Wow!

My school – I mean the one I teach at – got mentioned in Harvard Business Review blog.

“But there is no question that this new MBA curriculum, stimulated by CEU’s unique position at the crossroads between East and West, is one place for more established business schools to look for an intriguing vision of the future path for business education.”

This is part two of a series covering the results of CIO Agenda 2007. First part is here.

Business priorities

Companies know they must prepare for the increased competition and they place “Improving business processes” as they number one priority for 2007. In 2006 “Improving business processes” was also on the first place indicating longer term planning.

“The need for revenue growth” is a close second as expected. Due to increased competition this year, the business leaders must pay closer attention to this one and bring it to second place from the fourth place in 2006.

On the third place is also a priority related to increased competitiveness: “Improving the effectiveness of the enterprise workforce”. Interestingly this was not in the first ten last year. One can speculate that after investments in tools and machines, now the business leaders decided to invest also in the workforce.

The extensive growth phase is also indicated by the place of “Controlling enterprise-wide operating costs”, 5 in Romania and 2 world wide (according to Gartner).

IT Budgets

IT budgets overall increase by 23% in 2007 versus 2006. This indicates a strong commitment of business leaders towards IT. Business leaders are convinced that investing in IT will help them achieve their goals.

IS Organization Capabilities

IT organizations have the funds they need (they just received a 23% increase in their budget) and deliver services to meet business expectations.

Most of the IT organizations also deliver the technology innovations needed by the business and have the necessary flexibility to adapt to current extensive growth phase.

Despite having funds and delivering excellent services, the IT organizations do not have enough business skills and CIO is not a player in business strategy. The two are connected: without an organization with strong business skills, the CIO cannot be a player in business strategy.

The CIOs must take this opportunity – increased budgets, extensive growth of the enterprise – and work hard to build an organization with strong business skills. This is a window of opportunity that will last probably 2 years.

This is part two of a series covering the results of CIO Agenda 2007. First part is here.

In 2007 IT budget grow by 23% to help companies to grow while facing an increased competition.

On Tuesday 19th CIO Council Romania released its second CIO Agenda survey. The survey includes input from 25 Romanian CIOs:

• IT budgets totaling more than EUR 270 millions
• Average IT budget of respondents is EUR 10 million

Provides a comprehensive view of CIO priorities, initiative, decisions and issues including:

• Business expectations for CIOs and IT
• CIO strategies and priorities

Romanian market
Competition is increasing on the Romanian market: in 2006 only 5% of the companies have their growth plans challenged while in 2007 this increased to 15%. In 2006 85% of the companies aim to grow faster than the market while in 2007 this decrease by 10% to 75%.

Paths to growth
Most of the companies want to “play safe”: 53% want to increase in the same market with new products or services. In Romania most of the markets grow, some of them with double digits CAGR. Now it’s the moment when the pie is sliced and everyone wants a bigger slice.
Romania is in a consolidation wave: 19% of the companies aim to grow by acquiring other companies or making partnerships.

14% will expand into new markets.

A surprisingly small percentage, only 14% will increase relationships with current customers. This indicates that most of the companies are in an extensive growth phase. Most of the companies want to get new clients, and current customers are sometimes neglected.

This is part one of a series covering the results of CIO Agenda 2007. The second part is here.

The corporate IT is invaded by the consumer world: wireless, PDA, messenger, Skype, you name it!

The peoples shops around for entertainment and convenience. While corporate IT is not expected to provide entertainment, it is judged by the convenience it provides.

I have heard countless times complain of IT senior executives about their users that demand convenience.

Users expect corporate intranet to rival Google, purchasing process to be friendly like Amazon, to contact workmates via messenger like they contact their friends.
They expect corporate phonebook to have at least LinkedIN functionalities, expect knowledge management systems like Wikipedia and the list can go on for ever.

The average IT executive thinks the corporate IT is like army: you have to suffer to strengthen yourself! Rough edges are not only accepted but expected. One has to fight with cumbersome processes, bloated web pages, and weird rules to perform even the most simple tasks.

They position themselves like the drill sergeant of corporate IT!

Even if your CFO will be happy with the cost reduction you achieved, it will be very hard to live with a crowd of angry customers.

Your users will compare your offering with the convenience industry outside and you will be in real trouble!

These days most employees are knowledge workers. They don’t need punch clocks, complicated processes or bloated software.

The first priority for you is to remove any obstacle preventing them to achieve highest intellectual productivity. Second give them tools they like and use happily. As Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth use to say:

Nice IS a feature!

It is now time to throw away your campaign hat and bring in a charmed flute!

Tomorrow I will the whole day at CISCO Expo.

I have a presentation in the morning about Rompetrol voice network and I moderate together with CISCO country manager an afternoon session “Paths to Growth” reserved for IT Executives.

I will be back with some impressions.

Through some web “magic” I found two CIO blogs:

CIO Web Musings: http://petesiegel.blogspot.com/

and another one:

Keith Parnell :: Marketing CIO: http://keith.jaseblog.com/

Enjoy Reading

I knew I shouldn’t believe journalists.

As Norman Mailer said :

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

I my previous post I was quoting an article in Computer Weekly about the four types of CIOs.

Meanwhile after some emails exchanged with Brinley Platts, author of the Building Effective IT Executive Teams research and chairman of CIODevelopment.com I understand better the full picture:

Each of them will have strengths and weaknesses based solely on their career track and the experience it has given them, and smart CIOs (and CEOs) will take account of these in building and deploying their top executive teams.

The types are based on previous experience: technology versus other functions and current organization versus other organizations

Every type has it place in an organization life-cycle and culture. The CIO Role-Types Model is also great to plot your career path.

Please go to CIO Development site and download the study. Worth reading it!

I always preach that IT is no different than any other business discipline: from project evaluation to people management the same good old ways applies. There is no “magic” in IT.

I am convinced that any good manager can run an IT organization.

I found today an intriguing article in Computer Weekly: The way to become a top CIO.

“Some organizations appoint the CIO from within, but not from within the IT department. These ‘executive CIOs’ are typically appointed when the chief executive has become so frustrated with IT that he gives it to a more experienced, proven executive.”

The CEO’s assumption is that IT will now be in safe, familiar hands, run by someone whose capability is known, and who is “one of us” so far as the business executives of the company are concerned.

This makes perfect sense to me.

But all too often the appointment proves temporary or a mistake – certainly for the CIO in question. On average, the executive CIO lasts two years in the CIO role, whereas the internal IT professional CIO lasts seven years, says Platts.

This comes as a big surprise to me. Unless Platts get his figures wrong this is very disturbing evidence.

Their problems stem from the fact that they will inevitably discover that they are between a rock and a hard place, says Platts. With neither competence in nor experience of IT, they will fail to engage the confidence of their own team.

Worse, if the CEO has placed them in charge of an IT function riddled with problems, they will swiftly realize that one of the key problems is the lack of trust in IT by senior business management and the poor relationship it has with IT in the first place.

Although it may be expected that the best relationships between IT and business should be where an executive CIO runs IT from general management, once they are CIO, the executive CIO’s relationship with their CEO can deteriorate very quickly.

“The CEO will say, ‘I have worked 20 years successfully with him and in six weeks in IT he has gone native’.” In general, no executive CIO should accept the job if offered – it is a no-win situation, says Platts.

Very disturbing. I’ll dig for some more facts.

I rediscovered today in Guy’s blog a great essay about writing by George Orwell (the original article is here).

I have to read (and write) almost daily a lot of English language documents: business cases, project initiations, reports, meeting minutes, etc.

Quote from George Orwell:

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

All the current business documents are written using this “modern English” language or even worst.

Who is not tired of: “Time to Market”, “on the same page”, “at the end of the day”, “in a nutshell”, “total cost of ownership”, “business value” and so on.

Pages and pages of words voided of almost all the meaning. And we write like we speak. And we wander why staff is playing bullshit bingo in the meetings.

Even a business case must be written in good English. So, this is a letter to all writers:

Dear All,
Please read the great essay of George Orwell. Before starting to write anything, please read it again. After you finish writing read it again and correct you work.

Thank you,
Your Reader.

PS: And I don’t even mentioned vendor marketing materials. Another fine example of “business language”!

The short answer: with your eyes wide open.

The long answer:

Like many of my CIO colleagues, I am a big consumer of analyst services.

Silicon Valley Guy put it very well:

IT managers simply do not have the time or energy to systematically gather information including talking to many of their peers, vet blogs for accuracy and synthesize conclusions. So tens of thousands IT organizations outsource market, product and management technique research to analysts just like they outsource PC help desk outsourcing, hardware break/fix and janitorial work. Why do 20 or 40 hours of research when you can read a couple of research notes and do a 30-minute phony inquiry? Yeah, they might be cutting corners, but that’s life.

Still….your analyst (be it Gartner, Forrester, AMR or whatever) report is not the holy book. You can question your analyst conclusions; you can question whether or not they apply to your country or your industry.

Do your own homework: learn about your company, learn about your country and your region, learn about your industry, and talk to your close peers.

Don’t get scared by “the brave new world” and the “unprecedented speed of change”. The ground rules of management still apply!

Read the ARmadgeddon blog from time to time, and join (or start) your local CIO Council.