Posts Tagged ‘success’

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 »

Why Don’t IT Alliances Work Out?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

IT Department Alliances Can Make Everyone Stronger - If They Are Done Correctly

IT Department Alliances Can Make Everyone Stronger - If They Are Done Correctly

You would think that the more alliances that your company / IT department makes with other firms, then the better that they would become at making them. After all, practice makes perfect – doesn’t it? It turns out that this is not always the case.

Koen Heimeriks has spent time studying 200 firms that had formed more than 3,400 alliances. What he has found just might surprise you.

He found that those firms that had the most experience striking up alliances actually had worse results when compared to those firms who had moderate experience.

Why the difference? It turns out that there are two problems that develop in firms that already have  a number of alliances:

  1. they have a tendency to become overconfident in their alliance building skills, and
  2. they can develop learnings about alliances that are in actuality based on unsupported ideas about cause and effect.

So what can make an IT department’s alliance with another firm actually work out well? It turns out that it’s the methods and procedures that the firm uses to create alliances that will determine their eventual success. Established firms that already have many alliances will probably have rigid and inflexible business processes for making decisions and selecting partners.

However, IT departments with fewer existing alliances will have more flexibility built into their processes. An example of this would be where employees who have worked on previous alliances share information with the employees who are trying to create a new alliance. This type of discussion can lead to experimentation and allows novel approaches to each alliance opportunity.

So in the end, what does all of this lead to? Heimeriks reports that the larger firms who had many alliances and a more rigid alliance creation process had an alliance success rate of around 50%. Those firms that had fewer alliances and a more flexible alliance creation process had an alliance success rate of around 71%. Sure looks like flexible processes are the key to successful IT alliances!

Does your IT department have any alliances with outside firms? Would you say that you have a lot or a few of these alliances? Are they generally successful or not so successful? Do you feel that your alliance creation processes are fixed or flexible? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in process | 2 Comments »

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 »

Are CIOs Looking Down When They Should Be Looking Up?

Thursday, November 6th, 2008
CIOs Should Be Looking Up At Strategic Goals, Not Down At Tactile Ones

CIOs Should Be Looking Up At Strategic Goals, Not Down At Tactile Ones

Rob Preston over at Information Week was talking about some interesting CIO studies that were done recently and what they show is that it looks like CIOs are not spending their time where they should be. As the U.S. (and the rest of the world!) sufferers through a financial downturn, you’d think that everyone would be trying to show just how valuable they are to the company. Sadly, in the case of CIOs it doesn’t look like this is happening…

The surveys of CIOs showed that “IT / Business Alignment” is still a top priority for CIOs. Now what makes this interesting is that this has been on the top of CIOs to-do list for a very long time. Preston makes the point that he is hoping that internal alignment between IT shops and their business counterparts has already occurred. He is hoping that what CIOs are talking about is taking IT / business alignment to the next step and extending it down the supplier path and perhaps even reaching out to align with the customer. I hear his frustration; however, I don’t think that internal alignment has actually occurred yet, but more about that later on.

One of the pieces of good news that came from the survey of CIOs was that items such as “IT strategic planning” have moved up CIOs to-do list. The hope is that if IT departments are involved in these types of activities, then as things get tighter due to the economic downturn IT funding won’t be slashed as much as it has been in the past. When IT projects are seen as “nice to have” instead of “must have”, it’s far easier for a firm to take money away from an IT department.

The biggest concern that came out of the two CIO surveys that Preston talks about are how the CIOs identified how their departments were contributing to the overall success of their firms. You would be hoping to hear some solid business thinking here; however, that was not the case. Instead, traditional IT tasks such as maintaining existing systems, ensuring network operation, deploying large-scale systems, reducing costs by automating processes, etc. If you read though this list with a careful eye, you’ll notice that any one of these tasks could be done by an outsourcing firm just as well as a captive IT shop.

What does all of this mean? To put it simply, CIOs get that they need to do a better job of becoming part of the business. When they think long term, they are working to figure out how they can make their IT department help the business to succeed. However, the problem comes in the short term. Too many IT departments are focused on doing what they have always been doing – the comfortable stuff. The problem seems to be that nobody, CIOs included, really knows how to get from here (present time) to there (IT / business alignment nirvana). That’s sorta sad because the steps are pretty clear to me. They start out like this:

  1. Business Wins: IT needs to accept that it needs to become more like the rest of the business, not the other way around. IT is just one department, the rest of the business is much bigger and they make the money. Enough said.
  2. Subject Matter Experts Rule: IT staff need to spend some serious time learning everything that they can about the business that they are working in. No matter if you work with food, drugs, cars, or glass, everyone in IT needs to understand how that industry operates from top to bottom.
  3. Learn To Make Life Easier For The Business: IT exists to make life easier for the business – so show it! Specifically, IT should understand how the business runs so that it can identify and automate business processes that slow the business down.
  4. Speak The Language Of Business: Develop the ability to speak the language of the industry! This is how the rest of the company communicates and it’s high time that the IT department gets on board. Stop talking about version control, requirements gathering, maintenance upgrades, server consolidation because the rest of the company doesn’t have a clue what you are talking about. Instead talk about revenue, customer retention, driving sales growth, and bottom line results.

Hopefully the next time a bunch of CIOs are surveyed, they’ll have the right set of “looking up” priorities that are being used to manage their short term actions.

Does your IT department have a tactical or a strategic focus? Does your team have a good understanding of the industry that you are working in or is everyone just really good at “IT stuff”? What do you think that it would take to transform your IT shop into a business driver for your firm? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in CIO | 5 Comments »

Time To Think About IT In A New Way

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

How To Align IT With The Business
In the past, the IT department was left alone and was only noticed if something stopped working (like email!) However, in the 21st Century IT has become a critical part of how business competes. The problem is that very few firms have figured out how to evolve from treating IT as a simple cost center to using it as a competitive advantage.

If you are looking for a quick and easy solution, sorry — it just doesn’t exist. However, there are some very specific, concrete things that innovative IT departments are doing that can dramatically change how a business thinks about IT. The key is to align what the IT department and its staff do with what the rest of the business does in order to create a more powerful firm. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Well it’s not. But now you’ve found this blog and we can spend some time talking about how to make what seems impossible to happen.

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Posted in alignment, business, IT, success | 3 Comments »