CIO Tools Archive

Technology CSI

By
John.Weigelt
Published: May 2, 2010Posted in: CIO Toolbox, General

How do you know if your project is successful?  How would you describe this success to your kids or parents?  What differentiated your work from that of your predecessor?   How will the history books describe the legacy that you’ve left behind?  These are some of my favourite questions that I ask in job interviews.  I’ve found that these questions are deceivingly difficult for many to answer.  I’ve also asked these questions to organizations on both the delivery side and the receiving side of large IT projects.  “On time and on budget” simply doesn’t cut it as an answer. 

What stands out in my mind are those answers that are based on measurable results and not some squishy terminology.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that many outcomes are qualitative.  But saying that you were responsible for a particular domain or contributed to a particular effort gives no sense of how noteworthy the effort was.  Consider the following statement “I participated in the Vancouver Olympic effort”.  Unfairly ambiguous?  Perhaps.  But it helps demonstrate the point that it is difficult to make a decision without more concrete evidence.

Evidence based decision making, a sort of technology CSI, helps link technology projects to business outcomes which ultimately gets the attention of an organization’s senior leaders.  In an era of shrinking budgets and the occasional scepticism towards technology initiatives it becomes more important than ever before to build the evidence of concrete business outcomes.  Evidence helps us appreciate if we are accomplishing the business objective that we set out to and allows us make course corrections when the evidence show us otherwise.  Evidence therefore allows for informed risk taking.  While evidence alone won’t guarantee 100% project success, it will improve the odds dramatically.  It will also allow for earlier identification of those activities that should simply be stopped.  With the appropriate evidence, those efforts that have been stopped, cancelled, discontinued, etc. will not be deemed as failures but rather stepping stones towards the next success.  Evidence helps everyone understand what has happened, helps us safeguard against the reoccurrence of those things that stood in the way of full success.  I say “full success” in place of “failure” since we will have learned from the efforts the led up to the decision point and will be able to build from them going forward.  Of course even with all the evidence in the world, doing the exact same thing twice and not being successful is just wrong.

So as you build out that project plan or consider your objectives for your upcoming year, take a moment to consider how you can prove your success to others.  You’ll be glad you took the time to think about the evidence you’re going to need to convince others of how really great your work was.

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Storm Clouds?

By
John.Weigelt
Published: April 29, 2010Posted in: CIO Toolbox, Security

If you were asked about the link between technology and the weather what would you say?  You might first think about constant change or perhaps areas of high pressure.  (Hopefully you won’t mention bad similes as well.)   The excitement surrounding the latest era of computing has cemented the connection between technology and the weather.   This latest era is familiarly called Cloud computing as shorthand.  Unfortunately, the shorthand terminology creates challenges for business and individuals alike as they look to gain a better understanding of what it means to make use of the many advantages of this new computing paradigm. 

If we lay back, hands behind our head in a grassy field and look up at the sky, we may see any number of different types of clouds.  A quick search reveals a long list of meteorological phenomena, including:  cirrocumulus, cirrus, cirrostratus, altostratus, altocumulus, cumulus humilis, cumulus mediocris, stratocumulus, nimbostatus, stratus, cumulonimbus, cumulus congestus, pyrocumulus, noctilucent.  For most of these clouds we could remain comfortable on the grass, but if we see a select few (e.g. cumulonimbus:  thunderstorm clouds) we would probably seek extra protection.  The same can actually be said of cloud services technologies.  There are a wide variety of cloud services and several options for how these services can be provided.  Cloud services are often characterized as infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service and are available in a continuum from a fully private cloud through hosted cloud to a fully commercial cloud offering.   Each of these varieties of cloud service has its own considerations for protection and imposes different obligations on the organizations that leverage them.

The most significant barrier for organizations looking to harness cloud computing is uncertainty.  Organizations are uncertain about the cloud’s impact to their business or uncertain about how the cloud will impact their status quo.  This uncertainty impedes an organization’s efforts to build up the confidence to make use of cloud services.  So like pilots planning their route from take-off to landing carefully review the specific types of clouds that they may encounter along the way, IT and business leaders must become skilled on the variety of cloud technology options that are available to them as they plan their projects.  A comprehensive understanding of the cloud offering that matches their business will help provide a focus on the actual risks to the business and not those derived from the unfortunate generalizations frequently found today.  So as you and your organization explore the vast potential of cloud computing, be sure to take a little extra time to identify the specific cloud options applicable to your business.  A little bit of up front effort will go a long way to crisply identify the detailed risks and compensating safeguards to help avoid a turbulent ride.

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Grow Your Technology Shop with Distributed Empowerment

By
John.Weigelt
Published: April 13, 2010Posted in: CIO Toolbox, Open Government

CIOs continue to be under pressure to do more with less as businesses and governments look to reduce costs.  With shrinking workforces and almost endless opportunities to leverage technology for the organization’s goals, what’s a CIO to do?  Harnessing the creative energy of people outside of the CIO’s immediate circle of influence can help build out the capabilities to transform how you do business.

Set the Vision

How do you get hundreds or thousands of people to help you reach your goals?  Clearly, reaching out individually to each and every person would be prohibitively time consuming.  And then, how to manage the many questions that arise along the way?  Setting a well-defined vision establishes the direction for the extended community and the common goal that the community is working towards.  In the face of uncertainty, the community can return to the vision and independently perform the course corrections to arrive upon the goal.  This frees the CIO from having to intervene with every individual project while allowing the adoption of the collaborative efforts of the community.

The Heath Brothers remind us what makes a good vision statement and those that perhaps are less compelling.  I would simply note the advice of a past mentor of mine passed along, namely that “there’s a fine line between Vision and Hallucination.”  Articulate your vision with care and the community will follow.

Empower the Community

Whether the CIO has a large distributed organization, works with a small team with relationships though peer associations or has a small team but wants to leverage the skills in the community, empowering the extended community broadens the reach of the technology shop.  Many organizations have established cultures where people will actively work to shut down useful projects that are perceived to encroach on their particular turf, often spending more time to block the work than growing the capability.  Not only is this negativity counterproductive, it creates a toxic environment and dampens creativity.  A preferred approach is to acknowledge the work being done by others and either hitching your project to that wagon, or accelerating the project you’re working on so that the other team decides to follow you.

Having been part of both activities, I can honestly say that the latter is more constructive.  After all, everyone is working towards the same vision and goals.  This distributed empowerment is at the heart of the Open Government work and the associated collaborative community development.  Perhaps the externally focused empowerment can be further embraced internally to allow the creativity of one group to be adopted by the others within the organization.

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