Category: Technology

Discussion about technologies and usage

Productivity in IT Divisions

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I thought some years ago that Enterprise information system growth was more or less linear, according to a size factor. But getting experience, I soon discovered that inserting a new application in an existing information system comes to the same thing of creating a kind of turbulence which will take several months before to be stabilized.

Indeed, when counted in a stabilization process, applications may undergo several changes which do not change their initial function points count. Also when enterprises acquire or reengineer some of their information system parts, they use to implement COTS which are difficult to assess in function points. It results that measuring information system size is allways difficult and, even done, it will be a poor predictor for change which is rather related to business optimisation pace.

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Harsh times are coming for IT divisions. What to do ?

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Financial Insights, a research subsidiary of IDC, forecasts that top 10 american financial institutions  will cut  their IT budgets by 30%. Money is becoming dearer worldwide and investments harder to make. Europe which need big restructuring, fears recession.

For IT managers, it is time to consolidation for being able to support unavoidable budget cuts.

What means consolidation ?

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IT Strategy is not enough, what’s about men ?

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A recent survey commissioned by the Society for Information Management gave the following concerns for CEO, CIO and enterprise top managers :

1) IT/business alignment

2) Building business skills in IT

3) IT strategic planning

4) Attracting new IT professionals

5) Making better use of information

6) Manage change

7) Reduce the cost of doing business

8) Improve IT quality

9) Retaining IT professionals

10) Security and privacy

Among the high ranked points, 2-4-9 regards human resources management. Indeed, if you have not the right men able to implementing your strategy you ‘ll probably loose most of your bets. Successful companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple,…  have build their success on human asset.

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If you transform, align

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I already wrote in a previous post how the number of papers discussing IT alignement suprised me. Indeed, for me, priority should be given to deciding, to planning and to setting up Enterprise Change.

Formerly, 15 years ago, Enterprise Change was contemplated by planning and launching big projects which frequently crashed. Then, best practises of IT led to break down big projects into pieces managed locally. It results an higher rate of success, but with some pieces left behind. By this time, Enterprise was rather a collection of stovepipes with more or less communication in between.

Some of us attempted to glue stovepipes with EAI and business process automation. They get a pretty complicated system which never had the expected flexibility required to follow users business changes.

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A change agent CIO, his real strategic stake.

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CIO contribution is often assessed on the basis of IT value indicator which most of the time is improved when costs lower, quality of service rises, and risk level is acceptable. Furthermore, some firms expect from CIO to be one of their most important change agent. This is an opportunity for CIO’s which helps to bring them front and to give them a true strategic role. Then, the scope of CIO is not limited to IT Division but encompasses the whole company.

Often in the past, the widespread thought was that’s enough to find the right technology and company people will immediately get it and change its way of working.

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IT vision and IT Strategy what is the difference ?

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In my previous post, I addressed the point of view that IT Strategy is not only business alignment, but should rely on a strong vision of IT role in the company.

Then, in this post, I propose to address the points of IT vision utility and how to build it with respect to IT Strategy.

Unfortunately, in the business world, few situations support to undertake no move, because usually stakeholders are facing externalities which raise questions on the way the company business is done. Beside, business undergo internal pressure when, for example, company reach poor execution performance in some areas.
The same happen for IT, if you choose to not move when all your environment is changing, you are quickly out of the business, or if you perform poorly you out your buiness at risks.

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IT Strategy and IT alignment

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Holidays ending up shortly, it is time to rise up a little bit our views and to start discussing about Strategy.

When reviewing papers regarding IT Strategy, they often talk about IT Strategic alignement. Most of them seems to assert that the only acceptable strategy for IT is to be aligned with Business. Despite this general point of view, when rewinding the tape, some messages looked questionable.

For instance, when considering strategy you deal with long term goals and action plans. As it seems obvious, the spreading of strategic planning methods like Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has set the long term line to next year which is pretty short. Are we really still in strategy ?

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Services management and SOA infrastructures may be the best investments for IT

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At a UK IT conference, a senior IBM analyst provided some clues on what IT services will become in the future which were in short :

  • 70% of 2005 CIO budget was labour
  • Operations labour will be 73% of CIO labour budgets by 2008
  • Application development will decline at –10% CGR to 2008
  • If this trend continues, there will be not development budget left by …2012!

The first one recalled me a discussion I had with a senior consultant in France who defended the view that the best IT performance indicator was staff number. By this time I was not really convinced since I expected that IT value might curb staff importance in the discussion.

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A dreamed CIO life ?

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Here is, below, some thoughts I exchanged with a consultant in the Paris metro, regarding CIO life. Does it match your knowings ?

Once you have stepped in as CIO, you are facing quickly to a lot of operational concerns which usually are managed by crisis meetings. Your people expect from you to take the harsh decisions they have not been able to take and they think they need, to be backed in their day to day work. You are trying a say about strategy, everybody hears you politely, but they all seem to think : “hey, guy shed your illusions ! Here, you will deal with the hard. only if such a thought may support the budget, it is worth to have”. Your team is expecting a change but nobody believe it is still possible.

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