eyetoit

The Risk of Dark-side CIOs: Crooked Information Officers

The Twin Cities local business paper reported Monday that Buca restaurants announced that they are suing their former CFO (who had resigned) and CIO (who they actually fired after an internal investigation) for all manner of malfeasance including most egregiously, manual journal entries and related party transactions. From the Business Journal:

The complaint alleges that Gadel and Motschenbacher caused the company to enter into unfavorable transactions with companies in which they had undisclosed, material financial interests, causing the company to overpay for goods and services. Buca also accuses Gadel and Motschenbacher of soliciting and receiving undisclosed kickbacks from a vendor, and seeking and receiving improper reimbursement from the company for personal expenses, such as family vacations, that were presented as business expenses.

Hurd Puts In New CIO at Dell; Rethinking Bouchard

Last year, I was a little harsh on HP's CIO at the time ("HP's CIO on the ERP Problem & the Art of Diplomacy") for accepting virtualyl no responsibility for the problems with and fallout from their SAP implementation debacle (which caused them to miss their earnings number because they couldn't ship product (background)).

HP's new CEO clearly felt HP needed a new CIO and replaced Giles Bouchard with Randy Mott (formerly CIO at Dell and WalMart, two companies that effectively use IT to make the trains run on time). Mott's reputation is impressive, and I'm sure he'll do a good job at HP. Of note about this change, however, is that Bouchard is still at HP, as the EVP of Global Operations, which is apparently his area of expertise. The fact that Bouchard was a business manager responsible for IT has caused me to reevaluate my assessment of him, and brings up the whole reason I write here in the first place.

Why You Shouldn't Earmark Capital for IT

Bart Perkins of Leverage Partners has a short and sweet piece in ComputerWorld titled "A Separate IT Capital Pool Makes No Sense." While I have certainly argued in favor of valuing IT projects (and their too-common overruns) in the context of the impact they have on the business (cf "The $1.6 Billion Web Site"), Perkins does a good job of breaking out some clear reasons why firms should not provide an earmarked capital IT budget. Several of his reasons are the obvious ones, and most all cache out to the benefit of holding all capital spending to the same standard, but he also identifies out some organizational benefits that occur when IT investments must stand on their own merit.

Square Peg/Round Hole

GTSI, a government technology sales and integration firm reported recently that they will be missing their earnings targets and may have jeopardized their growth plans due to problems implementing a new ERP system.

GTSI went with PeopleSoft as their ERP platform (clearly prior to Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft). As a distribution firm, it is unclear why they went with PeopleSoft's platform for their ERP. I can see a couple of possible reasons, one being that PeopleSoft does have a fairly good presence in the public sector markets (although it's reputation there has not been pristine, with some challenged implementations in some state universities). Another possibility is that they bought when PeopleSoft was basically trying to buy business through extremely heavy discounting as they tried to fend off Oracle's takeover offer.

FLEA is the new TLA

A friend of mine on the IT side of things always jokes that if one needs to sound technically impressive, one just needs to throw around a bunch of TLAs. What's a TLA? A Three Letter Acronym, of course. The IT world is full of them and has been for years: ERP, CRM, XML, SQL, SAX, DOM, and the new developer darling SOA (which in some ways is just an update of the old RPC). Of course, a popular BA (bigramic acronym) is XP (eXtreme Programming), but TLAs are still the stock-in-trade for most of the acronym-makers.

Lately, though, I've noticed the need many have to actually move to FLEAs, a term that I think I may be the first to coin: a FLEA is a Four Letter Enhanced Acronym. A popular one today on the development side is AJAX (for Asynchronous Java and XML). Then I was reading a Boston Consulting Group paper on COPEs. What's a COPE? Well, do you remember COEs, Centers of Excellence? Pretty much the same deal, but a COPE is a "Center of Process Excellence"

Now, the nice thing about FLEAs is that you have a much better chance at creating pronouncable words. While there are just fewer than 18,000 possible TLAs there are fewer than 3,500 if you require at least one to be a vowel, and even most of those don't result in a pronouncable word. This, and the availability of another 450,000 possible FLEAs for vendors to create and market should insure their success for years to come.

So just remember, you read it here first: FLEA is the new TLA. Watch for them.

All Things In Moderation - Sensible Choices between Custom and Package Applications

I am usually considered a big fan of custom software (also known as signature software, or bespoke software to those in the UK). I think companies today often put too much reliance (faith maybe) on and poorly assess the total cost of ownership of a packaged application and concurrently overestimate the risks associated with custom development. Having a consultancy that delivers both signature software and implements Tier I ERP products gives me an unusual vantage point and a fair amount of balance in this area, or at least I think I have my bias under control.

I recently came across a case study about the IT operations at Crutchfield Corp, the electronics retailer HQ'ed in Charlottesville, Virgina. This is a company that seems to have gone overboard in the custom development activity. According to this Computerworld case study ("Closely Held Applications") Crutchfield has 18 developers supporting 300 custom applications which consitutute 85% of the running software code inside the company. (I am assuming they are excluding office productivity applications and operating systems from this figure).

The "do-nothing CIO" - You wish you had one

One of the chronic problems IT folks have is a failure to align with the business. IT executives often want to build a shining castle on the hill, technologically speaking, even if what the company needs is something much less technically impressive. Often in such cases the CIO pushes forward with the vision regardless, usually to a negative result for the company; sadly the CIO's career may be harmed less than the company, folk in the IT industry are pretty good at spinning failures.

So it was really quite pleasant to stumble upon a commentary piece in Computerworld "Lying Low, and Thinking Big Picture" by Bruce Stewart. He writes about a CIO working in the timber industry who is basically doing very little, and trying to do less.

I bet they answer their main phone number though...

The Customer Respect Group came out with its 4th annual ratings for the public web presence of the 100 largest companies in the U.S. (I believe they use the Fortune 500 list as their guide, since they list neither Koch nor Cargill, both private and both with $50bil+ revenue numbers). In any event, as usual, the report card was not very good. You can read their press release with a quick findings overview as a PDF.