Executive Advisory Program

If IT was King... (but it is not)

Posted by Mike Rollings

Maybe I'm just sensitive, but the recent McKinsey Quarterly article "Using IT to enable a lean transformation" by Nicklas Ilebrand, Tor Mesøy, and Remco Vlemmix was a disappointment.

The article started out okay, "Senior leaders can play an important role in assembling a lean program by involving the CIO more closely in designing and executing the transformation."  Definitely agree that transforming one cog in a machine that needs to be redesigned is a bad idea.

The authors continued,

"At one large European bank, executives wanted to speed the account-opening process for corporate customers...While lean techniques could address these issues, the bank had experienced roadblocks in previous lean programs, which in the end failed to deliver the hoped-for returns...Operational changes failed to gain a toehold as employees fell back into their old ways of working, and the program fizzled once the start-up phase ended...Senior managers, determined not to launch yet another stalled implementation effort, knew that IT had to play a central role in the lean redesign of the corporate-account program..."

But the conclusion did not match the story, "Because IT can help not only to coordinate program deliverables but also to spot opportunities to lower costs and boost innovation, CIOs are often well placed to lead the joint effort."  McKinsey, have you been reading your own publications?

I think the article builds a case for the following conclusions, just not the conclusion that "CIOs are often well placed to lead the joint effort":

• IT is as relevant as manufacturing, marketing, sales, and other organizations as part of a business transformation.  Leaving out a major piece of the puzzle was a fatal flaw.
• Business transformation must be led by the business to succeed, and cross-functional participation is a must.  
• Don't believe that just because you tell someone to change that it will happen without support to make it happen.
• LEAN helps you focus on an outcome.  Changing the outcome requires getting all the players in the room to figure out the new play.

This is a posterchild for "how not to conduct a transformation".  I bet the authors looked at the pieces of the story that illustrate the cross-silo coordination of technology changes and for that aspect I agree, the CIO is best positioned.  But the CIO does not rule over the domain where these other failures happened -- the business.  I just don't want to see CIOs thrown under the train as they try to push transformation when the business is not on board.

Check out the other Executive Advisory Program transformation blog posts here.

Forget H1N1; focus on STS

Posted by: Jack Santos

There is a disease among us that I call STS – stock ticker syndrome.  I experience the symptoms at least once a day.  Usually it’s someone asking me if I saw their email, or me asking someone else.  And usually the response is : “No..I never got it…let me look…oh there it is….sorry”.  Or, alternatively, “No – never got it, must have gone into spam”  (usually it’s sitting in the inbox).

The real problem is that in our 21st century communication system that we have built, these tidbits of information fly in and out so fast it is easy to miss something – like watching a stock ticker.  At any given minute of any given hour of any given day, you can see the emails coming in at a regular pace.  And many people do just that – mesmerized by the pattern.

Our Gartner/Burton content and collaboration guys have a good recommendation for this: software that “pulls” relevant info forward, and pushes “irrelevant” info back.  The real issue becomes what is relevant and not.

Vendors are jumping into the fray – Facebook comes at it with a social networking bent,  Google, in its typical “throw mud on the wall and see what sticks” approach, has already introduced multiple attempts (like “Wave”) -- the latest is “Buzz” for Gmail. Even collaboration tools like SharePoint (or Lotus Notes) think they have a solution. Twitter comes at it from a different direction…make the tidbits smaller, but more numerous; so if you can’t beat STS, join it .

They fact is that it’s just life as we know it, and we’ll have to get used to high “miss” rates….which is worrisome.  I suppose the argument could be made that the only difference with pre-internet life is that now we know (or can find out) what we missed, whereas before we would have no clue, and no way to find out. I suppose so.  But this is a troubling side effect of the information society, and not something the just “unified communications” (whatever that marketing term means) can solve…..But it’s an issue we (as management) need to focus on.

Just delivering new ways of funneling more information, and no context or filtering, (like Buzz) won’t help…

Cloud-fuscation

Posted by: Jack Santos

Part of the Gartner/Burton integration plan calls for, of course, integration of benefit plans.  I have some particular insight here, since I have been on both sides of that equation – in health insurance IT, and as a health care provider CIO. 

Insurers have always been on the leading edge of technology usage – and that continues to be the case. There is extensive use of websites, online modeling, customer based data entry, and self help.  It’s cool stuff.

But it’s also an example of a nascent problem with “cloud computing” – or even its red-headed step child: e-business. 

As businesses have found that an internet-based delivery model solves many issues (and reduces many costs) they have gone at it with a vengeance. So has government – health plans are becoming increasingly complex (HSAs, HFSAs, CDHP are all in the alphabet soup), because a side effect of increasing automation is that it is (ostensibly) easier to develop more complex plans, and easier to deliver them.  Hence, like water flowing into an empty glass, the level of complexity rises.

The role of IT leaders is changing – no longer are we just the advocate of automation, we must be the advocate of appropriate and judicious automation – whether it’s through participation in business strategy, or government regulatory frameworks.  An excellent primer on this is “The Laws of Disruption – Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in The Digital Age” by Larry Downes.

This issue is not unlike a situation I found myself in a few years ago.  After months of bake-offs, evaluations, vendor grilling, RFIs, RFPs, etc, we were about to make a major software decision, and were reviewing vendor contract terms (it was a 15-20MM dollar purchase).  Of course, the contract was internet accessible, PDF format;  And it was littered with hyperlinks to terms on web pages, references to commitments on web pages, and detailed product features on web pages.

I wouldn't sign it; they were reluctant to change it, and it almost cost the deal.

Besides the complexity of referencing material outside of the signed document, there was the issue of audit – clearly those web pages change frequently, almost at whim – with no clear audit trail of who/when/where/why.  God forbid we should get into an argument at a later date (inevitable) and both parties look at the terms – just to find they were written on beach sand that had been scoured by hundreds of successive tides of changes…..In the end, they dutifully printed out all of the referenced web pages, we reviewed them, and explicitly included them in the contract.

I submit this is an example of yet another potential unintended consequence of cloud computing; we are attracted by the dynamic and elastic aspects of cloud, but those same features can be detriments to a long term, sustainable business model. 

A potential way to deal with this may come out of design thinking and hybrid thinking approaches.  Gartner research is exploring that genre of ways to think about IT solutions, and the impact on business strategy…

When I had 20 different websites open from 5 different companies, and multiple time-sensitive modeling and data capture pages in process, it occurred to me that the benefits enrollment process is approaching lunacy-- not any one business’ fault, just a zeitgeist. I am not sure whether health care reform (if it ever happens) will worsen or improve this situation.  But issues around appropriate automation, user interface design, and silo integration are at the heart of what should be on an IT leader’s agenda for the coming years….and cloud computing will only add fuel to the fire…

Now if I can only get Fidelity to stop insisting that I only rely on web-based statements and alerts….

IT organizational issues

Posted by: Jack Santos

It’s been a busy 2 weeks here at Gartner/Burton. 

Massachusetts to Dallas to Helsinki and back, with stops in between.

Part of what I was doing when meeting with clients was going over 2010 IT trends and macro trends.  Usually those trends lead to in depth discussions, and – Guess what???  Most enterprise challenges are not fundamentally technical – they are organizational – people, process, culture, structure.

Which made this recent TED video that Richard Watson (in our Application platform strategy group) passed along so relevant.  It is really worth a watch.

In my meetings I discussed similar topics – and how to engage the business.   During a more light-hearted moment in one meeting, this particular CIO shared with me a story from a few years ago that captured the state of the IT department in many companies, and how key the business felt IT was back then:

A CIO planned a celebration for his team, and chartered a small cruise ship for two hundred.  Alerted to the fact that company policy, due to the risk, frowned on that many of the senior staff of one department on the same transport (ships, planes, automobiles), he decided to check with the right folks to see if he could bend the rules.  The phone call went something like this:

CIO: …so you see I thought that on this one occasion we might be able to make an exception.

HR: Sorry.  That’s been policy for a long time, and departments have had to work around it.  We just felt the risk was too major a factor for our key departments and functions. No exceptions.

CIO (with persistence) Isn’t there anything we can do to work around this?  Have you discussed it with your VP?

HR: (flustered) Well I can certainly try to bring it up with him, if you insist.  What department is this again?

CIO: IT

HR: Ohhhh,   IT.  Hold on <a few moments passes> Hello?  On second thought, we think it would be fine. No problem. Have a nice trip!

Business as Unusual

Posted by Mike Rollings

In my last post I stated, "This is my first post as a Gartner employee.  In the spirit of business as usual, here we go".  Truthfully, this is anything but business as usual, and that is good.  The New Normal is filled with business as un-usual.

Taking a page from my own research in April 2009, "Real Transformation: Why IT Change Is Not Enough"...  "Your organization’s success has been built on a set of assumptions. Those assumptions have driven choices related to every aspect of what you do and how you do it. But fundamental assumptions upon which you have built success may have dramatically altered. Like any life-changing event, this may alter what customers you serve, the products and services you provide, and the processes and information required to support a new normal".

In the new normal all organization's need to release the death grip on what you think is important based on assumptions about the past, and they must keep in mind two uniquely human characteristics. 

First is our ability to derive comfort from 'business as usual' and to let it obscure our ability to see anything other than what we 'want to see'.  Like Michael Disabato writes, "Processes provide a framework and guidance, but should not be relied on as a universal panacea. While processes must be executed to be effective, blind reliance on them in the face of changing requirements is a recipe for disaster. Likewise, metrics can be a trap for the unwary".  Human's have an ability to develop blind reliance on status quo and 'facts' -- we manufacture reality. 

Many facts are 'facts' because we have declared them to be 'fact'.  The analysis that provided comfort to the managers of financial instruments leading to the sub-prime mortgage crisis is one example.  Another piece of this puzzle about 'fact' is in front of your eyes right now -- the device that allows you to read this blog post.  The device allows you to search and find your own facts, but it also has the power to obscure them.  Many of the business and information systems within organizations present a fact that was determined by someone (or something) else.  Do you really know why the information should be trusted?  When you add the fact that many data environments have multiple pieces of data that could be considered the same 'fact' and the one selected is just one of many possibilities, then it really makes you think, doesn't it?

The over-reliance on ‘facts’ also applies to planning by past patterns.  Don't assume it is the same situation and the old-business playbook still applies.  A pattern may render an important piece of the puzzle, but assuming it is the same is dangerous.  (Also see ‘Fixing Intel’ is a wake-up call for analysts everywhere).

The second uniquely human characteristic is our ability to use our minds to use information from multiple contexts to create a new insight.  This is an amazing gift that we all possess.  But as Gary Hamel states in "The Future of Management", "The machinery of modern management gets fractious, opinionated, and free-spirited human beings to conform to standards and rules, but in so doing it squanders prodigious quantities of human imagination and initiative.  It brings discipline to operations, but imperils organizational adaptability".  Hamel's statement is not a call for anarchy, it is a call for all of us to engage the human mind and spirit to do amazing things that are otherwise impossible, and to reorient organizations so that this can happen.

I believe we need to reorient our technology focus too.  Our IT focus for the last 50 years has been to automate and to fuel the credo of modern management -- pursue efficiency ahead of every other goal.  This is not surprising, since modern management was invented to solve the problem of inefficiency.

Frederick Taylor who is regarded as the father of modern management believed that an empirical, data-driven approach to the design of work would yield big productivity gain.  Hamel quotes Taylor who maintained that efficiency came from “knowing exactly what you want men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way.”   But as Hamel further illustrates, this has become a liability for organizations trying to drive innovation and to tap into the human ability for discovery.  An overt focus on efficiency and its brother automation can hobble our ability to benefit from human insight.

The new normal requires forward-looking insight versus an over-reliance on historical patterns and 'facts' that may be irrelevant.  The new normal is business as un-usual.  As we proceed, we need to account for these two uniquely human characteristics to make the most of what lies ahead.

Processes, creative thought, and judgement

Posted by Michael Disabato

Back in September (yes, I’m catching up), Mike Rollings posted an entry about how our processes are removing our capacity for judgement and accountability for our actions (or inactions) by allowing us to rely on a cookbook that “handles everything.” Being the Process Guy (I write about ITIL), that struck home.

Processes provide a framework and guidance, but should not be relied on as a universal panacea. While processes must be executed to be effective, blind reliance on them in the face of changing requirements is a recipe for disaster. Likewise, metrics can be a trap for the unwary.

Managing to metrics is akin to “studying for the test”. While properly designed metrics assure that business requirements are being met, business requirements often change faster than the thresholds are updated. This requires human judgement to decide “this isn’t working” and that a change request needs to be filed.

Incident Management relies on quick fixes or the use of the Known Problem Database to restore services as quickly as possible. This requires Level 1 technicians to become creative in their problem solving. Triage and quick fix actions require fast thinking and a broad knowledge of the infrastructure (including applications). This is not a job for non-thinking automatons.

So do processes remove our capacity for thinking?

You tell me.

Michael

Marginalizing Enterprise Architecture

Posted by Mike Rollings

This is my first post as a Gartner employee.  In the spirit of business as usual, here we go.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline for managing business processes explicitly as strategic assets.  Richard Watson states in his Burton Group document “Market Profile: Business Process Management Infrastructure 2009” that the BPM infrastructure market is growing and it  appears immune to recessionary forces.  The BPM market continues to grow.  BPM market growth should be great news for enterprise architecture (EA), but it is not all good news.  

EA includes the pursuit of business architecture -- a representation of the collective understanding of the business model, current strategies, business functions, processes and information.  Because BPM is married to process and information then BPM should mean good things for EA, right?  Surprisingly, no!  The way that BPM is happening in some organizations foreshadows a bigger trend for EA and a bifurcation of what we have long thought EA includes. 

In organizations pursuing BPM, Business Capabilities and Business Architecture should finally take center stage -- successful examples of BPM show that they do even if they do not use these terms explicitly.  The concerning part for EA is that Burton Group’s Contextual Research Study conducted in December 2009 shows that the people responsible for these successful BPM programs do not describe what they are doing as EA.  In fact, some even say that they are still figuring out how to connect with the EA group.  WOW!  One would think that EA teams would be celebrating in these organizations, not disconnected!

The good news is that the business is doing business architecture related activities.  The bad news is that EA is beginning to disappear into the business. Why is this happening? I believe it is because the EA community continues to make EA appear "special".  EA has become just another thing that the business does not understand and therefore feels "Oh, let IT worry about that".  The special language, the pursuit of EA as a profession, and the fact that people still are trying to figure out what EA is, what it does, and what it looks like when it is successful all contribute to the marginalization of EA.

Yet, this can be a good thing for the EA discipline - practitioners just need to come to realize that EA has gone through a fundamental change and EA does not exist solely as an IT competency.

• Embrace this and feel good about it - many already have.
• Learn to describe architecture’s business contribution and value without using EA’s secret language.
• Deliberately avoid a highly theoretical approach to EA in favor of helping produce results.
• Describe what you can do to help versus describing EA.
• Help the broader audience of business and technology professionals use the knowledge of dependencies, implications, and constraints to improve their results.

As I said in my blog post "Is the business result more valuable than 'EA'?", the reason we care at all about the analysis techniques etc. in the EA bucket is because we want to improve business outcomes – not because we care what you call the bucket!  When you focus solely on the bucket it leads to ivory towers, ineffective processes, a lack of participation, and low stakeholder commitment. I would rather focus on the value to the business. The foundations of good architecture are disappearing into the business.  Go with the flow!

#EA #Gartner #BurtonGroup #BPM

Gideon's Children

Posted by: Jack Santos

By now you may know that Gartner has purchased Burton Group. This post is a perspective on that purchase, and not meant to be any way, shape, or form an official announcement of intentions, or any type of inside information.  So take it as such. 

That said, the behemoth in the analyst/2nd opinion space has, to some extent, validated the business model and market approach that Burton Group has taken.   That is heartening.  As briefed to me, the Burton Group brand will live within Gartner, Burton analysts will continue as a group, and the emphasis on in-depth, technically-oriented, front-line targeted research will continue to be a focus.

Given my role as a technology officer, CIO, and within the industry  for thirty odd years, my relationship with Gartner (and Gartner EXP) has been a long and intensive one.  It will be hard to not say “Gartner Group”, Gartner’s original moniker. 

These are Zelig-ian perspectives.  I’ve sat down face to face with the heads of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Novell  - sometimes cordially, sometimes in negotiation.  I’ve been in arms length contact with just about everyone who’s who in the tech industry.

The same path crossing is true with Gideon Gartner.  Still have some of the earliest Gartner Group analysts on my rolodex (or the 21st century equivalent: Linked In) from when the company was less than 20 people.  I have vivid memories of Gideon’s swagger in the room in those early years, and my admiration for his grasp of the big picture – and his business acumen.  He sold the company, and bought it back (in a flip of the classic maxim) by “selling high and buying low”. Smart guy.  After his Gartner Group years he moved on as a serial entrepreneur – creating similar firms (like Giga).

Gideon has been well known for his support of the arts in the New York area, another admirable quality.  Somewhere in his DNA is nurtured the fact that life is not all “work”, but “play” as well, and that sometimes “work” is “play”.  The ancestral (and current) Gartner home base of 56 Top Gallant Drive was ostensibly chosen so that one could dock a boat out the back.

The argument can be made that Gideon is the father of the IT analyst industry, and that all analyst firms owe a debt of gratitude to him.  Most businesses do, too.  If there is one thing that the information age has made clear is that information about information (the “meta” layer) has value as well, and Gideon Gartner’s progeny have proven that.  Google, in later years, would prove that point through its search engine.  In some ways, manufacturing, services, day to day commerce becomes a commodity, and understanding that commodity and how to plan for the future and react to events has value beyond the basics.  It’s not all about how quickly you get that information (stay glued to twitter if that’s how you feel), but the quality and thoroughness of the interpretation of information – the analyst industry has proven that over and over.  It’s the difference between a day trader and Warren Buffet, one-night-stands and long-term commitment.

I stand with the latter, and I hold my practitioner badge proudly; 30 years in the business of managing technology for financial services and healthcare firms,  That gives me (in many ways) an edge over folks that have been analysts their whole career, or have worked solely in the vendor space.  There is a joke somewhere about the similarity between analysts and priests with regard to marriage and sex. The fact is, over that time I have relied heavily on the analysis provided by the likes of Gartner, Forrester, Giga, and Burton  (kind of like pastoral counseling).  It’s all about perspective, and ideas, and firing new synapses to solve problems in different ways.

Burton has an approach that works well for technologists. Gartner’s approach has always been technologist based, but over the years has grown to emphasize technology management.  My role at Burton is to bridge that, especially with senior level IT and business management.  The combination of Burton Group  and Gartner (Group) is a good thing, even if it means one less analyst firm in the landscape. No doubt there are many of Gideon’s children that will take this as a business opening and opportunity, just like Gideon did.  And Burton Group will be there as part of Gartner to compete on quality, independence, and thoroughness.

So in that sense, we are all Gideon’s children.

Adam and Eve’s Progeny Can Find Persistence with Apples

Posted by: Jack Santos

My apologies for the biblical allusions in the title, but reading rumors about the inevitable Apple Tablet brought me back to many years ago during a  dark, secret meeting deep in Apple labs.

I was sent as an emissary for a major Fortune 200 company, and Apple saw me as the techno-weenie to win over in order to keep a fairly lucrative contract for Macintoshes.  So they held no punches, pulled out the big guns, and showed me what then Apple Chief Technologist Dave Nagel felt was the hardware to end all hardware wars.  The crème de la crème, the “it’s not a desktop, it’s not a laptop, it’s not a handheld” answer to every techno geek’s dream.

It was the early 90s,  and it was “The Newton”.  Not just an apple from any tree, but one from within the Apple tree.  Even then, the prototyped envisioned always-on wireless capability, endless applications at the palm of your hand, ease of use at your fingertip (albeit with a stylus).

OK OK – they didn't get it right, and the Newton is on the dung heap of history. Sure, it was attempted during the Jobs hiatus – with Sculley in charge of all things visionary gone wrong.  But one thing you have to give the folks at Apple – they don’t give up.  I really think some of the visionary thinking and experimenting that went into the Newton is what has made the iPod, iPhone, and the impending tablet a commercial success.

A classic “If at first you don’t succeed…” story.  They didn’t succeed, they did try again, and the rest is history.  Stubbornness and persistence has gone a long way at Apple.  Right, Steve?

2010 arrives: Hope stays alive, and CIOs should look hard at the mirror

posted by Jack Santos

There is a lot of talk about the role of the CIO, the future of the CIO, and whether CIO’s are taken seriously.  Hogwash. As leaders, one of the last things we need to do is bellyache about how we “don’t have a seat at the table”.  If you want to be at the table, act like you should be.

Along those lines, One of the things I have always tried to do as a CIO and IT leader was balance my work life, home life, and community life.  The latter has led me down some interesting paths – like ladling soup at a home less shelter once a month for about 4 years, or chairing the Chambers’ economic development efforts for hi-tech companies. 

Many years ago I also was involved in selecting college scholarship recipients for an inner-city scholarship program: The Jacob L and Lewis Fox Foundation (of which I am an alumnus – but that’s another story).  For hours I would diligently pour over the high school student apps, rank their responses on key criteria, help with the interviews, and participate in the final selection.

This past Tuesday evening I took a ride back to my “ancestral homeland” (Hartford, CT) and joined the annual Fox Foundation Holiday Dinner – a tradition which I attended religiously, but (sadly) due to schedule  and distance it has not been something I have gone to in at least 10 years.  My loss. 

I had forgotten how invigorating it was to listen to these kids (click here for the current year winners), at such early stages in their lives, yearn for opportunity and learning.  It was even more poignant since most of these kids didn’t come from well-to-do families, but were products of an inner city school system in the first minority-majority state capital in the nation. 

Besides engrossing conversation with old-timers (former scholars), we were entertained by poetry, dance, and acting performances by this year’s crop of scholars --- and a talented bunch they are.  What are they doing with the financial backing the foundation gave them?  Attending local schools like UCONN and the University of Hartford as well as Dartmouth, Temple, NYU, Trinity, and others.  An impressive lot.

In a time where terrorist attacks are on our mind, religious and racial  hatred and bigotry is almost unavoidable, and peace seems like such a foreign concept…it brought tears to my eyes to see our future.  Lewis Fox, lawyer,  philanthropist, devout Jew, dedicated community member, and  founder of the Foundation (in his father’s memory) would have been proud.  His legacy continues, and our future as a country is in good hands with these kids.

And for CIO’s concerned about their place in their company – think broader, look in the mirror, and take action.  “The table” is a lot bigger than just your company…and the compensation much more heartening.

Happy New Year!