eyetoit

Good Reading for you CIO

There is a great interview in CIO Insight with the principals of CogniTech on analyzing the IS contribution to an organization's performance. Unlike the vast majority of blurbs or articles I see about this subject in the IT press (fodder for a future post maybe), CogniTech's Lodahl and Redditt really get it. They founded their business on the same two premises that I do my writing here: "that businesses were going to become more and more dependent on IT, and that IT was being managed incorrectly."

Governance by Committee vs Real Leadership

Many organizations have attempted to develop an IT governance framework, largely with the aim of better aligning IT with the business by selecting the major projects and investments for the IT organization. Since I first started seeing this trend, it seemed almost intuitively flawed to me for two main reasons

• The governance framework itself doesn't inherently provide participating business executives with sufficient interest or knowledge to best direct the IT function. The dispersion of responsibility for decision-making across a group inherently reduces individual accountability for outcomes.
• I have a fundamental suspicion of committees as a decision-making tool. My recollection from most organizational behavior research is that committees by and large operate with an effective IQ of the dullest, rather than the brightest, member of the committee.

Now, some might take issue and say that with the right performance measures and incentives, team-level training and selecting the best people, an IT governance committee can provide a reasonable crutch for a CIO unable to really align with the business. I call that making the best of a bad situation.

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.

RFID - Value Beyond Supply Chain Management

Wharton professors Peter Fader and Eric Bradlow recently released a paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing entitled "An Exploratory Look at Supermarket Shopping Paths." A PDF draft of the paper can be found online. I was alerted to the paper via this reasonably detailed highlights article from Knowledge@Wharton.

There were some findings that may be interesting to retail grocery marketers, and may be surprising if you haven't actually done any grocery shopping. As might be expected, while some of these findings offer insight, most of them could have been captured just be actually spending time watching customers. Possibly the most amusing part is just how wrong conventional wisdom about shopper behavior was. Some findings:

Strategy Without a Roadmap

AlwaysOn is sort of like the new Fast Company or similar magazines of the go-go late '90's Silicon-Valley-as-the-center-of-the-world.

Having said that, they do have some interesting content, including a transcript of a Churchill Club panel Ann Livermore of HP, John Thompson of Symantec (formerly of IBM), and John Hagel of McKinsey & Company (or at least I am assuming he is still there, they simply refer to him as "strategy author.") The panel discussion, "Strategy Without a Roadmap" has some fluff in it, but they succintly express views which EyeToIT readers may find valuable.

Technology Is Not for Babysitting

Dr Carsten Sorensen of the London School of Economics has recently released a report comissioned by Microsoft. The report titled, "The Future Role of Trust in Work" [PDF] has some findings that are potentially troubling, and not for the reasons privacy activists may be concerned.

In a nutshell, the report observes that network technolgy such as cell phones, e-mail, instant messaging and phone-based text messaging have created an environment in which managers are more prone to micromanage. From the LSE press release:

He describes how the old classical management hierarchies of the past are being replaced by flatter networked structures. He explained how micromanagement causes people to spend a lot of time proving that they are working, instead of getting on with actually working. The trick will be setting up a system where the workers see a benefit in being monitored. ’But building the kind of trust between management and workers can take years, and it can be erased in a second,’ Sorensen notes.

Thinking About Offshoring As a Solution: What's The Unit of Measure?

I continue to be surprised at the continuing flight many firms are making to offshore development, even as many of the early adopters of offshoring are returning to domestic sourcing of more services (See "Return to Sender"). I think much of the pressure for offshoring comes from flawed assumptions and possibly flawed logic, both of which merit discussion.

Possibly the most pernicious situation with offshore development is the preordination or blanket directives for using offshore development. As an example, about three years ago I was in discussions with a global manufacturer about contracting with my firm to build a reasonably complex software application. I knew what the complexity of the system was because my firm had already built a very, very similar application. As we are able to do with most of our engagements, I suggested that we could do this for a fixed fee, and ballparked a fixed fee cost of approximately 1/2 of the next best (primarily offshore) development estimate they had on the table. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Infrastructure Complexity

Swapnil Shah has an "opinion" piece in Computerworld this week on the challenges of complexity in corporate computing infrastructures, "Defying the IT 'Butterfly Effect.'" I put the scare quotes around "opinion" because in all fairness, Shah is the CEO of mValent, a company that, not surprisingly, has tools for managing complex corporate computing infrastructures (imagine that!).

However, Shah's economic interest in solving the problem doesn't diminish the truth of much that he writes, and it is good food for thought when thinking about the real cost of excessively complex architectures. And while Shah focuses on the value of tools from vendors such as mValent for solving some of the problems this complexity creates, it is also worth considering the long-term savings that can result from rationalizing a complex architecture, as I wrote about some weeks ago in "ROI and IT Architecture"

Of Scorecards and Dashboards

Someone recently asked me to explain the difference between scorecards and dashboards, as this person seemed to hear them used almost interchangeably at his company regarding a portal initiative. Using the rule of thumb that for every person who asks a question there are at least ten more that also want an answer, I figured a quick discussion here might be in line. I will also provide some comments about what the role of each is, suggestions for each type of system, and which might be more relevant to your business (or business unit).

The names of each are actually very well-chosen with respect to their real-world analogs. A scorecard is usually part of a broader corporate methodology or management discipline and is a report card of how a given person, business unit or entity performed with respect to certain goals over a given time period. A dashboard is a set of indicators about the state of a process, piece of equipment, or business metric such as cash on hand or YTD sales at a specific point in time.

An example should make this very clear.