Tag: IT Leadership

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

Why you want an Australian Pilot: Lessons for Outstanding IT Leadership

    Jim D

Perhaps you are wondering what nationality or culture has to do with piloting an airplane? And how could piloting an airplane be similar to making decisions in an IT organization?

For those of you who have read Outliers, which I heartily recommend, you would be familiar with the well-supported conclusions that Malcolm Gladwell makes:

  • that incredible success often has strong parallels and patterns among those high achievers, often factors you would not expect or easily discern
  • and no one ever makes it alone

A very interesting chapter in Outliers is based on the NTSB analysis of what occurred in the cockpit during several crashes as well as the research work done by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede. What Hofstede found in his studies for IBM HR department in the 70s and 80s is that people from different countries or cultures behave differently in their work relationships. Not surprising of course, and Hofstede did not place countries as right or wrong but used the data as a way to measure differences in cultures. A very interesting measure of culture is the Power Distance Index (PDI). Countries with a high PDI have cultures where those in authority are treated with great respect and deference. For countries with a low PDI, those in authority go to great lengths to downplay their stature and members feel comfortable challenging authority.

Now back to having an Australian pilot your plane: commercial aircraft, while highly automated and extremely reliable, are complex machines that when in difficult circumstances, require all of the crew to do their job well and in concert. But for multiple crashes in the 1990s and early 2000s, the NTSB found that crew communication and coordination were significant factors. And those airlines with crews from countries with high PDI scores, had the worst records. Why? As Malcolm Gladwell lays out so well, it is because of the repeated deference of lower status crew members to a captain who is piloting the plane. And when the captain makes repeated mistakes, these crew members defer and do not call vigorously call out the issues when it is their responsibility to do so even to fatal effect. So, if you were flying a plane in the 1990s, you would want your pilot to be from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, or the US, as they have the lowest PDI cultural score. Since that time, it is worth noting that most airlines with high PDI ratings have incorporated crew responsibility training to overcome these effects and all airlines have added further crew training on communications and interaction resulting in the continued improvement in safety we witnessed this past decade.

But this experience yields insight into how teams operate effectively in complex environments. Simply put, the highest performance teams are those with a low PDI that enables team members to provide appropriate input into a decision. Further, once the leader decides, with this input, the team rotates quickly and with confidence to take on the new tack. Elite teams in our armed forces operate on very similar principles.

I would suggest that high performance IT teams operate in a low PDI manner as well. Delivering an IT system in today’s large corporations requires integrating a dozen or more technologies to deliver features that require multiple experts to fully comprehend. In contrast, if you have the project or organization driven by a leader whose authoritative style imposes high deference by all team members and alternative views cannot be expressed, than it is simply a matter of time before poor performance will set in. Strong team members and experts will look elsewhere for employment as their voices are not heard, and at some point, one person cannot be an expert in everything required to succeed and delivery failure will occur. High PDI leaders will not result in sustainable high performance teams.

Now a low PDI culture does not suggest there is not structure and authority. Nor is the team a democracy. Instead, each team member knows their area of responsibility and understands that in difficult and complex situations, all must work together with flexibility to come up with ideas and options for the group to consider for the solution. Each member views their area as a critical responsibility and strives to be the best at their competency in a disciplined approach. Leaders solicit data, recommended courses and ideas from team members, and consider them fully. Discussion and constructive debate, if possible given the time and the urgency, are encouraged. Leaders then make clear decisions, and once decided, everyone falls in line and provides full support and commitment.

In many respects, this is a similar profile to the Level 5 leader that Jim Collins wrote about that mixes ‘a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They feature a lack of pretense (low PDI) but fierce resolve to get things done for the benefit of their company. Their modesty allows them to be approachable and ensures that the facts and expert opinions are heard. Their focus and resolve enables them to make clear decisions. And their dedication to the company and the organizations ensure the company goals are foremost. (Of course, they also have all the other personal and management strengths and qualities (intelligence, integrity, work ethic, etc.).)

Low PDI or Level 5 leaders set in place three key approaches for their organizations:

  • they set in place a clear vision and build momentum with sustained focus and energy, motivating and leveraging the entire team
  • they do not lurch from initiative to initiative or jump on the latest technology bandwagon, instead they judiciously invest in key technologies and capabilities that are core to their company’s competence and value and provide sustainable advantage
  • because they drive a fact-based, disciplined approach to decisioning as leaders, excessive hierarchy and bureaucracy are not required. Further, quality and forethought are built in to processes freeing the organization of excessive controls and verification.

To achieve a high performance IT organization, these are the same leadership qualities required. Someone who storms around and makes all the key decisions without input from the team will not achieve a high performance organization nor will someone who focuses only on technology baubles and not on the underlying capabilities and disciplines. And someone who shrinks from key decisions and turf battles and does not sponsor his team will fail as well. We have all worked for bosses that reflected these qualities so we understand what happens and  why there is a lack of enthusiasm in those organizations.

So, instead, resolve to be a level 5 leader, and look to lower your PDI. Set a compelling vision, and every day seek out the facts, press your team to know their area of expertise as top in the industry, and sponsor the dialogue that enables the best decisions, and then make them.

Best, Jim

Moving from IT Silos to IT Synergy

    Jim D

We will revisit the Service Desk best practices this weekend as we have several additions ready to go, but I wanted to cover how you, as an IT leader, can bring about much greater synergy within your IT organization. In many IT shops, and some that I found when I first arrived at a company, the IT is ‘siloed’ or separate into different divisions, with typically each division supporting a different business line. Inevitability there are frustrations with this approach, and they are particularly acute when a customer is served by two or more lines of business. How should you approach this situation as a leader and what are the best steps to take to improve IT’s delivery?

I think it is best first to understand what are the drivers for variations in IT organizations under large corporations. With that understanding we can then work out the best IT organizational and structural models to serve them. There are two primary sets of business drivers:

  • those drivers that require IT to be closer to the business unit such as:
    • improving market and business knowledge,
    • achieving faster time-to-market (TTM),
    • and the ability to be closer in step and under control of the business leads of each division
  • those drivers that require IT to be more consolidated such as:
    • achieving greater efficiencies,
    • attaining a more holistic view of the customers,
    • delivering greater consistency and quality
    • providing greater scale and lower comprehensive risk

So, with these legitimate pushes, in two different directions, there is always a conflict in how IT should be organized. In some organizations, the history has been two or three years of being decentralized to enable IT to be more responsive to the business, and then, after costs are out of control, or risk is problematic, a new CFO, COO, or CEO comes in and  IT is re-centralized. This pendulum swing back and forth, is not conducive to a high performance team, as IT senior staff either hunker down to avoid conflict, or play politics to be on the next ‘winning’ side. Further, given that business organizations have a typical life span of 3 to 4 years (or less) before being re-organized again, corollary changes in IT to match the prevailing business organization then cause havoc with IT systems and structures that have 10 or 20 year life spans. Moreover, implementing a full business applications suite and supporting business processes takes at least 3 years for decent-sized business division, so if organizations change in the interim, then much valuable investment is lost.

So it is best to design an IT organization and systems approach that meets both sets of drivers and anticipates that business organizational change will happen. The best solution for meeting both sets of drivers is to organize IT as a ‘hybrid‘ organization. In other words, some portions of IT should be organized to deliver scale, efficiency, and high quality, while others should be organized to deliver time to market, and market feature and innovation.

The functions that should be consolidated and organized centrally to deliver scale, efficiency and quality should include:

  • Infrastructure areas, especially networks, data centers, servers and storage
  • Information security
  • Field support
  • Service desk
  • IT operations and IT production processes and tools

These functions should then be run as a ‘utility’ for the corporation. There should be allocation mechanisms in place to ensure proper usage and adequate investment in these key foundational elements. Every major service the utility delivers should be benchmarked at least every 18 months against industry to ensure delivery is at top quartile levels and best practices are adopted. And the utility teams should be relentlessly focused on continuous improvement with strong quality and risk practices in place.

The functions that should be aligned and organized along business lines to deliver time to market, market feature and innovation should include:

  • Application development areas
  • Internet and mobile applications
  • Data marts, data reporting, and data analysis

These functions should be held accountable for high quality delivery. Effective release cycles should be in place to enable high utilization of the ‘build factory’ as well as a continuous cycle of feature delivery. These functions should be compared and marked against each other to ensure best practices are adopted and performance is improved.

And those functions which can be organized flexibly in either mode would be:

  • Database
  • Middleware
  • Testing
  • Applications Maintenance
  • Data Warehousing
  • Project Management
  • Architecture

For these functions that can centralized or organized along business lines, it is possible to organize in a variety of ways. For example, systems integration testing could be centralized and unit test and system testing could be allocated by business line application team. Or, data base could have physical design and administration centralized and logical design and administration allocated by application team. There are some critical elements that should be singular or consolidated, including:

  • if architecture is not centralized, there must be architecture council reporting to the CIO with final design authority
  • there should be one set of project methodologies, tools, and process for all project managers
  • there should be one data architecture team
  • there should be one data warehouse physical design and infrastructure team

In essence, as the services are more commodity, or there is critical advantage to have a single solution (e.g. one view of the customer for the entire corporation) then you should establish a single team to be responsible for that service. And where you are looking for greater speed or better market knowledge, then organize IT into smaller teams closer to the business (but still with technical fiduciary accountabilities back to the CIO).

With this hybrid organization, as outlined in the diagram, you will be able to deliver the best of both worlds: outstanding utility services that provide cost and quality advantage and business-aligned services that provide TTM and market feature and innovation. .

As CIO, you should look to optimize your organization using the ‘hybrid’ structure. If you are currently entirely siloed, then start the journey by making the business case for the most commodity of functions: networks, service desks, and data centers. It will be less costly, and there will be more capability and lower risk if these are integrated. As you successfully complete integration of these area, you can move up the chain to IT Operations, storage, and servers. As these areas are pooled and consolidated you should be able to release excess capacity and overheads while providing more scale and better capabilities. Another area to start could be to deliver a complete view of the customer across the corporation. This requires a single data architecture, good data stewardship by the business, and a consolidated data warehouse approach. Again, as functions are successfully consolidated, the next layer up can be addressed.

Similarly, if you are highly centralized, it will be difficult to maintain pace with multiple business units. It is often better to divest some level of integration to achieve a faster TTM or better business unit support. Pilot an application or integration team in those business areas where innovation and TTM are most important or business complexity is highest. Maintain good oversight but also provide the freedom for the groups to perform in their new accountabilities.

And realize that you can dial up or down the level of integration within the hybrid model.  Obviously you would not want to decentralize commodity functions like the network or centralize all application work, but there is the opportunity to vary intermediate functions to meet the business needs. And by staying within the hybrid framework, you can deliver to the business needs without careening from a fully centralized to a decentralized model every three to five years and all the damage that such change causes to the IT team and systems.

There are additional variations that can be made to the model to accommodate organizational size and scope (e.g., global versus regional and local) that I have not covered here. What variations to the hybrid or other models have you used with success? Please do share.

Best, Jim

 

 

 

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

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

 

Getting Ready for 2012: A few things to add to your technology plans

    Jim D

By now, you have submitted your budget for 2012 and hopefully have an updated set of business and IT goals. And even if it is not final, you have a solid draft and good understanding of what you must get done in 2012 to be successful. So, here are several things to add to your technology plans if you are not already doing them:

Give them BYOD: If you have not enabled your company’s staff to do their work on their own mobile device yet, put it in your 2012 first quarter plan to pilot it and then to roll out in 2012. This is an easy win — it saves your company money and it enables your users to use the device they want to use and be more productive. Not sure how to begin? Here is one reference on how and another on the trends. And check out the prevalent toolset being used at Good Technologies.

Implement more self-service: An oft-neglected area is the improvement of your 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. 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. Continued improvement in workflow toolsets from Sharepoint to Lombardi mean you can automate and put on your intranet more and more minor business processes than ever before at far less cost and effort. The end result is lower operations costs in HR and Finance, a more satisfied user base, and a better perception of IT.

Topgrade your team: With the weak economy of the past several years, and your budget being under pressure, there is significantly less turnover of personnel, even in IT. Don’t wait for the upturn to improve your team. Ensure you have rigorous improvement plans for the mediocre performers on your team. And if there is no material improvement, look to topgrade. Now is the time to replace poor performers with strong new talent. Don’t wait for the economy to fully turn around and growth to be required, everyone will be looking then, and it will be much harder to get the best talent.

Virtualize everything new: Perhaps you have made good progress on virtualization and are now above 40 or even 50% of your servers being virtualized. You should be able to get this to 80 or even 90%. How? Presumably you have projects in your 2012 budget to tackle some of the remaining significant pools of legacy servers. That’s great. But make sure you close the barn door. Insist that every new project must use virtualized servers and storage. And any exceptions require CIO approval with strong business case rationale. You want to use fiats sparingly, but this is one case where the change in behavior from every project thinking they must have dedicated infrastructure yields outstanding benefits across the board.

Start an intern or graduate program: Often, intern or graduate programs are the first areas to be cut when times get tough. Yet these programs enable you to bring on skilled resources at very low cost to assist your team. And you should really view them as extended interview sessions where you have productive work being done during the interview. As you should be keenly aware, the IT unemployment rate is quite low, this summer it was 3.8%, which is basically close to full employment. So, in order to get a jump on the best grads this year, start or expand your intern and graduate program. By bringing new talent in the door, you will reduce your overall, average IT staff cost, bring in new ideas and fresh energy,  and contribute to your community and local education institutions. A win-win-win all around.

Do some fun awards and incentives: Let’s face it, things are tough and have been for several years. The economy, the global situation (e.g., Euro), and the housing crisis contribute to a dour mood. And the upcoming yearlong political campaign in the US will only further heighten the general negativity. Your workforce though will not be as productive in this downtrodden mental state. So make a difference in 2012. Have some fun and celebrate successes, even smaller ones. Provide some fun and low cost rewards for your teams that meet your goals and values. And providing some fun recognition is a key retention factor for your best staff. Don’t make the mistake of rewarding the arsonist for putting out the fire he set, so ensure that you consider the means as well as the ends on any effort. But have some fun, make it unique, and reward the team!

Business intelligence: One last item to check to make sure you have it in your 2012 plan 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? Knowing your customers and knowing your products and services requires IT to partner with the business to leverage the data you have to obtain intelligence. Investing in this area should be a key goal for 2012. 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. Add it to your list.

What would you add to the 2012 plan? What are your highest priority areas for 2012? Risk and Regulatory? Growth and new product? Or Cost and Efficiency?

Share your thoughts, I look forward to hearing from you.

Best, Jim