Friday, March 16, 2012

Six Essentials for Effective IT Strategy


IT Strategy initiatives frequently fail to deliver tangible benefits; organisations remain unchanged, costs continue to rise, value-add is diminished, and morale falls. 
Despite this, it is possible to create a genuinely  effective IT Strategy; one that will result in pragmatic actionable recommendations to transform your organisation from “chaotic” to “managed”.
Developing an effective IT Strategy can be fraught with difficulties; it is not uncommon to meet organisations having the results of a Strategic Review, embellished by charts, graphs and well-meaning policies, who then struggle to convert these good ideas into practical action. And without practical action, the company sees no tangible benefits.

The temptation is to abandon the Strategy entirely, and revert to tried-and-trusted behaviour. After a short interval, the organisation falls back into “making it up as we go along”, or “Just do it” methodology. Neither of these extremes are optimal for an IT organisation. Neither are they inevitable.
Our experience shows that there are practical ways to transition an IT organisation from “chaotic, ad-hoc, individual heroics” to “managed” or even “optimising” ( i ), by addressing six major areas.  Some of these are familiar to IT Service Management professionals, others are taken from the wider world of Management Consultancy. All of them are fundamental, focused, and clear to implement.

1. Control what you Measure
It is ironic that the IT industry, guardian of most things numeric, can ignore collecting and publishing numbers about it’s own activity. Yet statistical data is an essential pre-requisite for modern management. 
As an IT Manager do you (and your business) know the numbers of servers you are managing, what they are used for, how much storage they use, how many support issues are being resolved etc.? 
More importantly, do you know how these figures are changing? Are you currently managing twice as many virtual machines as two years ago? With more or less staff? And what projects and initiatives are your team working on?
Capturing Key Performance Indicators or Metrics enables us to:
    • explain to the Business (our paymasters) what the IT Team is actually doing
    • justify existing and future IT expenditure
    • engage with Business sponsors to address issues with “problem applications”. 
    • improve internal planning and control resource allocation.
Metrics help us ensure that we are “doing things right” in terms of allocation of effort, and to demonstrate to business stakeholders that we are “doing the right things”.
2. Deploy appropriate Software Tools
Most software vendors accept that the sheer complexity of Managing IT requires a variety of different management tools. So we need a clearly defined strategy for choosing, implementing and integrating them.

Consider the following typical concerns; do you have multiple software tools that do the same thing? Do you have different software products using different naming conventions for the same thing? Can you extract holistic reports across different software tools? 
It is essential that we focus on the two primary reasons for using Software Tools: (1) to capture metrics on the status of IT, it’s assets, costs and activity, and (2) to automate the actual IT support function itself. 
A Software Tools approach incorporates the following:
    • “golden references” that hold master data which is replicated to other tools.
    • clear ownership of tools and skills to run them.
    • maximum utilisation and maximum return on software investment.
Without this, we risk purchasing duplicated products, creating “shelfware”, or adding to the complexity of the environment we are trying to manage.
An integrated Software tools approach enables us to maximise the return on our investment in Management software, and to scale our capability to handle future growth of IT and the business.
3. Establish and Improve Processes
The majority of IT Managers are aware of the necessity of proper Processes, regulatory requirements such “SOX” and best practices such as ITIL and ISO-20000. Unfortunately, poorly designed processes can hinder, rather than help. Processes can become a bottleneck, rather than an enabler. Alternatively, a poorly implemented “Agile” approach to organisational behaviour can lead to quality issues, particularly in the long term.
Our experience in this area suggests IT Managers can address this dilemma by formulating a Strategy which focuses on:
    • Building on existing behaviours rather than enforcing textbook patterns,
    • Improvement techniques such as LEAN and Six-Sigma,
    • Processes that deliver measurable “outputs” to the business,
A pragmatic Process Improvement strategy enables us to introduce an integrated set of processes, resulting in (a) Reduction in costs and increased efficiency, (b)Predictability, better resource planning and estimating, and (c) Repeatability, Audibility, and Verifiability.
Such a process improvement strategy enables us work “smarter”, and to deliver IT services faster, more responsively, and at a more predictable cost. 
4. Standardise Technology Choices
Many IT organisations exist without an Infrastructure “road map” for the technologies which they will operate in the future. This can result in:
    • Legacy applications with high maintenance costs
    • Heterogeneous data centre technologies, 
    • Scarcity of resources capable of supporting old infrastructure
    • A multiplicity of different support teams, and duplication of support effort.
    • Spiralling costs of technology refresh.
These issues can be addressed early, without having to resort to periodic “crisis management” technology refreshes.
The first phase of the Standardisation strategy is to define the “Production Readiness” criteria for your organisation. This means describing the importance of Scalability, Resilience, Security, Management and Supportability you require, as part of the Enterprise Architecture Framework.
Production Readiness enables IT Managers to “score” applications (whether purchased or in-house) for their suitability for deployment. 
Once a mechanism is in place to assess supportability, then an appropriate costing mechanism can be implemented, so that these costs are exposed when project decisions are taken.
A Production Standards strategy ensures that technologies are chosen on the basis of their long-term supportability. As a result, business IT decisions take into account the true cost of IT. Cost transparency leads to trust, which can lead to more focused IT investment.
5. Build People and Teams
Most IT managers accept that managing IT is as much about managing people as it is about the technology. Unfortunately, they are often given little opportunity to develop skills for managing and motivating people, other than through the hard knocks of doing the job, the sink or swim approach to team and people development.
The IT industry in general has a strong reputation for investing in technical training, but frequently does not invest in the “people skills” needed for managing teams.
Using a framework such as the Action-Centred Leadership model ( ii ), a Management Coaching and Personality Profiling initiative can help managers to improve their performance in the three core areas:
    • achieving the task
    • managing the team or group
    • managing individuals
This approach helps Managers recognise the benefits of really understanding their team, and to learn how to capitalise on the diversity of skills and personalities that they are responsible for. This, in turn, leads to significant productivity gains as well as reduction in staff “churn”. 

Leveraging the services of a Management Coach and Personality Profiling is therefore an essential part of an effective IT Strategy.
6. Energise the  IT  Culture
IT departments often  see themselves  as nothing more than a cost centre or a slave of the real business. In order to drive forward the potential benefits of IT, the IT department needs to see itself as a business in it’s own right, with its own strategy, values, skill, expertise and passion. 

This can be achieved by:
    • building a distinctive culture through team communications
    • envisioning the team by a shared strategy
    • acknowledging success and challenges as a common experience.
By addressing these cultural changes, the IT organisation will rightly see itself as a “profit centre”, rather than a “cost centre”. 
As it values itself and behaves differently as a result, then its customers, (the business sponsors) will start to  see it as  valued advisors, subject matter experts and enablers of business change.

Deliver Cost-effective IT
Experience tells us that it is possible to have an IT Strategy, which:
    • is practical and workable.
    • is easy to communicate and gives genuine improvements.
    • uses proven techniques from IT and Quality Management in a systematic way.
    • creatively combines solutions to build a better future.
For IT professionals, faced with 21st century challenges (Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Green Imperatives, to name a few), an Effective IT Strategy is essential.
This original article was written by Dennis Adams, and appears in the TWENTY:12 Enhance Your IT Strategy Yearbook of the BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT.  Text reproduced by permission of the BCS and ATALink Ltd. 

i) The terms “chaotic, ad-hoc, individual heroics”, “managed” and “optimising” are taken from the Maturity Levels descriptions in the Capability Maturity Model. CMM is registered Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), which led to the creation of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).
ii) The Action Centred Leadership model was developed by John Adair, who is also the author of over 40 books on management and leadership, including Effective Leadership, Not Bosses but Leaders, and Great Leaders.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The Cloud won’t solve your Management Issues


I like the idea of “cloud computing”; in our own consultancy business we use shared services for most of our key business processes. But I don’t think the cloud will solve some of the problems people had hoped for.

Of course, I may be just over-cautious.

Having worked in IT for a number of years, I have to fight the temptation to resist the “next big thing” which promises to solve all our IT problems. To make matters worse, I used to work in the sharp end of Software Sales, so I have seen over-zealous marketing glossing over the practical challenges of implementing the latest solution.

But this time my concern is more fundamental; It is based on our core motivation for embracing the Cloud concept in the first place.


Outsourcing compute processing, even core data, brings risks - security risks, performance and capacity risks to name a few. The justification for cloud computing is that the benefits outweigh the risks.

The attraction of the cloud approach is that someone else looks after hardware provisioning, capacity planning, availability management etc. etc. leaving you to get on with running your business processes.

So what if you need more capacity? Just pay more - Simple! Or is it?

The fact is that no technology provider has unlimited resources, and if you choose a supplier which is not the “right size” for you, you could end up with excess costs or (worse) a provider that cannot provision to your needs.

So you still need to think about Capacity Management.

The Cloud enables you to outsource technology. But there is no such thing as outsourcing responsibility.

For some, the attraction of moving to the cloud is that they no longer need to manage hardware and software. Instead, they need to manage the “wetware”; the people who supply the cloud solution.

You might get rid of Availability and Capacity Management.

But instead you have to replace it with Supplier Management.

And, as many people will tell you, managing people can be far more complex and hazardous than managing technology.