Chris Weston - Making IT Work

Making friends or influencing people

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:20:00 +0100

At the IT Directors Forum this year I attended a session by Gartner, one of the themes of which was ‘how does the CIO increase his/her influence in the business’. Gartner and many other organisations have been paddling this canoe for a few years now, and I’m starting to think that it’s an idea that’s past its sell-by date.

I’m not suggesting, by the way, that it is becoming irrelevant because there has been some change in the tide, that IT leaders are now accepted as a fundamental part of the senior management of the business. That is patently not the case in the majority of organisations. There are many examples where the CIO or IT Director has an ongoing and valuable part to play in the running of the organisation but this is still a relative rarity.

No, I think it’s losing relevance rapidly because of the increasing commoditisation of a lot of what the IT department does. As a service provider the IT department can hope and aspire to be a ‘trusted partner’, in the same way that the man that maintains your car can be a valuable source of information. If you trust his opinion and ask his advice, he might tell you that he replaces your brake pads more often than he would expect, and that you might be a little heavy on the gas and the brake. This advice could save you money on maintenance and fuel economy, but the relationship has to be good for this advice to be offered and accepted - if it’s unsolicited then it can be seen as extremely presumptuous, and the response ‘mind your own business’ might be forthcoming.

It’s time to wake up and realise that the IT leader isn’t driving the car. There are times and places where the unique viewpoint of the IT leader is valuable and should be sought out, and (as is a common theme of this blog) the wise business takes the time to involve this important partner. But the idea that ‘increasing influence’ is an important or necessary activity is now rather self-serving and speaks of personal ambition rather than corporate improvement.

Matt Ballantine makes a related (and as usual, more eloquent) point in his recent blog post, and links to other articles that are well worth a read if you are interested in exploring this idea further.

How to publish a proper list of Social Business ROI examples.

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:33:00 +0100

How to publish a proper list of Social Business ROI examples.:

In this blog post, Olivier Blanchard takes us through what is a pretty comprehensive description of how to document ROI for social media / social business projects. In fact what he does is to reiterate the rules for reporting ROI for pretty much any effort.

A key piece of advice in this post is not to rely on anecdotal evidence. If you want to retain any kind of credibility at all, you need to be 100% sure of your source data, don’t put yourself in a position where somebody can do an hour’s research and show your case to be built on sand. This is your career we’re talking about!

Sometimes you come across a piece like this that teaches you a lot of lessons in a very short space of time, and you just have to share it.

http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/how-to-publish-a-proper-list-of-social-business-roi-examples/

Why is there an 'I' in 'IT'?

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 19:07:00 +0100

What’s the most important thing an IT department does? It’s important to maintain systems, ‘keep the lights on’ as they say, and to resolve problems in a professional manner. This is essentially managing the technology. But in order to add value, we should concentrate less on the ‘T’ in IT. The ‘I’ is where the function makes a difference, by delivering the right information to the right people, quickly. They can then make faster, better, more informed decisions. This reduces costs, both the measurable cost that comes as a result of poorly focused work, and the opportunity cost that comes with making poor choices. It can and should also lead to happier customers, who see an organisation working well, with their finger on the pulse.

This isn’t always straightforward. Many organisations don’t get this, and treat their IT departments as custodians of the technology and nothing more. Many IT departments don’t get it either, or can’t communicate their potential value in an effective way.

When I was thinking about this the other day, a whimsical thought occurred to me as I considered ‘corporate IT’. The word ‘corporate’ is from the latin corporatus, from the root corpus, or body. If you consider the organisation to be a body, the technology, the networks and systems are the organs and arteries, that exist to move the information oxygen around. They are only there for that purpose. It is information that allows the body to make choices, move forward, achieve its aims.

Allowing the IT department to forget about the ‘I’, is to starve the whole entity of a vital function. Unfortunately the Information is often forgotten in the shadow of the Technology.

Managing against the tide

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 13:53:00 +0000

Since 2007 we have been through a turbulent economic time, with credit crunch, followed by recession, followed by (in the UK at least) a Government seemingly hell-bent on managing a contraction of the economy rather than fighting to grow it. In business this environment has been tough. Over the last few years I’ve had my share of tough decisions to make, had endless conversations with colleagues telling them how we’re on top of things and that things would work out for the best, and felt the frustration in myself, and from colleagues, when they don’t work out quite as well as we’d all hoped.

Still, we’re still here and still have problems to manage. I’m going to talk about the our IT functions specifically now - we have shared in the pain and been asked to find cost savings, cut budgets, show ROI in the weeks and months rather than years. Is there anything IT Directors can do to keep contributing to the success of the business despite the pressures on budgets?

I believe it’s possible to add value and be a vehicle for success as an IT department but it takes courage, discipline and a willingness to change.

It’s important to be able to

Say no to unrealistic timescales;
Focus consistently on business goals;
Deliver on time;
Never compromise on our quality;
Not rush out of the planning phase;
Dedicate ourselves to continually improve;
Work through our differences with other people and disciplines;
Collaborate with other disciplines for team goals;
Admit to our mistakes and work towards improving them;

Some of these will cause problems at first, nobody likes to hear ‘no’, especially from a support function. But consistently applied, allied with judicious technology choices, these principles will win respect and bring success for all concerned in the long term.

How scientists use real ‘big data’ and incredible...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:31:57 +0000

How scientists use real ‘big data’ and incredible data visualisations. Don’t tell me we can’t show a manager how much they’ve spent against their budget!

Back on Brand

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 12:42:18 +0000

Last year I wrote a post about branding, in which I stated my opinion that it’s important to consider how you are perceived. Nothing I have seen since has caused me to reconsider that opinion, indeed it’s reinforced every time I talk to someone who ‘didn’t realise that x did y’. A brief chat with a colleague elicited the following gem. ’You have a brand, whether you like it or not. The thing you get to decide is, are you going to manage it?’

Whether you are thinking individually, as a management team, as a department or as an organisation, make sure you’re managing your brand - it’ll pay you back.

The Generation Game

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:44:00 +0000

Nick Heath at TechRepublic wrote an article in December in which he wondered whether many of the current crop of CIOs are the right people to take their organisations forward. He quotes a Gartner VP who suggests that many CIOs have been either clearing up mess or pushing through major ERP or standardisation programmes, and they’re not often the same people those organisations need to start harnessing the power of social media and mobile. ’Stop being order takers executing the demands of the board’, is what he said (echoing a blog post of mine from about a year ago), and start helping the organisation get better value from those technologies.

It’s a good article but it misses an important point. The average CIO, according to most of the surveys I have seen, is 47 years old. If you’re 47 today, you were at school until 1983 and maybe university until the mid-eighties. Computers started appearing in schools in large numbers from 1985 onwards. Email didn’t become widespread until the mid nineties, by which time these folk were in their 30s. A CIO who is 47+ didn’t grow up in a connected world. Of course, to be a CIO they have more than likely embraced a lot of the technology and make good use of the social tools that have appeared in the last few years. But your formative years are just that, and there is a big difference between a 30 year old who has always had personal (including mobile) computing power at his disposal, a 40 year old who never knew anything other than computers as he grew into the world of work, and a 50 year old who is always keeping up with the kids.

I’m generalising of course. I know of several people that are proudly 50+ and exploit social media and mobile technology in fantastic, inspiring ways. I’m not suggesting CIOs should have an age limit (not until I’m retired, anyway), and the fact that I am nearer 40 than 50 is undoubtedly a factor in how I have formed this opinion(!), but I’m confident it’s an opinion that bears closer scrutiny.

As organisations line up their next CIO, the candidate’s ability to engage with and harness social tools should be a factor, and at that point we’re definitely playing the generation game.

Whether you believe there is such a thing as ‘big...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:38:00 +0000

Whether you believe there is such a thing as ‘big data’ or not, Dave Feinlieb at Forbes.com has created this interesting view of the products and services that make up the landscape as of 2012. I wonder how many of these will still be there at the end of 2013?

Do your suppliers understand you?

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:59:00 +0000

All organisations are to a greater or lesser extent dependent on their supply chain. Poor performance by suppliers can bring a business to a standstill, even to the point of failure.

In an IT context, this is no different. Our resellers, implementers, infrastructure suppliers, they are all key to delivering a good service. So, we use balanced scorecards to measure potential suppliers to ensure that the features of their product or service match our carefully-researched requirements. We show these to our internal stakeholders to show that we’ve done our homework. And this always results in a perfectly-delivered solution, right? Unfortunately that is rarely the case. One reason for this is that our biggest motivation when it comes to choosing a supplier always seems to be price. We’re under no illusions about the return on investment required, so this is a natural behaviour, but it’s not always logical.

I believe it’s vitally important to pick your suppliers carefully. Key suppliers must be managed as delicately as key customers, as they really need to understand how they fit into your process. They must be aware of the ‘end requirement’, for example if you’re buying a sharepoint implementation, you’re not buying it because you fancy some sharepoint in your estate, you’re buying it because you need to manage information assets more effectively. That aim must be in the supplier’s mind, and the project isn’t complete until you’ve got the end requirement.

Choose suppliers that are really going to work with you to get to your goal, not box-shifters that leave the crate at the door and drive away with a cheery ‘good-luck’… in that case no matter how much money you save on the purchase you’ve got a poor deal. Good suppliers know that price drives the first sale, but perception of value drives the second, third, fourth etc.

Invest time and effort in choosing your suppliers, you’ll get it back over and over again.

The power of show-and-tell

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Following on from my last blog post about the rise of local search, this is another lesson from the school-of-stating-the-bleeding-obvious. As a comparitively old fogey I haven’t used YouTube other than to see video I would otherwise have no access to. Old programmes, specialist video from science and technology institutions, clips for the kids. It’s only this year I’ve really seen it as the fantastic educational resource it is.

Here’s my example. A few weeks ago I bought a Mazda MX-5, a small roadster, as a project over the winter. I’m no mechanic, but I can fix basic things and thought it would be fun when the summer came. One of the things that was wrong with it when I bought it was the electric aerial, which didn’t retract all the way. I did the sensible thing and googled ‘MX-5 antenna replacement’, which took me to several sites, one of which was this one, which showed I didn’t necessarily need to replace the whole mechanism.

Brilliant stuff. I bought the replacement mast, followed these instructions and I’d fixed this problem for about 25% of the cost of a complete replacement aerial complete with motor and no doubt 10% of the cost of a garage job.

This is happening in all areas of expertise, including the IT world. A colleague of mine recently showed me his web site, where he has dozens of instructional videos on various technologies, such as MS SQL server and Photoshop.

Here he gives an introduction to the basics of Fuzzy Lookups in Microsoft Integration Services

Being able to see how something is done is so much more powerful than reading it in a book - good written instructions are rare, because they are difficult to produce. ’Here, let me show you’ really works.

When we produce training or handover documentation for delivery of new systems to customers, internal or external, do we ever think about using this type of collateral? I think it’s an underused method - it has to be done well, but if it is it can be phenomenally useful.

Walking through a city centre the other night, I checked...

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 11:23:00 +0000

Walking through a city centre the other night, I checked tripadvisor on my smartphone to see if I could find a place to eat in the immediate vicinity. I found a place that suited my wallet, and that had great reviews, in a matter of minutes (and it was fantastic, too). It’s almost second nature to do this now, and I hadn’t realised that until I saw this excellent infographic. If it’s second nature for this techie chap that’s past 40, it’s going to be a no-brainer for most 20-somethings. Small businesses take note!

Ups and downs

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:59:09 +0000

As today is Remembrance Sunday, a quote from Winston Churchill is apposite.

“When you are going through hell, keep going”

A timely reminder in tough times, that the only way is forward!

This blog’s ‘wordle’ - I think it’s...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 09:57:55 +0100

This blog’s ‘wordle’ - I think it’s pretty representative…!

The why of blogging

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 21:19:47 +0100

Every now and again most bloggers will probably ask themselves why they do it. We get stats to show that people are reading our stuff, comments either online or in person that give us some affirmation. But why stick the neck out at all? For me, I think it’s a little like those people who call into radio shows and inform the traffic presenter about delays on the road. It’s not because I have any special insight, or can predict the future. Quite the reverse, in fact. Like the guy in traffic, I am sharing the news about where I find myself or where I have been, so that others may make more informed decisions.

This advice, if that is what you call it, is offered only in the hope that it might save others from frustration. I can’t guarantee that other roads are not also blocked, I can just give my assessment of the one I have travelled…

The State of Social Media at work in one slide

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:44:00 +0100

From IanGotts.com

Don't be scared of strategy

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 16:24:00 +0100

Most people haven’t been to business school to learn strategic planning. Yet many of us are expected to provide a strategic plan, whether it be an IT strategy, a general business plan, a sales strategy, recruitment strategy and so on. When we eventually manage to produce something, we’re not sure it’s really what was asked for.

In most cases, we find that we’ve done ok. The boss/board/team is happy with the strategy. How did we do so well? Often, it’s because the person that asked you for the strategy didn’t really know what they were asking for either, they just thought it was the sort of thing they should be asking for…

This is a shame, because strategy is not as scary as people tend to think. It certainly shouldn’t be a stick to beat people with. Unless you’re unerringly clairvoyant, you don’t know what the future holds, so a strategy is unlikely to be perfect the day it is created. Indeed, it’s never going to be perfect. However, it should be the tool you use to prioritise your work, because it’s the plan to get you from where you are now to where you want to be, from A to Z.

A common failure of strategic planning is to set objectives and call them a strategy. I have seen people literally go red in the face as they object to any assertion that they don’t have a strategy, pointing out the four or five lines that explain where they are going. These are in fact useful lines, and they are generally objectives, such as ‘we are going to sell washing machines’, or ‘we are going to make a 10% return on sales’. They do tell us something important, and that is where we want to go. They don’t tell us how we’re going to get there. That detail is in the strategy.

The reason a strategy is never going to be perfect is often, as Harold Macmillan reputedly said, ‘events, dear boy, events’. If I start this year expecting to be making a 10% return on sales at the end of it, and an earthquake in Bolivia makes a huge dent in my raw material prices or availability, then I’m not in a position to change the new reality. My strategy was based on what I knew when I was back at point A, and was valid, but it has to change to reflect the situation, or it’s not worth very much. Too many people have stuck rigidly to a plan or product because it’s ‘strategic’, and come unstuck. Strategy must evolve, not to shift with every change in the wind, but to take account of significant factors, and provide the new route to Z, not from A, where we started, but B, or C, or D, where we now find ourselves.

The Tesco Steering wheel above is a good example of how a business can modify strategy but stick to core objectives, encompassing customers, finance, operations, people and community. Every time they review their performance and strategy, they look to all of the areas on the wheel and measure how they are doing against those objectives and how any adjustment to strategy will ensure they stay on track to meet them.

If you have a tool like this, you can pass it to your HR, IT, Procurement teams etc, and they can tell you how they can add their weight to supporting the objectives. Every time you review your strategy you can take their ideas and build them in. In which case, you have an evolving, living strategy. One that you can show how what you do, even at the most granular level, is linked through the strategy to the core objectives of the business. Denys Shortt of DCS Europe has used this tool to help take his business to £130m+ sales over the past 15 years.

In the IT department, we can make our own wheel, define our own core objectives, and show how these link to the business as a whole. We then iterate our own strategy in the same way, using the same tools, as the wider business. Why have we got this particular hosting model, why do we use two mobile phone providers, why do we intend to move to a virtual desktop model? It’s much easier to get buy in (and funding!) when it’s clear how these things link to the core objectives of the business.

It’s important to plan, it’s important to have objectives, and it’s vital that the strategy to meet them is reviewed and improved regularly. You don’t need an MBA, just a willingness to communicate.

Taking responsibility, ownership and earning your salary

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:35:14 +0100

This year, I made a New Year’s Resolution. This isn’t something I normally do. I didn’t blog about it, although I did talk about it on Google+ (cynics will say it’s easier to get out of when nobody knows about it…). The gist of it was that I was going to be less tolerant this year. I am aware that this is not the usual way it goes, but I was pretty sure that I had been too tolerant of time wasters, liars and slopey-shouldered parasites that exist in large organisations. Seven months on, I am in no doubt that it was the right think to resolve, and I am probably still too tolerant if truth be told.

What made me think of this today? I read a blog post by Bob Sutton, about a friend of his who trusted United Airlines with their daughter’s travel, as an unaccompanied minor. They let her, and her parents down. The system didn’t care about this little girl. The people in the system didn’t care about anything but the system. It reminded me of a discussion on Euan Semple’s blog about the ‘hollow man’. It also reminded me of an interview panel I sat on earlier this year, recruiting a school employee. When the question ‘what would you do if you saw an adult behaving inappropriately toward a child’ arose, the most common answer we got was ‘I’d fill in the form to report it’. I’m not an educational professional, but I found this dispiriting and disturbing.

In large, or highly process-driven organisations, it’s easy to become the ‘hollow man’, it’s easy to be like those United Airlines employees who stopped thinking of the person they were failing. It’s easy to push the work around, waiting for pay day or the weekend. That’s why I was reminded of my resolution. If you’re doing that when you should be doing something for me, or my customers, watch out. I will not tolerate it, and neither should anyone else.

A few days after I wrote my last blog piece on delegation, a...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 08:50:00 +0100

A few days after I wrote my last blog piece on delegation, a couple of things happened to make me reflect more on it, one was a blog post on Harvard Business Review, and the other was the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, on the Red Planet. As I watched the video above, I thought about the time, effort and passion that had gone into the construction of this machine. I thought about the number of hours of research and science that will result from the data it sends back. Above all, I was in absolute awe at the complexity of the landing sequence. Everything had to go right, to an astonishing degree of accuracy. The Entry, Descent and Landing stage was entirely ‘delegated’ to the onboard systems, nothing was controlled from Earth. In order to trust the systems with the safe landing of the rover, the engineers back on Earth would need to have complete confidence in each other, and in the thing they were building. Billions of dollars were delegated by proxy to this machine. And, because it was designed and built fantastically well, because it was given the tools to gather the information it required, because it was given the thrusters and sky crane and heat shields necessary, it delivered.

If we design our delegation model well, build in all the information needed to complete the task, and the resources to achieve it, we will get the same result. On Earth, as they say, as it is in Heaven!

(and do watch the video, if you’ve any engineer in you at all, you’ll be gobsmacked…)

**NB when I posted this I hadn’t seen the xkcd comic for the day after the landing. Apt.

Delegation, control and neglect

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 21:35:00 +0100

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” - Theodore Roosevelt

Delegation is the key to management, they say. This is undoubtedly true as no one person can do everything, and in a traditional tiered structure accountability must (should) lie with the folk at the top of the tree, who allocate the work to those they have chosen to do, or manage those tasks. Whether these traditional structures are right or wrong is another story (for starters, check this slideshow out about organising for complexity), it’s fair to say most of us work in a traditional variant.

There are plenty of people who delegate well, but that’s not the majority of managers. The majority that delegate poorly tend fall into one of two categories. Those that delegate too much, and those that can’t bear to let go of work. I’d wager that in a lot of cases for both these groups, they don’t actually know they’re doing it wrong. More to the point, the subordinates that feel the pain and can see the problem first-hand are often extremely reluctant to communicate the fact. It’s understandable - if you’re a passenger in a car and you find that the driver is actually not very good at driving, do you tell them? You might find yourself without a lift next time! Unless you were actually in fear of your life, I expect you’d let it pass, and be grateful for the favour. Telling someone they are a bad driver is challenging a skill they probably take for granted, and one that people are often highly defensive about. Tell a manager they delegate badly, and you’re stepping into the same area.

However, we do owe it to ourselves to communicate where there are problems to be solved, both as managers and as the managed. I have often struggled to know whether I’m treading the line between neglecting someone I’ve given a task to, and being over-protective or controlling. I tend to ask the question ‘do you need anything from me?’ a lot, and hope that I get truthful answers.

As for the other problem, I’m not sure I’ve ever found the perfect method of dealing with neglectful or controlling managers. Blunt speaking is one way, but doesn’t work for/with everyone!

I’ve no answers to this one - but it does happen a lot, and it does help if we’re all aware that we could be contributing to the problem if we don’t communicate honestly and openly.

Positive feedback can go up as well as down

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 09:30:52 +0100

Received wisdom says that people perform better at tasks, and are happier in their work, when they get positive feedback on things they do well. Pretty simple stuff that I’m sure we all agree with. We all like to get affirmation from the boss, it lets us know that we’re on the right track and adding value to the team. Sometimes it doesn’t happen as often as it could, and many of us worked with the exception to the rule that seems to think criticism will motivate people… What we don’t often hear is that it is important to do the same for your leaders. This can be a difficult line to walk, but it’s important, and paradoxically I think the higher up you go the more important it is.

I’m not advocating sycophancy – there are plenty of people out there that will do that naturally and good luck to them. It took a long time for me to mature enough to be able to reflect good work to my manager without feeling like I was blowing smoke into the posterior orifice. It’s still not easy, because I’d be appalled at being thought of as a ‘yes man’. But, honestly done, it’s valuable and encouraging. For the same reasons mentioned above, good feedback means repeat performances. That’s a win-win, right?

So, get over yourself and tell your good leaders they’re doing a fine job!