As someone whose strengths in technology have been in looking at high-level design and adoption issues in service management, I communicate regularly with cross-domain service management groups. One thing that stands out for me from this dialog is that business objectives such as cohesive strategies, phased adoptions, and cross-domain political reformation are intersecting with the idea of the “Internet” in the form of cloud computing, Web 2.0 application ecosystems, and mobility. What results is a complex set of patterns -- something like an abstract mosaic.
For the CIO, trying to get your mind around all the permutations is likely to be headache-inducing (if not quite life-threatening), unless you stand back far enough to separate “end values” from “enabling values.”
To clarify: End values may sound rather bland or clichéd. Examples include things like cost-effective service delivery, business alignment (or optimizing IT services to business impact, which is easier said than done), faster time to value for services, and more relevance and options in service choice. These are not new ideas.
On the other hand, enabling values sound flashy and get a lot of media attention -- cloud computing most of all, right now. But cloud is not the “endpoint of a journey” so much as a catalyst. Cloud, Web 2.0, and other Internet-related technologies are helping to transform the role of IT to that of a broker of services rather than a back-office purveyor of technology.
This makes having good metrics for understanding your core objectives all the more critical. Having good instrumentation to look at the impact of a riotous array of interdependencies across your Web 2.0 ecosystem (credit card processing, DNS lookup, etc.) makes your ability to manage your applications – as well as service provider and partner relationships -- far more effective.
Understanding how and why and to what effect your services are used (something that theoretically was always key) has now become essential. Knowing if your applications are relevant to end users as you move to cloud-hosted environments, for instance, is one of the most effective ways to gauge the success of a cloud migration.
Optimization is not just about cost; it’s about relevance and value as well.
The end value of technology always resides outside it -- in the human beings who consume it and in what they do with it. What actual human beings can achieve -- versus what’s done just within a machine -- ultimately defines the success of enabling values.
For instance, social networking can be a useful resource, an annoying distraction, or a perverse time sink. SaaS solutions can be convenient ways to sample future options, cost-effective ways of delivering pre-existing applications, or SLA-deprived answers that cause more disruption than value. And yes, not all applications lend themselves to virtualized environments (in the cloud or outside it) -- though many can make the leap.
So, is your Internet ecosystem (cloud, Web 2.0, fill in the blank) a treasure chest or a trap door opening up into an abyss of chaos?
In most cases that I’ve seen, it’s a bit of both -- and I’d even go so far as to say a little chaos can be good for a healthy IT organization with strong leadership and a clear sense of mission. But there is a hierarchy of enabling services within IT -- from infrastructure through applications and true business services. Placing Internet -- and for that matter, cloud options -- in that hierarchy is still more an art than a science.
But the simple and perhaps unprepossessing truth remains -- that no technology (Java, VoIP, Internet, Web 2.0) and no paradigm (client/server, peer-to-peer distributed, Web ecosystem, social networking, cloud) should be viewed as ends in themselves. They are all just tools to allow human beings to move forward more happily and more effectively in their lives and work.
— Dennis Drogseth is vice president in charge of New England at the consultancy Enterprise Management Associates.
Yes, I for one admit to being a skeptic about social media -- not in total of course, but as a kind of panacea for communications that remain broken for fundamentally cultural, process or other reasons. In many cases, social media can lead to spinning a web around pre-existing enclaves more than breaking into new voices and directions. An Internet that shapes itself to what you want to hear may not be the Internet you need to listen to.
So, still, I think that 90 percent of the business articles on social media are of the "time waster" "cesspool of knowledge" type blueprint.
The opposite could be true though as the CIO might end up being the gamemaster for your MMPG versus mine. In sum, as business goes cloudy and applications are more like services interconnected with a lot of loosely and strongly coupled wires, what we're building are social networks anyway. But not ones where we discuss BFFs, but Best Products for Ever.
Social is a way of bringing text into the data stream. We've figured out how to use numbers and homegeneous information. Text is heterogeneous, but possibly more valuable.
The short course is to throw up one's hands, say "I don't git it" and declare it a time waster. That is until your competitor and his band of Shopping Elves comes over the Cloud Barrier to seize your Data Fortress....
As someone who has worked in large organizations where every department - IT, HR, you name it - was a fiefdom based on defending its territory and protecting its information - I welcome discussions like these.
I particularly liked Dennis's emphasis on balance in these matters. It's as absurd to make a huge commitment to social media just because it exists as to deny that social media can have any value. It's all about the closing the gap between business planning and IT planning (as I say in a blog I am writing today).
In dealing with IT and everything related to it for almost 20 years now, the one thing that never seems to be taken into consideration is the "What If Factor". I've seen great organizations drop the ball at the CIO level because they didn't actually look at scenarios that could (and usually did) happen. This often lends itself to an issue that causes an organization to lose sales, creditability, and often customers.
Regardless of the technology, CIO's (and their bosses at the CEO level) need to ask the questions that are looming in the shadows around any of these various technology platforms. And equally important have solutions that are incorporated early on into the deployment of said solutions.
Absolutely. Partnership is a two-way street. Three, four, even five and more ways.
But that's why CIO's get the C-level designation. To create that partnership. And those of us who are not CIO's, that's how we get there. By forging the relationships, and the partnerships, that make IT an integral part of the business.
We're not guardians at the gate anymore. Arguably, we probably never were.
Everyday, businesses start out small and funnel out, organizationally, as they grow.
So, if you were starting a business today, you might be by yourself. You might hire a salesperson, later a marketing person, then someone in finance. You might get to a point where you see some need to exploit technology and/or link your growing organization.
That's how IT organizations become born. Same for other support groups. Somewhere, these support groups often believe they are the drivers.
In fairness, you need a push and pull from these organizations. You need these organizations to come to other leadership members with trends and efficiency ideas that might make the business better. But that's where it really falls apart--bad senior leadership that doesn't immediately cut off ideas that don't impact the business.
Show me an IT organizaton that operates for the sake of the IT organization and I'll bet you'll see a weak leader a level up (usually the CEO).
I do think CIOs often lose sight, or never had the sight, of the business needs of the organization.
I'll go one step further. I submit that IT is completely irrelevant *except* as a component of business processes, and that unless and until IT managers, and workers, understand this, friction, missed deadlines, poor implementations, etc, will continue to haunt us.
I would like to think that this has been changing. But then I see too many IT professionals tossing busswords like "cloud" and "Web2.0", and then there's Maria's posting about IT shrinking as clouds expand.
We have all got to get out of thinking of IT as an end unto itself.
the distinction between product and process -- that buying a great new product wasn't going to solve the business problem if there wasn't a change in process at the same time. Otherwise you end up with the 'tool in search of a problem' situation.
Fully agree with you, Brian and with Dennis' overall concept.
The purpose of technology is to deliver value. CIO's that keep that focus will be at the helm of the ship in designing tools that are valued and effectively used throughout the enterprise.
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