Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

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3 Ways To Fix An IT Department (Suggestions From Europe)

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

An European Consulting Company Has Some Ideas About How To Organize Your IT Department

An European Consulting Company Has Some Ideas About How To Organize Your IT Department

Kuppinger Cole + Partner (KCP) is a European consulting firm that specializes in identity management. So it goes without saying that they spend their time in and out of multiple IT departments on a daily basis. They know all of our dirty little secrets. One of their founders, Martin Kuppinger has been doing some thinking about how to fix IT departments…

Martin starts out his thinking with some pretty basic suggestions. Specifically, he thinks that IT should be limited in what tasks it performs: do what the company wants you to do and nothing else. Now he follows this up with some clarification: an IT department needs to be able to support new business initiatives, provide insights on how the company is running, and keep itself lean and mean.

I’m pretty much in agreement with Martin, except for one thing. IT is not like accounting: in IT things change and they have a tendency to change quickly. I believe that an IT department has a responsibility to always be pushing the envelope and trying out new things before the rest of the company does. How can you roll a Wiki service out to the company if the folks in IT have not played around with it for awhile in order to get to know its ins and outs?

Martin goes on to suggest that IT should be reorganized. He’s got some interesting thoughts here. He’s recommending that strategy be done in house by the IT department. Next he starts to whip out the acronyms like GRC (governance, risk management and compliance) when he says that part of IT needs to be keeping an eye on how the business is being run and providing reports to all who need them. Finally, he suggests that IT knowledge be decentralized and placed in the business organizations.

I’m going to go both ways here. I’m not sure if IT needs its own stand-alone strategy department. Instead, I believe that IT needs to participate in the strategy planning that is being done for the whole company. What I think is needed is an architecture department that the IT part of the strategy team reports to.

I’m all for having part of IT monitor the business and provide the business with the reports on how it is performing. This is a critical resource that too many businesses don’t know how to do well.

Finally, I think that Martin might be on to something when he suggests that parts of IT should be moved out and into the actual departments that we support. I’m always for getting closer to the customer. There are some tricky questions here about who these IT staffers would report to and how they would be evaluated at the end of the year.

Martin ends up talking about the need for a layer to exist between IT and the rest of the business. His thinking here is that what’s been missing from IT is some sort of business control by which IT can be managed.

Once again, I think that he’s got some interesting ideas here, but I think that he’s missing the mark. I always get nervous when I hear people talking about “layers” because that sure doesn’t seem like the best way to streamline an organization. I do agree that an effective way for IT and the rest of the business to communicate is needed.

My thinking on how best to do that is where Martin and I differ. I believe that he’s hoping that implementation of standardization will result in smooth communications. I beg to differ. At the end of the day, communication will only occur if the proper motivations are put in place to help it along.

I’m just about out of space here, but my thinking goes like this: I believe that IT should be judged on results – how did ITs actions help the rest of the business to succeed? Likewise, I think that part of the way that the rest of the business should be judged is on how well they used the tools and information that IT provided them with.

Do you believe that Martin Kuppinger has the right idea? Do you think that IT should only do what the business asks of it? How should IT be organized in order to make it more efficient? Got any thoughts on how IT staff could be successfully placed in other departments? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in alignment | 2 Comments »

Does IHOP Have Tasty Lessons To Serve Up For IT?

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

IHOP's CIO Has Some Lessons For All CIOs Who Want A Seat At The Table

IHOP's CIO Has Some Lessons For All CIOs Who Want A Seat At The Table

I don’t know about you, but I’m always open to having breakfast no matter what time of day it is. This might explain why so much of my life has been spent sitting in IHOP restaurants eating mountains of pancakes. When I stumbled across an interview with IHOP’s CIO in eWeek magazine, I was of course interested…

Patrick Piccininno became IHOP’s CIO way back in 2003. He’s got some interesting thoughts on what it takes to get and keep a CIO as a part of a company’s strategy team. Piccininno agrees that just to get the CIO a seat at the table has been a long fought battle.

He believes that in order for a CIO to keep his/her seat at the table, they need to make sure that they are not a wallflower – they actually have to be participating members in planning the corporate strategy and they need to be willing to work with the CEO and the other members of the executive team.

Here’s the key take-away for all of us IT lovers: Piccininno states that in his experience, a CIO needs to take off his/her technology hat and instead put on their business hat. When working with other members of the executive team it’s critital the that CIO focus on those transformational initiatives that will help the company to achieve its business results.

Piccininno believes that what the rest of the company really wants from the IT department is to simply believe that they are in good hands – that the IT infrastructure will support whatever needs to be done to grow the business.

I think that we’ve all heard this kind of talk before, but it can be very difficult to understand exactly how to put it into effect in the real world. Piccininno offered an example that provided a good case study.

Back in July of 2007, IHOP announced that it was going to buy the Applebee’s restaurant chain. This was a big deal – it was valued at about US$2.1B. As Piccininno points out, a key part of the decision to go ahead and buy Applebee’s rested on the ability of the IHOP IT department to be able to successfully integrate two sets of disparate systems and environments quickly in order to reduce costs.

In order for IHOP’s IT department to be able to support this large scale merger, they needed to have made and implemented key IT infrastructure decisions a long time ago. Because they had made these decisions, the CIO was able to play his role in supporting the company’s strategy for purchasing Applebee’s.

The business world that we all find ourselves living in these days sure seems to have become more complex. We’ve got new regulations to live with including Sarbanes-Oxley and General Computing Controls. What all of this means to a business is that IT is now up in front and center of how the business is run. Without including IT in the planning of the company’s future direction, there is a great chance that the rest of the company won’t be able to find their way…

Do you feel that IT has a “seat at the table” at your firm? Does your CIO have the ability to talk tech with the IT staff and then turn around and talk business with the rest of the firm? Do you feel that your IT department does a good job of supporting the rest of the firm or are you constantly holding them back? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in CIO | 2 Comments »

What Can IT Become When It Grows Up?

Thursday, January 29th, 2009
IT Has A Lot Of Potential; However We Still Don't Know What We Want To Be When We Grow Up

IT Has A Lot Of Potential; However We Still Don't Know What We Want To Be When We Grow Up

So I love IT, and you love IT. We love the applications, the servers, the networks and, of course, the Internet. Whether it’s because we are closet control freaks or because we are fascinated by how all of the pieces fit together, we just love it. I’m not saying that love is a bad thing, but at the end of the day IT exists to help the company be successful ( = make more money).

Michael Vizard over at Ziff Davis has been thinking about our love life just a bit and he’s come up with some interesting thoughts about where we need to be taking this relationship.

In the end, it all revolves around data – or as we like to call it using fifty-cent words, information. By now, just about everybody realizes that there is no shortage of information (just take a look around your office: there are piles of information EVERYWHERE!) What is missing is knowledge – and the only way to get knowledge is to process all of that data and squeeze the knowledge out of it.

Michael believes that we in IT need to get our act together. The rest of the organization is waiting for us to provide them with the relevant knowledge that they need in order to make good decisions. This means that there are five IT developments that we need to do a good job of managing over the next few years in order to truely make IT valuable to the rest of the business:

  1. Locate A Good Search Tool: Just as we have too much information in our personal lives, so too do businesses have too much information stored in all of their different intranets. They may not be able to say it in so many words, but the rest of the business is desperately looking to IT to provide an enterprise search tool that will help them to find what they need.
  2. Smart Middleware: The days of logging into one application, entering data, and then logging into another application to enter the same data are soooo over. If I can upload my Microsoft Outlook email contact book into my new Gmail email account, then why can’t I load my product catalog into my marketing database just as easily? Smart middleware will allow all of a firm’s applications to share information and thereby will allow a complete view of the business to be provided.
  3. BI,BI Baby: Finally Business Intelligence tools have become powerful enough to mine those bloated databases and provide all sorts of different users with specific answers to detailed questions about what is working and what isn’t.
  4. The Blog Has Arrived: Remember all those fancy “knowledge management” applications that software firms tried to sell everyone back in the 90′s? It turns out that what we really needed was a good blogging platform and permission to  write our little hearts out. Once problems and solutions are blogged about, then the blogs can be mined by search tools and the information shared throughout the firm.
  5. Stop Repeating Yourself: If I worked for a storage company, these would be the best of times – everybody is storing everything. Deduplication software is only now starting to arrive which will allow us to just store one copy of everything and this should finally stop the storage madness.

Most firms now realize that IT will be a critical factor in their future success. It’s only by leveraging what IT can bring to the table that a firm can beat its competition while satisfying its customers. The challenge is that IT is going to have to find some way to bring all of these different technologies together in order to make the company successful. But that’s ok, because we love this stuff…

What enterprise search tool do you use today? How do you link your applications together (or do you)? Do you use BI tools? Is blogging permitted and supported in your department? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in it strategy | 12 Comments »

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 »

Creative Abrasion: How To Build Innovation Into IT

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
A discussion about innovation reveals how far we've come and how far we have to go.

A discussion about innovation reveals how far we've come and how far we have to go.

While trolling the Internet over the holidays, I came across a write-up of the Unstructure Event held that was held Orlando, Florida, USA on 17 Nov & 18 Nov 2008.

Unstructure is basically a platform for open discussions on a wide range of business topics. They had a face-to-face meeting back in November. What caught my eye is that they spent some time discussing one of my favorite topics, IT and business innovation.

If you need a great quote on how IT leaders need to behave, you can always count on Nelson Mandela:

“A leader… is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go on ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind” – Nelson Mandela.

During Unstructure conference, Linda Hill from the Harvard Business School, ran a panel that included four panelists from companies such as Cisco, Powerwave, Smiths Medical and another academician from Carnegie Mellon.

The panel’s primary focus was on trying to answer the question “How can an IT department unlock innovation within the organization?”

Sure, a manger can tell / force the people who work for him/her to do things and that will cause things to occur. However, a true leader can create a world that people want to belong to, to harness talent and diverse slices of genius of people around who need to affirm individual identity and allow them to contribute to the larger goal. That’s the difference between a manger and a leader.

I think that Linda Hill hit it on the head when she said that: There is a need for collective work through creative abrasion, creative agility, integrative problem solving, sense of belonging and civic engagement. Amplify differences and leverage them as resources even though it does not feel good. A person needs to feel a part of a community to want to give them his/her slice of genius, else it makes them vulnerable.

Linda also said that: Innovation happens when artistry blends with Engineering. It takes both sides of the mind, and different disciplines or specialists working together to breed innovation.  When Imagination meets Engineering Precision, this makes for a positive impact and changes the way the world lives, works, plays and Learns.

From an IT point-of-view, the question is will technology play a role? We all know that the answer is yes! The next wave of innovation will be captured through collaboration and connecting ideas inside out and outside of the IT department.

As much as we’d all like to have our IT departments be known as being innovative, the question remains: how? Speakers on the Unstructure panel said that innovation cannot be nurtured in a streamlined process. An example of this was  the campaign run by Barack Obama in the elections where several new channels were used to run the campaign.

Good discussions all around – my hat is off to the the folks over at Unstructure. It appears as though it’s still not clear how we can transform an IT department into a smooth running innovation machine. However, we seem to be asking the right questions and we are making progress in working towards finding an answer that will work for us all.

Do you feel that your IT department is innovative? Do you have a way of using creative abrasion to make sure that nobody gets “too comfortable” with the way that things are? What steps are you taking to make your IT environment more open to innovative thoughts? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in innovation | 1 Comment »

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