Where does your fall? (click to see diagram full-screen)

Thanks to Bob Zimmerman of Geneca for collaboration.

Post from: CEOpundit.com

The 4 Perspectives of CIO Performance

Unfortunately, problems in data quality projects often reveal themselves late — when much of the costly IT work is already done. This is in part because the new processes needed to improve the data can cause their own critical problems. Here are six ‘challenge questions’ to keep in mind when considering data-quality-driven project. Getting good answers to these will go a long way to preventing data-quality-driven project failures at your company.

1. Why does better data really require buying (or building) new software?

Separate the issue of improved data from the big software project. The knee-jerk reaction is to say, “We need a new system.” Instead, look at making incremental changes to the current system. Possibly build a prototype that proves out some of the anticipated benefits. In other words, make smaller, less risky investments first to prove out the investment thesis.

If improvement in data quality is quoted as a side benefit of another project, make sure that project plan includes complete costs for realizing those benefits. Improvement in data quality seldom is a ‘freebie’ side benefit.

2. Determine what the new process will break.

This question is the one that seldom gets seriously considered in IT proposals. It can be a killer.

Realize that your ‘old’ process is in one way or another a working ecosystem. People communicate, there is a rhythm and dynamic that makes the thing go — even with its imperfections. You see the flaws, but seldom acknowledge how well the current system really delivers.

Therefore, look at how the new-and-improved system might break that pragmatic working. Determining these breaks too late in the game will tempt you to hard-wire changes into the system so you retain the best of the old ‘pragmatic’ workings. This makes IT work more expensive and can it more difficult to realize the anticipated benefits. In the worst case scenario, your department leaders might undermine the project as they better understand the implications of the new process.

3. Who do I hold accountable for data quality?

Who is accountable for data quality? Staff the role realistically. You need a supervision process to ensure the data quality work gets done correctly. Typical mistakes include assigning this to an IT function, or staffing it as a part-time ‘add-on’ job. Result: the business doesn’t accept the results, or the work doesn’t get done in a timely fashion. Thus you don’t realize the value of the investment. Take this seriously! Data cleansing usually requires effort. Withot an owner, it probably doesn’t get done.

4. Does the plan account for the add-on processes related to data quality?

Ensure that your team is looking realistically at what it takes to process the data end-to-end to an enhanced level of quality. Such processes include:

1. Who handles data that is ‘kicked-out’ of the system (e.g. bad addresses)? How fast does it happen?
2. What is the measurement framework that analyzes the data quality process? Have the metrics been thought through? Example: old process: everything counts as a lead — marketing happy, sales not happy. New process: Only certain ‘clean’ items qualify as a lead? marketing loses lead count, sales close percentage goes up. These can devastate existing core marketing and sales metrics, and undermine support unless you plan to address the issue.
3. What is the process for managing disagreement about how data is categorized?

5. Is there a clear process for maintaining data quality?

Cleansed data must be maintained. The investment in data cleansing and enrichment is an on-going investment so long as the data is to be used. The more abstract your objectives, the more carefully data must be reviewed and confirmed — along with change management if changes to the data affect interests within the company. If you fail to budget or organize around maintenance, you find yourself back with bad data in no time.

6. Is the project focused?

Do the minimum as fast as possible. In most cases, there should be a business-relevant deliverable in no more than three months. After the first delivery, additional phases should be expected every six weeks or so. Your team will learn a lot this way early in the investment cycle and this will ensure better outcomes in the long run. If data quality is the key deliverable, focus on reporting and analytics to get the value. Making use of the data as fast as possible will demonstrate other possibilities for using it that can influence the direction of the project. Consider deferring ‘extra’ application functionality so that extra work doesn’t sidetrack getting to the real meat.

Post from: CEOpundit.com

6 CEO Challenge Questions for Avoiding Data-Quality-driven Project Failures

The article has good points to make, but misses the key remedy: better leadership from the top.

These articles discuss IT and management as ‘we’ and ’them,’ prescribing that ‘we’ need to better collaborate with ‘them.’ It assumes a model in which management’s role is a passive ok’er of investments which then sits back and effectively says, “Go ahead, make my day…”

That kind of passivity leads to costly failures as IT carries the risk and is left guessing about how best to deliver value. Because they aren’t not effectively leading, Top Dogs don’t carry a deep understanding of what was decided, and because they aren’t sufficiently engaged, they don’t give themselves the chance to shape the business outcome for maximum punch.

Here’s how a Top Dog must lead:

1. Teach IT leadership how to analyze the business and its key challenges.
2. Make the needs of the strategy vivid.
3. Include IT in the strategy process.
4. Conduct the conversation in the language of business results.
5. Set up measurement to assess IT’s contribution to strategy.

Focusing on these points reduces the intensity of the ‘lost in translation’ problem, as the article calls it. Following these points get Top Dogs prescribing priorities and the key constraints IT must satisfy. IT now has a better top-down grasp of how to add value.

Post from: CEOpundit.com

Refinements on ‘How to Tap IT’s Hidden Potential’

When IT is not in the loop on business strategy, three bad things happen:

1. IT loses the linkage between its everyday work and what the business needs to thrive. Systems are interesting, and the natural human tendency is to perfect them. In the absence of clear, pressing priorities, your IT people will work on that last 10% - 20% that has ‘de minimus’ value to your business. This is totally natural.  Like a hamster spinning in its wheel, IT has to work on something. If it doesn’t understand what you strive to achieve, IT will not advance towards achieving it.
2. The second bad thing is that you risk IT over-reacting to half-baked cues and rough draft project ideas because it does want to deliver value. Since it doesn’t have the stabilizing rudder of strategy, it doesn’t deliver what you and your team have identified as the key winning deliverables. In the worst scenario, IT charges ahead on projects that you’ve never even heard of and surfaces months later with a deliverable that no one is waiting for.
3. Finally, when IT is not in the loop on business strategy, you as CEO experience your CIO as a hopeless geek who doesn’t ‘get it.’ This only isolates IT even further, deepening the hole. Whether or not your CIO has the business chops you wish he had, your job is to ensure the IT agenda flows from your business priorities.

Here’s how you start:

#1. Include the CIO in Your Strategy Process

Include your top IT leader (called CIO here) in your strategy process. Three reasons why this is vital:

1. If the CIO doesn’t participate in — or least audit — the back-and-forth of the strategy creation process, he isn’t going to get the nuanced grasp he needs.
2. It builds the right conversation between yourself, the CIO and the rest of the management team.
3. It arms the CIO to generate ideas as to how IT can advance the strategy. As the one who has the deepest understanding of company-wide systems, she is best positioned for doing this.

If your company doesn’t have a written strategy or strategy process, we’ll have a post on that topic in the near future.

 #2. Examine How IT Work Advances the Strategy

Coming out of a strategy process, you ideally have three deliverables:

1. The key strategies / themes / mantras that according to the strategy deliver success. These represent your theory of competitive advantage, the investment thesis of your business.
2. The initiatives that — when well executed — define the successful execution of the strategy. Commonly these initiatives must happen now so you can sample the anticipated benefits and take in evidence that the strategy works.
3. The initiatives that you could do, but you put aside for now. This is sometimes the hardest point to accomplish, but often the most important. You have precious little headroom to work on new initiatives after satisfying the essentials. Freeing up just 5% of wrong-focused attention might double the ‘discretionary’ resource available to work on strategy.

Therefore the next step in getting IT working on the right stuff, is to review existing IT effort in terms of how it advances the strategy.

First, draw out the relationship between the strategy and the required IT ‘capabilities.’ We choose the word capabilities carefully. Too often your staff jumps to the conclusion that you need to buy a new system to deliver capabilities. But if done with discipline, you might be able to deliver capabilities with a web-based service offering, with admin or offshore labor, or with a prototype pulled together in a matter of days. Often the ‘capabilities‘ are simply improved business process combined with better information. You work backwards from the needed results, and pull through only that which clearly delivers value.

Second, review your list of existing initiatives. Are they focused on strategic value? How clear is the value delivery? How far away is the promised value? This is where you have to be the bad guy. Most projects have that feel-good, ‘good ideaness’  about them. But most are in support of ’second-best’ benefits and don’t deliver clear enough value to overcome the execution overhead that stands in their way. Without really big and really clear value, these projects don’t get the business attention to overcome the technical challenges, the power struggles, and the resistance to change that most projects must overcome. That’s where you have to step in when there are too many things going on and get the team focused on that compelling, game-changing initiative. To these good-but-not-great projects,  say, ‘Not yet.’ — not ‘no.’

#3. Lead

Upon completing step 2, you should have a sense for where the effort needs to go and how much ‘dry powder’ you have. You also have some consensus on what new work will move the dial. You work with the team to prioritize, you make decisions. This is where most CEOs dust themselves off, set a progress review date, and say to themselves, “My work here is done now… time to get back to something important.” 

One big key to getting these important projects delivered resides with you. Here are three tips for your leadership role in delivering strategically important projects:

1. Demand business-relevant deliverables at least every three months. The only exception would be in the first start-up phase, and even the case for that usually is weak. After that first phase, every six weeks is about right. This keeps everyone focused on value delivery, keeps a sense of urgency in the team, and forces hard prioritization which is the kind you need. You’ll get push back, but insist on it.
2. Give face time to the team. Your role is to keep the connection to the project’s urgent strategic meaning clear to the team / organization. This includes the technical team, which will learn much and be inspired to work hard and long for the privilege of this direct connection with you. Make unexpected appearances. Don’t stand judge and jury every couple of months. Your people want to feel the connection of what they do to the business significance of the strategy.
3. Run Interference. As soon as you pat yourself on the back for running this process, new stuff threatens to derail IT projects. More requests. False emergencies. A desire for topical instant gratification. Measure your CIO on her ability to keep focus on the right stuff. Give support when she takes the inevitable hits when she has to say no in order to keep that focus.

There’s a lot here, and we will dig deeper in future posts. Keep to the high level principles and think ‘lean and fast.’  You should see improved focus on the active priorities of the business, and will drive more of the IT iceberg above the waterline where you can see it and assess the value it delivers.

Post from: CEOpundit.com

The 3 CEO Essential Keys for Getting IT Focused on the Right Stuff

CEOs Don’t Manage IT Well

Our thesis was that you the CEO have been cowed into believing that IT can’t run predictably well.

The purpose of the book was to lay out a set of simple practices that CEOs and business owners can use to reverse bad IT performance. These practices can change how you think about your business in a world that is increasingly network-accessible, data-driven.  

The bottom line: We as CEOs do a pretty bad job leading IT.

Our book never saw the light of day. The year was 2002 — just after the dot-com bubble and September 11. Even with our writing track record, it was the wrong time for a book that was part business, part technology. The prospective publishers couldn’t even decide on which shelf to put it.

So we put the writing aside and continued to refine the ideas. Now we’re bringing this material to you via this website. The need is huge and the value for most businesses is immense.

Our Promise to You the CEO

Here’s what we promise:

1. We’ll show you how to be a more effective manager - leveraging your strength as business leader, and helping you improve your skills at driving IT results.
2. We’ll give you practical tips that will save you thousands, perhaps millions of dollars.
3. We’ll reveal how to get more predictable performance from IT.

We organize the blog into three categories:

MANAGE - Getting the IT strategy and structure right

DECIDE - How to make better decisions about software, services, vendors

DELIVER - How to play your appropriate role as ‘top dog’ in getting things done

The simplest way to follow progress is to subscribe to email updates (full privacy, of course).  We’ll send you the latest posts when we update the site. If you have an RSS feed, of course, you can use that — or just bookmark www.ceopundit.com and check in every few days.

Post from: CEOpundit.com

CEO: Manage IT Better!