CIO Mind

Usual staff turnover for white-collar workers is around 3%. In Romania for IT professionals (geeks :-)) is much higher. I just reviewed figures for my team (120 people): 0,18% for the last 12 months. Not bad, isn’t it?

What makes geeks tick? Are geeks different? Do we need special skills to manage geeks?

I always said that a good people manager can manage any team: geeks or not.

Take a look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (quote from Wikipedia):

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the four lower levels are grouped together as deficiency needs associated with physiological needs, while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs. While our deficiency needs must be met, our being needs are continually shaping our behavior. The basic concept is that the higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus once all the needs that are lower down in the pyramid are mainly or entirely satisfied. Growth forces create upward movement in the hierarchy, whereas regressive forces push prepotent needs further down the hierarchy.

Read Linus book “Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary“:

There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life – for anything that you or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order.

The higher the abstract level of a job the higher is the importance of the upper level motivational factors. Geeks happen to work at a very abstract level: computers and anything around them are highly abstract.

After basic work needs (reasonable salary and job security) are fulfilled, geeks place an inordinate amount of importance to other factors: environment, colleagues, management style, type of work, and many other factors.

If you work a lot on other factors can obtain significant savings in his payroll budget: within the right environment you can pay below the market and still enjoy very low turnover.

Do you think this is achievable?

Sometimes CIO is the Chief Information Officer or Chief Innovation Officer or even Chief Intelligence Officer.

Not according to Nicholas Carr. In a recent post he announces another step on the road from CIO to CEO (Chief Electricity Officer).

Nicholas blogs about an announcement from Sun: a data center in a container. The data-center-in-a-box is a readymade data center in shipping containers at a starting price of a half million bucks a pop. And Nicholas comments:

In many ways, the containerized data center resembles the standardized electricity-generation system that Thomas Edison sold to factories at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Manufacturers bought a lot of those systems to replace their complex, custom-built hydraulic or steam systems for generating mechanical power. Edison’s off-the-shelf powerplant turned out to be a transitional product - though a very lucrative one. Once the distribution network - the electric grid - had matured, factories abandoned their private generating stations altogether, choosing to get their power for a monthly fee from utilities, the ultimate black boxes.

Something similar will happen - is happening - with computing, but how exactly computing assets end up being divided between companies and utilities remains to be seen. In the meantime, commodity data centers, in various physical and virtual forms, should prove increasingly popular to companies looking to radically simplify their computing infrastructure and reduce the single biggest cost of corporate computing today: labor.

Nicholas seems to wander between hardware, software and information. Modern IT is as much about process as is about information (and much less about hardware). Nobody says that a wide area networks really adds value, but one should not place process modeling and simulation (for example) on the same plateau with operation system installation.

Back in 1960’s having a computer up and running was a great achievement on it’s own. Today It is muuuch more than that.

Depending on your definition of IT, IT may or may not matter to an enterprise. Unfortunately Nicholas still uses a 1960’s definition of IT.

What do YOU think?

Today I was invited on “The Money Channel” at their Sunday “IT&C Show”. The topic: open source.

I had an interesting discussion with two smart gentlemen. I told them about how my company uses various open source solutions and how we selected them. During the discussion two interesting aspects of the open source world came to our attention.

Open source vs. world

As a CIO I was asked countless times: “Do you use open source software?” I don’t see the point of this question. I am not using a development model. I use specific solutions, specific pieces of software, chosen based on their merits.

When I analyze a potential solution it is never “open source versus Microsoft Windows Server” or “open source versus Lotus Notes”. I always compare “Linux versus Windows Server” or “sendmail versus Lotus Notes”. One cannot compare a development model with a specific piece of software.

The Che Guevara selling methodology

There are many “Che Guevara” in open source community. They come waiving flags and preaching about changing the world. They are convinced that only open source revolution can avoid the …. (fill in the blanks with your favorite apocalyptic scenario).

I can only tell them that I don’t want to save the world; I only want a decent solution to my IT problem. Corporations want solutions to their problems. The “suits” usually left world rescue to Mattel super heroes.

Don’t came to corporate speaking like a knight on a white horse. Please come armed with NPV, TCO and ROI weapons!

PS: I am a BIG fan of open source solutions! I am only sad when I saw attitudes that create bad perception about very good solutions.

In a recent issue Harvard Business Review has an article about HR departments. Most of the things in article also apply to IT departments.

Many IT mission statements boasts about “excellent” service, of course “beyond expectation”, about support, about “enabling the business” and a lot of related buzzwords.

But in business it’s always about competitive advantage and about customer.

Any CEO wants a competitive advantage for every dollar spent: growth, better customer service, lower costs and so on. Consider Wall Mart: every dollar they spend on IT it’s dedicated to improvements in their supply chain – their competitive advantage. And the CIO wants to provide “excellent service, beyond expectation”… I am not saying that good service is not necessary; I am arguing only that service is not the mission of IT. IT, like any part of the company must help create and maintain competitive advantage.

Next time when you draft you IT strategic plan ask yourself: what are my company’s competitive advantages? And what can I do to increase them? Or even better: what can I do to create a new competitive advantage?

The new technologies allow you to remain connected wherever you are. You can talk on the phone, check your email or access your files.

Welcome to the world of 24 hours shifts!

We are like a child discovering a new toy. Mobile and laptop became status symbols. We like to impress with them. They are “cool”.

Always connected we begin to think everything can be solved “now”. And from “can” to “must”, there is only one step.

Everything must be solved now, everything is urgent. We lost the sight of another dimension: “importance”. Slowly, we begin to solve only what is urgent, forgetting about what is important.

We think that the higher the rank a person has in the company, the higher the mobile phone bill must be. This means solving as many urgent problems as possible.

Wrong!

The higher the rank, the less mobile phone usage. This means solving more important, strategic issues.

If a manager must solve by himself all the urgent problems, what’s the team for? And when he can find the time for strategic issues?

I recently read a McKinsey article on strategic planning. McKinsey made a survey about strategic planning process and the conclusion are in this article.

I found interesting the declaration of one executive:

Rather than preparing executives to face the strategic uncertainties ahead or serving as the focal point for creative thinking about a company’s vision and direction, the planning process “is like some primitive tribal ritual,” one executive told us. “There is a lot of dancing, waving of feathers, and beating of drums. No one is exactly sure why we do it, but there is an almost mystical hope that something good will come out of it.”

Later in the conclusions, the author says:

A key starting point is the acceptance of the counterintuitive notion that the strategic-planning process should not be designed to make strategy. Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University, calls the phrase “strategic planning” an oxymoron. He argues that real strategies are rarely made in paneled conference rooms but are more likely to be cooked up informally and often in real time—in hallway conversations, casual working groups, or quiet moments of reflection on long airplane flights.

In our changing world, where everybody competes against everybody on a global scale, regular planning process are simply too inflexible and does not generate enough initiatives to thrive on the market. Very often, the strategic planning process in successful companies is more facilitating than prescribing.

One has to push his team, by creating an exciting environment. And if they are not the right people for your organization, remember Jim Collins:

first get the right people on the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it.

This week “The McKinsey’s Quarterly” published an interview with Paolo Scaroni, CEO of ENI.

Among other issues Paolo Scaroni shares it’s views on workforce in Europe:

The Quarterly: That raises a question about more widespread change, which many people think is needed by business systems in continental Europe. What’s your experience after working in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom?

 
Paolo Scaroni: In this context, I believe that some concepts are exactly the opposite of what they seem. When, for example, you read the European press, the talk—notably in France—is about people fighting to hold on to their precarious jobs. Well, personally, I think precarious jobs are fantastic, but the reality is that all jobs have to be precarious. Without the current labor legislation, companies in Europe would be able to create millions more jobs, as they have done in the UK. To me it is unbelievable that the boss of a company in France, Germany, or Italy devotes a lot of effort to the task of how not to hire new people, when we should be devoting our time to thinking how we can hire them.

 
In continental Europe, we have developed a mentality which says that if you were born in, say, Lyon, you deserve to live all your life in Lyon, with nobody ever firing you for any reason, every year making 5 percent more than the year before, and retiring when you are 58. In my view, that’s a pretty boring prospect, but apart from anything else, in a global world it’s an impossible dream. All politicians understand as much, but every time they try to explain it they are no longer elected. From the employee’s point of view, so-called freedom means doing dull and stupid tasks, working on when your boss is nasty and undermining your career—all because your job is “safe.” Stability, in reality, fires back, and in this respect Belgium, France, and even Spain are worse than Italy. In a world in which everyone is changing, by contrast, you can quit when you are unhappy, find a better job, and compete.

I emphasis the last sentence. The world is no longer a comfortable place. There aren’t many places left to hide from competition. All successful companies are now eliminating any warm places. You are competing on a global basis.

Customer service legends are created when everybody, and I mean everybody is dedicated to this. See this post of Jackie Huba about a Southwest Airlines gate agent. This is “WOW” customer service.

Think now about YOUR team. When was last time your IT call center received a WOW from your customers? Did your helpdesk ever received a WOW?

And you wonder why they want to outsource your department…

I tried today to find some blogs of fellows CIOs. Tough luck! I was proud of my Internet searching skills, but today I have to admit defeat.
A blog is a form of communication and require a certain degree of extroversion. A modern CIO job is about interacting with people: with top management, with peers, and with own team. A modern CIO is a communicator.
I wonder why CIOs are not present in blogoshpere….

I regularly read some programmers blogs. Most of them look like advertising to Despair, Inc. products. 

None of them is complaining about money. Still they are most demotivated people I “talk” to. Most of them are complaining about very small things, like the desk phones distribution.

In emerging markets (and I live in one) IT professionals are in a sellers market. You have to search them and keep them. Salaries are growing, agency fees are growing, and all the acquisition costs are growing. There is no single reason not to try keeping your programmers. Still, almost all blogs shows highly demotivated people.

It’s so easy – in terms of budget and management attention – to create a pleasant work environment. I did it and I know how to do it. Few of my people returned after a onlz a couple of months with another employer. And returned to a salary with 20% lower than offered by my competition.

Their arguments: the team, the environment, and the managers.