Service industry productivity is the current challenge for Europe
December 5, 2008
The term “post-industrial society” was first coined by Daniel Bell in 1973. He predicted things like the global diffusion of capital, the imbalance of international trade, and the decline of the manufacturing sector on the behalf of service industry. This leads to slow growth economies since services usually show less productivity growth than manufacturing. This is the Baumol Effect which states that in labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing,education, or the performing arts, there is little or no growth in productivity over time.
Should companies appoint a CTO ?
October 30, 2008
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.
Harsh times are coming for IT divisions. What to do ?
September 25, 2008
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 ?
September 17, 2008
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.
A change agent CIO, his real strategic stake.
August 31, 2008
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 Strategy and IT alignment
August 18, 2008
Holidays ending up shortly, it is time to rise up a little bit our views and to start discussing about Strategy.
When reviewing papers regarding IT Strategy, they often talk about IT Strategic alignement. Most of them seems to assert that the only acceptable strategy for IT is to be aligned with Business. Despite this general point of view, when rewinding the tape, some messages looked questionable.
For instance, when considering strategy you deal with long term goals and action plans. As it seems obvious, the spreading of strategic planning methods like Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has set the long term line to next year which is pretty short. Are we really still in strategy ?
At a UK IT conference, a senior IBM analyst provided some clues on what IT services will become in the future which were in short :
- 70% of 2005 CIO budget was labour
- Operations labour will be 73% of CIO labour budgets by 2008
- Application development will decline at –10% CGR to 2008
- If this trend continues, there will be not development budget left by …2012!
The first one recalled me a discussion I had with a senior consultant in France who defended the view that the best IT performance indicator was staff number. By this time I was not really convinced since I expected that IT value might curb staff importance in the discussion.
Hewlett-Packard, one step beyond again ?
May 18, 2008
A dreamed CIO life ?
May 7, 2008
Here is, below, some thoughts I exchanged with a consultant in the Paris metro, regarding CIO life. Does it match your knowings ?
Once you have stepped in as CIO, you are facing quickly to a lot of operational concerns which usually are managed by crisis meetings. Your people expect from you to take the harsh decisions they have not been able to take and they think they need, to be backed in their day to day work. You are trying a say about strategy, everybody hears you politely, but they all seem to think : “hey, guy shed your illusions ! Here, you will deal with the hard. only if such a thought may support the budget, it is worth to have”. Your team is expecting a change but nobody believe it is still possible.
In the 80’s and the 90’s, information systems viewed the world as enterprise centric. All business facts and events the enterprise ought to manage, were entered into the system by employees or captured by technical equipements like sensors.
By these times, enterprises were compared to complex living systems made of people and machines. They need at the same times programs and psychology, that was in short the H A Simon point of view when he work out the decision process. Information systems should support all aspects of the enterprise brain, especially they should cater for a virtual machine which help to understanding events, to taking the right decision, to leading the required operations. This cannot be achieved without dealing with the question of reality representation. Beside technology, this is the main question addressed by researchers and developers.
