First came across the book when recommended by Martin Curley, Vice President & Director, Intel Labs Europe, Intel Corp – I was attending a conference of the Innovation Value Institute.

I think the book speaks to so much of what I see as not working in the business/IT overlap in so many companies – and points out what, from a CIO perspective, needs to change (and implicitly from a business perspective, also).

Bottom line is IT should be all about improving business performance – and that has to be the mindset. And if the CIO and the business leaders have this shared perspective then there are only business projects, there are no ‘IT projects’.

I liked the authors (Richard Hunter and George Westerman) analysis of the value traps which CIOs and IT managers need to avoid: in particular needing to put themselves in the same shoes as the rest of the business – the customers are the ultimate customers of the business.  IT investment needs to enable business to serve customers (and possibly new customers) more effectively and more efficiently.  Too often, in a well-intentioned effort to be ‘customer centric’, IT leaders limit themselves to describing their customer base as the IT end users in the company.

The book gives great examples of the type of questioning CIOs can use to understand business strategy, business objectives and work with the business to prioritise business projects requiring IT investment.

I have shared the book with a number of CIOs with whom I have worked – all of whom are looking to make more impact on business performance, rather than being seen as IT people, supporting and administering hardware or software systems.  Interestingly, in some cases, I have encountered  resistance at business leadership level (particularly below CEO level) to CIOs looking to make the agenda more business centric – and operate in the CIO+ role suggested.  Perhaps the CIO+ is seen as part threat – challenging long-established processes – in a crowded management space?

Finally I would draw attention to the sections dealing with measuring the value delivered – and this requires upfront planning, attention throughout business/IT projects and effective follow through post implementation.  And the commitment is required of everyone – be they internal/ external, IT or business.

The current trend towards increased outsourcing of basic IT facilities and systems provides the opportunity (and the requirement) for CIOs to step up a level.  Alternatively, if they don’t, CEOs will have to do it themselves or find someone else to help them.

I would encourage managers, in CIO or general management roles, to read the book – and take up the challenges and opportunities highlighted by Hunter and Westerman.

It is important not to underestimate the effort involved in managing delivery of outsourced services by a third party.  The contract should be monitored and assessed on a regular basis – including regular meetings with the relevant personnel from the outsourced provider.  Failures to deliver should be tracked and resolved.

But what are the practical challenges?

I would start with the scope definition – and, frankly, this can be anything.  Outsourcing may relate to infrastructure, to applications, to support desk, to specific technical support resources, out of hours cover, whatever.  However, as a business manager, you should be seeking to outsource for advantage – and this should be driving the scope (removal of risk, covering some aspect of the business more efficiently, out of hours support, etc).

Obviously in the first instance you need a people plan.  A move to a managed services arrangement may well involve transfer of employees to the third party, redeployment of resources internally or, in some cases, redundancies.  In an Irish context you need a clear understanding of the relevance (and practical workings) of the TUPE provisions.  Nad you need buy-in at all levels.

In respect of support desk activities you need to have an understanding of your current environment, your users’ current expectations and use this to inform your thinking about future Service Levels – to be required of the Managed Services provider.  However this is never too straightforward.  And it will have a direct commercial bearing on the managed services contract.  There are risks associated with negotiation of contracts based on previous call levels – risks for both the buyer and the supplier.  There may be a technology refresh associated with the new managed services contract – this may initially cause call volumes to jump, followed by a levelling off to previous or lower than previous levels.  It may be appropriate to build in some review process e.g. post 6 or 12 months – depending on risk attitudes of the buyer and the provider.

Management of third parties is often a key element of outsourcing.  You may appoint a vendor to manage your IT environment – but they may in turn depend of the performance of several third parties with whom you have established contracts (and associated service level agreements). In my experience several companies underestimate the work associated with this – reviewing current contracts, determining next renewal dates, understanding current SLAs and confirming that third parties are open to being managed by your new managed services provider.  Good preparation in this area will streamline the process of appointment of and handover to a managed services vendor.

Inevitably during commercial and contractual negotiations with any managed services partner there will be a number of key items requiring agreement – likely to include mutual indemnities, caps on liability, intellectual property rights, termination options, descoping, people transfers (beginning and end of contract) ,service levels and service credits.  Would strongly advise including legal advisors, with practical experience of managed services contracts, on your team throughout this process.  All fo this will proceed much more smoothly if you have a clear definition of the precise services being outsourced and your expectations of the managed services provider in respect of the performance of each of these services.  This may seem obvious but it is surprising how much of the detail is sometimes left until very late in the process.  And this is work to be completed by you – not your lawyers nor the supplier.

I would also place real emphasis on the transition process – moving from inhouse management (or management by another third party) to management by the new supplier.  An amount of this work is necessarily pre ‘go-live’ – may follow on from a vendor selection process which includes mutual due diligence prior to contract signing.  But it is important to understand how a new vendor will assume responsibility for provision of managed services from Day 1.  There may be ‘pre go live’ transition activities and ‘post go live’ transition activities – but the scope and outputs of each should be clarified early in the process.

Finally it is important not to underestimate the effort required internally to make a transition to managed services work – services have to continue to run until the handover takes place, detailed due diligence and knowledge transfer has to take place, detailed commercial negotiations have to be completed and people have to be bought into the process – although they may be going through the most significant career change they have yet experienced.

This recent piece in the Huffpost, serves to remind me why In god we may trust but not in one cloud provider.  Not sure the article is fair to the cloud provider (in particular or in general) in that availability is very high and that when outages occur there is a great deal of focus of substantial resources on fixing a problem impacting millions of users.

I thought the point about potentially innocently breaking a cloud provider rule and then being locked out of one’s data indefinitely pending resolution of the infringement was more worrying.  And who’s to day tow or three vendors might decide to keep you out of all their cloud environments because you represented a perceived threat?  Rcetnly have seen at least one business almost go to the wall because Google blacklisted them because of what they thought were legitimate SEO activities.  And it proved very difficult to demonstrate to Google’s satisfaction that they had addressed the issues.

Looking from the outside very easy to see why ckound providers needs rules, guidance, vigilance – in order to maintain systems integrity, support high availability.  But users need also to have a contingency plan – which must include some alternatives and backup date locally or with other, potentially non aligned, cloud providers.

Unfortunately will not get to climb the reek on the 17th – will be celebrating St Patrick’s Day in Dublin. Looking forward to the parade in Dublin and the All Ireland Club Football and Hurling Finals In Croke Park.

Patrick’s Day is an inclusive day – not just about those born in Ireland or those who are descendants of Irish ancestors.  It’s about celebrating Ireland, Irish culture and it’s for anyone who chooses to identify with any of this.  It’s also very much for all the people who have moved to live in Ireland – restating our welcome and enriching our culture by learning from our recent arrivals.

Over the last number of years we have again witnessed huge levels of emigration as a result of economic challenges.  We are all thinking very particularly of family and friends who have moved overseas in the last few years.

Ireland has embraced the required austerity in the last five years.  Lots of people are struggling but confidence is returning. There are now some real green shoots.

Looking forward to St Patrick’s Day on Sunday 17th March.  Wishing all our blog readers a great St Patrick’s Day.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig!

Having been a management consultant for many years – and have always seen merit in maximising the amount of time spent at client premises: increased interaction with client personnel, greater feel for the environment, visibility with the client.  And yet, when it comes to finalising a scope of work or a presentation often easier to work away from the client premises.

And when I look at many of the employees at client premises I see plenty of occasions when each of them would choose to complete part of their work from home – to enable them to complete a specific task, to accommodate them in a non work commitment e.g. getting to football training directly after work (by finishing the day at home, beating the traffic and being able to get to a neighbourhood facility c. 6.00pm.  The reward for this flexibility – the employee will often be back on line that evening finishing a task.

I have also seen companies move jobs from the office to home – in an effort to save on office space.  And not all of this has worked – employees in some cases losing out on the interaction. social development of casual meetings with colleagues.

I was surprised at Marissa Mayer’s (CEO Yahoo) comments – broad brush never seems to the the way to go. If you want to afford employees the opportunity to work from home then you need structures and frameworks to support this.  Not quite the ‘hybrid organisation’ Andy Drove was referencing in his ‘High Output Management’ book – but I think the challenges are similar.  It’s another form of hybrid which is dependent on creating the right culture, support and sense of trust.

As for me as a management consultant – will continue to mix onsite and offsite.  The challenge is to use each onsite to learn – while getting the job done.  Sometimes offsite you just get the job done – which is not always a bad thing.

Today’s comment in LEX (FT) seems to make sense – over dependent on non sustainable margins, relatively low costs of entry for competitors.

I ‘ve never been an investor in groupon.  I’ve been a customer.  In general I’ve been a satisfied customer.  And I would think at least one company has benefited from a number of purchases by me following an initial purchase via groupon.  I’ve actually made at least two purchases which I failed to follow up on – thereby wasting my purchase (or perhaps, more correctly, I treated it as an expensive option to purchase which I failed to exercise).

In many respects my experience has been that I enjoy being involved with groupon for a couple of weeks and then I get bored.  Probably not unlike a lot of my online experience!  I do not want Groupon offers every day of the week.  SO after a few weeks I just switch off – stop logging in, remove the app from my android phone.  But when I read about the company  - as over the last few days, I may be tempted to resume some left of interaction from another few weeks.  I wonder is this a typical user experience – is this reflect accurately in the financial models (is I represent a typical buyer persona)?

I have been involved in a number of startups.  Would be interesting to learn more of the dynamics of the startup itself – the roles of the founders, the decision making processes.  There has been plenty of speculation in the press – but I think we may need the former CEO’s book after he has taken some time.  Thinking lean and pivots – would be interesting to understand how lean group has been and ho many times they have pivoted.

Chief Information Officer for the Irish Government

 This is an exceptional opportunity for an experienced ICT professional to influence a major change programme, to provide guidance and leadership at the executive level across the entire IT spectrum, and to take responsibility for the development of the ICT strategy for Government and the wider public service.

Reporting to the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, this position will hold ultimate responsibility for the strategic direction of technology in support of the wider mission and strategic change objectives in the Public Sector. The successful candidate will lead the CIO Council and will drive the implementation of the eGovernment and Cloud Computing strategies.

The successful candidate will have experience of developing technology strategy and delivery of leading edge large scale ICT solutions in a complex environment.

…

This is a five year fixed-term contract. 

Will be interesting to see ho this role evolves/ develops…’driving the implementation of eGovernment and Cloud Computing strategies’.

The Irish Government has demonstrated to potential of IT through initiatives such as ROS – supporting/ driving self assessment, cash collection. process automation.  And yet it continues to be burdened by a number of inefficient processes and barriers to change.

I have commented previously on my reservations about the CIO role in industry – because of what is expected.  These challenges will be no less in public life.  I commend ‘the Real Business of IT – How CIOs Create and Communicate Value’ (Hunter & Westerman)  to the successful applicant.  The CIO will need a Minister (and Ministers) committed to leveraging IT and making the changes.  Ultimately  the  realisation of the benefits of eGovernment and cloud strategies should be another measure of the success or failure of government leadership.  The CIO has the potential to assist Government in succeeding.

Lots of organisations appear to have defined vision, mission and a series of ‘strategic objectives’.  The process whereby these are produced may be of some value within these organisations –  in terms of generating some sense of team, promoting communication, even collaboration – but the result falls well short of what most of them actually need.

But you seem to be able to have the vision, the mission and the ‘strategic objectives’ without necessarily making the tough choices.  Rumelt suggests good strategy consists of diagnosis, policy and coherent actions. And it’s quite hard to argue with him.

He is quite scathing about what passes for strategy – and attributes the blame for this to several groups/ trends – be they ‘failure to face challenges’, fluff, template driven approaches, unwillingness to go the hard yards.

He includes a number of excellent case studies/ anecdotes – including Apple turn around (survive and wait for the next big thing), Hannibal against the Romans at Cannae 216BC, President Kennedy putting a man on the moon, General Motors (their  range of offerings in different price brackets).

If I were to fault the book I thought it was a little disjointed in the second half.  Nevertheless got more than enough from the book to make it well worth reading.

Worth watching his presentation at the London School of Economics – available on YouTube

Have been listening to some chatter amongst friends, family, contacts which would suggest some increasing boredom amongst users of social networks.  I experience this myself – large volumes of inane postings.  Then I read this piece on Mashable and somehow it seems to ring true.

No more so that the phone, email, instant messaging, friends, colleagues – social networking content is a distraction when I am trying to complete a task.  And if I have a lot of tasks to complete in a limited time then social media (and phone, email, instant messaging, friends, colleagues) take a back seat – in terms of both passive (reading) and active (commenting or content creation) participation.

I think it’s the old maxim – ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’.  If you want to benefit from social networking then you need to accept that it will take time (out of your limited time).  At the risk of mixing metaphors, should also reference ‘lunch is for wimps’ – perhaps there are many who would suggest, at least in a work context, ‘social media are for wimps’.

So what brings me back to social media – or what has brought me back in the recent past?

Linkedin is serving me well at present – in the context of staying in contact with a wide range of business contacts and former colleagues.  Almost a CRM solution – but the real value is in the follow up interactions – be they phone calls, emails, meetings.  And then I find myself capturing some of this interaction in apps such as evernote.

Facebook continues to attract me as a way to continue ‘casual interaction’ with a range of friends – many of whom I would not bump into physically on a day to day basis e.g. because I live in Ireland and they live in US, Australia, South Africa, UK, France, etc.  In general I think the level of interaction on postings has gone down – and changes in the workings of facebook are well documented.

I think Twitter continues to provide me with the most relevant, interesting content – from people I choose to follow – grouped in lists.  So, if I am interested in health informatics for now, I tend to drop in and out to check on tweets by those I have added to my health informatics list.  And in general the content is current, well referenced and useful.

I like google+ – but I just do not seem to have the time to participate in another platform on a regular basis.  I am very frustrated with moves to make it more difficult for all of us to participate in several social networks at the same time e.g. making it more difficult to cross post.  But obviously the various providers have their own strategies for survival or world domination.

And blogging – like this: it really does take time.  And sometimes you wonder about the value of time spent creating personal content in a space that is already very crowded.  But, again, no free lunch and blogging is not for wimps.