There is a big opportunity for service oriented businesses to revise their approach to Information Technology Management. At a personal level Technology has evolved to the point that it is integrated in every person’s daily activities, to the point where the average person is savvy enough to be considered technology proficient, or at least when compared with the average person 10 or 20 years ago. Yet in many corporations the business leaders have not embraced technology at the same rate and it is often evident the gap between business strategies and their technology organizations.
To remain competitive it is becoming imperative to Align IT with the business. For this to happen business leaders need to embrace IT as an enabler that puts organizations in a position to execute business strategies; both business and IT need to see each other as equal partners.
On March 2011 McKinsey Quarterly posted the article “An IT growth strategy for insurers” that summarizes the challenges to take a new approach to technology in having IT still seen as a cost center and the feeling that technology can jeopardize the trust based relationships between insurers and clients.
Next are some points not exclusive to the insurance sector on how companies are aligning IT with the business.
- Senior business executives, CEOs must meet regularly with CIOs and their direct reports
- Map and monitor the company wide IT portfolio and key business initiatives
- Categorize funded projects under “Change the Company” and “Run the Company”
- The entire leadership team must be up to speed in trends about customers, service delivery and technology
- Setup an Observation deck to spot potentially disruptive technologies early on
- Invest in IT talent capable of implementing IT innovations
For more details here’s a link to the article “An IT growth strategy for insurers” by Stefano Martinotti, Oliver Schein, and Fabio Torrisi.
Technology is no longer a black box that business leaders can ignore to understand when setting their strategic goals. In order to be competitive in the not so distant future, companies whose business leaders embrace technology and incorporate IT leaders in the development of business strategies will be in a much better position and quite possible will have a competitive advantage.
Service Delivery is the name of the game, and technology is just a tool that enables and facilitates the delivery of services. It is up to the leadership of a company to set the tone and truly leverage technology as a strategic advantage and differentiator.
It is all About Perspective
As a manager one of my responsibilities is to provide an environment that enables each person to be successful. Earlier this week while reading a Baseline’s slideshows on how Personal Investment in IT Projects Translates to Success by Dennis McCafferty reminded me of just how important it is to keep people invested in the day to day activities, whether it is a project, operation, or anything else.
For example, if we want to increase the Success probabilities for any given project by increasing the project team’s level of involvement/engagement/attachment, we have to consider the following perspectives:
1. A worker perspective:
- Define goals for the year
- Maximize their full potential (via constant challenges and on-going learning)
- Working with and for people that they value
2. A manager perspective
- Passion, Passion and more Passion
Practice what you preach, if you don’t irradiate passion for a project then it is hard for a team to be inspired by you - Identify whether a goal is an achievement on itself, or is it important because of the reward after the goal
What drives each person, the goal itself or the potential reward that comes from meeting the goal - Transform the goals and make them more engaging
A great example is provided by Dennis on his sildeshow: “…Launching a spam filter is less fun than aiming to reduce e-mail-based system intrusions by 75%” - If a goal doesn’t get people fired up, then keep working on it
In the end people are what makes projects a success and managers have the responsibility to fine-tune how each person perceives the project by transforming the way goals are worded.
If you have any project, operation, initiative, or goals in progress, give it a try; transform the goal to get people fired up and remember It is all about Perspective!
A recent blog on CIO Insight lists 10 signs of Uncooperative Teams and how big of an impact it can have on productivity, customers and getting things done.
Next are four steps that provide a high-level approach to deal with the “Uncooperative Teams” problem
Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard I have been experiencing problems with the Cisco VPN Client (see workaround http://gamboaworld.com/home/?p=25), but finally I found the time to get it fixed permanently by using Snow Leopard’s very own VPN Network interface. Next are the steps on how to get it done, say goodbye to the ugly workaround and remove the CISCO VPN client permanently.
- Go to System Preferences and open Network
- On the left side you should see Airport, Ethernet and FireWire
- Click the + sign
- select VPN interface
read more…
Pronoun test your team / organization
It is well known how critical in this day and age is to have employees engaged in what they do. But a question that I have heard a lot is:
How do you know if your team or organization is engaged or not ?
In the August issue of Canadian Business Magazine, the Opinion article by Richard Branson mentions how important is to monitor the conversations of the team members and detect whether they use the pronoun “They” or “We”.
By coincidence, I was also reading the “Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” book by Daniel H. Pink, where there is a reference to Robert Reich’s “Pronoun Test” to assess how healthy is an organization. When visiting a company, he applies this test by asking some questions to different employees and based on how often they use the words “They” vs “We”, he gets a clear indication on how healthy the organization is.
The rational is simple. Employees that are engaged and feel part of the purpose of the company perform better and do more than those that are not engaged. Engaged people make reference to “We”, as they feel part of what’s going on; while not engaged people tend to make references to “They” accentuating the fact that they are not engaged.
So, since many companies are in mid-year reviews, pay extra attention at the pronouns used by your team and perhaps you will get a better sense of how healthy is your team.
Give it a try in some conversations next week and see what you find, it may surprise you.
For the last few months Facebook has been the spotlight of privacy. Anything that FB users post can be shared permanently and if the security settings are not adjusted properly the postings are vulnerable to search engines.
Ann Handley (@marketingprofs) posted a great article in OPEN Forum related about Social Media remorse stating that: “54% of users under 25 years old have posted something they regretted while only 27% of users over age 25 years old have posted something online they regretted”.
In addition, she mentions some of the urban legends that have been created around poor judgement of online postings as well as some advise on how to stay out of trouble.
read more…
Is your IS Organization designed for success ?
I have been involved in many different IS organizations for over 15 years, and there are always trends and theories that do add a lot of value such as ITIL v3 or improving an organizations CMMI level. But what about the organization structure, is it really defined to maximize business value and leverage technology ?
Setting the Stage
Let’s position ourselves as the VP running an IS area in a large corporation where IS is not the core function of the company.
The IS area services multiple business units, has resources in multiple locations
Mission Statement
“To add value and enable the business to execute their strategies through the effective use of Technology.”
The Question
Is your IS Organization aligned to deliver as per the mission statement ?
Mission Statement Analysis
To answer this question, let’s first analyze the mission statement and divide it into two segments:
1) “To add value and enable the business to execute their strategies…”
This can be interpreted in such a way that the business and the execution of its strategies are the reason for the IS organization to exist. Which makes sense; after all, if there is no business, then there is no IS area.
Taking this concept to the next level, the key role in the IS Organization is the one that liaisons the business with the IS organization, the Customer Relationship Manager.
2) “…through the effective use of Technology.”
If the first part of the mission statement gives the IS organization a reason to exist, this second part of the mission statement gives the IS Organization its function; to effectively use technology in support of adding value and enabling the business to execute its strategies.
At this level is where we can use all the traditional and common IS goodies, such as ITIL v3, Project Management Office, SDLC, Architecture Groups, etc. It is the What needs to happen, the How to make it happen and the Execution and Control to make things happen.
The Approach
In order to truly align an IS Organization to deliver and support such a mission statement, the organization needs to be defined and built around the Customer Relationship Manager (CRM).
In future blogs I will describe a CRM-centric organization and how it is well positioned to deliver as per the mission statement.
Recently Las Vegas hosted the Garner Business Intelligence Summit 2010; although I was unable to attend, a lot of interesting things have come out of there, where Gartner presented the 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms
Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI
Next is a high level view of the offerings from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, SAS, MicroStrategy and Information Builders
Excel can be categorized as one of those applications that people either love or hate. From the users’ perspective, it is a love affair, as it enables them to analyze data with no involvement from systems people.
On the other hand, IT people dislike Excel when it is used for production activities. In other words, relying on Excel for critical analytics or having to run Excel in a server as part of complex batch processes.
For years I’ve seen and actually have been part of the battle to free production environments from Excel spreadsheets, but like a zombie in a bad horror movie, just when you thing you are done, it comes back and it is there again; spreading like wildfire among users, and every now and then in a production server.
I have to be fair that Excel does some pretty good things and nobody can deny its importance as a Business Intelligence tool, and now Thanks go Cloudcel, Excel can harness the power of the cloud with the potential of making Excel a force to be reckon with, as it can analyze and filter real-time data.
Coudcel seems to be on to something as their purpose as they puts it in their website is: “… to bring the full power of advanced data mining and analytics, realtime stream processing, and massively parallel computing to everyone”.
This has the potential to be a disruptive technology that reshapes the BI landscape, and definitely something to keep an eye on.
First, to understand the differences, let’s look at how these are defined in wikipedia:
Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like a public utility.
Grid computing is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains for a common goal.
The closest definition to virtualization in Wikipedia is that of Virtual private server (VPS, also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS) as a method of splitting a server. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted.
Second, from those definitions and personal experience, I define each term as following:
Cloud Computing is a set of shared resources (hardware, software etc.) that provide services on-demand.
Examples of this are salesforce.com, workplace.com, gmail, google apps, yahoo email and most SaaS applications. Note how in many of these services, the users getting the services don’t know anything about the infrastructure running behind the scenes.
Grid Computing is putting together a group of computer resources to work together on a common goal or set of tasks. It is the evolution of distributed computing.
An example can be seen in highly computing intensive applications that require tremendous amounts of computing power (dozens or even hundreds of cores), such as the hedging environments in Financial Institutions to run complex mathematical models.
Virtualization is the creation of servers that host other servers. For example, if you had a physical 48-core wintel server, you can use virtualization to create and host multiple ‘virtual servers’ on one single physical server.
The best example is server consolidation and the industry leader is VMWare.
Conclusion
Cloud computing utilizes techniques such as Grid Computing and Virtualization to provide services on-demand.