The concept of “commander’s intent” has been around for almost 200 years. It’s a compelling military concept, originated by the Germans. The idea is that rather than apply tight command and control, leaders provide a clear sense of the outcomes they seek and the parameters they will accept. It’s a trusting relationship between manager and subordinate, and it’s one that has clear implications in the business environment.

From everything we see at clients and in the press, this means a (perhaps uncomfortable) return to basics in IT. That is, we will see great emphasis by CIOs and CTOs on the things that have in the past been very important. This includes, for example:

In short, CIOs and CTOs will be Read more ...]]> That there’s turbulence for 2012 that will affect business and IT isn’t much in question.  With great economic uncertainties (recession, Europe, elections) and, at the same time, significant changes in IT such as widespread user devices (tablets) and cloud, a lot is in flux. But what will this mean?

From everything we see at clients and in the press, this means a (perhaps uncomfortable) return to basics in IT. That is, we will see great emphasis by CIOs and CTOs on the things that have in the past been very important. This includes, for example:

• Improving Operational Excellence
• Understanding IT’s costs and taking action to reduce them
• Successfully delivering IT value (and projects)
• Doing effective business-focused IT planning
• Assuring the availability of suitable talents in the IT organization
• (Re)building the relationship with business

In short, CIOs and CTOs will be focusing on improving IT’s performance in the tried-and-true areas of IT management activities.

Back to the Future? This prediction, with the same bulleted items, could have been written ten (or maybe twenty) years ago. Oh sure, in 2012 we’ll be overwhelmed with continuing hype about new technologies, the disappearance of the traditional IT organization and/or the CIO, and the wonders of new opportunities (read “BI”, etc.)  These will be factors for some. And perhaps the means for achieving them will have changed for some (e.g., Agile, architecture). But for the largest group of CIOs and CTOs,  2012 will, indeed, be a year of focusing on traditional areas of IT’s performance: Back to the Future.

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

Financial ERP systems for State, County and Municipalities will be a major focus area for replacement and upgrades. While IT organizations have been prominent in developing project management offices (PMOs) over the last several years, IT leaders seem to have still not discovered how to gain the full support of the business. And with so Read more ...]]> Numerous State, County and Municipal entities are facing difficult times managing finances and workforce cost. With the continued economic slump, government and its departments/business units are experiencing tighter budgets and are insisting upon greater value from investments. At the same time, financial and budgeting systems have aged to the point where it’s time to look at replacing them. While still useful, many existing business systems are lacking integration capabilities, hindering much-needed increases in workforce efficiency and effectiveness. New systems come with high expectations for improvement.

Financial ERP systems for State, County and Municipalities will be a major focus area for replacement and upgrades. While IT organizations have been prominent in developing project management offices (PMOs) over the last several years, IT leaders seem to have still not discovered how to gain the full support of the business. And with so much at stake for these financial and budgeting systems, many government executives are leaving little chance for project failure by appointing business leaders to drive the project implementation. The need for collaboration between the department business units and IT is tremendous during these transitions. Three critical disciplines will be needed over the next couple years for CIOs and IT leaders:

• Business process expertise
• Project investment governance
• Business acumen

None of these is about technology; all of them are about implementing technology, which is still the most important part of a CIO’s job.

Business Process Expertise

One of the most important trends for CIOs and IT leaders is the ability provide high level expertise for redesigning business processes within the organization. CIOs and IT leaders need to develop Business Process Management (BPM) expertise within their organization to support the initial and ongoing efforts to assess the business requirements prior to selecting any ERP systems for finance and budgeting.

Governance

CIOs and IT leaders must also ensure that full governance methods, processes, and tools are in place across their organization as well as in departments affected by ERP implementations. In addition, the capability for change and readiness of the IT organization will be paramount for managing the significant investment in technology, vendor systems and resources required for ERP systems implementations. Every invested dollar will be held to higher standards as performance measures become part of governance expectations.

Business Acumen

The third discipline that will be required of CIOs and IT leaders over the next two years is “business acumen”. That is to say, they must have intimate knowledge of the business for the departments/business units they support. An even more critical aspect of business acumen is developing a first-hand business relationship with the stakeholders of the ERP initiatives long before the initiatives become defined and funded projects. Understanding individual stakeholder agendas and helping those stakeholders succeed will become an essential discipline as we move through the next few years.

Bottom Line

By viewing these trends as a positive change and developing the three disciplines mentioned, rather than tussling with the business for control of these major systems transitions, CIOs and IT leaders will enable a collaborative and shared approach to modernization efforts.

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

The systems-wholistic trend will continue even if the economy goes back into recession. Many who took the fractionalized approach and “squeezed everyone equally” are now weaker players than they were before. Those Read more ...]]> In 2011, and with increasing speed in 2012, Enterprises are embracing the whole-system view of themselves. This means they will take an increasingly strategic view of improvement, coordinating change across divisions and functions to achieve a higher overall level of performance. This trend is reversing the short-term, every-division-for-itself fractionalization that many organizations adopted during the financial pressure years 2008 – 2010. In the coming year we will see more of the team mindset (with some “taking one for the team” while others seemingly gain) than the “spread the pain” approach. The most successful organizations will compensate those groups which bear the greater pain so the whole can prosper.

The systems-wholistic trend will continue even if the economy goes back into recession. Many who took the fractionalized approach and “squeezed everyone equally” are now weaker players than they were before. Those who took the systems view are now stronger. The weaker organizations that return to a system-wholistic approach will rebuild their competitive position. Those that don’t will be (indeed, already are being) replaced by organizations that do. This is happening because, as systems theory shows, there is much more potential for improvement from optimizing a system as a whole than there is from optimizing its parts individually. The multi-year downward stock trends of traditional fractionalized players such as GE and Cisco versus the upward stock trends of integrative systems organizations like Amazon and Salesforce.com, conclusively show that this is already happening.

Other reinforcing trends to watch include:

• A return to the full vision of the Lean paradigm from the ineffective “pick and mix tools” approach adopted over the last few years. This will be facilitated by…
• A tectonic shift from management driven by command-and-control, to management driven by customer delight. (Both the “Beyond Budgeting” and “Radical Management” movements reflect this shift.) Much of the information needed to do this well will be provided by…
•  Greater use of Complexity Management techniques to increase the alignment of all the people in theEnterprisewith its customers based on needs, purpose and profit.

For the first time, all the tools needed to bring about these changes exist and have been proven in live corporations. The result of these interconnecting shifts will be that theEnterprise, at the end of 2012, will look more like an effective, coordinated whole and less like a collection of disparate, often at odds with one another, parts.

The Enterprise will begin to dance.

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

With regard to sourcing, I see 2012 as the year of the contract manager. More universities will offer contract management as a degree (not just a module), yet it will take some time for the students to enter the marketplace. The professional contract management associations will have a boom in membership (and for those with a job board, an increase in postings). But the demand for good contract managers will outstrip supply — next year Read more ...]]> Now that approximately half the IT shop is outsourced (on average) either on, near, or offshore, the transaction itself is hardly novel. What remains difficult, however, is getting the results one wanted when the deal was set up. Both academia and the commercial world have started to recognize the importance of the individuals that get those results, not just those who put the deals together.

With regard to sourcing, I see 2012 as the year of the contract manager. More universities will offer contract management as a degree (not just a module), yet it will take some time for the students to enter the marketplace. The professional contract management associations will have a boom in membership (and for those with a job board, an increase in postings). But the demand for good contract managers will outstrip supply — next year and for years to come.

In 2012, to “set and forget” a contract will only be the domain of the most naïve organizations. To get results, and the return on investment, organizations will need to invest in:

• Building contract management as an organizational competence, and not treat it as an ad hoc task;
• Creating practical, reality-based contracts that can be managed well, as opposed to the rather complex maze-like documents currently in play, and
• Recognizing, rewarding, and keeping the contract managers themselves.

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

Figure 1: Wall of Confusion Slide By Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer

As the dialog took place a short time Read more ...]]> A couple of years ago I found myself immersed in a devops dialog with an executive of a fully integrated service provider. I forgot how many hundreds, if not thousands, of developers reported to her. While all might not have been well with the way software was produced in her organization, the bigger problem she was wrestling with was time-to-value. The software might be done, or even ‘done done’ as Agilists would often say, but its deployment unto the data centers owned and operated by the very same service provider was agonizingly slow. In particular, time to deployment of anything that touched legacy code was “infinite.”

Figure 1: Wall of Confusion Slide By Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer

As the dialog took place a short time after colleagues Patrick DeBois and Andrew Shafer delivered their landmark presentation on the subject in Agile 2009, I borrowed their Wall of Confusion slides (Figure 1) to bolster my conviction that the walls between her company’s development organization and the data centers they operated could and should be breached. As I happened to know and think highly of her boss, who “owned” both development and IT, I expressed the opinion that it will be much easier for her and him to do so than it would be for the average CIO in a company for which software is means to an end, not the business in which the company is engaged. To my great surprise she gave me a wry grin and uttered the following four words:

Our walls are thicker.

Indeed, not only were their walls thicker, they actually seemed to have razor wire on top and armed guards with vicious dogs patrolling each side of the metaphorical wall. As the dialog did not seem to be promising much from a business perspective, I dropped it and completely forgot about it until the CIO of a client company has recently told me:

This is huge.  After ~7 years of building up silos, essentially training our staff to pass things along to the next group and only allowing for new product development w/o looking back on either infrastructure or overall health, has definitely created a suboptimal culture.

Whether you metaphorically perceive it as walls, silos or a cultural form of passing the buck,  the question, ultimately, is that of generating value for the end customer through horizontal services. A certain set of tasks needs to come together from a user perspective  irrespective of your internal organizational structure. Moreover, the tasks that need to come together typically involve various partners, and these days, prosumers. Thick walls, no matter how strongly they reinforce efficiency in one department or another, are not too helpful when it comes to overall effectiveness, let alone exceptional effectiveness of the form “You [the customer] Above All” practiced so successfully as a business strategy by JetBlue.

Walls, as history teaches us, might or might not suffice in the face of barbarians in the gates. The “barbarians” nowadays are hyper-segmented markets that form and vanish faster than ever. The fractal segment these days might be as short lived at as a Google G+ Circle. You need to be able to identify such fleeting segments, understand their needs and fulfill them ‘real time.’ You can’t do so if your staff needs to engage in an obstacle race in which the walls are thicker, taller and impenetratable.

I propose to Cutter clients to think of their walls as a degenerate form of the Berlin Wall of the cold war era. Right or wrong, it was very clear who the enemy was back then. These days I cite a very simple question to my clients with respect to their walls:

Who is your true enemy nowadays?!

Figure 2: Juggling on the Berlin Wall (source: Wikipedia)

Imagine my delight getting the thoughts captured below from Ernest Mueller. Drawing upon the research of Richard Cook, M.D., Ernest emphasizes the similarities between medicine and computer science. With Ernest and Richard Read more ...]]> Last February I developed an Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT)  problem that placed me squarely in the category of “interesting patient” (as one of the physician I saw told me with a wry grin). Just at the point the number of medical specialists I had to consult grew to the level that my medical insurance started suspecting a fraud, I reached the conclusion that while nothing is too wrong with any single organ, I am probably struggling with some from of a system problem. Since then I have been known to quip that henceforth Jerry Weinberg will be the only “physician” whose help I would seek..

Imagine my delight getting the thoughts captured below from Ernest Mueller. Drawing upon the research of Richard Cook, M.D., Ernest emphasizes the similarities between medicine and computer science. With Ernest and Richard supporting me, I felt totally vindicated in my carefully thought through strategy for choosing physicians….

On a more serious note, Ernest nicely captures the real nature of IT Operations nowadays, viewing it as an integral part of an indivisible spectrum from user needs to fulfillment. In the course of so doing, Ernest breaks a few metaphorical walls and shatter some myths that have hurt the IT industry for long time.

Here is Ernest:

There is a common fallacy I often hear regarding IT operations work. People describe development as the “creative end” of technology work, and say that operations in the perfect world would be completely automated. It’s all simply rote work, and that is what computers were created to obsolete in the first place.  I consider this view to be quite incorrect.

I contend that it takes originality and ingenuity to keep a complex system running. It’s a false “Jetsons” inspired view of the future to think that all complex activity can be reduced to pushing a button.

Early in my tenure at National Instruments (NI), an application architect was trying to get my systems team to work on a pet project of his, which was not prioritized, leading to some contention. As the conversation became heated, the developer said “Well, I don’t know why your group exists anyway.  All you do is move files around all day!” And this is what some people think operations is, just moving files around all day. Needless to say a developer’s job can be similarly trivialized. Someone else’s job always seems like it should be simple to one who doesn’t do it.

It reminds me of the apocryphal story about the engineer who thought a moment and marked the problem area with a chalk “X” and submitted an invoice for $10,000, and when asked to itemize the invoice, allotted $1 for making the mark and $9,999 for knowing where to place it.

Some of the issue, I think, is that certain tasks are done by different people in different shops.  In some shops, all systems engineering work is done by “the dev organization” and Ops is relegated to answering tickets and taking pages.  In others, the devs are hapless functional-code-writers only and testing, application performance management, security, and architecture falls to Ops. (NI was like this when I started there.)

But even if you remove all the systems engineering work and just leave pure troubleshooting, the work of a modern Operations person begins to appear a lot like that of a medical doctor. The complexity of these systems defies a purely procedural approach, and invention and intuition are extremely valuable in curing the patient. As an illustration, take the seminal essay “How Complex Systems Fail,” by Richard Cook, M.D., a medical doctor with the University of Chicago. This essay was reprinted in the O’Reilly Web Operations book because its insights on caring for the complex system of patient safety are directly relevant to the practice of Web operations as well! “Complex systems require substantial human expertise in their operation and management,” contends the essay. Caring for a complex system is a continuous exercise in risk management and the continuous creation of safety (in our case, uptime) can require “novel combinations or de novo creations of new approaches.”

You certainly can try to perform operational tasks without any ingenuity or creative thought. And the fact that many organizations promote that way of thinking explains why in general the state of operations remains unsophisticated in many ways.  I personally have spent many years leading operations teams with highly skilled individuals continuously striving to apply new and ingenious solutions to the problems that face complex systems.

In the end, the problem is false assumptions about the nature of things.  It’s one of those theoretical scientist vs. engineer mindset differences – developers tend to “assume a frictionless environment” due to their largely theoretical CS backgrounds. The default state of a complex system is not “safe.” To quote Dr. Cook again, “Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems.” Changes aren’t safe to make by their nature, they are risky. You don’t have any idea what a complex system is doing without thoughtful instrumentation and analysis of what those instruments tell you. You cannot correct problems without a sound scientific method – hypotheses and tests. All these activities are an exercise in human ingenuity, just as engineering or medicine are.

My team has certainly labored to automate all the routine work – environment provisioning, code deployment – but that has simply freed us up to innovate even more.  Cloud computing, for example, has made system provisioning a lot easier, more like the goal of “waving your magic wand,” but it is naive to think that level of convenience is the default state of the universe instead of the result of continuous and sustained innovation.

Bio: Ernest Mueller (ernest.mueller@ni.com) has 18 years of IT industry experience in large and small organizations. He has been with National Instruments (http://www.ni.com) for the last nine of those years, and in 2009 moved into the LabVIEW R&D group at NI to serve as the Web systems architect for its new cloud-based SaaS products. He is active in the DevOps movement and helped found the the Austin Cloud Computing Users Group (http://groups.google.com/group/austin-cug) and the Austin chapter of OWASP (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Austin). He also blogs with several of his colleagues at the agile admin (http://theagileadmin.com/). Ernest resides with his daughter, Aoife, in Round Rock, Texas.

What about you? Do you have a business architecture story to share?

The November 2011 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor William Ulrich, will examine business architecture experiences from the trenches. Proposals of interest are due 9 September 2011.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers03.html

So what’s the Read more ...]]> Large, complex organizations regularly struggle with the pros and cons on each side of the centralization/ decentralization argument — and then they reorganize, usually to the opposite extreme. If you are looking at decentralization, the argument is that business unit executives need IT resources under their direct control to better achieve their business goals. Under this approach, the organization will typically maintain a small central IT group with limited responsibility, perhaps related to architecture and standards. If looking to centralize control, the argument is that this is the only way to ensure economic efficiency, and it may be absolute. These arguments have merit, but not absolutely, in either case. Both extremes create an environment for dissatisfaction in some part of the organization, and there often isn’t any mechanism for relieving that dissatisfaction other than another broad reorganization.

So what’s the solution? IT management structure has to follow service needs: centralized for those services better provided centrally, and decentralized for those services better provided locally, and with established channels for close collaboration across all units. This isn’t easy, but it is the middle ground that will avoid the disruptive sine wave. If we look hard enough, we can all recognize that there are some IT needs that really are better met via a localized approach (e.g., specialized applications used by particular division where detailed subject matter knowledge is particularly important). At the same time, others benefit in both efficiency and effectiveness from a more centralized approach. Examples are e-mail, networks, and corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP). The question is how to set up and then govern this type of mixed environment.

Many organizations have created the post of corporate CIO to focus on these issues, and that person almost always begins with improving communication and collaboration. A CIO creates an environment where responsibilities are clear and benefits long-lasting by proceeding along the following lines:

Take steps to ensure good communication between central and local IT. Regardless of IT department reporting relationships, communication across units is key to reducing tension and resolving issues. Creating a CIO council with leaders of all divisional IT departments as well as directors from the corporate IT department provides a structure for ongoing communication and creation of collaborative efforts.

Establish a governance process for deciding which services are to be managed by the central IT department and which by local IT. The first step is to understand where you are now: develop a matrix listing key IT services (e.g., e-mail, network, telecom, general user support, data center operations, database services, Web development, major application areas) and show who the “service provider” is for each business unit or department (i.e., who that department holds responsible for providing the service). Note whether the service is provided by internal resources or is outsourced, but the primary question is who is responsible.

Set up processes for measuring cost and quality of IT services across the organization on an ongoing or periodic basis. This gets to the issue of how to know that all businesses are getting the best service for the money, and seeing trends that may signal that a change is required. While “cost per unit” is a standard operating measure in the manufacturing world, we in IT also must learn how much it costs to provide and service an e-mail box, network access, and every other IT function. Determining your costs also gives you data for comparing internal costs to outside vendor costs in making sourcing decisions. You can measure quality through on-the-spot surveys, Web pages with “like-dislike” buttons, and periodic in-depth focus groups, not to mention on-time and uptime measures and problem reports.

Keep in mind that the types of services and the balance between centralized and locally managed services will change over time, so build a regular review process from the very start. In the 1980s, central IT departments were mostly in the business of running the corporate accounting system. They weren’t ready for designing and running networks and e-mail systems. It made sense for operating departments to make their own decisions and handle their own support for these new services. More than 20 years later, the vast majority of the organization is best served by corporate decisions on what e-mail to use, what network routers to install, and whether to run these services internally or to outsource them. These changes don’t occur overnight (or even over a single year), but they do change and you must reassess regularly the technology, cost, and service levels in your IT services matrix.

Implementing these processes will go a long way to helping you provide IT services that satisfy corporate needs efficiently and effectively — and keep you off the IT reorganization sine wave.

The July 2011 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor Patrick Debois, will examine both the opportunities and challenges created by the devops movement. Proposals of interest are due 29 April 2011.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers03.html