Other CIO Bloggers

When I started writing it was in part because I couldn't find anyone else of my ilk blogging. That is, there were lots of people writing about CIO's or at CIO's but precious few who actually were CIO's writing for their peers.

Nice to find a few more this morning, thanks to Abbie Lundberg's post this morning at CIO.com.

Do you Bento? Mac OS X software

Anybody try out Bento from Filemaker? I downloaded it recently and played around with it but just couldn't get all that excited. To me, there's not much added value over just running the iCal, Mail and Address Book.

What I am in the market for is a better way to link my task manager (I use iGTD today) to a website so that I can track and manage tasks while at work. Any suggestions?

AND I recently installed Leopard. Piece of cake. About 45 minutes and I was done. A couple of apps needed to be updated to work properly but that's it. Not nearly the headache I had installing Windows Vista on one of my PCs. Though I do confess that the Vista upgrade was by far the easiest Windows upgrade I've ever done.

Seattle CIO Forum Part Deux!

We're very nearly ready to send out invites to the next CIO Forum in Seattle. The focus of this one is to explore what makes for good and not-so-good CIO-CFO relationships.

At least 50% of the CIO's job is to build and maintain excellent relationships with the peers in the executive ranks. It's been my experience that you can get all the others "right" but failing to build a strong working relationship with the CFO will at best hinder your ability to carry out the technology agenda. I've been fortunate to be able to work with some excellent CFO's over the years and built solid relationships that allowed for executing on the strategic initiatives needed by the business.

The date is January 23 at the Harbor Club in Seattle. My friends at Sierra Systems have agreed to pick up the tab and help with logistics, while avoiding any sales pitches. They're a class act and I couldn't pull this off without them!

Drop me a line if you are interested in joining us.

P.S. There's been interest expressed in hosting a similar forum in other cities. If that's something you'd like to discuss, let me know.

Risk Management

I've started writing a post about this topic and thought I'd ask for input (anybody listening?). It's a subject I think gets far too little real consideration as we define, sell, manage projects.

What rules of thumb do you use? Tools?

One I've been thinking about adding to our tool box is the spider or radar chart (at right, from Managed Care Magazine). There are a number of dimensions to consider including customer/user tolerance for risk. Working with users to define in advance what the key dimensions are then mapping the proposed technology solution over the map can help clearly identify where we need to pay attention, build contingency plans, communicate with the user.

More to come but what's your take on this topic?

Currently reading.......

Wikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams
Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell & Patrick Robinson

Up next

The Kite Runner
Social Intelligence

Rules of Thumb - Process

Maybe it's just the companies I've worked in as CIO but process often gets a bad name in the context of IT governance. Even companies such as FedEx with a very strong process culture within the Operations environment were initially reluctant (put mildly) to put a structured governance process in place. A Sr. VP there, when I first introduced a resource management process, told me that she didn't appreciate being "second-guessed".

The issue I think almost always comes down to a perception that IT process is meant to put up roadblocks. Process management should be the way to streamline everything from resource allocation and prioritization to delivering the products that the organization needs. Process provides not only a way to measure, manage and improve but to make the goings-on within IT transparent. Transparency is very often the one key ingredient that's missing. It provides management with the insight and confidence needed to determine the resources are being invested wisely.

Even developers can be reluctant to embrace process discipline. This can be as simple as check-in/check-out discipline to appropriate testing to time tracking. Time tracking is one I'm particularly sensitive to because I don't like feeling like someone's looking over my shoulder any more than anyone else. That said, I look at time tracking from the perspective of figuring out where we're spending our resources. The goal is two-fold (at a minimum): first you can't improve estimation without tracking and comparing actuals vs estimate; second the only way to ensure we're working on the right priorities is to track time. I don't mean every minute. For most efforts, measuring in increments less than 1/2 a day is too fine-grained to matter very much.

At every turn, process remains the way out of the chaos that often seems to envelope the high demand IT environment.

IT Strategy or How I Put a Mission Statement to Work

Earlier I wrote about Mission Statements and got enough comment that I thought I'd follow that up with a some thoughts on strategy. To me, strategy is the instantiation (isn't that a great word? Anyone other than geeks use it?) of your mission. It's the game plan for carrying out the organization's mission. How long is a strategy timeframe? I have a hard time thinking about a technology strategy that has a horizon of more than 2 years. Two years is an eternity in the technology world. Two years is about as long as the business side of the company can wait for the benefits. Have a time line longer than 2 years and you'll end up with multi-year projects and your chances of success drop significantly. That's a topic for another day.

So what should frame that strategy? Well at the risk of over-simplifying things, I think there are three pillars to build on; three key tenets to keep in mind as you formulate your strategy. All can be defined around the basic life blood of the company.

IT work has to either reduce costs, avoid costs, or increase revenue (and occasionally serve some truly regulatory requirements). What no focus on people????? Those of you who've worked for me know that I think and talk often about People and I'll be writing about that in the future as well. Treat your people poorly and you'll fail. As leadership, our job is to get the tools in place, including strategy, then knock down roadblocks for those that actually do something.

Look at your company's cost of goods sold (or equivalent for services companies). Look at what drives that number and begin to dig into the signficant components. For manufacturing companies, inventory is a high leverage target for reducing costs. Improving visibility to inbound materials can reduce the need for WIP, safety stock etc. For a commercial vehicle manufacturer I worked for, our ability to improve visibility to what was inbound resulted in millions in savings in inventory, which increased capacity by freeing up work space and reduced excess and obsolete charges. Do you think the CFO and CEO were interested?? As a result how hard was it to sell the next IT investment?

The successful CIO has to be able to think like a business-person. In many ways, we need to act like the COO, searching for opportunities to improve operations at every turn, whether through process, technology or people.

One of the blogs I read is Scott Wilson's CIO Weblog. I thought his post on the Mac in the corporate world was an interesting perspective, though as you can see from my comments, copied below, not one I agree with. That said what do others see?

"Hi Scott. My experience with corporate CIO's (I've been CIO or CTO for 3 companies in the last 10 years with revenue from $12B to $825M) is rather different than yours. In fact, I find that most IT executives (say direct reports to the CIO) have changed their perspective. I don't find any IT executive who is still consider the Mac 'amateurish'. Many of us use it personally and some professionally. The issue is a pragmatic one and comes down to two key points. One- what is the cost of managing a mixed environment? Two- will all of your apps run there. Beyond that, I think most of us (I'm a Mac-ophile to be sure) see the benefits of the Mac OS X Unix roots. Thanks for an interesting read!
Patrick Flynn"

Seattle CIO Forum

If I was smarter, I'd have posted about this event BEFORE it happened not afterwards. On Wednesday this week (Oct 24, 2007) I hosted the first of what we, in a stroke of creative marketing genius, called the "CIO Forum". Pretty clever isn't it?

About a dozen CIO's from the Puget Sound area met for lunch in Bellevue. I'd actually tried to set something up years ago while I was still at PACCAR. The common thread was a desire to be able to connect with others in the same role. The industries varied from banking to health care to agri-business. Leslie Pentland, former CIO for a number of organizations in the area and now a PhD focused on organizational development, took an impossibly hard task ("Distill down the literature around developing exceptional leadership in the CIO's direct reports") and did an outstanding job of giving the group some key takeaways.

The group's consensus was to continue the forum as a key networking opportunity. I'm thinking of tapping a couple of friends who are or were CFO's to discuss the keys to a succesful relationship between CIO and CFO.

Special thanks to Janice Colburne and Barbara Purrington at Sierra Systems for sponsoring this get together....even to the point of being very scrupulous about avoiding the temptation to turn it into an infomercial. Thanks Sierra Systems!

Let me know if you are interested in joining us or forming something similar in your area.

Whither the CIO

I started this post back in early August and it got lost in the draft folder.  So, while the referenced post is now a bit dated, the topic certainly isn't any less timely.

In a post on Brian Gillooly's CIO Nation Blog, Gregor Bailor, recently CIO at Capital One, said: As to where the CIO role goes... The use of IT is moving up the value chain and needs to be a part of "Business Design and Fulfillment" rather than "IT". This means that Operations and Technology groups are going to merge more. In addition, the e-commerce and customer interactions are so technology enabled now that they too need to be closely linked with IT strategy and process design. To this end, the new CIO role here will incorporate Enterprise Customer Management (all customer touch points and data), management of all Internet activities, Enterprise Process Engineering as well as all typical CIO functions."

A couple of thoughts came to mind while mulling this over and, since this is my blog, I figured I'd share them.

1. I generally agree with Gregor's perspective.  Having run both Content Operations and IT for Getty Images, I have some recent experience with just this kind of blended role. I was fortunate to have really superb leaders working for me which gave me the freedom to look down the road a bit to develop strategy and encourage taking more risks to gain more innovative solutions.  The Content Ops groups were heavily dependent on tools created by IT to really move the needle and I think it helped that both functions were aligned in one organization.  The teams were able to make process and quality improvements that were in some cases measured in an order of magnitude kind of way.
2. There are clearly going to be cases where the CIO's role is best filled by a focus on partnering with other functional leaders who are specialists in their fields rather than ownership.  I do think that the days where the CIO could "get away with" only taking responsibility for delivering a system to spec are very much in the past.  Partnering means not just sharing budget and sponsorship but should include being on the hook to deliver results as well. 
3. The days where successful companies could push IT underneath CFO or Chief Administrative Officer or somewhere else on the SG&A side of the business are gone.  Those companies still operating that way are unlikely to be leaders in their sectors as more and more customers expect that effective, customer-focused technology is part of the delivery of goods and services. 

It used to be that we argued about whether the CIO role was going to go away, subsumed into every functional organization because it was so important.  We seem to be headed the other way, to where the CIO role continues to be elevated in importance to the success of businesses. Perhaps it's the seperate COO role that's going away.....

Or is that just CIO daydreams??

IT Mission

For some organizations, formal Mission Statements are standard fare. Some organizations even go so far as to believe them, make them actionable and something that sheds light on where they need to go.

For IT in for-profit organizations, I think the Mission Statement can be neatly and succinctly captured - We make Money. Either directly or indirectly, the mission of every IT organization is to increase profits.

Sure you can add words to dress it up. You can include something that makes HR feel warm and fuzzy like valuing employees (or associates if you are in that kind of company). You can be sure it includes fashionable words like Innovation, Collaboration, other-ation. At the end though, it all boils down to making money whether you are publicly traded or privately held. Your raision d'etre is to participate in generating enough profit to meet the company's other goals. Being good corporate citizens, helping employees to earn a fair wage, and so on revolve around profit.....but this isn't an Economics blog, it's an IT Leadership blog.

Too many CIO's and IT executives wonder why they "don't have a seat at the table" or are in some other way marginalized by the rest of the business. Every executive I know of has a set of financial goals. Ask yourself a couple of questions:

• Do you know what your partners on the business side are tasked with achieving? If not, you are behind already.
  
• Can you clearly and in business terms express how IT is (or isn't) helping meet those goals? Can your business partner??
  
• What are your ideas for helping to grow the business? What does IT need to do? How much risk is there? Will something else have to give?
  
• Are you meeting your current obligations? What do the business leaders think about IT's performance? Honestly? If you aren't running the existing portfolio of IT products and services with excellence it's highly unlikely you'll get to talk about anything else. Don't waste your time and that of your partners. Fix things. If the trains don't run on time, you don't get to talk about new and exciting strategic projects. At the risk of mixing metaphors, your political capital account is at risk of being overdrawn.

The further up the org chart you are talking, the less important are the bits-and-bytes, speeds-and-feeds of technology. What matters are things like revenue, customer retention and satisfaction, quality, etc. Your technology strategy, tactics and performance should be wrapped with those business metrics. Your business partners don't really care about the how's of technology, they care about the impacts on their profitability. In Board presentations, I never use technology jargon, instead I use the same language and jargon that you'd hear from the heads of Sales, Marketing and Finance.

When you can clearly define the impact on the bottom-line of that next project, you'll find your opinions are being sought out by those who need that project.

Cool Tools

One of my favorite technology tools of late is a product called Personal Brain.
It allows me to quickly and easily capture thoughts on a variety of topics. I typically keep it open on my desktop all day long, using it as a repository of all kinds of ideas, reminders, books, music lists, family matters. I've even entered my family tree here.

The editor is quite capable, easily attaching files, pictures, hyperlinks, etc. Search is fast.
No interest in nor connection to the company whatsoever. Just a fan.
Interesting uses here.
Got something you like?

CLEARLY I'M NOT....

Dr. Gervase Bushe who's website is about Clear Leadership....but not about IT and not a blog.
or Harwell Thrasher who also has a book but adds a newsletter AND writes about IT but doesn't blog. He does offer a Free Gift. Interesting site.
I don't promise to Grow "..Leaders from the Inside Out" though it's a good idea.

Just thought I'd clarify....

PEOPLE- Rules of Thumb
I'm, in a show of naivete, surprised at how challenging it can be to post something on a regular basis. Regular being defined as something more frequently than once a week (or longer). Something being defined as reasonably intelligent and useful. So, working to get back on track.....

People. The most important predictor of a healthy, strong IT organization is the quality and energy of the people. Seems like a "motherhood and apple pie" kind of statement but what are the metrics we can use to indicate that quality?

Turnover is often used as a measure as are employee satisfaction survey results. While those can render good indicators of employee satisfaction, I don't think it's a very good measure of quality. At best I think you come up with clues about quality or its lack.

I look at turnover as a target range to strive to keep turnover within over a period of time. Too low, say below 5%, and we likely aren't being aggressive enough about managing poor performance. Too high- above 15% depending on location and industry- and we're likely losing talent and knowledge plus spending too much time in backfilling those positions.

Employee satisfaction surveys? Necessary for getting insight into how employees are feeling about their work, the company and their peers. Look for the trends and the outliers.

But here's a couple of key indicators I use that can tell a lot not just about the quality of individuals but the IT organization as a whole including perception by the business.

1. How many people, especially from the leadership team, have moved from IT into the business in the past 3, 6, 12, 18 months? And into the business in what capacity?
   
2. How many people from the business have applied for and been given key positions within IT?

If the answers are "Can't remember when." or a small and infrequent number, you have a problem. How can IT be a strategic and dynamic part of the business if no one wants to join the team from the rest of the business? How business savvy are your IT people if the business isn't trying to poach them?

What do you think? What's your experience been? What other kinds of Rules of Thumb do you find useful?

Over the years, I've been involved in some published research but forgot that I'd actually had something published!
Actually, it was just a chapter in a book but still kind of fun. I did learn that I shouldn't have left so much control to the editor. I ended up wishing I'd said a few things differently or had more time to expound on the subject at hand.

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A number of years ago now, while at PACCAR Inc, I was asked to speak at the quarterly Leadership Institute we held for mid-level managers and high potential employees. My assigned topic was Change Management. I'd been hired as PACCAR's first CIO in 1997 to help develop a world-class IT capability. In that role, I part of a significant upgrade in just about everything within PACCAR's IT Division. So speaking on the subject of Change Management would seem to be a natural.

But how to convey all that we'd done, how we'd approached the task and the pitfalls? A recent search on Amazon.com listed nearly 8,000 books on the subject. Clearly there's lots been said but CIO's and other IT leaders continue to struggle with how if you judge by the continued high churn rates. For better or worse, I thought I'd share what I said in those sessions.

If we are to be successful, we have to accept the challenge to not only manage change but to be a cause of it. Believe what you will about evolution (I won't debate it here!) but this quote is a favorite: “It is not the strongest of species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change”. Charles Darwin.

IT Leadership has a strategic imperative to continuously sponsor, manage, encourage and sometimes force change. There are three key areas: People, Products and Process. Change in what we produce and how we go about it are the Product and Process bits. The People side is the key however. Get the other two "right"- and a case can be made that it's not possible without the right People in the right roles- but neglect the People element and you've failed.

I'll take up the issue of People in the next few posts.

In a logical follow-on to my last post re: moving away from Microsoft Office there was an interesting article in Computerworld's online edition today (July 17).

I don't think by any means that every organization should ditch their existing Microsoft infrastructure for Apple or Linux or anything else. Wholesale replacement is an expensive proposition to say the least. Historically, however, little real thought's been given to considering how to eliminate or reduce some "fixed" costs. Challenging our assumptions is a key part of being a leader, especially for Technology leaders.

While at Getty Images, my team and I began to discuss ideas for how to eliminate and/or reduce our ongoing "fixed" costs.

First off, it's my opinion that there are few if any truly fixed costs in IT. There are many that are more or less semi-variable but few that are really fixed.

That aside, one of the places to we felt we could find savings was in the annual software license bucket. We began to think about how we could get out from under the Microsoft Office tax. Could we stop paying Software Assurance? What about maintenance of any kind? Once that stream of payments commences I don't many, if any, organizations who've stopped it.

Of late, I've been using NeoOffice 2.1 (yes, I'm a Mac user again, having begun with the first Mac and Apple IIe way back when). It does everything I need. I dutifully sent in a small donation and I'm never going back.

So why not the typical organization?

IT
Leadership

Why does it seem that those two words don't go together? Or at least not in the way that businesses, their leaders, their Boards, their customers and suppliers expect?
And haven't we been talking about this problem for 20 years or more? Since the dawn of IT time?

Additionally, I've talked with a number of colleagues about the challenge to identify and develop the next generation of IT leaders. These folks may be our direct reports today. The challenge exists both inside "captive" IT groups and the consulting side of the industry.

These are two of the topics I plan on exploring in this blog. Since I don't have all the answers, I'm hoping to engage the IT and business community in discussing how we meet the challenges ahead.

What do you think is the number one reason that IT Leadership continues to be such a challenge?