Should companies appoint a CTO ?

Strictly speaking CIO extent is around company information asset management, even if he encompasses often operations management as well. Larger companies which would like to lead processes on its own, may feel better with a second IT manager dedicated to technology, this is a CTO. According to company main stakes, this manager could be outside IT department, where he reports to COO or CEO, or inside and then he reports to CIO.

Productivity in IT Divisions

I thought some years ago that Enterprise information system growth was more or less linear, according to a size factor. But getting experience, I soon discovered that inserting a new application in an existing information system comes to the same thing of creating a kind of turbulence which will take several months before to be stabilized.

Indeed, when counted in a stabilization process, applications may undergo several changes which do not change their initial function points count. Also when enterprises acquire or reengineer some of their information system parts, they use to implement COTS which are difficult to assess in function points. It results that measuring information system size is allways difficult and, even done, it will be a poor predictor for change which is rather related to business optimisation pace.

Harsh times are coming for IT divisions. What to do ?

Financial Insights, a research subsidiary of IDC, forecasts that top 10 american financial institutions  will cut  their IT budgets by 30%. Money is becoming dearer worldwide and investments harder to make. Europe which need big restructuring, fears recession.

For IT managers, it is time to consolidation for being able to support unavoidable budget cuts.

What means consolidation ?

IT Strategy is not enough, what’s about men ?

A recent survey commissioned by the Society for Information Management gave the following concerns for CEO, CIO and enterprise top managers :

1) IT/business alignment

2) Building business skills in IT

3) IT strategic planning

4) Attracting new IT professionals

5) Making better use of information

6) Manage change

7) Reduce the cost of doing business

Improve IT quality

9) Retaining IT professionals

10) Security and privacy

Among the high ranked points, 2-4-9 regards human resources management. Indeed, if you have not the right men able to implementing your strategy you ‘ll probably loose most of your bets. Successful companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple,…  have build their success on human asset.

If you transform, align

I already wrote in a previous post how the number of papers discussing IT alignement suprised me. Indeed, for me, priority should be given to deciding, to planning and to setting up Enterprise Change.

Formerly, 15 years ago, Enterprise Change was contemplated by planning and launching big projects which frequently crashed. Then, best practises of IT led to break down big projects into pieces managed locally. It results an higher rate of success, but with some pieces left behind. By this time, Enterprise was rather a collection of stovepipes with more or less communication in between.

Some of us attempted to glue stovepipes with EAI and business process automation. They get a pretty complicated system which never had the expected flexibility required to follow users business changes.

A change agent CIO, his real strategic stake.

CIO contribution is often assessed on the basis of IT value indicator which most of the time is improved when costs lower, quality of service rises, and risk level is acceptable. Furthermore, some firms expect from CIO to be one of their most important change agent. This is an opportunity for CIO’s which helps to bring them front and to give them a true strategic role. Then, the scope of CIO is not limited to IT Division but encompasses the whole company.

Often in the past, the widespread thought was that’s enough to find the right technology and company people will immediately get it and change its way of working.

IT vision and IT Strategy what is the difference ?

In my previous post, I addressed the point of view that IT Strategy is not only business alignment, but should rely on a strong vision of IT role in the company.

Then, in this post, I propose to address the points of IT vision utility and how to build it with respect to IT Strategy.

Unfortunately, in the business world, few situations support to undertake no move, because usually stakeholders are facing externalities which raise questions on the way the company business is done. Beside, business undergo internal pressure when, for example, company reach poor execution performance in some areas.
The same happen for IT, if you choose to not move when all your environment is changing, you are quickly out of the business, or if you perform poorly you out your buiness at risks.