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.

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!

Next are four steps that provide a high-level approach to deal with the “Uncooperative Teams” problem

First Step: Spot the signs (As mentioned by Diane Katz in CIO Insight)

1. Your managers never come to you with a collaborative solution to a problem.
2. One manager badmouths another consistently.
3. People are complaining that they don’t have the information they need to get the job done.
4. When errors occur, everyone blames everyone else for the mistakes, rather than taking responsibility for their actions.
5. You hear complaints that your organization has unfair pay practices: Workers say the wrong people get the goodies.
6. There is minimal or no exchange of talent between teams. Everyone hoards people instead of developing them and working to achieve the best results on projects.
7. Your managers complain that when asking for resources, they either get no help at all or receive resources from the bottom of the heap.
8. When you tell your managers that service levels coming from your organization are inconsistent, you get finger-pointing and a lack of accountability.
9. A manager who is a team player appears unhappy, complains of a lack of teamwork or doesn’t stay.
10. Your internal customers seem to be lining up behind one of your managers or another–as if they were rooting for opposing teams.

Second Step: Clear Lines of Communication

A leader has to emerge or be appointed to clear the lines of communication among the different teams, this is done by executing some of the following actions:

• Build relationships with all teams, at all levels of the hierarchy
• Understand each team’s point of view, challenges, roles and responsibilities
• Understand the ‘value chain’ or inter-dependencies among the different teams
• Assess whether it is lack of process or lack of Trust & Communication as the driving source of the problems

Once the appointed ‘leader’ has to earn the respect from the different teams, which will lead to opening trusted lines of communication.

Third Step: Reinforce Common Goal / Higher Purpose

Once a leader is accepted and respected by most members from all teams, the next step is to build on the momentum and get the teams to use the lines of communication among themselves.

Usually, reinforcing the fact that the different teams share similar goals, are part of the same company (if applicable) or are part of the same project will get them going.

The role of the leader at this stage remains critical as he or she is promoting relationships among the teams.

Fourth Step: Fine-Tune the Process

Once the lines of trusted communication have been opened at all levels, it becomes feasible to tweak, enhance, implement processes that smooth the flow of information among different teams.

By this stage, steps two and three have smoothed the way as teams are on board to improve their inter-communications. Unfortunately it is often the case where companies go directly to step four without ever realizing that they are facing the Uncooperative Teams problem.

Have you faced an “Uncooperative Teams” problem, if so, what worked and what didn’t work as you expected ?

1. Go to System Preferences and open Network
2. On the left side you should see Airport, Ethernet and FireWire
   
3. Click the + sign
4. select VPN interface
   
5. select Cisco IPSec as VPN Type
6. Give it a Service Name; by default is VPN(Cisco IPSec)
   
7. Click Create and you should see something like the following picture
   
8. Enter the Server Address
9. Enter the Account Name (your user id)
10. Enter a Password (optional; if blank you will be prompt for a password when connecting)
11. Click Authentication Settings…
    
12. Enter the Group Name as provided by your company’s VPN connection instructions
13. Select a certificate or enter the password for the Group Name in the Shared Secret field
14. Click OK
15. Check off the “Show VPN status in menu bar” (optional)
16. Apply the changes
17. Done… You should be able to connect

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.

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.

On the other hand, there is a new industry taking the extreme opposite approach, such as VaporStream’s email that is founded on encryption, SSL and RAM to send emails that will vanish without trace.

There is sure to be many great uses for services such as VaporStram, just as regulators and compliance may have a strong opinion about its use in the Corporate world.

On one hand of the spectrum you have Social Network posts that based on frequent ‘privacy settings modifications’ can make user’s postings available to a larger audience than intended; not to mention permanently. While on the other side there are vanishing emails that cannot be traced.

Could it be that we are just a few months away from a new or existing Social Network to marry both worlds by offering something in the lines of the following features:

- Reverse period: X period of time after a posting is made, the posting can be reversed leaving no trail whatsoever.
- Clear privacy position and privacy controls that do not change that much over time
- If the Social Network makes money by selling your likes and dislikes, share the profit with its users

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.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI

Next is a high level view of the offerings from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, SAS, MicroStrategy and Information Builders

IBM

IBM’s approach is centered around its Business Analytics and Optimization Services Group and its value proposition is based on leveraging industry best practices, leading edge technology and a formidable number of smart people that together support the “Smarter World” initiative.

It is important to mention that IBM has an impressive arsenal of technologies that can be leveraged to solve almost any type of problems; and recently it acquired SPSS giving IBM a strong advantage in the predictive analytics market.

IBM also claims to play well in shops that are based on other technologies such as Oracle or SAP. This makes IBM a player that can service companies that take either the one-vendor or multi-vendor approach to enhance their BI capabilities.

Oracle

Oracle is probably one of the kings when it comes to very large data warehouses, and its approach to BI is founded on its Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Suite. This year is quite challenging for Oracle as it still integrating SUN into its model and that can be a distraction that can delay advancing its BI strategy as fast as they would like.

Nevertheless, Oracle will provide an end-to-end BI approach for those big companies that like the one-vendor approach.

Microsoft

Microsoft has always been consider as a more cost-effective solution than Oracle, and it is sticking to this by pushing SQL Server, Sharepoint and yes, the good old Excel. Later this year Microsoft has plans to release PowerPivot for Excel, PowerPivot for Sharepoint, SQL Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint 2010 and Office 2010.

Together these technologies are to offer a  low-cost alternative to implement a BI strategy. Although a key success factor will be the Microsoft Business Partner that the company chooses to work with when designing and implementing a BI strategy.

SAP

SAP is moving on the right track with BusinessObjects and other products, but it is still struggling to come up with a clear offer. Right now it seems like it continues to rely on its huge SAP customer base, who by nature of their implementations, prefer integrated solutions.

Customer support is the Achilles heel and its up for SAP to step it up before it starts losing major ground.

SAS

Its key area is data mining and its product base integrate well with database management systems and Microsoft Office. It is still evolving and has some challenges in 2010, including its battle to “R”, an open source software that is an alternative to SAS.

MicroStrategy

Its products run on top of large enterprise warehouses, as such it lacks and end-to-end offering which limits its market to companies looking for multi-vendor BI strategies

Information Builders

WebFocus continues to be a great environment for building custom web-based BI applications. It faces marketing and branding challenges and its integration capabilities need to evolve further, especially with its OLAP capabilities. Having said that its existing customer base is more than satisfied with the customer service they get from Information Builders.

Information Builders is looking at a great year and have lots of potential to grow based on their innovation track record and excellent customer service, but then again, the megavendors are also growing fast.

This blog entry was based on the following sources by Christina Torode
- Gartner rates the Big Four business Intelligence vendors
- Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms 2010

Links of Interest (Megavendors)
- IBM Business Analytics and Optimization
- Microsoft BI home
- Oracle’s Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Technology Center
- SAP Business Intelligence

Other BI top players

- MicroStrategy
- SAS
- Information Builders

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.

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.