Archive | IT Leadership

Book Review – Be The Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT

Be The Business: CIOs in the New Era of ITAfter reviewing Martha Heller’s excellent last book, The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership back in 2012 I was delighted to be asked to review her new book entitled, Be The Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT.
The book rightly covers how technology now permeates nearly everything a company does and how regardless of industry, IT has moved much closer to (if not directly in) the revenue stream of the organisation.

Martha has an amazing network of CIOs and an innate knowledge of how their roles have evolved in the past 5 years including how many leading CIOs are dramatically re-conceptualising the role of IT and creating new IT operating models as a result. In keeping with this new era of IT, these new operating models distribute IT investment decisions, innovation, delivery, and adoption throughout the enterprise, rather than keeping those activities solely within the IT function.
Ultimately, these new IT operating models position the IT function as an internal professional services organisation that provides the company with a wide array of services including management consulting, customer experience, innovation, end-user productivity, and security.

I have long heralded the cause for CIOs to be more progressive and deeply involved in operating and driving the business forward; Actually being a part of the core team which leads and drives the business forward rather than being content just running the technology silo and ‘keeping the lights on.’ I have referred to this more commercially focused and digitally savvy role as CIO 2.0 with more focus on supporting the business, reinvigorating its use of technology, enhancing the customer experience, driving the digital initiative and enabling it to deliver its strategic growth objectives.

This book is full of practical and thought-provoking narrative on how CIOs can progress to the ‘2.0’ role in this new era of IT and each chapter resonates with illuminating quotes from leading CIOs who have been through this transition and which lend real world insight to Martha’s text.

Chapters such as Step in to the Digital Void, Turn IT Consumers in Co-investors and Becoming the ‘What’ CIO invigorate the mind and really help you shape your thoughts in to meaningful and effective strategic goals that you can carry forth in to your own organisations. This book is by no means an instructional guide on how to elevate yourself as a technology leader but gently steers you in to the key areas you need to consider, investigate and embrace to succeed in this new era of IT.

When digesting this book on first reading, it really resonated with me on how well it flowed and knitted together the journey to becoming a CIO 2.0.
On second reading, I did so with a highlighter pen and marked out large areas of text in each chapter from which I wanted to take time to further drill down in to.

I highly recommend this book and feel confident in saying that it will be a well-thumbed reference point for me that will stimulate my thoughts and interchanges with others for a long time to come.

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Gartner: Top 10 Strategic IT Trends For 2015

Gartner Sym 2014 LogoGartner Symposium/ITExpo is under way in Orlando. As always, their IT experts have identified what they believe to be the top-ten information technology trends for the year ahead. Strategic technology trends are defined as having potentially significant impact on organisations in the next three years. Here is a summary of the trends:

1. Computing Everywhere

With the continued advancement in smart-phone technology, Gartner assesses that an increased emphasis on serving the needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts and environments, as opposed to focusing on devices alone. Gartner posits that smart-phones and wearable devices are part of a broader computing offering to include connected screens in the workplace and in public spaces. User experience design will be of critical importance.

2. The Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things will continue to expand, propelled by the ubiquity of user-oriented computing. Gartner posits that this will be replicated both in industrial and in operational contexts, as it will be the focus of digital business products and processes. Embedding technology more deeply will create touch points for users everywhere. This will form the foundation of digital business.

3. 3D Printing

The cost of 3D printing will decrease in the next three years, leading to rapid growth of the market for these low-cost machines. Industrial use will also continue its rapid expansion. Gartner highlights that expansion will be especially great in industrial, biomedical and consumer applications, highlighting the extent to which this trend is real, proving that 3D printing is a viable and cost-effective way to reduce costs through improved designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.

4. Advanced, Pervasive, Invisible Analytics

Analytics will continue to advance due to the Internet of things and the embedded devices that trend will continue to foster. Vast pools of structured and unstructured data inside and outside organizations will continue to be generated. Gartner points out that every app will need to be an analytic app. The analysis also concludes that big questions and big answers are more important than big data.

5. Context-Rich Systems

Embedded intelligence that is ubiquitous combined with pervasive analytics will foster the development of systems that are alert and responsive to surroundings. Gartner highlights that context-aware security is an early application of this trend, but that others will emerge.

6. Smart Machines

Analytics combined with an understanding of context will usher in smart machines. Advanced algorithms will lead to systems that learn for themselves and act upon those learning’s. Gartner notes that machine helpers will continue to evolve from the existing prototypes for autonomous vehicles, advanced robots, virtual personal assistants and smart advisors. The analysis goes on to speculate that the smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.

7. Cloud/Client Architecture

Mobile computing and cloud computing continue to converge and lead to the growth of centrally coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device. Gartner notes that cloud computing is the foundation of elastically scalable, self-service computing for both internally and externally facing applications. Apps that use intelligence and storage of client device effectively will benefit from lowering bandwidth costs, coordination and management will be based on the cloud. The analysis goes on to note that over time applications will evolve to support simultaneous use of multiple devices. In the future, games and enterprise applications alike will use multiple screens and exploit wearable’s and other devices to deliver an enhanced experience.

8. Software-Defined Infrastructure and Applications

Agile development methods for programming of everything from infrastructure basics to applications is essential to enable organisations to deliver the flexibility required to make the digital business work. Software defined networking, storage, data centres and security are maturing. Application programming interface (API) calls render cloud services software configurable, and applications have rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically. Gartner notes that in order to deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business with demand shifts both up and down require computing to move away from static to dynamic models.

9. Web-Scale IT

Gartner notes that more companies will think, act, and build applications and infrastructure in the same way that technology stalwarts like Amazon, Google, and Facebook do.  There will be an evolution toward web-scale IT as commercial hardware platforms embrace the new models and cloud-optimised and software-defined methods become mainstream. Gartner notes that the marriage of development and operations in a coordinated way (referred to as DevOps) is the first step towards the web-scale IT.

10. Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection

Lastly, the analysis concludes that security will remain an important consideration through this evolution toward the digital future, but it should not be so heavy-handed as to impede progress. As many companies have recognized that 100 percent security solutions are not feasible, this will become more mainstream, and more sophisticated methods of risk assessment and risk mitigation from a process and tool perspective will be implemented. Gartner notes that perimeter defence will be broadly recognized as inadequate, and multi-faceted approaches will be devised.  Security aware application design, dynamic and static application security testing, and runtime application self-protection, combined with active context-aware and adaptive access controls will all be necessary.

 

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Water Will Always Find a Way

Just like water will always find a way through or around any obstacle, so will people find a way around any security measures you seek to implement.
You may think you have thought of the most foolproof method of managing your data, but as soon as you implement it and ride out the first wave of direct (and often blunt) feedback, people will start beavering away on ways to get around your processes.

Anybody who thinks otherwise is only fooling themselves and will be rudely awakened when a security or other serious data breach occurs.

The best way to remedy this and eliminate it as best you can is to create and reinforce an educative program that informs people of the reasons as to why you are having to implement these policies and not just labouring on the pitfalls of not adhering to your security policies.
As time consuming and labour intensive as it sounds, a period of open discussion and feedback sessions will alleviate some of the staff objections prior to drawing up your policies and generate an enormous amount of goodwill.

Everybody appreciates there needs to be some level of security, especially in heavily regulated or security conscious industries but nobody appreciates dictatorship levels of oppression when they are not completely necessary.
Simply saying it’s a disciplinary offence to not adhere to these policies without explaining them thoroughly first or taking an objectionable point of view on board will alienate you from the very people you are trying to protect.

We’ve all been asked by staff across the organisation if they can use third party file sharing services like Dropbox to share data etc. and had to refuse them on security grounds.
We all know they use these services (and you probably do as well) and trying to implement an internal, secure enterprise version of a similar technology is very time consuming to manage and expensive not to mention extremely difficult to secure.

Smaller companies with less advanced infrastructure will often use third party file sharing services as a low cost and logical extension to their infrastructure.
The security risk to their IPR is no less great than larger corporates but they thrive on the nimble and agile gain that using these services gives their businesses.
When new individuals join your organisation from these smaller and more agile business through acquisition or organic growth, they will quickly challenge any seemingly draconian procedures you have in place. They will challenge you that their agility and productivity is being stifled by these procedures with the very valid reason they are often brought in to disrupt your existing business working in precisely the way they need to.

We need to take on board these new types of people and the roles they perform, adapting the necessary rules and procedures to allow them to go about their business rather than stifling them with regulation.
This is challenging and a bit scary but as long as your security is not diluted too far, adapting to incorporate these new roles and working practices will show your willingness to change and adapt and will not go unnoticed across the organisation.
In the new arena of change and disruption, those who adapt will thrive and those that don’t…. Well, you know how that story ends.

This piece has also been posted on:
The Business Value Exchange in my position as CIO ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Contributor
The Intel IT Peer Network in my position as IT Industry ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Blogger
Outsource Magazine in my position as IT Industry ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Columnist

 

 

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Review of the Gartner Symposium European IT Expo 2013

Gartner 2013 SymposiumI attended the Gartner Symposium IT Expo 2013 in Barcelona last week along with 5000 others.
It was an intriguing event with lots of excellent speakers, sessions and content.

Some of the main themes being pushed out by Gartner were:

  • The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – A nexus of converging forces is building upon and transforming user behaviour while creating new business opportunities
  • Master the six essential elements of a digital strategy – 60% of organisations report they have no effective digital strategy. As uncertainty recedes, the digital future emerges
  • The function of IT in business is changing and Gartner believes the best way to cope is to establish two-speed IT, where innovation can be separated from operational IT
  • Gartner describes three types of IT function: systems of record, systems of differentiation and systems of innovations
  • Innovation will require IT to become more agile and work differently, changing your primary suppliers and lots more partnering with smaller, leaner IT companies
  • The Internet of Everything – How the Internet of Things is reinventing industries and driving new usage and business models
  • CIO’s have to master power, manipulation and warfare – they must become comfortable with the idea of power, gathering it, and using it as an essential leadership tool
  • By 2017 smartphones will be smarter than people – not because of intrinsic value but because the cloud and the data stored in the cloud will provide them with the computational ability to make sense of the information they have so they appear smart

There were a couple of things, which caught my eye that I wanted to lift out:

IT Leadership Roles in 2020: The keynote at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo raised a number of interesting points but something that leapt out at me were the references to what IT leadership roles they see will be in play in 2020.
Interestingly and in a different twist to what others are saying, they see the CIO role continuing and the CDO role coming to an end having played its significant part.
They see the CDO role as a transformation and change agent who will lead the digital transformation and implementation of a digital leadership culture within the organisation between now and 2020 before bowing out gracefully with a job well done.
You can view a more in depth piece about this on my blog here.

Who Will Be Your Primary Suppliers in 2017? In confirmation of what I have noticed in recent months is a distinctive trend emerging whereby CIO’s are switching from larger, well-known suppliers to smaller vendors who are leaner and more agile.
This was backed up by the feedback in the sessions and the CIO’s who I spoke with at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo.
This is an interesting and positive trend as it allows the market to thrive with more up and coming vendors allowed to pitch for and win contracts by showing real innovation and enthusiasm to get the job done where they may have previously been frozen out at the RFP stages through staid supply chain processes.
To further highlight this shift, Gartner stated in their keynote session that their recent CIO survey showed that the majority of CIO’s would change their primary suppliers by 2017.
You can view a more in depth piece about this on my blog here.

The Gartner Symposium European IT Expo is a very worthwhile event for CIO’s and IT leaders to attend with excellent networking potential.
Couple this with a great location, excellent local restaurants and warm sun in November and you can see why it’s such a popular event.

This piece has also been posted on:
The Business Value Exchange in my position as CIO ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Contributor

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Don’t make yourself an island

I fear that the pace of digital and social disruption is catching out a number of CIO’s who aren’t moving at the same pace as their organisations.
Couple this with the naturally accelerated rate of change that is currently rippling through many organisations, and the need for technology to be leveraged to support it is causing CIO’s many a sleepless night.

My advice to them is: don’t make yourself an island.

Don’t retreat in to the abyss of technology and speak only in forked tongues; learn the language of business, get out there and engage with your peers and organisation.
It’s easy to lose track of what the organisation needs and suppose that you have got everything covered including what you think they need.
This is such a dangerous way to think and act, as it shines like a beacon to the rest of the organisation that you aren’t open to communicate with them and understand their pain points.

You will find that if you communicate and work with your peers to understand the issues they face, they will be more open to discussing with you the best ways you can leverage technology to help them.
Better still, you can work together and start to pick these things up before they become issues and deliver real innovation and value across your organisation.

If you find that you are making yourself an island, nip it in the bud as quickly as you can as the truth of the matter is that others in the organisation will have noticed it long before you do.
This could mean that you have an increasing shadow IT problem as others in your organisation have gone out and gotten their own solutions rather than through your organisation or involving you.

Don’t continue to resist change as the current digital and social disruption means that change is inevitable.
Those that resist it will be left behind pretty quickly and as the CIO you really cannot afford that to happen as your organisation will quickly find someone else who will engage.
Better still, you may find that you really enjoy it and as they say, change really is as good as a rest.

This piece has also been posted here on the Samsung Business site

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Who will be your primary suppliers in 2017?

In recent months I have noticed a distinctive trend emerging whereby CIO’s are switching from larger, well-known suppliers to smaller vendors who are leaner and more agile.
This has been backed up by the feedback in the sessions and the CIO’s who I have spoken with here this week in Barcelona at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo.

This is an interesting and positive trend as it allows the market to thrive with more up and coming vendors allowed to pitch for and win contracts by showing real innovation and enthusiasm to get the job done where they may have previously been frozen out at the RFP stages.

Gartner themselves stated in their keynote session that their recent CIO survey showed that the majority of CIO’s will change their primary suppliers by 2017.
Could new entrants like Samsung muscle their way on to your list of primary suppliers? Their launch this week in to the B2B market makes them a credible player.

What does this mean for established suppliers? Basically it means they need to be less complacent and engage better with their clients and not just around the times of contract renewal.
It shouldn’t mean they try to shortcut this process and just go out and buy a crop of these bright young new vendors, far from it. They would be better served in studying why they are winning business away from them and looking to instil that hunger and innovation back in to their product offerings and services.
I know they will say that due their size and complexity of contracts etc. this will be difficult but innovation and enthusiasm are contagious and adding those to anything at any level will only give everyone a boost.

I have even heard of some companies looking in to gamification techniques and the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage people in solving problems.
This may be a bit bleeding edge for some but it really highlights what digital and its associated disruption is bringing to the market with the amount of new technology and value added services it offers.

With the introduction of digital and other disruptive technologies, CIO’s are now faced with more requests from the business to leverage technology than ever before, often wanting to do it themselves within their own business units.
The smaller, leaner and more agile vendors are able to seize upon this and bring to the market services and solutions which you can get up and running in less than half the time your previous vendors take to do something along with significantly faster versioning and the addition of new features.

It’s an interesting marketplace and never before have I seen such a seismic shift in the way that organisations are being disrupted.
The better-organised organisations that are more agile and quicker to adopt will thrive in this new world and so they should.

This piece has also been posted here on the Samsung Business site

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IT Leadership Roles in 2020

The keynote at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo here in Barcelona this morning raised a number of interesting points but something I wanted to lift out and explore in a bit more detail was the references to what IT leadership roles they see will be in play in 2020.

Interestingly and in a different twist to what others are saying, Gartner see the CIO role continuing and the CDO role coming to an end having played its significant part.
They see the CDO role as a transformation and change agent who will lead the digital transformation and implementation of a digital leadership culture within the organisation between now and 2020 before bowing out gracefully with a job well done.
If you think about this I believe it makes a lot of sense – it frees up both the CIO and CMO to concentrate on innovation, adding value, meeting their strategic objectives and engaging their client bases.

My only reservation was why wait until 2020 to get this done and instil a digital leadership culture across your organisation?
Surely those who jump on this now and instil a digital leadership ethos throughout their organisations will steal a march on those that postpone or delay the inevitable.

What is becoming more apparent is that by 2020 all leaders no matter what business unit they lead will be expected to have digital skills (and rightly so).
This is key and executives who don’t currently know what digital technologies can bring to their organisations really need to start finding out or risk being left behind.
CMO’s have been working with digital for a while and this has led to the CIO Vs. CMO debate but digital is and will be such an integral part of any organisations strategy, the whole leadership team needs to get involved and work together to enable it.

The rapid rate of improvements in technology means that it will only get easier to implement and manage the digital transformation within your organisations and instil the necessary digital leadership backbone.
Everyone is trying to get one step ahead of the competition and those who correctly identify, digitalise and engage with the right objectives now will quickly launch themselves ahead of the competition.

So, a slightly different angle on what the IT leadership roles may look like down the line but refreshing to see a different viewpoint.

What do you think?

This piece has also been posted on:
Here on the Samsung Business site
The Intel IT Peer Network in my position as IT Industry ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Blogger

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The Changing Role of The CIO

This is my first piece for Samsung Business and is published here on the Samsung at Work site.

There are always many theories on the position of the CIO role, from the CIO role is dying through to should they be renamed the Chief Innovation Officer. The truth is that many still do not understand the CIO role and its place within the organisation. Many CEO’s and CFO’s still find it hard to understand IT and just see it as a money laundering operation rather than something that can add real value to the bottom line. It’s really up to CIO’s to stand up and be counted and show not only what they can bring to the table but prove they can be strategic, customer facing and deliver both innovation and revenue whilst making sure the technology still operates.

There is no doubt the CIO role has and is evolving constantly but that is true to say of all c-suite positions who want to stay relevant and ahead of the game.

As technology moves at such a pace, so must the CIO understand and work out the best way(s) to leverage it to add best value to their organisation.
Technology has seeped more in to our everyday lives and as a result the roles that manage it must adapt to become more innovative and constructive in the ways they use it.
Gone are the days of just making sure the equipment is in working order and the datacentre is operational – CIO’s are now measured on what they deliver to the bottom line and rightly so.
If you want a seat in the boardroom, you have to earn it and work very hard to keep it.

As the CIO role evolves it naturally starts to touch a lot of other technology areas such as digital and mobile.
This is where people are now saying they enter the CIO v CMO battleground with the victor seemingly the one who owns the digital space and ultimately the technology piece.
Politics aside, what’s to stop both working together? A quality CIO and CMO alliance would be a really formidable force in terms of delivering innovative and strategic solutions built around the needs of the customer.
Many companies are struggling with this ‘middle ground’ and anointing a new role, the Chief Digital Officer (CDO).
Does this only add more mud to the water of who owns what or is this another career path for marketing savvy CIO’s or tech savvy CMO’s?

What I do know is that if you add tangible value, deliver your strategic objectives, beat your KPI’s and deliver innovative solutions, you can choose your own job title and sit wherever you want in the boardroom.

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Samsung Business at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo 2013 Barcelona

SamsungLogoI’m delighted to have been asked by Samsung Business to work with them at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo 2013 in Barcelona next week.

I will be capturing the event and creating a body of high quality content through live blogging and comment, insight and analysis articles published through this blog and my social channels.

Get involved, comment and follow me through this blog and my social channels through the Twitter hashtags #SamsungGSym and #GartnerSym

My blog pieces will be posted on the Samsung at Work site during and after the conference – link here

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Is outsourcing the question or the answer?

Once upon a time, the answer to the question of what are the main benefits of outsourcing was cost savings based on labour arbitrage, but today that response would be superficial and incomplete.

I believe the main benefits of outsourcing are access to scarce skills, expertise and the latest technology, cost reduction, turning capital expenditure into operating expenditure, and the opportunity to concentrate resources on core business objectives.
If you think about outsourcing in this manner, you will not only start to realise areas within your IT organisation that would benefit from adopting it but also ways as a strategic leader you can add further value to your entire organisation by doing so.

The first big error people make when considering outsourcing is looking to resolve a problem without first looking to do so in-house – a problem remains a problem no matter where it sits.
Sensible outsourcing providers will often sniff this out during the RFP or other stages of the bidding process but others may look to take it on, hoping they can fix the issue(s) as a calculated risk whilst trying to win the business (the fact a vendor accepts this huge risk should really start ringing alarm bells for you as you both know there’s an elephant in the room).
Those that don’t take the business (and hopefully this is the majority) will likely make you consider going back and fixing the problem before re-tendering. Those who take it on will only delay the inevitable, leaving you not only with a larger problem downstream but also with the added bonus of a whole heap of complex contractual issues to sort out (which I imagine you will now discover were also not properly agreed or worded up front).
Many take this approach and get their fingers burnt with outsourcing, vowing never to return.
It’s a real shame, as outsourcing done in the right way is an extremely beneficial way to add to the value you provide to your organisation.

The second biggest error people make when considering outsourcing is to engage with and select a vendor by having only had a few live sales meetings/conference calls with a cursory glance over provided case studies. Coupled without ever having visited their operating/service centres to see them in action in a live environment or meet their staff that will be working with your team in person.
You wouldn’t do this if you were hiring permanent staff or running the project in-house, so why do this when exploring outsourcing? It makes no sense.
This often occurs when a company decides to outsource a small project or a portion of it to see if outsourcing works for them in an operational sense.
The vendor is often chosen just on labour arbitrage and due to this the work is often performed in Asia or Eastern Europe.
The ‘project’ is often then left with the vendor with scant and seemingly erratic communication and only poured over in detail once the deliverable is returned with obvious errors.
The end result is the project often has to be redone in-house, blowing the project budget, causing delays and delivering red faces all round.
Outsourcing is again blamed as the enemy with the lack of communication and poor vendor selection/interaction issues being swept conveniently under the carpet.

So, in reflection it may be outsourcing is not for you but you owe it to yourself and your organisation to try everything that can add value to what you deliver.
Outsourcing executed properly can provide real value when opportunities are identified, structured, communicated and managed correctly, so what are you waiting for?

This piece has also been posted on:
The Intel IT Peer Network in my position as IT Industry ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Blogger
The Business Value Exchange in my position as CIO ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Contributor
Outsource Magazine in my position as IT Industry ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Columnist

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