Valuedance

If you’re tempted to ask your boss, “Am I your guy?” don’t bother. 

My guess is that you probably already know his answer.

Rather than asking your boss a question that will raise, rather than squelch concerns, it’s much more productive to ask yourself:  “What would my successor do?”  After all, if you think you may be replaced, you might as well replace yourself (with your new-and-improved self) and get your boss thinking about how you are the answer to his prayers rather than the cause of his problems.  To read more click here.

There are quite a few companies who have tried to cut their way to IT success over the past five years and are starting to regret it. 

The economic crisis and subsequent lackluster recovery has IT spending at significantly lower levels than 2008.  Companies that have delayed investments – in people and technology – are finding that they are now at a competitive disadvantage.  New competitors, without the burden of legacy IT environments bowing their backs, are leveraging low-cost, fast-cycle disruptive technologies. These fast-moving competitors are pushing industry incumbents to build new IT-enabled capabilities or risk falling farther behind.

To read further, click here.

Cloud computing is inevitable.  

The end state promises computing resources that deliver against the New Normal's need for speed, collaboration, productivity, and scale.

The transition state, however, delivers nothing but challenges for all involved.

On the vendor side, big names don't necessarily equate to big capabilities.  Every "world class" cloud vendor consists of mere mortal employees who are struggling (given organizational silos, fragmented technology, and dramatic growth) to deliver on their company's service level commitments .  Buyers beware.  Take your reference checks to a new level - and focus not only on vendor capabilities but also the internal capabilities necessary to make sure the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

On the company side, technology and process changes are pretty well understood, security implications less so, but the organizational impacts are the most profound and sure to confound.  

As we transition from managing assets to services, what is the role for our MVP technologists?  With the transition to cloud, they are being asked to transfer their knowledge and manage service levels without direct access to the tools that allow them to do so.  As an technical IT leader said to me recently, "We are now managing relationships and tickets - not technology."

Don't write off these employees as "unnecessary" in the end state and replaceable in the transition.  Companies need to "lift and shift" their MVP technologists from the micro to the macro:  architecting, integrating, innovating, directing, monitoring, resolving, negotiating.

As you move to cloud computing, how are you making sure that your people are moving with you?   

Big thanks to client Todd who turned me on a to a great article on innovation.

The article does a wonderful job illustrating that no one owns innovation - it's a horizontal, not a vertical process. One where innovations must travel across organizational boundaries to find purpose and become reality.

There are three major players in the innovation process:  those involved in an open-ended search for knowledge (e.g., found in universities and some great R&D labs), those facing needs and serious constraints (e.g., start ups, front line knowledge workers), and those with the discipline and resources to define and scale products that have broad-based appeal (e.g., vendors and IT organizations.)

Innovation is a messy little soup where the magic happens as the different players interact.  There is no simple recipe, but key ingredients include employees who understand the needs of marketplace, are exposed to the outside world, and work within a culture that nurtures creativity within a disciplined process of iteration, prototyping, and pruning.

The fact that no one owns innovation means that everyone should. This presents an enormous challenge for companies with bloated project agendas, over-burdened employees, and overzealous bosses.  Google's "20% time" is a boundary rule targeted at keeping these toxic ingredients at bay.

What is your company doing to foster innovation?

Many of us involved with IT believe that success in the new normal calls for democratizing IT-enabled innovation. But democratized innovation represents a significant shift from how IT currently operates and there is no clear roadmap or consensus on how to move in this direction. IT leaders know that change is necessary, but are so busy struggling with today's challenges that they don't have the time to bring the future forward.

Nobody knows how technology will be managed or consumed in 5, 10, or 15 years, but we do know that change is coming.

My last post profiled a CIO who is interested in increasing the IT-smarts of his organization. To help ensure success, we encouraged the CIO to approach the effort in a way that respects that change is driven from psychological, not just logical, forces. With this in mind, we identified eight steps to smarter IT.

Yesterday, a CIO said to me: "It's time to increase the IT-smarts of the rest of the business. They are demanding more direct control and they are ready for it."

In case any of us doubted it, our frustrations with IT — and IT's frustrations with the business — are alive and well. We recently posted a slideshow, 8 Things Executives Hate About I.T. based on the core principles in my book.

If you want to know what keeps IT leaders up at night, check out this oh-so-depressing article. Entitled "Why The New Normal Could Kill IT," is a well-written summary of the challenges and risks that IT faces as it tries to navigate the new economic order with complex and difficult-to-change technology, poor technology adoption, and the reality that consumer technology is outpacing enterprise technology.

My previous blog emphasized the importance of increasing the IT-smarts of business leaders in order to fully leverage technologies that are reshaping the competitive landscape.

Consumer electronics. Sensors. Analytics. Web services. The Cloud. The cool technologies that are transforming the competitive landscape and how companies operate are not prototypes in some electronic giant's lab. They're in the marketplace, and affordable. You don't have to overhaul your IT architectures to implement them. If anything, they improve the value of that architecture that you spent gillions putting in place.

With the cash crunch, focus is coming back in style. A lot of people are hoping for a future — both professionally andpersonally — that will be, in the words of Peggy Noonan, "pared down, more natural, more stable, less full of enervating overstimulation, of what Walker Percy call the "trivial magic" of modern times."

Without concerted effort, what was once neat and tidy becomes marred and messy. Just finding something in the garage feels like an archaeological expedition. Periodically, when someone dies, or relocates, or becomes disgusted, there's a whirlwind of activity to purge and reorganize. This cathartic experience is followed by a brief period of exhilaration, until time passes and entropy exerts itself once again.

Have you heard? Thanks to the new stimulus package, electronic health record (EHR) systems are now on sale! Better hurry, though. There are an estimated 525,000 doctorsthat need them and only $19 billion dollars to go around...

Last week, the Conference Board announced that CEOs, Chairmen, and company presidents "were especially concerned about speed, flexibility, and adaptability to change" in the face of the credit crunch and slowing global economy.

Many managers find it difficult and to get IT projects approved. They don't know how to justify projects in a way that that unlocks the various governance doors that stand between good ideas and good, hard cash.

At one time or another, all leadership roles involve some type of IT responsibility, such as serving as an IT liaison, subject matter expert, project or program manager, system or process owner, project sponsor, or participant in IT governance.

Whew. It wasn't easy, but the days of decentralized IT resulting in fragmented business processes, duplicate and error prone data, security holes, vendor driven technology, and runaway costs are over.