Category: Looking Ahead

Both Sides of the Staffing Coin: Building a High Performance Team -and- Building a Great IT Career

    Jim D

I find it remarkable that despite the slow recovery the IT job market remains very tight. This poses significant hurdles for IT managers looking to add talent. In the post below, I cover how to build a great team and team into good seams of talent.  I think this will be a significant issue for IT managers for the next three to four years – finding and growing talent to enable them to build high performance teams.

And for IT staffers, I have mapped out seasoned advice on how to build your capabilities and experience to enable you to have a great career in IT. Improving IT staff skills and capabilities is of keen interest not to just the staff, but also to IT management so that their team is much more productive and capable. And on a final note, I would suggest that anyone who is in the IT field should consider reaching out to high schoolers and college students and encourage them to consider a career in IT. Currently, in the US, there are fewer IT graduates each year than IT jobs that open. And this gap is expected to widen in the coming years. So IT will continue to be a good field for employees, and IT leaders will need to encourage others to join in so we can meet the expected staffing needs.

Please do check out both sides of the coin, and I look forward to your perspectives. Note that I did publish variants on these posts in InformationWeek over the past few months.

Best, Jim Ditmore

Building a High Performance Team Despite 4% IT Unemployment

Despite a national unemployment rate of more than 8%,  the overall IT unemployment rate is at a much lower 4% or less. Further, the unemployment rates for IT specialties such as networking, IT security or data base are even lower — at 1% or less. This makes finding capable IT staff difficult and is compounded because IT professionals are less likely to take new opportunities (turnover rates are much less than average over the past 10 years).  Unfortunately these tough IT staffing conditions are likely to continue and perhaps be exacerbated if the recovery actually picks up pace. With such a tight IT job market, how do you build or sustain your high performance IT team?

I recommend several tactics to incorporate into your current staffing approach that should allow you to improve your current team and acquire the additional talent needed for your business to compete. Let’s focus first on acquiring talent. In a tight market you must always be present to enable you to acquire the talent when they first consider looking for a position. You must move to a ‘persistent’ recruiting mode. If your group is still only opening positions after someone leaves or after a clear funding approval is granted, you are late to the game. Given the extended recruiting times, you will likely not acquire the staff in time to meet your needs. Nor will you consistently be on the market when candidates are seeking employment. Look instead to do ‘pipeline recruiting’. That is, for those common positions that you know you will need over the next 12 months, set up an enduring position, and have your HR team persistently recruit for these ‘pipeline positions’. Good examples would be Java or mobile developers, project managers, network engineers, etc. Constantly recruit, interview and when you find an ‘A’ caliber candidate, hire them — whether you have the exact position open or not. You can be certain that you will need the talent, so hire them and put them on the next appropriate project to be worked on from your demand list. Not only will you now have talent sourced and available when you need it because you are always out in the market, you will develop a reputation as a place where talent is sought and you will have an edge when those ‘A’ players who seldom look for work in the market, decide to seek a new opportunity.

Another key tactic is to extend the pipeline recruiting to interns and graduates. Too many firms only look for experienced candidates and neglect this source. In many companies, graduates can be a key long term source of their best senior engineers.  Moreover, they can often contribute much more than most managers give them credit, especially if you have good onboarding programs and robust training and education offerings for your staff. I have seen uplifting results for legacy teams when they have brought on bright, enthusiastic talent and combined it with their experienced engineers — everyone’s performance often lifts. They will bring energy to your shop and we will have the added dividend of increasing the pool of available,  experienced talent. And while it will take 7 to 15 years for them to become the senior engineers and leaders of tomorrow, they will be at your company, not at someone else’s (if you don’t start, you will never have them).

The investment in robust training and education for graduates should pay off also for your current staff and potential hires. Your current staff, by leveraging training, can improve their skills and productivity. And for potential hires, an attractive attribute of a new company is a strong training program and focus on staff development. These are wise investments as they will pay back in higher productivity and engagement, and greater retention and attraction of staff. You should couple the training program with clearly defined job positions and career paths. These should spell out for your team what the competencies and capabilities of both their current position as well as what is needed to move to the next step in their career. Their ability to progress with clarity will be a key advantage in your staff’s growth and retention as well as attracting new team members. And in a tight job market, this will let your company stand out in the crowd.

Another tactic to apply is to leverage additional locations to acquire talent. If you limit yourself to one or a few metropolitan areas, you are limiting the potential IT population you are drawing from. Often, you can use additional locations to tap entirely new sources of talent at potentially lower costs than your traditional locations. Given the lower mobility of today’s candidates, it may effective to open a location in the midwest, in rustbelt cities with good universities or cities such as Charlotte or Richmond. Such 2nd tier cities can harbor surprisingly strong IT populations that have lower costs and better retention than 1st tier locations like California or Boston or New York. The same is true of Europe and India. Your costs are likely to be 20 to 40% less than headline locations, with attrition rates perhaps 1/3 less.

And you can go farther afield as well. Nearshore and offshore locations from Ireland to Eastern Europe to India should be considered. Though again, it is worth avoiding the headline locations and going to places like Lithuania or Romania, or 2nd tier cities in India or Poland. You should look to tap the global IT workforce and gain advantage through diverse talent, ability to work longer through a ‘follow the sun’ approach, and optimized costs and capacity. Wherever you go though, you will need to enable an effective distributed workforce. This requires a minimum critical mass in each site, proper allocation of activities in a holistic manner, robust audio and video conferencing capabilities, and effective collaboration and configuration management tools. If done well, a global workforce can deliver more at lower costs and with better skills and time to market. For large companies, such a workforce is really a mandatory requirement to achieve competitive IT capabilities. And to some degree, you could say IT resources are like oil, you go wherever in the world you can to find and acquire them.

Don’t forget to review your recruiting approach as well. Maintain high standards and ensure you select the right candidates through using effective interviewing and evaluation techniques.  Apply a metrics-based improvement approach to your recruiting process. What is the candidate yield on each recruiting method? Where are your best candidates coming from? Invest more in recruiting approaches that yield good numbers of strong candidates. One set of observations from many years of analyzing recruiting results: your best source of strong candidates is usually referrals and weak returns typically come from search firms and broad sweep advertising. Building a good reputation in the marketplace to attract strong candidates takes time, persistence, and most important, an engaging and rewarding work environment.

With those investments, you will be able to recruit, build and sustain a high performance team even in the tightest of markets. While I know this is a bit like revealing your favorite fishing spot, what other techniques have you been able to apply successfully?

Best, Jim Ditmore

 

 

In the Heat of Battle: Good Guidelines for Production

    Jim D

If you have been in IT for any stretch, you will have experienced a significant service outage and the blur of pages, conference calls, analysis and actions to recover. Usually such a service incident call occurs at 2 AM, and there is a fog that occurs as a diverse and distributed team tries to sort through a problem and its impacts while seeking to restore service. And often, poor decisions are made or ineffective directions taken in this fog which extend the outage. Further,  as part of the confusion, there can be poor communications with your business partners or customers. Even for large companies with a dedicated IT operations team and command center, the wrong actions and decisions can be made in the heat of battle as work is being done to restore service. While you can chalk many of the errors to either inherent engineering optimism or a loss of orientation after working a complex problem for many hours, to achieve outstanding service availability you must enable crisp, precise service restoration when an incident occurs. Such precision and avoidance of mistakes in ‘the heat of battle’ comes from a clear command line and operational approach. This ‘best practice’ clarity includes defined incident roles and operational approach communicated and ready well before such an event. Then everyone operates as a well-coordinated team to restore service as quickly as possible.

We explore these best practice roles and operational approaches in today’s post. These recommended practices have been derived over many years at IT shops that have achieved sustained first quartile production performance*. The first step is to have a production incident management processes which based on an ITIL approach. Some variation and adaption of ITIL is of course appropriate to ensure a best fit for your company and operation but ensure you are leveraging these fundamental industry practices and your team is fully up to speed on them. Further, it is  preferable to have a dedicated command center which monitors production and has the resources for managing a significant incident when it occurs.

Assuming those capabilities are in place,  there should be clear roles for your technology team in handling a production issue. The incident management roles that should be employed include:

  • Technical leads — there may be one or more technical leads for an incident depending on the nature of the issue and impact. These leads should have a full understanding of the production environment and be highly capable senior engineers in their specialty. Their role is  to diagnose and lead a problem resolution effort in their component area (e.g. storage, network, DBMS, etc). They also must reach out and coordinate with other technical leads to solve those issues that lie between specialties (e.g. DBMS and storage).
  • Service lead — the service lead is also an experienced engineer or manager and one who understands all systems aspects and delivery requirements of the service that has been impacted. This lead will help direct what restoration efforts are a priority based on their knowledge of what is most important to the business. They would also be familiar with and be able to direct service restoration routines or procedures (e.g. a restart). They also will have full knowledge of the related services and potential downstream impacts that must be considered or addressed. And they will know which business units and contacts must be engaged to enact issue mitigation while the incident is being worked.
  • Incident lead — the incident lead is a command centre member who is experienced in incident management, has strong command skills, and understands problem diagnosis and resolution. Their general knowledge and experience should extend from the systems monitoring and diagnostics tools available to application and infrastructure components and engineering tools as well as a base understanding of the services IT must deliver for the business. The incident lead will drive all problem resolution actions as needed including
    • engaging and directing component and application technical leads and teams and restoration efforts,
    • collection and reporting of impact data,
    • escalation as required to ensure adequate resources and talent are focused on the issue
  • Incident coordinator – in addition to the incident lead there should also be an incident coordinator. This command centre member is knowledgeable on the incident management process and procedures and handles key logistics including setting up conference calls, calling or paging resources, drafting and issuing communications, and importantly, managing to the incident clock for both escalation and task progress. The coordinator can be supplemented by additional command centre staff for a given incident particularly if multiple technical resolution calls are spawned by the incident.
  • Senior IT operations management – for critical issue, it is also appropriate for senior IT operations management to both be present on the technical bridge ensuring proper escalation and response occurs. Further, communications may need to be drafted for senior business personal providing status, impact, and prognosis. If it is a public issue, it may also be necessary to coordinate with corporate public relations and provide information in the issue.
  • Senior management – As is often the case with a major incident, senior management from all areas of IT and perhaps even the business will look to join the technical call and discussions focused on service restoration and problem resolution. While this should be viewed as natural desire (perhaps similar to slowing and staring at a traffic accident), business and senior management presence can be disruptive and prevent the team from timely resolution. So here is what they are not to do:
    • Don’t join the bridge, announce yourself and ask what is going on, this will deflect the team’s attention from the work at hand and waste several minutes bringing you up to speed and extending the problem resolution time (I have seen this happen far too often)
    • Don’t look to blame, the team will likely slow or even shut down due to fear of repercussions when honest open dialogue is needed most to understand the problem.
    • Don’t jump to conclusions on the problem, the team could be led down the wrong path. Few senior managers have the ability to be up-to-date on the technology and have strong enough problem resolution skills to provide reliable suggestions. If you are one of them, go ahead and enable the team to leverage your experience, but be careful if your track record says otherwise.

Before we get to the guidelines to practice during an incident, I also recommend ensuring your team has the appropriate attitude and understanding at the start of the incident. Far too often, problems start small or the local team thinks they have it well in hand. They then avoid escalating the issue or reporting it as a potential critical issue. Meanwhile critical time is lost, and potentially mistakes made by the local team then compound the issue. By the time escalation to the command centre does occur, the customer impact has become severe and the options to resolve are far more limited. I refer to this as trying to put out the fire with a garden hose. It is important to communicate to the team that it is far better to over-report an issue than report it late. There is no ‘crying wolf’ when it comes to production. The team should first call the fire department (the command center) with a full potential severity alert, and then can go back to putting out the fire with the garden hose. Meanwhile the command center will mobilize all the needed resources to arrive and ensure the fire is put out. If everyone arrives and the fire is put out, all will be happy. And if the fire is raging, you now have the full set of resources to properly overcome the issue.

Now let’s turn our attention to best practice guidelines to leverage during a serious IT incident.

Guidelines in the Heat of Battle:

1. One change at a time (and track all changes)

2. Focus on restoring service first, but list out the root causes as you come across them. Remember most root cause analysis and work comes long after service is restored.

3. Ensure configuration information is documented and maintained through the changes

4. Go back to the last known stable configuration (back out all changes if necessary to get back to the stable configuration). Don’t let engineering ‘optimism’ forward engineer to a new solution unless it is the only option.

5. Establish clear command lines (one for technical, one business interface) and ensure full command center support. It is best for the business not to participate in the technology calls — it is akin to watching sausage get made (no one would eat it if they saw it being made). Your business will feel the same way about technology if they are on the calls.

6. Overwhelm the problem (escalate and bring in the key resources – yours and the vendor’s). Don’t dribble in resources because it is 4 AM in the morning. If you work in IT, and you want to be good, this is part of the job. Get the key resources on the call and ensure you hold the vendor to the same bar as you hold your team.

7. Work in parallel wherever reasonable and possible. This should include spawning parallel activities (and technical bridges) to work multiple reasonable solutions or backups.

8. Follow the clock and use the command center to ensure activities stay on schedule. You must be able to decide when a path is not working and focus resources on better options and the clock is a key component of that decision. And escalation and communication must occur with rigor so maintain confidence and bring necessary resources to bear.

9. Peer plan, review and implement. Everything done in an emergency (here, to restore service and fix a problem) is highly likely to inject further defects into your systems. Too many issues have been complicated by during a change implementation when a typo occurs or the command is executed in the wrong environment. Peer planning, review, and implementation will significantly improve the quality of the changes you implement.

10. Be ready for the worst, have additional options and have a backout plan for the fix. You will save time and be more creative to drive better solutions if you address potential setback proactively rather than waiting for them to happen and then reacting.

Recall that the  ITIL incident management objective is to ‘restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user, at a cost-effective price.’  These best practice guidelines will help you drive to a best practice incident management capability.

What would you add or change in the guidelines? How have you been able to excellent service restoration and problem management? I look forward to hearing from you.

P.S. Please note that these best practices  have been honed over the years in world class availability shops for major corporations with significant contributions from such colleagues as Gary Greenwald, Cecilia Murphy, Jim Borendame, CHris Gushue, Marty Metzker, Peter Josse, Craig Bright, and Nick Beavis (and others).

Just about Time for Spring Break

    Jim D

It is just about time for spring break and given the significant number of new readers, I thought I would touch again on the key goals for this site and also touch on some posts and additions you may have missed.

I would also like to thank Steve Wignall for his contributions in the Service Desk arena. We now have 5 solid pages relating to all aspects of Service Desk and we are typically ranked in the top 20 searches in Google for a number of searches related to service desk (e.g., ‘service desk best practices’, etc). While I am quite pleased for us to achieve this in a matter of a few months, what is most important is that the content is useful and relevant and meaningful to IT leaders.

As many of you know, delivering IT today, with all of the cost reduction demands, the rapidly changing technology, the impact of IT consumerization, and security and risk demands, is, simply put, tough work. It is complicated and hard to get the complex IT mechanism, with all the usual legacy systems issues, to perform as well as the business requires. RecipesforIT has been built to help those IT leaders out, to provide recipes and ideas on how to tackle the tough but solvable problems they face. And in addition to providing best practices, we will give you a solid and sensible perspective on the latest trends and technologies.

And note we will continue to build out the best practices areas and not necessarily post the material. For example, we have added Build an Outstanding Customer Interface, Service Desk Leadership and Service Desk Metrics pages to the appropriate best practice areas. So don’t forget to leverage these areas for material when you are faced with issues or challenges.

As promised in January, we have really covered the service desk area with the help of Steve Wignall and Bob Barnes. And we covered innovation (and Kodak). There was also a request to cover how to effectively consolidate an IT organization and that was covered in  the post Building IT Synergy. 

So what is upcoming? I will continue to touch on current topics (hopefully you liked the Australian pilot and low PDI post) but I will also divert time to cover leadership and high performance teams. I have also received a request to cover production operations and best practices in that area that I hope to complete. Steve will also cover another page on service desk for us. And I will continue with incremental but hopefully material improvements to the site pages that will provide further details on best practices in a comprehensive manner.

I continue to receive strong feedback from many of you on the usefulness and actionability of the material. I will definitely work to ensure we maintain that relevance.

One last note: don’t forget you can subscribe to the site so you get an email when there’s a new post (subscribing is on the rightmost bar, halfway down the page). And feel free to provide comments or suggestions — the feedback really helps!

If you are new to the site, I recommend a few posts for relevance and fundamentals:

So, expect plenty more and enjoy your break and the warm weather!

Best, Jim Ditmore

The Accelerating Impact of the iPad on Corporate IT

    Jim D

Apple announced the iPad two years ago and began shipping in April 2010. In less than two years, the rapidity and scale of the shock to the PC marketplace from the iPad has been stunning.   The PC market trends in 2011 show PCs of all types (netbook, notebook, desktop) are being cannabilized by tablet sales. And iPad sales (15.4M in 4Q11) are now equivalent to PC desktop sales. We saw desktop PCs shipments slowing the last several years due to the earlier advent of notebooks and then netbooks, but now stagnating and even dropping in great part due to the iPad. With the release of the iPad 3 just around the corner (next week), these impacts will accelerate. And while the release of Windows 8 and new PC ultrabooks (basically PC versions of the MacBook Air) could possibly cause improved shipments in 2012, the implications of this consumer shift are significant for corporate technology.

Just as IT managers used to determine what mobile devices their employees used (and thus invariably Blackberry) and now companies are adopting a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) approach to mobile, IT managers will need to shift to not just accommodating iPads as an additional mobile device, but should move to a full-fledged BYOD for client computing for their knowledge workers. Let them decide if they need a tablet, ultrabook, or laptop. Most front office staff will also be better served by a mobile or tablet approach (consider the retail staff in Apple’s stores today). Importantly, IT will need to develop applications first and second for the internet and tablets, and only for traditional PCs for back office and production workers.

The implications of this will cause further shock to the marketplace. Just as in the mobile device marketplace where the traditional consumer vendors were impacted first by the new smart phones **(i.e., Nokia impacted first by Apple and Android) and then the commercial mobile vendor** (Blackberry), PC vendors are now seeing their consumer divisions severely impacted with modest growth in commercial segments. But front office and knowledge workers will demand the use of tablets first and air books or ultrabooks second. Companies will make this shift because their employees will be more productive and satisfied and it will cost the company less. And as the ability to implement and leverage this BYOD approach increases, the migration will become a massive rush, especially as front office systems convert.  And the commercial PC segment will follow what already is happening in the broader consumer segment.

As an IT manager you should ensure your shop is on the front edge of this transition as much as possible to provide your company advantage. The tools to deploy, manage, and implement secure sessions are rapidly maturing and are already well-proven **. Many companies started pilots or small implementations in that past year in such areas as providing iPads instead of 5 inch thick binders for their boards ** or giving senior executives iPads to use in meetings instead of printed presentations. But the big expansion has been allowing senior managers and knowledge workers to begin accessing corporate email and intranets via their own iPads from home or when traveling. And with the success of these pilots, companies are planning broader rollouts and are adopting formal BYOD policies for laptops and pads.

So how do you ensure that your company stays abreast of these changes? If you have not already piloted corporate email and intranet access from smart phones and pads, get going. Look also to pilot the devices for select groups such as your board and senior executives. This will enable you to get the support infrastructure in place and issues worked out before a larger rollout.

Work with your legal and procurement team to define the new corporate policy on employee devices. Many companies help solve this issue by providing the employee a voucher covering the cost of the device purchase but the employee is the owner. And because the corporate data is held in a secure partition on the device and can be wiped clean if lost or stolen, you can meet your corporate IT security standards.

More importantly, IT must adjust its thinking about what the most vital interface is for internal applications. For more than a decade, it has been the PC with perhaps an internet interface. Going forward, it needs to be an internet interface, possibly with a smartphone and iPad app. Corporate PC client interfaces (outside of dedicated production applications such as the general ledger for the finance team or a call center support application) will be one of casualties of this shift from PCs.

If you are looking for leaders in the effort, I would suggest that government agencies, especially in the US, have been surprisingly agile in delivering their reference works for everything from the state legal code to driving rules and regulations on iPad applications in the Itunes store. I actually think the corporate sector is trailing the government in this adoption. How many of you actually have their HR policies and procedures in an iPad application that can be downloaded? Or a smart phone app to handle your corporate travel expenses? Or a front office application that enables your customer facing personnel to be as mobile and productive as an Apple retail employee?

And ensure you build the infrastructure to handle the download and version management of these new applications. You can configure your own corporate version of a iTunes store  that enables users to self-provision and easily download apps to their devices just as they download Angry Birds today. This again will provide a better experience for the corporate user at reduced cost. And the leading senior infrastructure client managers today are looking to further exploit this corporate store and later extend this infrastructure and download approach to all their devices. This is just another example of a product or approach, first developed for the consumer market, cross-impacting the commercial market.

As for those desktop PCs, where will they be in 2 to 3 years? They will still be used by production workers (call centers, back office personnel, etc) but they will be more and more virtualized so the heavy computing is done in the data center and not the PC. And desktop PCs  will be a much smaller proportion of your overall client devices. This will have significant implications on your client software licenses (e.g. Windows Office, etc) and you should begin considering now how your contracts will handle this changing situation.  And perhaps just beyond that timeframe, it is possible that we will consider traditional desktops to be similar to floppy drives today — an odd bit of technology from the past.

Best, Jim Ditmore

* for those of you who read my occasional post on InformationWeek, I have updated my article that was originally posted there on Feb 14.

 

Real Lessons of Innovation from Kodak

    Jim D

At Davos this past week, innovation was trumpeted as a necessity for business and solution for economic ills. And in corporations around the world, business executives speak of the need for ‘innovation’ and ‘agility’ for them to win in the marketplace. Chalk that up to the Apple effect. With the latest demise of Kodak, preceded by Borders, Nokia, and Blockbusters, among others, some business leaders are racing to out-innovate and win in the marketplace. Unfortunately, most of these efforts cause more chaos and harm than good.

Let’s take Kodak. Here was a company that since 1888 has been an innovator. Kodak’s labs are  full of inventions and techniques. It has a patent portfolio worth an estimated $2.5B just for the patents. The failure of Kodak was due to several causes, but it was not due to lack of innovation. Instead, as rightly pointed out by John Bussey at the WSJ, ‘it failed to monetize its most important asset – its inventions.’ It invented digital photography but never took an early or forceful position with product (though it is unlikely that even  a strong position in that market would have contributed enough revenue given digital cameras come for free on every smart phone today). The extremely lucrative film business paralyzed Kodak until it plunged into the wrong sector – the highly mature and competitive printing market.

So, it is all well and good to run around and innovate, but if you cannot monetize it, and worse, if it distracts you from the business at hand, then you will run your business into the ground. I think there are four patterns of companies that successfully innovate:

The Big Bet at the Top: One way that innovation can be successfully implemented is through the big bet at the top. In other words, either the owner or CEO decides the direction and goes ‘all-in’. This has happened time and again. For example, in the mid-80s, Intel made the shift from memory chips to microprocessors. This dramatic shift included large layoffs and shuttering plants in its California operations, but the shift was an easier decision by top management because the microprocessor marketplace was more lucrative than the memory semiconductor marketplace. Intel’s subsequent rapid improvement in processors and later branding proved out and further capitalized on this decision. And I think Apple is a perfect example of big bets by Steve Jobs. From the iPod and iTunes, to the iPhone, to the iPad, Apple made big bets on new consumer devices and experiences that were, at the time, derided by pundits and competitors (I particularly like this one rant by Steve Ballmer on the iPhone). Of course, after a few successes, the critics are hard to find now. These bets require prescient senior management with enough courage and independence to place them, otherwise, even when you have a George Fisher, as Kodak did, the bets are not placed correctly. I also commend bets where you get out of a sector that you know you cannot win in. An excellent example of this is IBM’s spinoff of its printer business in the ’90s and its sale of the PC business to Lenovo more recently. Both turn out to be well ahead of the market (just witness HP’s belated and poorly thought though PC exit attempt this past summer).

Innovating via Acquisition: Another effective strategy is to use acquisition as a weapon. But success comes to those who make multiple small acquisitions as opposed to one or two large acquisitions. Cisco and IBM come to mind with this approach. Cisco effectively branched out to new markets and extended its networking lead in the 1990s and early 2000s with this approach. IBM has greatly broadened and deepened its software and services portfolio in the past decade with it as well. Compaq and Digital, America Online and Time Warner, or perhaps recently, HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, represent those companies that make a late, massive acquisition to try to stave off or shift their corporate course. These fare less well. In part, it is likely due to culture and vision. Small acquisitions, when care is taken by senior management to fully leverage the product, technology and talent of the takeover, can mesh well with the parent. A major acquisition can set off a clash of cultures, visions, and competing products that waste internal energy and place the company further behind in the market. Hats off on at least one major acquisition that changed completely the course of a company: Apple’s acquisition of Next. Of course, along with Next they also got the leader of Next: Steve Jobs, and we all know what happened next to Apple.

Having a Separate Team: Another successful approach is to recognize that the reason a company does well is because it is focused on ensuring predictable delivery and quality to its customer base. And to do so, its operations, product and technology divisions all strive to deliver such value predictably. Innovation by its very nature is discontinuous and causes failure (good innovators require many failures for every success). By teaching the elephant to dance, all you do is ruin the landscape and the productive work that kept the company in business before it lost its edge. Instead, by setting up a separate team, as IBM has done for the past decade and others have done successfully, a company can be far more successful. The separate team will require sponsorship, and it must be recognized that the bulk of the organization will focus on the proper task of delivering to the customer as well as making incremental improvements. You could argue that Kodak’s focus of the bulk of its team on film was its downfall. But I would suggest instead it was the failure of the innovation teams to take what they already had in the lab and make them successful new products in the market.

A Culture of Tinkering: This approach relies on the culture and ingenuity of the team to foster an environment where outstanding delivery in the corporation’s competence area is done routinely, and time and resources are set aside to continuously improve and tinker with the products and capabilities. To have the time and space for teams to be engaged in such ‘tinkering’ requires that the company master the base disciplines of quality and operational excellence. I think you would find such companies in many fields and it has enabled ongoing success and market advantage, in part because not only do they innovate, but they also out-execute. For example, Fedex, well-known for operational excellence, introduced package tracking in 1994, essentially exposing to customers what was a back end system. This product innovation has now become commonplace in the package and shipping industry. Similarly, 3M is well-known as an industry innovator, regularly deriving large amounts of revenue from products that did not exist for them even 5  years prior. But some of their greatest successes (e.g., Post-It Notes) did not come about from some corporate innovation session and project. Instead they came together over years as ideas and failures percolated in a culture of tinkering until finally the teams hit on the right combination of a successful product. And Google is probably the best technology company example where everyone sets aside 20% of their time to ‘tinker’.

So what approach is best? Well, unless you have a Steve Jobs, or are a pioneering company in a new industry, making the big bet for an established corporation should be out. If your performance does not show outstanding excellence, and if your corporate culture does not encourage collegiality and support experimentation and then leverage failure, then a tinkering approach will not work. So you are left with two options, make multiple small acquisitions in the areas of your product direction, and with effective corporate sponsorship, fold the new product set and capabilities into your own. Or, set up a separate team to pursue the innovation areas. This team should brainstorm and create the initial products, test and refine them, and then after market pilot, have the primary production organization deliver it in volume (again with effective corporate sponsorship). Thus the elephant dances the steps it can do and the mice do the work the elephant cannot do.

As for our example, Kodak only had part of the tinkering formula. Kodak had the initial innovation and experimentations but they were unable to take the failures and adjust their delivery to match what was required in the market for success. And they should have executed multiples of smaller efforts across more diverse product sets (similar to what Fujifilm did) to find their new markets.

Have you been part of a successful innovation effort or culture? What approaches did you see being used effectively?

Best, Jim

So far, so good

    Jim D

It has only been a few weeks into the new year but I think we are off to a good start here at recipeforIT.com. Given the significant number of new readers, I thought I would touch again on the key goals for this site and also give you a preview of upcoming posts and pages.

As many of you know, delivering IT today, with all of the cost reduction demands, the rapidly changing technology, the impact of IT consumerization, and security and risk demands, is, simply put, tough work. It is complicated and hard work to get the complex IT mechanism, with all the usual legacy systems issues, to perform as well as the business requires. So to help those IT leaders out, I have started this site to provide recipes and ideas on how to tackle the tough but solvable problems they face. And in addition to providing best practices, we will give you a solid and sensible perspective on the latest trends and technologies.

So what is upcoming? First, I have two esteemed former colleagues who have run top notch service desks that will be authoring material on best practices and how to deliver an outstanding customer experience through this critical interface. Look for their posts on the ‘face of IT’ over the next several weeks. Second, I want to touch on innovation and the increasingly common business fascination with innovation as a solution to all manner of business ills. I hope to also explore leadership further in February. And lastly, I have a number of incremental but hopefully material improvements to the site pages that will provide further details on best practices in a comprehensive manner.

I think it is a good lineup for the next month! I continue to receive strong feedback from many of you on the usefulness and actionability of the material. I will definitely work to ensure we maintain that relevance.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to the site so you get an email when there’s a new post (subscribing is on the rightmost bar, halfway down the page). And feel free to provide comments or suggestions — the feedback really helps!

If you are new to the site, I recommend a few posts for relevance and fundamentals:

There’s lots more to come and have a great week!

Best, Jim

A Continued Surge in IT Investment

    Jim D

In recent posts, I have noted previous articles on how the recovery in the US has been a ‘jobless’ recovery yet one with stronger investment in equipment and IT. This peculiar effect in the latest reporting appears to be even more pronounced, perhaps even running in ‘overdrive’. According to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article, the investment in labor savings in the US stepped up at the beginning of the decade, but with the recession, companies found bigger opportunities to automate even more with machinery and software.  Timothy Aeppel, the author notes, this investment and spending level has continued broadly through the fourth quarter. And while certainly investment in technology will cause employment subsequently to rise, I think it appears that CEOs are investing in technology far more than adding staff as in previous recoveries. And they are doing this for a reason — they can get better returns from the machinery and robotics and software than before. Part of this is due to low interest rates and unique tax breaks, but I believe that technology is enabling greater returns on reducing costs and improving productivity than previously. Further, I think fundamental changes in IT capabilities and robotics are fueling improved returns from automation even more than has occurred in the past, spurring even greater investment in IT.

Historically, IT applications and systems were applied to domains with large amounts of the routine work, often done by hundreds if not thousands of staff. These were the areas that justified the cost of IT and provided the greatest return. Improvements in application and database technology enabled technology to tackle tougher and more complex problems. It also enabled leverage of technology on medium scale processes. Basic toolsets like email and Sharepoint tackled the least complex and departmental processes. This progress is represented in the diagram below.

The introduction of client server platforms allowed solutions to be applied to routine work on a smaller scale, to large departments and medium sized companies rather than just divisions and large corporations. This accelerated with the internet and the advent of virtualization.

But the cumulative and accelerating effect of new development technologies and methods, new toolsets, new client devices, cloud infrastructure, and advancing data and analytics capabilities has enabled a far broader range of solutions to be applied easily and effectively across a wide range of institutions and problem sets. Small and medium sized companies through cloud services can now leverage similar infrastructure capabilities that previously could only be implemented and afforded by the largest corporations. This step change in progression is represented by the chart below.

The increase of automation scope with new Tech toolsets

The new lightweight workflow tools like IBM’s Lombardi toolset and many others open up almost any departmental process to be easily and rapidly automated and achieve a decent ROI.  The proliferation of client interfaces through the internet and mobile allow customers to self serve intelligently for almost any product and service, enabling the elimination of large amounts of front office and back office work. This cumulative and compounding effect is truly a step change in what can be done by IT to automate the work within medium and large companies. And yet, despite this sea change in capabilities, you still find many IT departments focused almost wholely on their traditional scope. The projection initiation and selection process is laborious and even arduous, oriented towards doing large (and fewer) projects. The amount of overhead required to execute almost any typical project would overwhelm lightweight automation for departmental-sized efforts. And yet, there are huge new areas of scope and automation that are possible now in almost every company. And so how do you start to prove out these new areas and adapt your processes to enable them to get done?

I think there are several ways to get started here, some of which I mentioned briefly in my December post on  ‘A few things to add to your technology plans’.

1. Improve customer signup or account opening: Unless your company has redone these functions within the past 24 months, it is doubtful that this area is up to the latest expectations of customers.  Enable account opening from the web and mobile devices, leverage the app stores to provide mobile clients that have additional, useful and cool functions (nearest store, nearest ATM, or if you are a climbing gear company, the current temperature and weather at base camp on Mount Everest). Make them easy to navigate and progress through the application with  progress bar and associated menu. Ensure the physical process at the store or branch is as easy as the internet version (i.e., not twenty pages of forms). And tighten up the security with strong passwords (many sites today have a strength indicator as you type in the new password) and two factor security on critical transactions (e.g. wire transfers or bill payments). Remember you can now deliver the two factor security through the customer’s mobile device and not a separate token.

2. Fix two or three process issues that are basic transactions for customers: Just as you need to continually cycle back through your customer interfaces to keep them fresh and take advantage of the latest consumer technology, you should also need to revisit some of the basic transactions that business typically fail to put on their list to invest and yet become problematic service areas for customers. These would be areas like change of address or statement reprints or getting a replacement card. Because they are never on the project list, these services remain backwaters of process and automation with predictable frustration for the customers, high error rates, and disproportionate manual effort to complete. Work with a strong business partner (perhaps the COO or someone close to the customer experience) to tee these up. Use the latest workflow tools to tackle the process piece. Leverage the latest data warehouse and ETL capabilities to integrate the customer data across business units and applications so that the process can be once and done. If you are not sure on what basic customer process to start, then talk to the unit handling customer complaints and look for those processes that have the highest number of issues yet the customer is trying to do something quite basic. Remember, every customer complaint requires expensive responses that by eliminating, you drive material improvements in productivity and cost.

3. Implement more self-service: An oft-neglected area is the improvement of corporate support functions and their productivity and service. In a typical corporation almost every employee is touched by the HR and Fiance processes, which can be heavily manual and archaic (again they rarely show up on the project list) By working with your Finance and HR functions you can reduce their costs and improve their delivery to their users through implementation of automation and self-service. The advanced workflow toolsets (IBM’s BPM) mean you can do far more with incremental, small tiger team efforts than ever before. Your scope to automate and move to self service on your intranet is much greater. More and more minor business processes than ever before can be automated at far less cost and effort. The end results are higher productivity for your business, lower operations costs in HR and Finance, a more satisfied user base, and a better perception of IT.

4. Get to a modern production and service toolset for IT: For the past twenty years, there have been two traditional toolsets that most companies leveraged for production processes and service requests (Remedy and Peregrine). And most of us have implemented (with some struggle) reasonable implementations that met the bulk of our needs. But the latest generation of these toolsets (e.g., ServiceNow) make our previous implementations look like dinosaurs. And when you consider the 60 or 70% of your staff and service desk are using these tools every day, and you can make them far more productive with a new toolset, it is worth taking a look at. Further, your business users, will love the new IT ordering facilities on the intranet that are better than ordering a book from Amazon. By the way, the all-in operating cost of the new tools should be substantially less than your current costs for Remedy or Peregrine. And your team will be operating at a step level improvement in efficiency and productivity.

5. Get Going in Business intelligence: One last item to make sure your company is capitalizing on is leveraging the data you already have to know your customer better, improve your products or services, and reduce your costs. Why have advertising for customers who never click through or buy? Why do customers call your call center when they should be able to do it easier online? Wade through all the unstructured data being generated on social about your company to figure out how to improve your brand. Knowing the mood of the market, understanding your customers and the perspectives on your products and services requires IT to partner with the business to leverage the data you have to obtain intelligence. Investing in this area can now be tackled with the new big data tools on the market. If you are not doing much here, then I recommend finding out what your competitors are doing and sitting down with your business partners to sort through what you must do.

So, there’s 5 things that five years ago, would have never made any list. Yet if you make real progress in 3 of the 5, you can hit home runs in customer satisfaction, service quality, and a much better view of IT. And most important, you can ensure your company stays ahead of the game to achieve greater productivity and lower costs.

Any views or alternate perspectives on the progression of IT tools and solutions? Do you see the same sea change that I am calling out here for us to take advantage of?

Let me know. Best, Jim

Delivering More by Leveraging the ‘Flow of Work’

    Jim D

As you start out this year as an IT leader and you are trying to meet both project demand on one hand and savings goals on the other, remember to leverage what I term the IT ‘Flow of Work‘. Too often, once work comes into an organization, either through a new project going into production or through the original structure of the work, it is static. The work, whether it is server administration, batch job execution, or routine fixes, continues to be done by the same team that often developed it in the project cycle. Or at best, the system and its support are handed off to a dedicated run team, that continues to treat it as ‘custom’ work. In other words, once the system has been crafted by the project team, the regular work to run, maintain, and fix the system continues to be custom-crafted work.

This situation, where the work is static and continues to be executed by the initial, higher cost resources, would be analogous to a car company crafting a prototype or concept car, and then using that same team to produce every single subsequent car of that model with the same ‘craft’ approach. This of course does not happen as the car company moves the prototype to a production factory where the work is standardized and automated and leaned, and far lower cost resources execute the work. Yet in the IT industry we often fail to leverage this ‘flow of work’. We use senior server engineers to do basic server administration tasks (thus making it custom work). We fail to ‘package’ or productionalize or automate the tasks thus requiring exorbitant amounts of manual work because the project focused on delivering the feature and there was not optimization step to get it into the IT ‘factory’.

Below is a diagram that represents the flow of work that should occur in your IT organization.

Moving work to where it is most efficiently executed

The custom work, work done for new design, or complex analysis or maintenance, is the work done by your most capable and expensive resources. Yet, many IT organization waste these resources by doing custom work where it doesn’t matter. A case in point would be anywhere that you have IT projects leveraging custom designed and built servers/storage/middleware (custom work) instead of standardized templates (common work). And rarely do you see those tasks documented and automated such that they can be executed by the IT Operations team (routine work). And not only do you then waste your best resources on design that adds minimal business value, you then do not have those best resources available to do the new projects and initiatives the business needs to have done. Or similarly, your senior and high cost engineers are doing routine administrative work because that is how the work was implemented in production. Later, no investment has been made to document or package up this routine work so it can easily be done by your junior or mid-level engineering resources.

Further, I would suggest that you often find the common or routine engineering work stays in that domain. Investment is infrequently made to further shrinkwrap and automate and document the routine administrative tasks your mid-level engineers so that you can hand it off to the IT Operations staff to execute as part of their regular routine (and by the way, the Ops team typically executes these tasks with much greater precision than the engineering teams).

So, rather than fall into the traps of having static pools of work within your organization, drive and investment so that the work can be continually packaged and executed at a more optimal level and free up your specialty resources to tackle more business problems.  Set a bar for each of your teams for productivity improvements. Enable them the time and investment to package the work and send it to the optimal pool. Encourage your teams to partner with the group that will receive their work on the next step of the flow. And make sure they understand that for every bit of more routine work that they can transition to their partner team, they will receive more rewarding custom work.

After a few cycles of executing the flow of work within your organization, you will find you have gained significant capacity and reduced your cost to execute routine work substantially. This enables you to achieve a much improved ratio of run cost versus build costs by continually compressing the run costs.

I have seen this approach executed with great effect in both large and mid-sized organizations. Have you been part of or lead similar exercises? What results did you see?

Best, Jim

 

Your Start of the Year Leadership Checklist

    Jim D

Just as I published a quick checklist for you to use as the year was closing, here is a checklist for your first week back to help you get off to a great start of the new year.  Plus, this is a lot more fun than taking down those outdoor Christmas decorations or doing returns of the unwanted gifts. So before the office gets busy, use your first few weeks to get a jump on outstanding results in 2012 with this list:

1. Remember to get the things done we planned in December. You have booked time in January with your team to do the detailed planning to ensure you have the IT goals for 2012 clearly defined with the key steps to get there. Knock it out with your team.

2. Set your 1st and 2nd quarter virtualization goals for your server and storage and sit down with them and ensure they are mapping out how to get it done. Get them off to a quick start.

3. Pick one or two major contracts to renegotiate in your favor this quarter. A quick hint: Oracle missed expectations last quarter so you may have an opportunity. Remember to hold tight, put something new on the table to get the most out of a deal, and insist on your terms and conditions (and if your company does not have an up-to-date contract template, put that on the plate with your Chief Procurement Officer to get it done).

4. Take those new insights that you gained from your holiday vacation (remember you were going to spend part of your vacation time reading a good management or IT book) and ensure you bring the view to your planning meeting.

5. Review your January schedule and ensure you have time with your customers fully scheduled. Invite one of them to kick off your planning meeting.

6. Also review the planning meeting agenda with your boss and ensure you capture any ‘messages’ he/she wants to make sure come across.

7. Sit down with the intranet team and ensure they are adding 1 or 2 helpful ‘widgets’ a quarter to your intranet site. Start with a ‘How do I …’ list button or improved search tool, or a wikipedia for corporate terms and abbreviations. The little helpful things mean a lot to the productivity of your company’s employees.

8. If you don’t have BYOD yet, sit down with your client device team and review the plans to pilot and then implement it this year.

9. Schedule a visit for you and several of your team to review either a customer facing site (call center or retail store) or a key operations facility for your company. Ask questions and see how IT is working where the rubber meets the road in your firm. I am certain you will learn plenty.

10. Review and report on your performance for the past year – do it with thought and be provocative. Challenge yourself and your team where you have not delivered well. Then follow up with a high level and positive note to your entire team talking in broad strokes about the goals for the year. Strong communication at the start of the year will help ensure you and your team are lined up for success throughout the year.

Many of these items are reconnecting activities: with your business, with your customers, with your boss, and with your team. Before you start off on any major endeavor, it is critical to recheck the plan and the communication lines — that is in essence what we are doing. And with it you will be much more likely to have a successful and rewarding 2012.

All the best, and roger on those plans! Jim

Your Year End IT Leadership Checklist

    Jim D

I think we can all feel the holiday and yearend swooping in and things winding down where we work. The Christmas parties are in full swing and everyone is focused on making sure they get everything on their Christmas gift list. Next week is certain to be quiet in the office. For senior IT managers, here is a quick list of things to do as the year-end approaches:

1. Vacation overlaps: Re-check that you and your senior team are not all out on vacation and no one is left to mind the shop. If there’s a gap, given the timing, you need to be the one to fill it (besides, this way you’ll have an excuse when your spouse asks you to go to the store with return items).

2. Batch Cycles: With the upsurge in retail sales and other peaks this time of year, ask the production batch team to re-calibrate the peak processing time for batch runs in December, month-end and year end. It’s better to find out now you need to address capacity than at 3 am Sunday morning in the New Year and your company can’t close the books on time.

3. Feedback for your team: Spend some of your vacation time writing thoughtful performance reviews for your team. Start with your best and worst performers, they will get the biggest positive impact from a better writeup this year. For outstanding insight on competencies and how to coach, check out FYI: For Your Improvement by Lombardo and Eichinger.

4. Gain new insights: Spend another part of your vacation time reading a good management or IT book. The new perspectives experienced will help your fresh thinking in the new year. If you are looking for ideas then perhaps Magical Mathematics or The Rare Find or perhaps Great by Choice.

5. Start out proactively: Book time in January with your planning team to ensure you have the IT goals for 2012 clearly defined and map out the steps you will be taking to communicate it broadly. Otherwise you can get caught up on the first assignments that come in the door in 2012 and remain reactive the entire year.

6. Allocate the time for your customers: Ask your admin to ensure you have regular meetings scheduled every month with all of your business partners. You may already be doing this, but regular sessions are key to keeping in touch and providing great service.

7. Thank the team: Take your team out for a drink and thank them for the accomplishments for the year. Keep the evening clear of any assignments or negatives on missed deliveries. Everyone needs to be thanked and appreciated, and you’re likely to do enough ‘coaching’ of them the rest of the time.

8. Thank your admin: Your admin is the primary interface by which most people interact with you. If she or he has done well, make sure you thank them. And a nice gift is very reasonable — and ensure they do not get you one either. This would be on top of any formal bonus.

9. Thank your sponsors: Spend some quality time with your boss and whatever the challenges for the year have been, thank them for their support and the opportunities they have given you. Let them know you will be refreshed and ready to go for the new year.

10. Take time for yourself and your family: Make sure you take the time to decompress and reflect. Do whatever you need to do to relax and recharge. Focus on your family. Think about what went well and not so well. Identify the key things about you that you want to change in the new year. Save the how for another reflecting session. Make sure you walk into January with renewed strength and vigor and a focus and game plan on the new you.

For some of you, you have already either completed or will knock off all 10 items. For others, perhaps you have nearly all of them, but there is one or two items you can add to your list. If you are doing less than 5 of them, you need to make sure you do #10 so that you personally are ready for next year.

I hope your year has been successful and rewarding. And I trust that this blog has provided some insight for the last part of the year. Next year, I plan to make to continue to provide the regular posts and insights but have the best practices sections well-developed to enable a quick reference guide for IT management for you and your team.

All the best, and have a great holiday, Jim