perspective

CIO Perspective: How to Free up Money to Innovate

March 20, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

There is the cliché of “doing more with less.” Almost every company is asking their CIOs to do more with less budget. This is way annoying than it sounds, I agree, but surely it forces people to think creatively to free up resources. Throughout the article, I will discuss ways to free up resources to continue to be innovative in your IT department.

Start with your department and analyze your tools and services. Here and there you will find things that do not justify the costs, and even better, that have open source equivalents. Although I like open source and used Linux for many years, I would not go so far to switch your infrastructure to open source, but I will say that there are very strong open source alternatives to costly applications. As an example, my colleagues were considering Adobe Photoshop for basic image editing. I have asked a few questions and saw that GIMP would do. I pushed even further and now we are using Paint.net.

When you are analyzing your services, take your time to see if you are spending way too much resources on functions that can easily be outsourced. This can be on basic tasks such as telephony or can be some complex tasks such as servers. I had one client that has completely outsourced its telephony services. They were using landlines only. Now they utilized Lync and kept landline as backup. Another client of mine is opening up a freight forwarder company. He is starting from the ground up, entering the forwarding business. The company has just one line of business (LOB) application, which is not available as an SaaS offering. I have implemented Office 365 Business Premium and utilized Azure for their LOB application. The company avoided costly data center investment, server installation, maintenance, electricity altogether and outsourced all the IT functions at once. Another client outsourced all of their WAN links. In all these scenarios, there is one common thing: if you analyze the situation carefully and consider the alternatives, you have more, and possibly more efficient (and economic) ways to do things.

Digging your tools and services will bring more things to your attention. Legacy systems and forgotten servers are one of them. As a company, you are paying a lot of money to keep the legacy systems up and running and as a CIO you are paying a lot of money to monitor the servers which are forgotten. There are legacy systems which are hard to touch, we all know, but there are such systems that can easily be updated or consolidated. Today, there is no reason to keep a Windows 2003 Terminal Server running Office 2003. You may have some macros, you can just hire a VBA programmer to update them. In terms of server consolidation, it is better to consolidate applications into one server and upgrade that one server rather than keeping applications on a few low-end servers. I suggest checking each and every server to see what it is running. I have seen servers kept up just to run a 500 K – 1.5 MB exe applications.

Once you are done with your department, arrange meetings with the business to understand where the company is heading to, what lies ahead and what services would most probably be required. This, in combination with the above, enables you to show how much of your IT budget is needed to keep up with the pace of the business and how much of your budget is kept for running the legacy systems. When you bring the numbers to the table, noone is caught off guard because you have laid the foundations for the investments: both to acquire new resources (system and personnel) and to retire/upgrade legacy systems.

And finally, one bit of advice for every geek: you don’t need the latest, greatest, cutting-edge equipment. As a CIO, you don’t need the latest all-flash storage providing gazillions of IOPS. Define your strategy, know what lies ahead, plan what is required, plan the upgrade cycle and then evaluate the alternatives. Only then invite the vendors to present what they have.

Here is my take on freeing up resources for your IT department to continue innovation. What creative ways do you use to free up resources? We would love to hear from you in the comments below.

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CIO Perspective: How to Improve the ROI of Your Software

February 20, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

IT departments spend a good time to justify the return of their investments. However, software investments, taking a significant portion of the investments, are often neglected. Considering that the Pareto rule is in place for software use as well – 20% of the users use 80% of the application, or 80% of the users use 20% of the application etc.- CIOs need to rethink about improving the return on software investment.

Let’s start the evaluation before we purchase the software. Why do we invest in making an investment on the software? Is it creating operational efficiencies, automating a manual process, solving a business problem, building opportunities? What is the value that it is adding? If we cannot answer the simple question of adding value, then the investment may not be justified at the first place.

Next comes the training. Many software vendors direct users to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sections or the support forums on their web sites. However, user manuals, product documentation, extensive help files, end user and IT support trainings are often not mentioned. If the vendor does not have solid training programs in place, we can be pretty sure that hard times will begin immediately after we invest in this software.

Following the training, we have to evaluate that we have service, support and development solutions the vendor provides. Our vendor should have clearly defined service and support terms, which should also be translated into Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The SLAs should be stated in the contract, not just in the vendor’s website and nowhere else.

In the past, the tendency was to select enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, which are monolithic, expensive to maintain, lock-in systems that allowed “my way or the highway” type of integration with other systems. Today’s computing environment is exactly the opposite: the vendors compete on making their applications compatible with other applications. When choosing our software, we have to make sure that it easily integrates with our existing solutions. If in doubt, we need to ask the vendor what integration features it provides – native, APIs, export/import etc..

Continuing on the ERP systems, one of the benefits that they provided was scalability. The applications could scale up and scale out without any problems. The first thing that we have to look for in the software is the scalability. The numbers that the vendors could be high, but these can be deceptive. Imagine a vendor offering a 5000 page limit for your company knowledge website, which you are evaluating for 200 knowledge workers. It is obvious that 5000 looks big at the first sight, but making the small math it translates to 5000/200 = 25 pages per knowledge worker, which will definitely expire very soon.

We can also think about scalability in terms of accommodating further business requirements in today’s environment. Suppose that we are evaluating a customer relationship management application for our enterprise. We have designed our workflows, the application can hold, process and report the data without any problems. However, if it does not take into account today’s mobility and portability requirements – if it does not support mobile communications, mobile workflows, does not have mobile security, is not optimized for mobile viewing -, and if the vendor still does not have those features in the roadmap then the application is definitely promising rough times.

To ensure that we will be able to use the application for some years to come, we need to ensure that the contract has [1] new features and enhancements [2] less than 5-year terms. These two items are closely tied together. A lot of changes happen in the business environment and they come out of nowhere. Our software has to roll out features that can answer such changes and it should have less than 5 year, preferably yearly renewing terms. If these options are not available, we have to negotiate a 3-year contract or an opt-out option. Failing to do any of these will most likely cause our company to get stuck in the application and result in painful update, maintenance, support processes in the future.

Next, we need to discuss with our IT team on the time they require to deploy the application. Given that we have some time, it will be a good idea to get the evaluation version and try to deploy to a couple of computers. That way we will be able to identify how long it will take for deployment and if the deployment will have any impact on the mission critical applications.

Once we decided on the application and deployed it, we need to measure the use. To be frank, there are very few companies that measure the use of the software. But when they do, they cannot believe the results. One of my clients deployed an application that provides business writing templates to 2000-plus users; on Remote Desktop Servers, on laptops and desktops. During deployment, I asked them to carry out the necessary work to track the use on System Center Configuration Manager (although they did not believe it is necessary, they did not turn me down). After one month, when I asked them to check the telemetry, it was seen that the application was only run once, which was immediately after it is deployed!

Finally, we have to evaluate the application with our IT staff. Is the IT staff satisfied with the application? What is the state of the support requests from the end users? What is the vendor’s expertise? Is the vendor willing to give a hand or is the vendor “just doing its job and nothing more?” In case of any dissatisfaction, we need to arrange a meeting with the vendor and take actions to iron out any issues that we are having.

Taking these steps carefully will ensure that we are improving our return on our software investments. What steps do you take to maximize your investment? We’d love to hear your comments.

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CIO Perspective: How to Form Strong End-user Relationships

February 13, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

As I have discussed in my previous articles, the days of the “dictating IT” is long over. We are in an era where the end users are involved and influence technology purchasing decisions. There are some cases where IT is not even part of the decision process. There are two reasons why this is so: either the IT processes take forever or the IT staff says they are too busy to look for solutions. Whatever the reason, CIOs and their managers must make sure that without strong and healthy relations with the non-IT side of the business, their jobs are not guaranteed. Why would business keep on paying IT if IT is not developing/assisting in solutions? Here are some ways to improve the communications.

To start with, it will be a good idea to have IT staff deliver training for the end users. I have covered this topic extensively in one of my articles before. To give it a quick recap, having IT to train end users make IT understand how the business runs daily, help prioritize tasks, develop solutions and embed user input for the future projects and make the end users break the ice with IT (of course, there are even more benefits beyond these).

Next, IT and business can exchange employees. In the business side, there are the key users and power users who are closer to IT matters compared to other employees and there are the IT people who are working heavily with the end users. When an exchange for a determined time – 8 weeks will be enough – is committed, it builds a very effective experience and relationship for both sides.

During IT’s support functions, IT always run into difficult users. This difficulty can result from two things: either the end user himself is difficult or there is a cultural difference. To overcome the former problem, it is a good idea to arrange a training for all the IT staff on dealing with difficult people and negotiation skills. There will also be times when training will not be enough and the IT managers has to intervene – the user could be resistant, not cooperative, paranoid, somehow accusing and the like. In those cases, the IT manager has to escalate the issue to the user’s manager or help the employee to work with the user.

In terms of cultural difference, the situation can be more delicate. The problems can pop from anywhere. Once I was delivering support to a north African country. I called the person, asked how he was doing politely and moved on to the subject. This was reported to my manager, myself being rude. Upon digging the issue, it was understood that the other party was expecting more introductory talk then I did – we learned that I needed to talk about 5 minutes with the other party about him, his job, family, politics etc. and me, asking only about himself was considered as having no talk at all. If we extrapolate this issue further to working in projects, we can see how communications and understanding changes can make things better or worse in unexpected ways across the border. I would recommend finding someone to give a brief about the country’s customs – a tourist guide experienced in that country will be more helpful than you can think of.

Combining all above, I recommend IT departments to move to an account representative concept. IT is a task-oriented job with task-oriented people, this is due the job’s nature. With this orientation, it is hard for the IT people to treat end users like customers. Especially in terms of corporate IT, the end users are taken for granted; if IT is paid to support end users, why should IT treat them as customers? However, in today’s environment where end users are directly connected to and having support from the outside vendors, it is of utmost importance for the IT to excel the outside vendor support.

The account representative can have more than one hat: you can define her both in terms of a particular job and a particular geography. One of my clients had a computer engineer, who had her degree in University of Moscow. She was the account representative for the BlackBerry Enterprise Service for the corporate VIPs. Her manager made her also the account representative for the Black Sea countries.

Finally, it is important for the IT people to talk in plain English and provide visibility to IT projects. Using plain English removes the communication barrier and any type of intimidation people may have and creating visibility ensures that everybody understands clearly what IT is doing. I had one client who tried to communicate with the end users but failed all the time. The IT manager was sending out a message something like “This week, on Sunday we will be upgrading our systems storage from IBM DS4400 to IBM DS5000 series to take advantage of the fiber SAS disks.” Among all the employees, this became a joke because it definitely meant nothing. In the next project, I wrote the email: “This week we will be having a modernization in our infrastructure to deliver a smoother experience to all our employees in Istanbul head office. We expect interruptions to various systems from 1400 to 2200 on Sunday. You can always reach us from the help desk line. Thank you for your kind understanding.” Of course, this message was a more generalist one for IT, but let every employee know what was ahead and the employees arranged their work accordingly. Further, the employees prepared their B plans, so that if something goes wrong, they can continue their work until Monday noon!

What would you recommend other IT people? How do you establish and maintain good end user relationships? Share your experiences in the comments.

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CIO Perspective: Don’t Overlook Those Risks

February 6, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

The bulk of CIOs time is spent working on data breaches, security issues, disaster recovery, business continuity and justifying technology investments. However, there are some issues that may not seem that obvious but can have serious consequences when overlooked. Here are some undercover risks that need to be addressed.

Let’s start with the IT staff. Critical expertise in IT is neither earned nor can be handed over overnight. IT managers know their key players and know their expertise but they often fail to understand that small things these players contribute every day. As almost always is the case, the value of this key member is understood when he leaves. The situation strikes even more drastically when the IT manager must manage without this expertise. This is one of the reasons why CIOs have to look for ways to keep their IT staff and back up their work and expertise with other members.

Continuing with the IT staff, the internal attacks launched by the IT staff are often overlooked. IT dedicates its time to secure the company from the outside attacks to ensure business continuity, but often does not spend enough time to consider insider attacks. A frustrated IT staff member with high privileges can severely paralyze a company. Imagine a domain administrator waking up at 2 o’clock A.M. and placing malware on the domain controllers to corrupt the Active Directory contents. Knowing about such risks and taking actions begin at the employee screening phase and continues with assigning at least two IT staff members to high security areas.

Aside from security, today’s IT is about many specialities. Inevitably, every speciality builds specialized knowledge and in turn every specialized knowledge builds its own experts. This is good so far but when those specializations hamper effective communications, the first thing that will take the hit will be the projects that touch those specifications.

The communication risk, or more generally interpersonal skills is an area to watch out for. IT staff tend to speak in its own jargon and tend to keep their relationships inside the IT department. This tendency results in “tech talk” and this tech talk is viewed as IT arrogance by the non-IT people. It is exactly this point where the bells should ring for the IT managers: this is one of the places where IT is being broken from the business, creating IT versus business scenarios.

Inside IT, there is the case of developers and the code. I have many clients who run a custom built application on legacy systems. The application works fine, without any problems and it is not touched because it is running. However, there is no documentation, there are no people left in the company that know how it runs, there is no similar software package, there is no one that can support, modify or fix the code. However, if/when it fails, it is the responsibility of the IT department to get it up and running. IT managers should have the courage to touch the code and to convince the management that it is not the costs involved in replacing the application is prohibitive, it is the costs involved when the application fails.

Great working relationships has to be maintained both inside and outside the organization, including the vendors. A changing account manager or a changing vendor can therefore have very negative effects. One of my clients have switched its backup software from Vendor A to a much bigger, so-called industry-leading Vendor B. Just two weeks after the deployment project started, my client realized that Vendor B’s work ethics were questionable despite their position in the industry. To make things even worse, the account manager in Vendor B has changed a few months later, which left my client in almost no position to get support. It has been about 3 years by now and still the effects of the account manager and the contract lock-in clauses make the company’s backups suffer still.

There is also the issue of multinational support. It is tempting for the management to select a support solution that works in every country; the tendency is to select a vendor that works in all countries. Even you select a multinational vendor, the operations of the vendor will most likely to be outsourced in some countries, resulting in different service levels. A perfect example of this is one of my ship owning client: it has various cargo ships sailing the world, with servers on board. When there is a any problem, we see how the service level of the servers’ vendor differs from one port to another: from Rotterdam to Fuzhou, from Boston to Conakry. When you are evaluating the vendors, try to evaluate what service levels it offers in the areas that you operate/plan to operate in.

This, so far is my list or risks that may effect any CIO one way or another. What are your undercover risks? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

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CxO Perspective: Here Is How You Are Putting Your Company At Risk

January 22, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

A CIO has to succeed in many areas; from technology to financials, from people to service levels, a CIO has to keep an eye on all the issues. However there are times when CIOs, together with all other CxOs lose common sight and neglect things that they never should. Here are some points where CxOs are putting their companies at risk.

The first and foremost item is ensuring business continuity and with this I mean disaster recovery before everything. People sometimes fail to lose the understanding that they are in the company because of the business; if business is gone, they have no place there. It is that simple right? Wrong. CxOs fail to realize that simple point and still do not think about disaster recovery solutions. Often CIOs cannot make them realize how important this is. This is not to discuss the capability of the CIOs, but rather how other CxOs are “closed” to the subject. Disaster recovery is not just another data center to spend money. It isn’t just the business’s continuity, it’s CxOs chance to continue to earn money when all is gone.

Minimizing costs is another point where CxOs lose common sense. I am not talking about extravagant expenses, or avoidable costs, such as preferring videoconferencing instead of flying, when and where one can. I am talking about the costs of doing business. The cost of doing business is what you must do to continue your sales, to continue your business. If you are -say- a photographer you must have that lens to do your job. If you are seeing that lens as a “cost” and you are travelling to your customer’s location with taxi when you can use public transport (when you can, of course), you are doing nothing other than hurting your business.

Some CxOs also lose sight on the revenue losses and decreasing profit margins. These are where the company is bleeding. The business environment seems to value financials all above anything else and tend to take cost-based decisions. Frankly, cost-based decisions look very good both on paper and in the presentations. Many items go unnoticed: what if the best-price supplier cannot meet the demand? What if we do not have a back-up supplier? What if the lower-cost logistics company cannot place the goods on the shelves before the holiday season? What if our web server cannot keep up with the traffic during the peak times? There is yet another dangerous issue with all these problems; these are attributable to 3rd parties. “The logistics company couldn’t”, “the web hoster couldn’t”, “the supplier couldn’t” and all other excuses will obscure the truth: you made the decisions based on cost only.

When the company gets big enough, CxOs forget that it is the people who made the company great, not the IT systems nor themselves alone. Everybody in the company worked hard to get there, from the janitor to the CFO from the security to CIO. And it is not just that you can replace anybody with anybody because the unemployment rate is high. And it is not just that you do not need to develop any inside talent because there are many high-profile unemployed people. Companies who train and develop their staff proactively achieve employee engagement and commitment, and the employees pay back really good. There is an excellent dialogue that highlights this situation perfectly:

CFO: What is we train our people and they leave?

CEO: What if they don’t and they stay?

Sometimes the CxOs do not want to develop their key personnel with the fear that this personnel will be their successor and they will be replaced when the time comes. This fear marks the stumbling point for many enterprises. The loss of a key manager or an officer comes quite costly for any company. I believe any CxO who does not make succession plans should be replaced as soon as possible: he is trying to secure his future rather than the company’s.

Customer satisfaction is often measured with some numbers: sales figures or call center responses. CxOs assume that if a customer is serviced below X minutes, she is happy. One GSM operator in Turkey made that mistake for 10+ years. Then the tide turned and they were calling people and asking what it could do for them to switch back to the operator. Neither me, my family, my wife and my wife’s family switched back. They are still sending SMSs. The point here is to ensure overall customer satisfaction. In Turkey, Dell offered 2-year in-place repairs for its notebooks free of charge. I purchased one for myself and had problems the first week with my laptop computer. They kept their promise and I made 5+ people buy Dell computers. They stopped this service and I am not sure if I will go with Dell again.

And finally, the “quarter” issue. Acting only on quarterly reviews are as destructive as the cost-only decisions. Will you be shutting down the company after a quarter? If yes, then go on. If not, quarterly statements are there just to keep an eye on and see how you did. Acting only on the quarterly statements make you forget about the long term strategies and commitments. You have to ensure that your business is an established business. You have to think about years ahead. Quarters are just guides on how you used your time and what you need to do to achieve your strategies.

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CIO Perspective: Be Careful with These Bad Technology Decisions

December 19, 2014 by Admin Leave a Comment

As the CIO, you are building the technological roadmap of your company for the coming years. There are some decisions that are likely to have serious consequences in the future, which you need to look out today. Here are some suggestions on avoiding them.

Let’s start with the users. 2 years ago, I was discussing that IT departments are undergoing a transformation with the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement. Now the transition is already over and the users are using theirw own devices. IT is no longer in the position to dictate the user the underperforming equipment and inferior services and ask them to “take it or leave it.” The users are just one credit card swipe away from the devices and services they want to use.

This “dictating” approach, if still pursued today, also leads to differentiating IT from the business. It not only brings/augments resentment for the IT Pros, it also causes the IT to lose focus on what it is doing: IT departments are there for the business, they are not in a versus position with the business. When the IT department has lost its position and in turn the focus on the business as a whole, it is lost.

In terms of technology, the trend in the late 1990s and 2000s was the monolithic Enterprise Resource Planning applications. You would choose SAP, Oracle or Microsoft and you would get reduced prices, free/discounted training and various other benefits. Today, in mid 2010s, the trend is towards small, integrated, mobile applications that excel in their services. If you do not evaluate the alternatives and make informed decisions, you can easily end up with an unsupported, inflexible infrastructure that is prohibitively expensive to maintain.

Such an infrastructure is very likely bring custom integration requirements in the future. It is normal that we cannot predict the future accurately but investing in an infrastructure that is desktop only with no social and mobile roadmap in today’s environment is simply taking huge risks, if not calling for trouble.

The vendor relations are another point. There are companies that try to suck every drop from their vendors in the business. However they fail to understand that such attitude puts the vendor in a stronger position. When you make a bad decision or have a failure, the vendor is motivated to charge you with high prices – be it support or licensing – which may not be covered with your contract. If you push your vendor even further and force him to the point of quitting, then you are in even worse position: you lost the know-how the vendor has built over time, and you are undertaking a really painful separation process. And yet, it is no guarantee that you will find a better vendor. I must admit that I had such clients who did not see the picture despite all my efforts.

The pressure on the IT departments to do more with less, especially in budget terms forces CIOs to evaluate alternatives primarily from the cost metric. It is perfectly normal, but when the evaluation is only from the cost perspective, then the alarm bells have to ring. It is only commodity products that are evaluated based on price only. If the IT does not consider its strategic position and the long term business objectives, it can easily be seen as a commodity service.

Unfortunately the story does not end here. When IT is lost, it is seen but unheard. A dictating attitude, differentiating itself from the others, making bad technology decisions, positioning itself as a commodity puts IT departments in the “computer repair shop” position instead of the “strategic business unit” position. It really ends with IT being the operational department, where other people agree on the course of action and the IT pros are left just to implement it. Even more, I have seen many IT departments closed and outsourced when people no longer could tolerate them.

What are the bad decisions that you have seen so far? We would love to hear you in the comments.

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CIO Perspective: How to Free up Money to Innovate

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