Posts Tagged ‘support’

5 Things That CIOs Need To Stop Doing

Monday, June 15th, 2009

CIOs Need To Stop Doing Things That Hold The Company Back

CIOs Need To Stop Doing Things That Hold The Company Back

I firmly believe that the reason that any firm has a CIO is so that they have someone who can drive the company’s IT department to provide services and support that will enable the rest of the business to grow faster. It really is that simple – if you can leverage your IT department to support what the business is trying to do, then you’ll be more successful. Of course, this only works if the CIO is doing his / her job…

First You Need Respect

Bob Evans (no, not the breakfast sausage Bob Evans) over at InformationWeek has been thinking about why, of all of a company’s senior leadership, CIOs seem to be the ones who get the least amount of respect.

His conclusions are that the world at large believes that CIOs lack the business skills that are needed in order to have a seat at a company’s strategy steering table. It doesn’t help that all too often CIOs tend to talk using technology terms that seem to go right over the heads of the rest of the business.

If CIOs are to take the reins of the IT department and turn it into the engine that allows the rest of the company to move faster, then there are 5 things that they need to STOP doing.

#1: Stop Avoiding Customers

In order to provide the firm with the tools and services that it needs to meet the needs of its current and potential customers, CIOs need to be spending time meeting with customers. It’s all too easy to become focused on internal issues, cost cutting, and staffing challenges. Get out and talk to customers in order to find out what you REALLY need to be doing to support the company.

#2: Stop Avoiding Change

It is all too easy for an incoming CIO to adopt the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mentality. However, even as you read this the world is being changed by the arrival of Twitter, the long rumored Apple tablet PC, etc. Changes of this magnitude mean that everything must be constantly reconsidered by the CIO in order to find ways to allow the company to move faster and perform better.

#3: Stop Doing Projects Based On “Gut Feel”

Microsoft is getting ready to come out with a new operating system. Should the firm upgrade all of its PCs? Good question. The answer lies in another question: how would upgrading those PCs help the company achieve its business goals? Could the money be spent on something else that would do a better job of achieving those goals? It’s the ability to justify projects based on solid business reasons and not “gut feel” that has been missing from the way that CIOs have been doing business.

#4: Stop Spending So Much On Support

We’re not just talking about money here, we’re also talking about time. Everyone seems to be hung up on the 80/20 rule when it comes to support / new business. Over at HP they’ve found a way to do it, so why can’t everyone else?

#5: Stop Supporting Stereotypes Of CIOs

Evans points out that both at the online version of CIO magazine as well as over at Fortune magazine, disparaging things have been said about the role that CIOs play in firms. CIOs need to stand up and push back – as long as reporters and press are allowed to push them around, they will. CIOs need to start to publicize the fact that their departments are powerful enablers that the firm desperately needs in order to stay ahead of the pack.

Final Thoughts

No senior leadership position is easy to perform these days. However, CIOs have the double burden of having to stay in front of a rapidly changing technological wave as well as being intimately connected to what’s going on in the firm’s business. This can be done; however, in order to be successful, CIOs need to stop doing things that produce more harm than good.

Questions For You

How often does your CIO meet with customers: once a week, once a month, or once in a blue moon? Does your CIO talk about change or does he/she actually cause it to happen? Does your CIO have the ability to turn off the technology talk and turn on the business talk? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Coming Up Next Time

The role of a  CIO in any organization is to find ways to enable the company to be more successful. 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…

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IT Work Split: The New 80/20 Rule

Monday, May 11th, 2009
IT Departments Need To Apply The 80/20 Rule To Support Work

IT Departments Need To Apply The 80/20 Rule To Support Work

Pity the poor CIO – he manages a team of professionals that do great work, but he / she rarely gets any credit for a job well done. Why you ask? Well an unfortunate comparison can be made to the maintenance staff that takes care of the building that your work in. It’s great that they keep everything up and working and looking good, but how often do you ever really think about them?

What’s missing here is for CIOs to determine what the right work split is for their team. No matter what we do, there is always going to be some support and maintenance work to be done, but how much is too much?

HP’s CIO Randy Mott was facing this problem when he came on board a few years ago and he’s moved quickly to try to resolve it.

Chris Murphy over at InformationWeek had a chance to sit down with Randy and ask some questions about how he’s gone about getting his team to work on the things that really count.

When Mott first joined HP the IT department was spending about 70% of its time doing support work – keeping the network up, resetting passwords, recovering deleted files, etc. This meant that only 30% of their time was being spent doing things that moved the company forward.

So did Mott do? First he cut his IT payroll almost in half – they went from 19,000 staff (50/50 contractors and employees) down to under 10,000 (90% of which are employees). The thinking here is that if you are just doing support, it really doesn’t matter who doing the job, contractor or employee, as long as it gets done. However, if you are doing mission critical system development, then the person doing the work had better be an employee so that you’ll have continuity.

The way that Mott figured out who to keep and who to let go was by documenting what everyone was doing. Once a week folks would stop and document what they had been working on that week. The thought was that if you don’t have good data on what folks are doing, then you can’t make good decisions about what they SHOULD be doing.

One other key change that HP made is in how they define work. There are only two buckets these days: support or “new development”. No middle ground is permitted so say goodbye to “enhancements”.

In the end, Mott’s been able to get his work split to a 70 / 30 mix. It’s not quite the 80 / 20 that he’s shooting for, but he’s getting close. This approach also allowed Mott to get enough data to be permitted to decommission some popular but high maintenance applications. How many other IT departments wish that they could do that?

What is the work split between support and new development in your department? What would you like it to be? What steps are you taking to reduce the amount of time that your team spends on support activities? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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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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