however, this is clearly a service who’s time has come – now we just need to figure out how best to make use of it.
  3. Microsoft Goes A-Hunting: We saw Microsoft make a whopper of a bid for Yahoo, saw Google step in and strike a deal with Yahoo, and saw Microsoft go slinking off unsatisfied into the night. Microsoft is not done yet and Yahoo is now a hurt and wounded beast with a depressed stock price. There are more chapters to this story to be played out during 2009…
  4. Let’s Go Mobile: Thanks to the incredible functionality provided by the iPhone, the G1, and the Blackberry Storm, laptop functionality is slowly but surely being supplemented by smart phones. This now means that access, data retention, and security issues that had been there all along will now burst onto the front burner during 2009.
  5. Wireless Broadband Is Coming: It’s not here yet, but so much money has been spent on acquiring expensive bandwidth that services can’t be too far away. Verizon Wireless bought up a bunch of 700 MHz bandwidth and Sprint / Clearwire rolled out the first site for their WiMax service. This is going to be a game changer, we just don’t quite know how yet…
  6. Virtual Everything: Moving from real servers to virtual servers continues as data center floorspace issues and the arrival of “green” computing makes this even more attractive. Can the virtual desktop be that far behind?
  7. Brower Wars, Part II: Who woulda thunk it? Once again we find ourselves in the middle of a browser war with three major contenders: IE (of course), Firefox, and (surprise!) Chrome. Google’s entry into this space caught some by surprise. However, their new browser has caught on in some circles and we’ll have to wait and see what web based applications follow on that will make use of it’s unique features.

Whew – there’s more, but this is all that I have time for. As the Chinese curse goes “May you live in interesting times…”, 2008 is clear proof that we are living in the most interesting of IT times…

So what do you think of my list? Did I leave anything off that you think is going to be a big deal in 2009? Are there any items on my list that you think will just fade away as we go into 2009? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in career | 1 Comment »

How To Drive An IT Department Into The Ground

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Seven Things That An IT Department Needs To Avoid In Order To Be Successful

Seven Things That An IT Department Needs To Avoid In Order To Be Successful

You can go just about anywhere on the web or in your local bookstore and find ways to make your IT department a success. However, clearly this is not an easy thing to do when you take a moment to consider how much time that we spend trying to be successful.

What’s missing from all of this is that you need to understand how people have failed at this task in order to understand what you need to do in order to succeed. How about if we take a look at some of the classic ways that IT departments have failed big time?

  • Fake Synergies: All companies love this one – let’s merge with someone who has complementary strengths in order to grow. However, this rarely seems to work for IT departments. Sometimes synergies do actually exist; however, this can be even worse because it can cause an IT department to head off in the wrong direction. Getting access to new customers or delivery systems can seem like a good idea, until AFTER the merger.
  • Questionable Financial Engineering: We’ve all see this one show up at the end of a quarter or a fiscal year. Getting aggressive in how accounting is done won’t necessarily land someone (you) in jail, but it can cause you some sleepless nights. The two big problems that getting creative with your company / department’s financing is that they can cause you to believe in a product that is less than perfect and they can cause you to take on more risk – a move that the current downturn shows can be very risky.
  • Sticking With A Strategy Too Long: Tenacity has long been considered to be a key asset of IT leaders. However, if you are going in the wrong direction in the first place, then this can lead to disaster. There is a secret at work here: the reason that IT departments don’t change course is because the economics of doing things the new way don’t measure up to the economics of doing things the old way.
  • “It’s Just A Step To The Left”: Often companies and IT departments decide that they need to try to sell new products to their existing customers or maybe through new channels (sometimes called an “adjacent-market” strategy). However, sometimes this is a bad idea that can bring down a department. You can tell that this is a bad idea if you are considering  making this move not because it’s a good business opportunity, but rather because your core business is having problems.
  • Selecting The Wrong Technology: This one we all should recognize – betting on BetaMax when VHS ends up winning.
  • Consolidating Too Quickly: All too often companies rush to consolidate when markets are maturing and the number of companies in the market start to shrink. Keeping in mind that when you buy a company you not only get its IT department, but you also get all of the problems that come along with it.

An IT department is just a part of a larger organization. However, both the company and the IT department are responsible for the overall success of the company. If you can avoid making these mistakes then you will that much closer to being successful!

Have you ever worked at a company that made any of the mistakes that we’ve discussed? Could you see that there were going to be problems from the beginning or did that only show up later on? What did the company try to do when problems started showing up? Did it help to address the problems? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Fighting IT’s "The Grass Is Greener" Syndrome

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

When an IT department lets a business leave its core market to seek higher profits, the company can stall.
Businesses and IT departments can be going along just fine when all of a sudden, the business goes into what is called a “stall”. Just like being in an airplane that goes into a stall, this is by no means a good thing! When a business goes into a stall, more often than not it won’t recover. The most dangerous part about a stall is that you don’t see them coming – everything is fine until it isn’t. We’ve talked about some different causes of stalls including having a premium product; however, there’s another reason and the IT department plays a big role in this one.

Most companies have a small set of products or markets that they currently serve. If the company is successful, then they are probably doing a good job. The IT department has probably become optimized to support both the products and the teams that are serving these markets. All is good. Then the “… grass is greener on the other side of the fence…” syndrome strikes senior management and they decide to take the company in a new direction in order to pursue more profitable markets. Of course what this means is that you need to abandon the core markets that are currently serving you so well. By doing this you won’t be able to exploit any future growth that occurs in your existing markets.

Now lets be honest here, these kinds of right hand turns made by businesses rarely show up all that dramatically – at first. Instead they have a habit of sneaking in from the sides as purchases of other companies or top down mandated growth initiatives in brand new areas of business that seem to have nothing to do with the company’s current customers, or products, or partners (can anyone say “Ebay buys Skype?”).

If you are looking for proof that this kind of abandonment of successful markets still goes on in today’s modern business environment, just open the paper and see all of the articles that are talking about public companies being bought out by private equity firms. Clearly something went terribly wrong and outsiders were able to step in. In almost every case when this kind of takeover happens, the new owners of the firm will implement a strategy for returning to what originally made the company successful and growing the core again.

Why do companies and their IT departments make these mistakes? There are two primary reasons. The first is that the company mistakenly believes that their core market(s) has become saturated. This belief is due in part to the information that the senior management is receiving from the IT department. It’s the CIO’s responsibility to evaluate the data that his/her department is producing and understand what it is saying. Just because it looks like a market is all tapped out, does not necessarily mean that it is so. Instead, this is when the CIO needs to work closely with the marketing team to find different ways to measure the market.

The second cause of a firm leaving a successful market is because they feel that there are operational impediments in their core business model. This happens when senior management just despairs of being able to solve business problems that are currently confronting the company. Instead of trying to solve them, they instead decide to move to other markets which won’t have the same problems. Once again, the CIO and the IT department play a big role in this decision. There should be no business problems that the IT department can’t help the rest of the company come to grips with. Whether it’s tracking sales and who is buying products more closely or collecting data on how the competition is doing, the IT department can help to create solutions to almost any business problem.

Leaving a successful market is never a good idea. IT staff should be on the alert whenever they start to hear the word “mature” being used to describe the company’s business situation. IT has a role to play in making sure that the company sticks with markets and customers that will serve it for a long time.

Have you ever worked for a firm that left it’s successful market in search of greener pastures? How did this all turn out in the end? Has a IT department in which you worked ever been able to stop a company from making a bad business direction decision? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in business, business opportunity, CIO, leadership, new profit | 3 Comments »