Getting IT a Seat at the Table

I’ve noticed a growing trend where CxO business leaders bypass the central IT organization for IT projects.  Often it’s the product of a “chicken and egg” situation. 

Business leaders feel IT isn’t responsive enough filling requests so they form their own workgroups that choose “best of breed” solutions, the implementations of which wind up failing (see previous article about the extremely high failure rate of projects) and then they dump the project in IT’s lap to save the day.  Why doesn’t IT respond quickly to business requests?  They’re consumed retrofitting “best of breed” solutions chosen by teams that didn’t involve the IT organization or didn’t involve them early enough. 

Statistics indicate that business leaders bypass IT as much as 65% of the time.  The sheer volume exacerbates the problem because the central IT team just gets more swamped performing personal heroics to salvage projects undertaken without sound infrastructure considerations early in the process. 

So, how does a CIO break this cycle and win a “seat at the table” with the other business leaders.  I’ve coached clients on many effective approaches but here are a few to try. If you’re interested in more details, send me a note.

1.  Ask to be part of the business strategy sessions.  If that is not possible, then ask to see the business goals and key projects that emerge from the business strategic planning process.  This gives you much more advance notice of the types of projects that will require IT.  Few strategic business projects these days don’t involve IT and many are outright IT projects.  Gather your team to determine the IT implications for supporting the strategic business projects and approach business leaders with ideas for the plan.
2. Explain the value of coordinating across all IT projects and having the IT organization lead that coordination.  Since IT is a component for almost all business projects, it puts IT in a position to increase collaboration between the individual strategic work streams for the business and to take a holistic approach rather than piecemeal one.  For example, one client for which I helped create an IT strategy had over 20 business projects that involved Analytics.  By the CIO leading the overall effort, the IT organization helped create an optimized infrastructure to support a prioritized roadmap for the full set of 20+ analytics projects.
3. If the business leaders will not invite you to their business strategy sessions, invite them to your IT strategy sessions.  If you do this, you will need to take a business approach to your IT strategic planning.  Understand business goals and key projects across all disciplines, have the business leaders prioritize across the full set of projects and then determine the IT implications for supporting these projects. This effort should also include exercises to understand the current and desired future states for the IT Provider Relationship (see previous article 1 and previous article 2) as well as all IT capability areas. 
4. Improve IT service quality in key areas.  Many times the IT organization is seen as providing sub-optimal IT services.  They might have enough ITIL certifications to wallpaper the office yet still have poor service quality.  Fix your IT service framework so that you truly offer services rather than just call applications services.  Take a practical rather than academic approach to instituting your IT service model.
5. Invest in a few good architects who can bridge between the language of business and the language of technology.  Many times IT is not invited to the table because they are seen as speaking a different language from that of business.  This results in IT being seen as techies rather than business people.  A few good architects can work miracles to change that perception.
6. Engage outside assistance.  As the saying goes, prophets are often scorned in their own land.  Sometimes using an outside organization to facilitate IT strategic planning or IT Service management improvement efforts gains a lot of credibility because the IT organization cannot be accused of being insulated or self-focused.
7. Institute effective governance and enterprise architecture processes.  Most business leaders circumvent IT because their project will deliver time-sensitive competitive advantage that can’t endure idling in the IT project backlog.  Enterprise architecture aligns business and IT at many levels to ensure IT can provide needed competitive differentiation efficiently as well as run mundane daily operations effectively.  Governance defines decision-making processes and authorities and includes offering, portfolio and project management.  Many clients that consistently deploy projects successfully use architecture boards as governing bodies to focus IT on the right projects and create architectural standards to streamline solution creation, deployment and maintenance.  If IT lacks the capability and capacity to deliver the highest priority business projects in a timely fashion, there’s usually governance and/or an architecture issues lurking about.
8. Assess IT resource (financial and human) deployment between day-to-day maintenance and competitively differentiating work.  The results of such analysis, when packaged in business language, are often good fodder for having a discussion with business leaders.
9. Combine business and IT project management offices.  This demonstrates you understand business and IT interdependencies required for successful project execution and increases project success. 
10. If you can’t win-over the CEO or full C-suite, find one advocate in the group and undertake a project with that business leader.  This demonstrates the value of business / IT partnership in planning the project all the way through execution.  If you do this, you need a strong project manager because you want to showcase this with other CxOs.  Hope for winning over skeptics diminishes if the project stalls or fails.

These are just 10 suggestions and I don’t recommend trying all of them at once.  Actually, I would recommend choosing only one or maybe two.  I offer a longer list because the right one to try will depend upon the business context and personalities involved.  But all of them help build the IT organization’s and your personal credibility as being business-minded rather than enamored with technology.

Building IT Leadership Skills: IBM Enterprise 2014

I began this blog earlier this year because in working with IT executives around the world, I noticed a trend that many began in technical positions and grew into their leadership positions with minimal formal training opportunities to develop their IT leadership skills.  Ernst & Young saw this same trend and noted in their study, “The DNA of the CIO: Opening the door to the C-suite,”  that most CIOs have technology-related degrees and only a small percentage have MBAs.

Yet, more and more businesses expect their CIOs to be business leaders not just technologists.  This might give pause to ask, “Why are there so few IT executives with formal leadership training if they are expected to be leaders?”

Increasingly universities offer some sort of IT Leadership track within their business programs but these programs are too few and new to have supplied the market with enough formally trained IT leaders.  Also, a quick web search reveals limited professional training opportunities to build practical IT leadership skills.  There tend to be many conferences aimed at helping CIOs build their vision but few aimed at helping them make that vision a reality.  Basically, many IT executives are learning IT leadership skills via on the job training while leveraging their natural abilities, professional networks and personal resourcefulness. 

That’s admirable but it can also be a bit scary.   I think human nature causes many people to feel a bit vulnerable if they admit they need more skills, especially if there’s no training to help them. 

In my own little way, I’m trying to help by creating this blog.  But I also tried to do something a bit bolder.  I added an IT Executive leadership training track to IBM’s very popular Enterprise 2014 event.  This year, IBM’s Enterprise Conference is being held at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas from October 6 -10. 

Historically IBM’s Enterprise Conference has an Executive Summit track that helps IT and business executives imagine the realm of what’s possible so they can create an IT strategy which uses technology for business competitive differentiation.   This event began years ago and increases in popularity every year.  It also has a technical track directed at building very specific technical implementation skills.   This too is a very popular and effective track for its intended audience.

New to Enterprise 2014 this year is the IT Executive Management Training track which focuses on building IT leadership skills and complements the Executive Summit.  Executives can spend Monday and Tuesday at the Executive Summit hearing IBM executives provide visionary guidance on using technology as a competitive differentiator and then spend Wednesday and Thursday updating their IT leadership skills to ensure success in making that transformation a reality. 

The Executive Summit provides ideas on "what" your organization can do and the IT Executive Management track helps you with the "how."  IBM Distinguished Engineers (such as yours truly) and Executive Consultants with decades of practical experience helping thousands of clients will lead sessions based upon insights gained helping clients succeed.

Specifically the track includes the following sessions:

• How to Make IT a Competitive Business Differentiator
• Why Most IT Projects Fail and How to Make Yours Succeed
• Align IT and Business Priorities with a Structured Assessment and Planning Methodology
• Create a Common Data and Analytics Strategy that Supports all Your Business Units 
• Practical Steps to Enterprise Cloud
• Make IT Essential to the Business through Enterprise Architecture and Governance
• How to Create Rock-Solid Business Cases to Get IT Projects Approved
• Anticipate Threats and Protect Your Business with a Security Framework Based on Governance, Risk Management and Compliance
• Create a Business Architecture That Supports Mobile and Social Applications
• How to Evaluate Which Applications You Should Deploy in a Cloud

You can read the session abstracts for the IT Executive Management leadership training track by clicking on this link.

 

Hope you can join us at Enterprise 2014 where you can make personal connections with the contributors to this blog.

Finding the Server Needle in the Infrastructure Haystack – Addressing Infrastructure Complexity

When it comes to managing a large complex data center and the server infrastructure within, many CIOs know they have severe challenges.  Some might even characterize their predicament as being akin to ordered chaos!  Most know where and what their business critical servers are and what they are doing.  These might comprise 10 to 20% of their overall IT infrastructure.  It’s the other 80 to 90% that few know where and what these systems do AND, more importantly, how they impact factors like capacity management (IT flexibility), response and recovery time objectives (DR), labor efficiency (costs), and more.  Wouldn’t it be nice if only there was some type of metric that would assist in understanding where major areas of complexity reside, how to deal with them, and how they compare with other IT environments of similar size, industry, and make up?

Good news!  There is now.  Using IT infrastructure data that the IBM Systems and Technology Group’s Lab Services team has amassed from 1,000 plus completed IT optimization assessments (ITOs) over the last 10 years, one can actually begin to calculate a metric we call the “Infrastructure Complexity Index” (ICI for short).  This ICI can be (and has been!) used to find and educate IT personnel on specific areas of IT complexity and the factors involved in addressing these areas.

The ICI metric itself is composed of a number of components, each of which can have an impact (positive or negative) on the level of IT infrastructure complexity being shown.  By recognizing the relative impact of each of these components and the effect on their ICI, a governing IT management team can advise, and make course corrections to simplification, standardization, and overall optimization of the IT environment.

The major components affecting the ICI metric include the following:

• Server hardware vendor variation (count of unique hardware vendors in use) 
•  Server hardware model variation (count of unique hardware models in use)
• Server physical servers (count of unique serial numbered servers in use)
• Server operating system vendor variation (count of unique O. S. vendors in use)
• Server operating system version/releases (count of unique O. S. version/releases in use)
• Server logical servers (count of unique logical servers using an O. S. in use)

Using these components together, one can calculate the ICI⁽¹⁾ for a given IT environment and share this with others in the organization as part of an overall ITO analysis and set of recommendations on how to decrease IT complexity and the resulting benefits of doing so.  In addition, the ICI can be used to benchmark your IT environment with another of similar size and type.

With the proper data in hand, one can even decompose the ICI down to the operating system (AIX vs Windows vs Linux), vendor (Oracle/SUN vs IBM/AIX vs HP/UX), or even platform type (Unix/RISC vs Linux/x86), thus providing further insights as to where deeper areas of infrastructure complexity might be impacting the previously mentioned areas of IT flexibility, recoverability, and cost.

Although currently focused on server infrastructure complexity, work is ongoing to expand the use of ICI to other areas of IT infrastructure complexity, including storage, network, and even software stacks.  For further clarification on the ICI and how it could be used for your situation, please contact the author (John F. Ryan jfryan1@us.ibm.com).

Thanks to John Ryan for his guest contribution!

(1)    The actual formula used to calculate the ICI is the intellectual property of the IBM and is currently under patent review.  Please contact the author for specifics on how to introduce the ICI to your situation

Small Things about Big Data

Common questions that bother most IT decision makers today are:

• Do I need a Big Data solution?
• How will my organization benefit from it?
• Should I implement one now or wait for a more opportune time?
• If I implement one, what is the scale I should look at?

Before answering these questions, it might be helpful to understand some “Small things about Big Data.”

An obvious requirement of any IT solution is the ability to provide reports on a regular basis. These reports represent anything from financial health, project status, and customer data to audit & security related information.  

Most times, organizations tend to generate reports during low peak periods to ensure their infrastructure is highly utilized and gives better ROI.  However, some of these reports if available at more regular intervals in a 24 hour period will benefit the organization much more than just generating them once in a 24 hour period.  This is nothing but Analytics.

Any workload that analyzes static or streaming data to produce reports useful for business & IT are essentially called “Analytic Workloads.”  

As evident from this case study at Coca Cola, timely delivery of reports can make a huge difference to an organization’s business and strategy.

http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=AB&infotype=PM&appname=STGE_TS_ZU_USEN&htmlfid=TSC03243USEN&attachment=TSC03243USEN.PDF

               

Therefore, for organizations to understand if they need to ride the Big Data wave or not, they first should identify the analytical pieces that form their IT backbone.  Important questions here would be:

1. What are the critical reports generated?
2. When are these reports generated? (time of day)
3. Are they based upon accurate and timely data?
4. If the information from these reports can be generated at a higher frequency or on-demand, will it enable quicker decision making or faster go-to market strategy?
5. If the answer to 4 is, “Yes” for certain reports, what stops the organization from generating these reports at a higher frequency? 

If the answer to question 3 is “No,” the first step is to address data quality with the business.  This gets into data structure and data governance.  It also requires cooperation with the business as the data owners.

Moving down the list, most often, the organizations I work with say the answer to question 5 lies in availability of IT resources needed to generate these reports.   A common reason to generate reports in the night (or during low peak window) is to avoid performance issues during peak load and to use resources effectively.

To address this, I see the need for a thought process shift to view analytics as an investment that can help bring higher efficiency to an organization’s business, thereby staying ahead of the competition.  Business cases that are developed around the opportunities these insights will bring to the business tend to be the most successful ones.  They justify investing in the right tools to facilitate this versus trying to limp along with analytics workloads taking second priority over other workloads.  

From the standpoint of balancing optimization of resources with business value potential, my experience has been the best way to get better and timely analytical reports is to create a separate set of analytics workloads that can work in real-time using faster systems & storage.   Compute and Storage systems have matured in terms of performance to an extent where one can run real-time reports without impacting the performance of online workloads.  And if the data analyzed contain untapped insights, the business value usually justifies using this approach.

Having identified analytics workloads and the need, the next step is to understand “Why Big Data?”  For any organization that benefits from real-time data sources like social media, complaint records, and service requests etc., Big Data is the way to go. These data sources helps organizations arrive at quick decisions and react quickly to the market or customer needs.

A common example is a customer recording their experience in a public domain which can either help or harm an organization’s reputation. In such cases, when real-time data are made available to the customer service team, they can quickly step-in, understand the situation and help manage the expectation with the respective customer.   However, there are many more.  Customers use these insights to target marketing to customers more effectively, identify patent infringements, identify trademark misuse, improve product design, gauge overall product and brand sentiment, etc…  There are countless strong business uses.

The CIO can initiate the Big Data discussion with the business in business terms.  Often this is a way for the CIO to earn a “seat at the table” with the other business executives.  But, it’s good to be ready by thinking about some practical “small things about big data” before you do.

Article by Subramaniam Meenakshisundaram, a guest contributor and IBM Executive Consultant in the Systems Group Lab Services organization. 

Many thanks Subbu for your guest column!