CTO/CIO perspectives

As I’ve written here before, I strongly advocate thinking of IT in general as a service organization to the rest of the business.

Any service organization needs one or more forms of “feedback loop” to be able to gauge whether it is successfully accomplishing its mission.  However, I’ve observed relatively few IT organizations that actively seek to implement such feedback loops on a regular basis.  At best, the IT executive does it informally by consulting with his peers at the executive table.  But with any such anecdotal feedback, the information gathered that way tends to be fleeting and unreliable, and it is especially influenced by strong personalities and emotions during crisis situations.

Here’s a better, and simple, suggestion, one that I’ve implemented to varying degrees at several firms with a good amount of success: Survey your constituents regularly and then publish the results.

Sounds daunting?  I promise it really isn’t, not in this day and age of easy-to-use web-based surveys.  With less than an hour of work, you can design and initiate a survey using a free service like Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey, and easily gather high-quality results (reports and statistics) in just a few days that can help you gauge (and present) how you’re doing.  Here’s how.

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As I promised in my previous post on this, and along the lines of the “intensely practical” goal of this blog, we’ll now take a look at the financial cost analysis for a specific project.  This is only an example, with details changed or obscured, but it is based on a real proposal from a few years back, analyzing whether to swap out an existing infrastructure element (a storage array) for a newer and more capable unit.

As I’ve argued before, any proposal like this should really analyze and present several alternatives – e.g., sticking with the status quo, changing to vendor X, or changing to vendor Y.  This example covers only one of those analyses, but I think you’ll get the point.  Here’s what I see a lot of IT people forget: your goal here is to analyze and communicate and recommend the best choice for the organization, not just to justify what you already want to do in your gut.  You need to be your own devil’s advocate in this process.  If you can’t clearly understand all the benefits and outline all the costs, you’ll make poorer decisions, no matter what your gut tells you.

So let’s dive into the practical.  Here’s the process: if you’ll recall, we want to look at hard benefits and hard costs of the proposal, and look at these over a five-year time horizon to get the big picture.  On the benefits side, we talked about how benefits break down into increased revenue and decreased costs.  Of course, the notion of actually increasing the company’s revenue based on an infrastructure change is unlikely, so we’ll leave that aside in this case.  The whole purpose of this particular example proposal is to decrease costs, both in real terms and in terms of making personnel more productive.  So let’s look primarily there for the benefits that will result from the proposal.

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I promised a while back to write more about some of the pet peeves I’ve developed in the CIO/CTO role. So here are a few more.

We all have pet peeves. Working as an executive in IT seems to present a lot of opportunities to develop a long list of these. They’re minor grievances, to be sure, but they also really matter, in that they drain away little smidgens of productivity or create frustration. And most are easy to address, so in the interest of enhancing the world’s productivity, I’d like to list a few of these. I’ll confine myself just to the ones that crop up at least once a week in the course of my workday. Consider fixing these a high priority to show good business etiquette and professionalism:

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Let’s talk some more about one of my favorite topics, project portfolio management (PPM). A lot of literature on PPM tends to focus on evaluating risks and returns. An excellent article on IT governance last week in The Wall Street Journal had the following sage advice:

“Create an IT portfolio by evaluating risks and returns. Just as an investor balances risk and returns in constructing a portfolio of investments, management should analyze the costs, benefits and risks of all IT projects to determine how to get the most benefit from the dollars invested in technology.”

I can’t argue with that. But I also like to talk about another major part of IT portfolio management, which focuses on juggling which projects can actually be resourced. It’s unfortunately easy to come up with ten distinct projects with positive return on investment (ROI), for example, in a situation where it’s really only feasible to do one or two of these a year. In some companies, the pressure to do any positive-ROI project becomes enormous, even if it means the company is biting off too much at once. So what to do?

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The Skeptic’s Dictionary tells us about a concept called channeling: “Channeling is a process whereby an individual (the “channeler”) claims to have been invaded by a spirit entity which speaks through the channeler. ”

Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not recommending that anyone get invaded by a spirit entity. But I am recommending that you learn to channel, and that you become a champion of that technique to your IT staff. Here’s what I mean.

The key problem I see in a lot of IT-to-business communication is when IT people fail to consistently anticipate and proactively answer the obvious and reasonable questions that stakeholders will have, particularly senior management stakeholders, including board members. Those questions are simple and almost always essentially the same, as I’ve mentioned before. On any given proposal, stakeholders want to understand these basics:

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More pithy sayings that (at least in my view) I reuse in an attempt to succinctly express key concepts and lessons. Or, perhaps in many cases, to annoy my staff via tireless repetition. I have several dozen of these sayings, most likely (I haven’t actually counted), and for many of them I can no longer remember their origin. The ones this time around, though, are attributable. You are free to draw conclusions or insights about my cultural values from the breadth of sources represented here. Aside from the theme of wildly disparate cultural derivation, though, these apothegms have another common thread to them: they tend to come to mind as you go through the standard back-and-forth negotiations with business stakeholders about features, projects, workload.

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As promised, I’m going to follow up on my last post (“Optimism, resilience, stamina: the make-up of the CTO/CIO“), covering the myths IT deals with on a regular basis, by talking about its flip side: the ways that IT itself can unfortunately perpetuate or contribute to some of the myths I’ve been discussing.

Here’s a point-by-point discussion of some of the things I talked about last time, the discouraging statements you frequently hear from stakeholders.

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Just a heads-up for readers: CTO/CIO Perspectives was mentioned this week in an interesting article in CIO Magazine, titled “20 Things You Can Do In 20 Minutes to Be More Successful at Work“. Not all the tips are spot-on, in my view (and I commented to that effect in the comments section), but there are definitely some gems there worth considering. All of us juggle a varied and heavy workload, and have frustrations about maintaining our personal productivity amidst the fray; lots of things in this article can help. Check it out!

In general, I highly recommend following the content published in CIO. As with all things, not everything is of equal value, but the range of topics and discussion is absolutely germane to anyone in an executive IT role in particular.