Archive | Transformation

Transformation – What level of surgery do you need?

 

In a surgical analogy, a transformation programme is relative to ‘open heart surgery’ as it is one of the most important and powerful opportunities you can undertake to change the purpose and strategic direction of your organisation.
Transformation programmes are a blend of business, people and technology change including root and branch process review. They are mainly focused around improving customer engagement, commercial return and re-energising the customer experience.
In the planning of any transformation programme, its imperative you fully understand the objectives you are looking to achieve and that your board or leadership team are fully aligned with and agree on the prioritisation of its primary objectives. Everyone must agree that the results you’re looking for are not only achievable and affordable but necessary for you to progress as an organisation.

For any transformation to be successful you will need the full support and buy-in of your whole organisation. Not just key stakeholders but all affected parties including key clients and partners, so you will need to have a full and open communications strategy at all times.
You will need to work out through internal and external consultation the level of necessary change and thus ascertain the degree of transformational surgery you need to perform including the level of process change you can readily consume alongside any necessary new systems, platforms or infrastructure to support it.
It is imperative you keep this communications line open and a continuous dialogue with your key clients to understand what they want from your organisation, what products and subsequent features they use or need and how they wish to consume them (don’t forget to focus on mobile consumption as this will affect your design and performance criteria). You should also take this opportunity to learn of competing solutions and how your products rank against them, which will often give you valuable feedback.

Strong leadership is required during any transformation programme so that it stays true to its principles and delivers its agreed objectives whilst staying open to internal and external client feedback throughout.
The leadership team will need to control the direction and pace of the transformation so that business as usual operations are not interrupted or allowed to veer off track (an obvious but often overlooked dilemma).
It is imperative the leadership team understands both the technology and business goals and how decisions in either can have a knock on effect in the other. Managing this critical symbiotic relationship will not only ensure adherence to the project plan but also limit costs and surprises along the way.

Most transformation programmes will require fine tuning and subtle alterations through their lifetime as not all necessary objectives will be deliverable without some form of tweaking.
Some objectives may not act as desired once in development or testing and require reworking, postponing until later in the programme or removal. This is where strong leadership and a firm hand on the tiller is imperative.

A full training, implementation and internal/external support plan is a major but often overlooked component of any transformation programme. Skip this stage at your peril as it will cause your transformation programme to fall spectacularly and very publicly at the last hurdle.
Transformation programmes of any size are major surgery on your organisation and subsequently need constant follow up and handholding of both internal staff, partners and external clients to make sure all of your implemented objectives are delivering as planned. This will allow you to make any necessary amendments and fine tuning whilst showing proactivity and desire to deliver the best possible results you can.

Transformation is an important process in reengineering an organisation and ensuring it stays relevant in how it operates, making sure its products and services are commercially relevant as well as improving the strength of the customer experience it delivers. It should not be taken lightly but when done well it can give you an enormous competitive advantage, re-energised staff, revenue generating products and an engaged client base.

 

This post has also been featured on the HP Business Value Exchange here and here on the IBM Middleware site in my position as a member of the IBM VIP Influencer Programme

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The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2014

CIOs have never had such a glorious—and challenging—opportunity to deliver significant, enduring, and transformational business impact and customer value as they do today.

But it’s not a job for the faint of heart. Any CIO pining for a return to the good old days of bonuses based on server-uptime and SLA enforcement should consider swapping out the CIO title for a new one: senior director of infrastructure.

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Flexible IT Systems – Building Systems that can Overlap Across Functions

My latest ‘CIO Thought Leadership’ piece entitled, ‘Flexible IT Systems – Building Systems that can Overlap Across Functions.’
This piece is available in the IT-Enabled Business Innovation topic section on The Business Value Exchange.
Read it here and get involved by leaving a comment.

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The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership

The CIO role can be a lonely place at times with not much written about it other than its demise or difficulty breaking in to the highest echelons of the corporate structure.

The CIO Paradox by Martha Heller changes that and has instantly elevated it to one of a handful of books I recommend as a must have reference book on every CIO’s bookshelf.

This book breaks the mould and not only enthuses you with an amazing amount of knowledge and case studies from other CIO’s but it also challenges your current strategic reasoning through its elegantly structured paradoxes.
It drives straight to the heart of the CIO role, openly discussing (with real world feedback) ways in which you can improve yourself/your IT organisation but it also takes the time to highlight ways in which you identify, nurture and manage talent within it.

It is well researched and Martha clearly knows her topic well having written about and engaged with CIO’s for many years.
My only reservation about the book is that the level of CIO’s that contributed to it errs on the larger corporate but this certainly shouldn’t detract from the lessons contained within that CIO’s from companies of all sizes can learn a considerable amount from.

The book is broken in to four sections, each of them relating to a key CIO challenge:

1.      YOUR ROLE: YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DO AND YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DON’T
2.      YOUR STAKEHOLDERS: WILL THE BUSINESS EVER LOVE IT?
3.      YOUR STAFF: THEY JUST DON’T MAKE THEM LIKE THAT
4.      YOUR FUTURE: WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE CIO?

I’ll break out a small portion of the first challenge with some of my own reasoning.
I could easily discuss and write about every single point in more detail but for the sake of the length of this review I will hold back:

YOUR ROLE: YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DO AND YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DON’T

As CIO’s you are hired to be strategic and innovative.
The stark truth is that you can spend most of your time on operational issues and whilst being the steward of risk and cost containment it can also be difficult to innovate.
Sound familiar?

This section quickly revs up and breaks in to the cost versus innovation paradox.
Regular readers of my blog will know my drive for innovation within the CIO role and the need for the CIO to add REAL value to the business through it but this must not be done without first stabilising the ‘run’ side of the IT organisation.
Running before you can walk is the death knell for many an IT leader, with the mantra here being that you must earn the trust and respect of the business in the stabilisation of the IT organisation before you move on to the chunkier, more innovative projects.

The most successful CIO’s (the ones who have broken the paradox) are those who do more than apply IT to business problems. CIO’s who have broken the paradox take the expertise that they have developed in their role as leaders of the IT organisation and use it to make improvements across the enterprise. They are company leaders, in addition to being IT leaders.

You must speak the language of the business, building relationships with business leaders, being a business leader first and a technologist second.
Whilst a huge group of CIO’s get it and are bona fide business leaders, another huge group does not….

 ——

When you think through the various paradoxes that are broken out across the book, many of them really resonate and delve in to the essence of the CIO role.

Each of the four main sections and resulting paradoxes will be graded differently in importance for each CIO that reads this book but I’m sure that we will all appreciate every one of them just as much.

The key strength of the book is exactly this and proves that not only does it cover in great detail a wide spread of the main issues facing a CIO in executing their role but its elegantly crafted paragraphs mean hardly a word is wasted in doing so.
When you work through the book you find yourself nodding in appreciation and making notes in the margin (and in my case putting index markers in to mark key pages).

The book is filled with many canny and informed pearls of wisdom that all CIO’s will appreciate but the best quote in the book by far is:

“it is really tough to be strategic when your pants are on fire”
– Ron Kifer, CIO at Applied Materials

The simple conclusion is that this is a must read book for every CIO.
Its going to 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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The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013

Perhaps no C-level position has undergone as many changes in expectations, approaches, and philosophies during the past few decades as that of the Chief Information Officer.

And the turbulent forces shaping businesses in today’s always-on global marketplace promise to accelerate that ongoing evolution. In that context, I’ve put together a list of what I believe will be the top priorities for strategic CIOs in the coming year.

As you’ll see, each of these 10 is rooted in change, and calls for the CIO to be a leader instead of a follower; a disrupter instead of a go-alonger; and a business-driven executive instead of a tech-focused manager.

Several themes reverberate throughout: analytics, breaking down silos, social, the cloud, and particularly customers, opportunities, growth, and innovation. I hope these prove helpful, and please share your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter at @bobevansIT and @christianmcm.

1) Simplify IT and Transform Your Spending: Kick the 80/20 Budget Habit. While surely not as sexy as Social and Business Analytics and Cloud, this bold decision to take an entirely new approach to IT infrastructure is the one and only way CIOs can unlock the funding necessary to pursue those snazzier and unquestionably vital new initiatives. Far too many companies today find that they need to devote 70% or even 80% of their IT budget just to run and maintain what they’ve already got, leaving as little as 20% for innovation. And if you wonder sometimes why you’ve got precious little IT budget available to fund growth-oriented innovation, the answer becomes pretty clear by looking at the list of usual suspects that have brought us to this point: server sprawl, massively underutilized storage resources, unproductive data centers, labor-intensive integration requirements, and a near-endless list of “strategic” vendors. The IT policies of the past that resulted in the 80/20 trap are simply no longer able to meet the needs of today’s intensely demanding and always-on business world, and are indeed becoming liabilities not just because they’re inadequate but also because they suck up vast percentages of the IT budget and make it almost impossible for CIOs to fund essential new efforts in analytics or cloud or mobile or social. CIOs need to determine which vendors are only exacerbating this problem, and which ones offer modern alternatives that are cheaper, faster, and smarter. My POV: CEOs should tie most or all of the variable compensation for their CIOs to changing that deadly 80/20 budget ratio by 5 percentage points per year. The CIOs willing to tackle this huge issue will not only earn some nice bonus dollars but will unlock huge value for their companies as well as for their own careers.

2) Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-Enabled Enterprise.When social media began to invade the corporate world some years back, the traditional border-collie behavior of many CIOs triggered immediate and unconditional opposition to social tools on the grounds of security challenges, lack of familiarity, and unproven value. As social’s ability to forge new and more-immediate relationships with customers became more clear, some CIOs grudgingly agreed to let down the drawbridge (but they drew the line at removing the alligators from the moat!). Today’s business-technology leaders must go well beyond that passive acceptance and become passionate and unconditional zealots for the social-driven revolution and its ability to help their companies grow by providing real-time customer insights, engagements, and processes. Beyond customers, the social revolution is also becoming indispensable internally for motivating existing employees and recruiting great new talent, and in forging deeper and more-valuable relationships with partners. My POV: CIOs who fight this trend will be pushed aside by CMOs and LOB heads who understand social’s potential and know they can’t compete unless that potential is harnessed by the company for competitive advantage. And what does “pushed aside” mean? At best, temporary embarrassment, and at worst, demotion or even unemployment.

3) Unleash Your Company’s Intelligence: Create the Enterprise-Wide Opportunity Chain. Building on but transcending existing notions of supply chain and demand chain and data warehouses and data marts, the Opportunity Chain transforms that internally oriented information into the customer-centric and growth-driven language of opportunity. New prospects, new market trends, new chances to engage, new insights for new products, new demographic patterns: information and insights about all of these probably exist somewhere within your corporate IT maze but are almost impossible to find because we cloak them in IT-specific terminology and then trap them in incompatible silos. But today’s new and always-on global marketplace requires new insights driven by the social revolution, and many of our old and trusty systems and approaches are simply not suited to the new realities demanded by our customers and by our times. In addition, the Opportunity Chain concept provides a market-facing framework and context for richly exploiting the potential of business analytics and Big Data. My POV: Whatever it’s called, this idea of the Opportunity Chain gives CIOs a fantastic, well, opportunity to drive high-value new information assets throughout the company and demonstrate again that when business technology is aggressively imagined and led, it drives growth and sparks new and deeper engagements with customers.

4) Embrace the Engagement Economy: Merge the Back Office and the Front Office into the Customer Office. One of the most-valuable perks of being a CIO is the ability to be involved with and understand not just some but all of a company’s end-to-end processes. From manufacturing to marketing, from procurement to product development, from finance to Facebook, the CIO and the business-technology team have tremendous insights into how a company’s operations, its priorities, its vulnerabilities, and its opportunities. So today, as our systems of record become systems of engagement, and as the social revolution opens up all facets of our enterprise to customer interactions as well as customer scrutiny, isn’t it time to bulldoze the internally constructed silos separating the folks that have traditionally touched the customer (the “front office”) with those that were never allowed to—or at least supposed to (the “back office”)? Shouldn’t we try to engage our customers in product development? Engineering? Service plans and operations? Marketing? Pricing options? My POV: While traditional systems reinforce the notion that only the privileged few get to interact with customers—and while that might be convenient for us internally—today’s socially powered consumers want access beyond the sales team. The question is, are you able—and willing—to grant that essential access?

5) Future-Proof Your IT Architecture. Think back just three years to the state of your business and the state of your IT strategy: the cloud was still mostly conceptual or isolated out on the fringes, social was a minor but persistent irritation, Big Data was mostly an egghead conversation and not likely to get beyond that, “engagement” was something you hoped your daughter would not get into with her goofy boyfriend, business analytics was all taken care of by a big team of specialists serving a small team of executives, and the iPad was still blessedly nothing but a rumor. The CFO badgered you every month about your endless demands for more real estate in which to put endlessly growing racks of servers requiring endlessly growing volumes of electricity and air conditioning, but what else could you do? The data explosion required a parallel explosion infrastructure growth, right? But the physics and the finances of such an approach no longer work, and the new business demands of today must surely be met with more-innovative tools tomorrow.My POV: Businesses need fresh thinking about the architecture of tomorrow because merely rehabbing or adding on to the existing plan will simply not meet the wildly different and more-demanding requirements of tomorrow. Cloud, social, mobile, engagement, Big Vision (formerly Big Data), and a greatly accelerated pace and scale of global business require modern apps, optimized systems, fault-tolerance, full support across cloud and on-premise and a mix of both, and built-in BI and social capabilities.

6) Upgrade “Cloud Strategy” to “Business Transformation Enabled by the Cloud.” Without question, CIOs must have detailed strategies and plans for cloud computing and many already have those in place (to those of you who don’t, well, did you ever get that high-school teaching certificate?). But the strategic CIO will use the next several months to collaborate with the CEO in upgrading that tech-centric plan into a broader vision for a sweeping business transformation of the entire enterprise. If you’re still viewing your cloud strategy based on a tech-driven plan written a year or two ago—before the ascendancy of social, customer engagement, Big Data, and business analytics—you’re going to miss the boat. My POV: Cloud projects will not be judged on their technical merits or on hitting their go-live dates, but rather by how deeply they impact essential business-transformation initiatives, and by how much business value and opportunity they unlocked. In the process, CIOs will segment themselves into two groups: IT leaders who focus solely on the tech aspects of cloud deployments, and business leaders who ensure that cloud projects are conceived and executed in the service of customers, business execution, and engagement.

7) Transform Big Data into Big Insights, Big Vision, and Big Opportunities. In the past year or so, much of the talk about Big Data has obscured the fact that the real issue is enabling intelligent and instantaneous analysis to provide optimal insights for business decisions. CIOs need to ensure they’re looking at these high-volume, high-velocity challenges in the right way: as business enablers, not tech projects. For example: What if you could enable dynamic pricing of your company’s products around the globe? What if you could perform fraud-detection analytics across all of your transactions in real time, instead of across just a random sampling of only a few percent of all those transactions? What if you could analyze three years’ worth of customer data in minutes, rather than only the past three months in hours? In the meantime, we can be certain that the scale and speed of this current challenge will only increase as CIOs must rapidly and seamlessly enhance their traditional corporate data with vast new streams of social and mobile data to realize the full potential of these strategic Big Opportunities.My POV: Some forecasts say the CMO will soon be calling the shots for IT; while I don’t buy into that, I do agree that CIOs who choose to sit back and wait for “the business” to tell them what to do will end up reporting to the CMO within a year or two. But companies will fare much better if their CIOs eagerly and rapidly begin framing Big Data challenges and opportunities in terms of customers, opportunities, revenue, and business value.

8) Preside over a Shotgun Wedding: Systems of Record Marry Systems of Engagement. Your traditional back-end systems might be sturdy and proven workhorses but they’re simply not equipped to handle the vast new streams of data and information from social, video, Customer Experience, and more. Conversely, while those new engagement tools and solutions are fabulous gateways into the real-time wants and needs of customers and employees, they lack the historical and institutional breadth and knowledge of your trusty ERP systems. The strategic CIO will find new approaches and/or solutions to rapidly and seamlessly tie these separate worlds together. This strategic integration will become the cornerstone of the Opportunity Chain described above in #3, and also of the consolidation of the archaic front office and back office into the modern Customer Office as described in #4. My POV: This union of social/mobile with transactional capabilities will give companies a new way to move at the speed of their customers, new methods for engaging with customers to build multifaceted relationships rather than linear transactions, and the ability to avoid getting stuck in the tar pit of siloed systems designed to meet internal requirements rather than enable the co-creation of value with customers.

9) Lead with Speed: CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer. I first suggested this aspirational model about 18 months ago when I wrote the following http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-cio-my-farewell-column-10-big-thi/229300888?pgno=2  ,  and the rationale for the CIO to function as chief corporate accelerant is even more true today: “If you could promise your CEO that you could shorten product-development times, reduce days-of-inventory turns, accelerate deliveries to customers, cut or eliminate the wait-times customers endure on your support lines, and shorten your order-to-cash cycle, is there a CEO on planet Earth who wouldn’t idolize you? So why not embrace that as a new mission for your IT organization and think of what you do as being the Chief Acceleration Officer, the exec who leads the company’s efforts to do everything it does not just better but faster? Give the gift of speed, and see if anyone in your company or among your customers wants to return it.” My POV: While I’m surely not proposing that title as an official thing, businesses in every industry will find in 2013 that, more than ever before, speed kills—the only question will be whether your company’s going to be the victim or the perp.

10) Bend the Value Curve: More Innovation, Less Integration. For the past 30 or so years, tech vendors have generally introduced streams of new products that were not only increasingly more powerful and capable, but also increasingly more complex, requiring ever-greater volumes of integration, testing, tuning, modifying, patching, upgrading, monitoring, etc., etc. Back when viable alternatives weren’t available, that was an okay model—IT teams specialized in stringing together piece-parts from hundreds of vendors and somehow managed to figure out ways to make it all work together. But today, that model is ready to begin making the transition over to the Computer Museum. Customer-side CEOs in particular are growing increasingly fed up with the apparent black arts of IT operations that require larger and larger budgets without predictably delivering more and more business value. For CIOs, the answer is simple—not easy, but simple: they need to begin rapidly withdrawing themselves and their business-technology teams from the integration business and begin devoting more and more of their time to growth-oriented and customer-centric innovation. In the past few years, a handful of IT vendors have begun offering a new breed of engineered systems or optimized systems designed to offer pre-bundled and pre-tested purpose-built machines that free customers from the drudgery of endless integration busywork. Oracle led the way at the high end with Exadata, Exalytics, and Exalogic, and Apple’s iPhone is on its way to becoming a $100-billion example of the core concept: more innovation and less innovation. IBM followed Oracle’s lead a few months back with its Pure Systems, and even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in introducing the new Surface tablet, said it was time for Microsoft to try to optimize the hardware/software interactions.My POV: While not the answer (yet) for every question, engineered systems give strategic CIOs considerable latitude to devote more people and energy toward innovative customer-facing initiatives, and simultaneously alleviate the need for CIOs to pour so many budget dollars into low-value integration work that generates little or no competitive advantage.

So there’s my list of priorities for the strategic CIO—how about sharing yours, along with your feedback on the list above?

Authored by and reproduced with full permission of Bob Evans, Senior Vice President, Communications at Oracle

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The Evolution of Today’s CIO

 

The face of today’s CIO has changed dramatically. Once upon a time the CIO was only concerned about the business of IT, from the development process and implementation to the operation of the IT world. What these CIO’s have learned, and some the hard way, is that isn’t enough. This narrow view has gotten IT in a load of trouble over the years.

This is manifested in many ways, the first being how consumers leverage our products and services. In 2009, the Better Business Bureau in Vancouver Canada listed Computers and Technology as the number one complaint across all areas.

As shown in the report, computer software and services are worse than those pesky car salesmen hunting you down on their lots. We not only see this from our consumer base but also from within our four walls. It is easier to not look at but there are systemic issues with the business of IT as it is today. As an example, the Standish Group released a report stating that 50% of all technology Initiatives are a waste of money. So what is the CIO to do? Stick with the status quo or make a change? It’s time for a change in how IT is operated.

It used to be that aligning IT with the Business was strategically in vogue for CIOs. And it still is. However there is a fundamental shift elevating the modern role of the CIO to that of not only doing the business of IT, but also transforming and innovating along the way. With 54% of mid-market CIOs viewing IT as the critical enabler of business  and organisational vision, CEOs are now looking to the CIO as the trusted enabler, the mainspring for IT solutions that meet the demands of the business, in real-time.

Figure 1: Pressures of the Modern CIO

The traditional lens of the CIO focuses on providing technology platforms that “allow” the business to function while aligning IT priorities with business priorities, reducing solution cost and ensuring proper controls are in place. This is the CIO as Optimiser, immersed and concerned with driving internal IT process, efficiency and responsiveness, keeping pace with the needs of the business.

Today however brings a new set of business pressures that stares the CIO as Optimiser squarely in the eye and asks the question: “How are you helping the business adapt and cope with accelerating changes in market conditions and technology disruptors?” The answer lies within the new-fashioned role of the Transformative CIO.

The 2010 State of the CIO Survey provided by CIO magazine highlighted that nearly nine out of 10 (89 percent) anticipate assuming some additional area of non-IT leadership responsibility three to five years from now, compared to 61 percent who are currently responsible in a leadership capacity for one or more non-IT areas of the business. Security (55 percent), strategy (49 percent), and risk management (41 percent) are most frequently cited by IT leaders as areas they expect to assume leadership responsibility for in the longer term.

The Transformative CIO will help in this fashion by striving to partner with the Business, truly advancing the business relationship beyond pacing alignment. He becomes an expert of industry solutions; understanding, rationalising and recommending strategies that meet the ever-changing demands of the Business. And as council and advisor to the CEO, he empathises and takes action on his concerns.

Figure 2: Understanding the Maturity of the Modern CIO

As CIOs gain a foothold with the Business thought process, maturing strategic business value through the IT lens means continuing to find new ways of delivering value, service and cost containment. Enter the CIO as Innovator. He sees that in order to support business growth, he must be out ahead of the game solving real strategic business problems through innovation.

The new CIO also provides clarity of IT utility by understanding how competition can affect the company and by making strategic big bets on emerging technologies that are directly in line with business goals. He truly believes in a business first organisation. In fact, fully 70% of the CIOs surveyed in the 2010 State of the CIO report said long-term strategic thinking and planning will be most critically needed in the coming year.

CIOs are starting to realize this in a substantial way. CIOs are actively moving their focus to not only the transformational areas in partnership with the business but also in an innovative role as well. The 2010 State of the CIO Survey also includes an interesting point that 54% of CIO’s will focus their time and energy on driving business innovation. That is a substantial amount of time for any role, especially the CIO. This will completely change the tone of the IT organisation.

The modern CIO is one who not only understands the mechanical aspects of IT but also harmonizes the elements of IT culture, business maturity and industry innovation. And by having a seat at the business decision table, embracing enterprise architecture and running IT as a utility,  he or she  can incubate these elements in to a set of enablers the business can count on.

The pressure to deliver beyond the traditional role of the CIO is evolving in to a key asset for CEOs. A blend of CIO as Optimiser, Transformer and Innovator provides a powerful profile mix that amidst the constant of change will emerge a stronger and more service-focused business partnership with IT. After all, without IT there is no Business. Or is it the other way around?

Authored by and reproduced with full permission of Mike Walker, Enterprise Strategy and Architecture Chief IP Architect at Microsoft

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