Thought if a new word today while my wife was at a conference for the day and I ended up surfing the ITunes store for a particular song.
Itunejugate (pronounced: I-Tune-Je-Gate)
the act of purchasing a song from ITunes that you already have in your library
One of the characteristics of an effective CIO is the ability to be a member of all teams within the company. For my firm, the Survey team and the Water team work together but are separate, unique, entities. So when Survey acquired a laser scanner and later the Water group leader asked me for advice on how to “wow” a potential client during a project interview, I was able to convince a surveyor that we should laser scan a similar project facility and create a digital fly-through for the Water project interview.
We leave tomorrow to do the scanning and although I do not know much about laser scanning, my role is to walk this digital fly-through to completion, hand it off to the Water team, and share it with all the other teams in the company so they know what can be done.
Recognizing opportunities to help win work, seeing them through to completion, and educating the company about it.
Heard a story about a friend’s IT Manager who, one day in early April, sent an email to his company (all 200 employees) stating that because of a new agreement with ATT, there was going to be 100 iPhones available to anyone who filled out an online Intranet form.
The form had questions like, “why do you think you should get an iPhone?”
85 people filled out the questionnaire - The submitted entries were captured in a database, and the “thank you” page shouted out, “April Fools!”
Classic.
I guess it upset some people, but the data was fascinating. The reasons people wanted an iPhone covered a lot of ground, but most felt it would improve productivity and communications. Is this merely a perception? Does the ability to receive and send email while driving or at lunch really make the company more profitable than the cost of the smart phone and supporting hardware and software to keep it running? Our network manager refuses to have a smart phone. Instead, he rolls around with a regular-old clamshell cell phone and, quite honestly, does his job just fine without one; the emergencies are voice calls and the other stuff is responded to when he has access to his laptop before, during, and after work.
It’s funny – Personally, there are many ways for me to get email, including, my laptop within any office, my laptop with the air card, my laptop with VPN from broadband, my Blackberry, and Outlook Web Access from any web-enabled browser. If an emergency should always be a voice call, that’s five different ways for me to get non-emergency emails…
Flying back from the bi-annual AEC/IT Leaders Roundtable meeting, a colleague and I were speaking about the challenges we face at work. In fact, this was an extension to a conversation held by five of us after dinner in the hotel bar. Mostly revolving around war stories and commiserating on those things that are always annoying but will never go away. Such things include challenging company owners, users who make the same mistakes yet refuse to be trained, and the ever-popular ‘ignored until blamed’ theory that holds that an IT department is ignored when things are fine and held responsible, and blamed, when things are not fine.
I asked my colleague what he thought about creating a personal list of those things that are challenging, or annoying, at work. Things that, if fixed, would make for a happier job and, perhaps, an improved work-life balance. Some of my quick examples revolved around a challenging employee as well as the occasion opposing request from my boss (the CFO) and the company CEO. For my colleague, the first thing that came to his mind was he didn’t like where he had to sit within his office.
After some consideration, his counter to the List was that the thing that most annoyed him, he had no control over. So, we agreed that a List might be good to have as long as it had a column that said whether that challenge could be changed or not. We also agreed that the List required prioritization. After identifying which item (that you can change) is the most important, to start working on changing it.
We have been playing around with VM Ware for a while. In fact, we now have two monster servers (Twin socket four-core 64-bit with 32 gig RAM) running High Availability within a virtual cluster. This virtual stack has come in handy – We’ve created ‘oh crap’ virtual copies of the Intranet, HR system, and our Advantage Accounting System. We have also used it when we needed another server right away for our Business Objects software. Mostly, however, it is used for testing and backup – Until now.
A few weeks ago, the server that connects to our storage area network device to serve just about every file for our intranet, extranet, accounting system, and payroll froze up big time. We had to drive to the collocation, hold in the power button, and force it to restart. It did get back to life, but we considered that a warning shot for worse to come.
Last night we swapped that server for a virtual one. Not a horribly difficult process, but not a cakewalk either. Although we were ready for a drop in performance, the testing we did showed a significant improvement.
This is a big step for us – A tier-one production server is now in a virtual environment.
I was at a competitor’s office previewing software we are close to implementing. This company was neck deep into it and didn’t mind sharing their experiences. (Our Marketing Managers are friends - Reminded me of the camaraderie shared between many competitive IT folks) During the demo it occurred to me that the laptop was running Office 2007. When I asked about it, they reported a few things:
One of the Office 2007 drivers for us is the software we were previewing (and months away from implementing) is our accounting, billing, and proposals software, named Deltek Vision. This software will apparently be requiring Office 2007 for their next version. Another driver is the users simply want the next, cool widget and this falls into that category.
To be honest, I’ve always thought of it as an all-or-nothing kind of roll-out. But, if we can make it auto-save down into the 2003 format, it really doesn’t have to be. Perhaps we can roll it out by team or office. Or, perhaps to those that can really utilize the new features. Maybe it should be rewards-based – Worked on a 3D project, started using the new email management system, got LEED accredited? Then you get Office 2007!
A friend of mine (at another Civil Engineering firm) called to commiserate about the latest bad news regarding land development slow-downs. Like us, if you asked a few years ago how business was, we would ask back if you know anyone who could operate CAD as we perpetually had more work than we knew what to do with. This time of mucho business also led to a broad range of skill sets within the company’s CAD user community; some users being very sharp while others were, well, not-so sharp.
As my friend described it, there was one particular CAD user in his office that most felt fell squarely into the “not-so sharp” category and came to be branded the, “Canary in the Mine.” The logic being if the Canary was still employed, the rest of the CAD users were safe from layoff.
What’s the moral? I can think of a few – What do you think it is? (Please leave a comment)
I’m a big fan of the three basic CIO roles, as laid out by the Executive Council of CIO magazine; Function Head, Transformation Leader, and Business Strategist.
Function Head – Operational excellence (keeping the lights on)
Transformation Leader – Business and process transformation (being a change agent)
Business Strategist – Enterprise strategy, innovation, and differentiation (developing strategy, not just reacting to it)
One of the largest challenges that exist for CIO’s as they play the role of Transformational Leader is in getting multiple people to change the way they work when they may not want to. Perhaps it is the acceptance of these challenges that defines a CIO. What I mean is, let’s say there are two projects on the table. One is the upgrade of Exchange to the latest version and the other is procuring a document management system aimed at filing and retrieving project-related emails. The new version of Exchange will make things “easier” for the server manager and the new Outlook Web Access (OWA) will impress the users. The document management system is pretty easy to set up but getting the entire company, spread over many offices and service groups, to use it is a different story. So, which is the better project - A lower total cost of ownership and Web 2.0-based OWA or a process that could help mitigate the risks, rework, and write-offs associated with missing or unshared client emails?
At a recent conference, I was speaking about change management and said one of the key differences between an IT Director and CIO was deployment versus adoption - An IT Director considers a project successful when it has been successfully deployed. A CIO considers a project successful when it has been successfully adopted. This might be a generalization, but it also could help define if an IT Director, who accepts the “adoption” challenge, is actually taking on a CIO role or if a CIO, who shies away from such projects, is acting more like an IT Director.
Which project did we select? Well, to be honest, both. Our server manager is taking steps to upgrade Exchange. We are trying to consolidate and cluster servers as well as give the users a better OWA experience. That said my role with the Exchange upgrade is to understand the project and its positive effect on the company, trust-but-verify the projects expectations, and monitor the progress.
The vast majority of my time will go into doing the same steps as above for the document management application, but to also work closely with the entire company in order to get a reasonable adoption of the software. To change the culture so a year from now we will have happier clients, less write-offs, and the current employees will be telling the new hires, “Well, that’s just how we file email here.”
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/205
Amazing speech from JJ Abrams, co-creator of ABC’s LOST, at the TED Conference, talking about technology enhancing the mystery of story telling. What’s amazing about this talk is the inspiration that technology brings to the potential of solving (business) issues. I’ve always been a proponent of the theory that technology alone cannot solve a problem. Typically, it is a balance of technology, well-defined user requirements, and change management. What JJ speaks about is how technology has advanced to the point of not being the weak link.
Based on that, one could premise that any business issue can be solved with the proper user requirements and change management. What do you think?
Perhaps it is one of the great dichotomies with promoting a geek to CIO. Take someone who (stereotypically) learned how to program and understand computers as a child, who prefers to be holed up alone, and give them a job where one of the gauges of success is to work with a lot of people to effect change in the organization. Doesn’t sound very fair… Thanks goodness I took drama class in high school and worked at the Renaissance Faire in my twenties. Those two experiences helped me understand people. Without them, I would either stink at or have never received the CIO job.
We just finished the company’s annual kickoff meeting where all associates and principals get together, meet about stuff, learn the overall strategic plan, and hear each departmental plan for the fiscal year. I decided to punch the three projects that require enterprise-wide change. These were not back-end projects like improving procurement or replicating databases – These were projects where everyone in the room needed to not only buy into them, but help them succeed. So, here I am, talking in front of about one-hundred people, thanking them in advance for their help, and, one the inside, crystallizing one whopper of an epiphany. I need to converse with each and every one of these people, probably in person, three separate times (one time per project). That’s a grand total of 300 conversations! And that’s if I only have to have one conversation per person per project – My guess is there will be multiple iterations for those resistant to change. Wow.
As the company grows, so does the number of stakeholders with which a relationship is vital. Every acquisition, every new team leader, every future leader, if they do not know who I am, what IT is up to, and why, I’m probably not doing my job very well. The great thing about the annual meeting is it reminds me who these people are and, in front of them all, briefly introduces them to the IT who, what, and why. Now comes the hard part - Phone calls, travelling for face-to-face meetings, working with the IT team to help spread the good word, and reacting accordingly to those leaders who are heroes, hitchhikers, snipers, and anarchists (more on this next week).
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