Posts Tagged ‘strategic planning’

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CIOs Need To Learn: Plans = Bad, Decisions = Good

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
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There's Got To Be A Better Way To Make Strategic Decisions

There's Got To Be A Better Way To Make Strategic Decisions

When you are CIO you will quickly come to dread (or maybe you already do) the annual strategic planning process for the IT department. Talk about choices: mobile devices, privacy issues, cloud computing – who can pack strategic planning for all of these issues into one short period at the beginning of the year – there’s got to be a better way…

Why The Way That We Do It Today Is Broken

CIOs know that they have a problem when it comes to strategic planning – it just doesn’t work in most IT departments. What they don’t understand is why it’s broken. Michael Mankins is a consultant who has been studying the way that firms make strategic decisions, and he thinks that he knows where we’re going wrong.

He believes that IT departments are making two fundamental mistakes when it comes to strategic planning. The first is that we treat this type of planning as an annual process. The problem is that issues that need us to make strategic decisions seem to come up all throughout the year, this leaves us unable to make key decisions when we need to.

The other mistake is that all too often we focus on individual IT silos when we make strategic decisions (network, data centers, applications, security, etc.). Instead, we need to be operating at a higher level and looking at what such a decision means for the IT department as a whole.

A Better Way For CIOs To Make Decisions

What is needed is a better way for CIOs and their IT departments to make strategic decisions. In order for this to happen, the way that we go about making these types of decisions needs to be changed.

First, we need to consider strategic decision making to be a separate task from plan making. This means that we will be able to start up a strategic planning session at any time during the year without having to tie it to the overall planning process. Based on the decisions that are made in the strategic planning session, we can then go back and make modifications to our plans. However, by separating these two activities we can allow them to process independently of each other.

When we do strategic planning, we need to make sure that we limit ourselves to dealing with only a few key issues. This means that instead of allowing ourselves to get bogged down in having to step through each of our IT silos, we instead move the discussion up a level and focus on what it means to the IT department as a whole.

Strategic planning does not happen at a single point in time each year – instead we need to be able to do it at any time. By arranging things so that issues can be discussed throughout the year, this will allow the discussions to be able to focus on a more limited number of items and that should help the discussions reach better conclusions.

Finally, we need to make sure that we don’t just do a lot of talking about strategic issues – we need to make real decisions. By clearly defining what will be discussed and keeping the discussion focused on the issue at hand, CIOs can ensure that good discussions result in great decisions that cause real actions to be taken.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs put a great deal of time and energy in to annual strategy planning sessions; however, the results of these efforts are often ignored. More often than not major strategic decisions are made more off the cuff. In order to change this situation, CIOs need to do away with the limitations of time and vertical IT business units.

Instead, CIOs need to separate the process of making strategic decisions from the planning process. This allows both to continue without being blocked by one another. They need to limit the focus of the strategy planning session in order to ensure that the right decisions can be made. Finally, they need to establish a system so that strategy decisions can be made throughout the year, not just at the beginning.

As IT becomes an ever increasingly important part of every company, CIOs need to reshape the way that their IT department makes strategic decisions. By making the changes that we’ve discussed, CIOs will find that they can make more (and better) strategic decisions throughout the year. This will allow their IT department to do what it was originally designed to do – help the company do more and do it more quickly.

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

Question For You: How many items do you think should be considered during an IT strategic planning meeting?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How long until you end up in jail? They say that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, so it sure seems as though just about every CIO will eventually become corrupted. How far along that path are you? Would it help if you had a chance to talk to someone who had already screwed up – do you think that maybe what they’d have to say might cause you to sit up, take notice, and stop doing bad things and start doing the right things?

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Posted in decisions | 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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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 »

What CIOs Need To Know About Performance Management

Monday, April 13th, 2009
Companies Don't Need Business Intelligence Without Performance Management

Companies Don't Need Business Intelligence Without Performance Management

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past couple of years, you’ve probably had a chance to read about the Business Intelligence (BI) fad that seem to have taken over the IT market.

The basic idea is pretty simple: use an application to crunch all of that complicated data that you’ve been gathering and present a simple dashboard to the CEO or whomever is making decisions. If the light on the dashboard is green, then the business is doing well. If its red, then he / she needs to make some changes. As with all such things in life, cool tools often turn out to have a downside.

It turns out that BI tools and the reports that they generate are IT centric. This means that the rest of the company agrees that they look cool, but they don’t find them as useful as we would like them to. It turns out that what they’d really like to have is performance management (PM) tools.

Performance management is defined by business needs and it provides the business’ decision makers with the data that they require in order to make the right moves in order to execute the business’ strategy.

PM shows up in a bunch of different places inside of the company. You’ll see it in the budgeting & financial processes (there it’s called “corporate” or “financial” PM). You can also find it on the operational side of the house. This is where BI is used to get more insights into supply chains, sales, customer service, etc.

I guess the easiest way to communicate the difference is to point out that BI is often about dashboards and scorecards. BI has been based on things that can be collected and measured. Where PM differs, is that it’s based on where the company WANTS to go.

This means that PM tools have to be created by consolidating  disparate data that is often stored in planning / budgeting spreadsheets. Then these planning activities and strategies then need to be transformed by both the business and IT into scorecards and key performance indicators (KPI).

The thing that sets PM apart from BI is that the information that IT collects to support a PM process is tied to a model or a framework for measuring performance. In finance, this model is the company’s budget. However, once you move outside of finance then IT and the business need to work together to create a budget that they can both live with.

Does your company currently use BI tools? Are they useful or are they just a set of pretty dashboards that sit around? Do you make use of performance management? Does your IT department work with the business to create performance management processes? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in business alignment | 1 Comment »

Can’t We All Just Get Along (In IT)?

Monday, January 26th, 2009
IT Departments Need To Work With Colleagues In Other Firms To Understand Technology

IT Departments Need To Work With Colleagues In Other Firms To Understand Technology

So there you are, manning the laptop, doing your utmost best to guide your IT department and, of course, your company on to greater glories. Do you really need to network with your colleagues at other firms? For that matter, do they really have anything to teach you?

Peter Whatnell over at Sunoco has some thoughts on this subject. Whatnell is a bright guy: he’ s been in charge of Sunoco’s IT operations since 2001 (remember the dot.com crash?) and he is now the president of the Society for Information Management. Ben Worthen over at the Wall Street Journal recently had a chance to sit down with Peter and have a chat about the importance of remembering to look outside the company for ideas.

Whatnell makes the good point that the colleagues that you network with don’t even have to be in the same industry as yourself. As an example, if you talk with someone who is working in IT for the construction industry and they start to mention how they are starting to use mobile devices to quickly distribute design changes, then you may have found an idea that you can use in your neck of the woods.

One of the big questions that we all deal with is “am I giving away competitive information if I talk shop with a colleague from another firm?” Whatnell makes the point that by now we should all be able to realize that what makes our firms competitive is not the underlying technology that we use. Talking about technology is not going to reveal any big company secrets.

What makes our firms competitive is how we go about using these pieces of technology in order to solve the problems that our firm is facing. This means that even if you and your competitor have access to the same technology, you’ll end up putting it together much differently.

Whatnell believes that the true source of a competitive advantage is knowing exactly how you can use IT to help make your business more successful. One interesting way to do this is to ask key executives how the firm makes money. If they don’t know, then this is an area that IT can help simplify.

In these tough times, it’s interesting to hear what Whatnell has to say about what his biggest challenge is. Sunoco is an oil company – it’s a commodity business that’s competing in a mature market. In order for Sunoco to be successful, the firm is going to have to find a way to become THE low cost provider.

What this means for IT is that we need to find ways to help the business side of the house cut expenses, reduce cycle times, and improve their overall agility. The goal should be to avoid having IT being told to just “cut your budget to help our bottom line.”

In the end, Whatnell says that an IT department needs to have earned its credibility within the company in order to be able to be able to contribute to helping the company reduce costs. The key here is that you need to have already earned this credibility.

Do you routinely meet and talk with colleagues that work outside of your firm? Do some of these colleagues work in different industries? Does your IT department have the ability to work with the rest of the business to trim costs? Do you feel that your IT department has the credibility that it will need to have these discussions with the rest of the business? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in it strategy | 3 Comments »

3 Secrets That Oil Companies Use To Run A Great IT Department

Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Peter Whatnell, CIO of Sunoco, Has Some Interesting Thoughts On How To Run A Successful IT Department

Peter Whatnell, CIO of Sunoco, Has Some Interesting Thoughts On How To Run A Successful IT Department

If you had to guess as to what the secret of running a great IT department is, what would you say? Peter Whatnell over at Sunoco has some thoughts on this subject. Peter breaks it down to three key items: knowing how your company makes money, choosing to not run against the company’s culture, and remembering to never fall in love with technology. How hard can that be?

Whatnell is a bright guy: he’ s been in charge of Sunoco’s IT operations since 2001 (remember the dot.com crash?) and he is now the president of the Society for Information Management. Ben Worthen over at the Wall Street Journal recently had a chance to sit down with Peter and have a chat about the role that an IT department plays in a company’s success.

Whatnell pointed out that the arrival of a global recession has caused all IT departments to take any plans that they had created prior to the end of August and basically throw them away. The big hit is going to be especially felt in new projects.

The difference between current events and the dot.com crash that happened back in 2001 is that that crash really only impacted the IT community. This time around, it’s really a global meltdown and it’s impacting the whole business.

IT is facing a significant challenge in that there is now a lot of easy-to-use IT technology that is available to consumers. Examples include the iPhone (of course!) and free on-line email accounts with virtually unlimited storage. What this means is that corporate users are now expecting to see similar products available to them while they are at work.

IT departments have some valid security and support issues for not diving headlong into offering such services internally. However, they do need to seriously consider how to offer their customers such services.

Whatnell stresses that we need to make sure that we don’t “…waste a good crisis.” What he means by this is that 2009 is going to be tough and it’s going to force every IT department to investigate nontraditional ways of delivering IT services.

Whatnell is somewhat famous for saying that he’d consider moving to a cheaper alternative, such as Google’s email system, if he could get 90% of the functionality for 10% of the cost. One of the reasons that he’s taken this stance is because he realizes that most users only scratch the surface of the functionality of the applications that they have available to them. Give the power users access to the fancy, expensive version of the apps and give everyone else the basic version.

Whatnell has some very specific thoughts when it comes to evaluating potential IT projects. He says that he evaluates projects based on what they do to support the company’s strategy, what the business case is, and finally, what the business risk is.

He points out that the more change that an IT project would cause to how business is conducted, the bigger the risk is. This does not mean that you don’t do the IT project, but that you need to be very careful and make sure that you give your full attention to all of the change management activities that would be required.

What do you think about what Peter has to say? Do you think that his view from inside an oil company is relevant to the rest of the IT industry? Which of his suggestions do you think is the most important? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in it strategy | 10 Comments »

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