CIO Mind

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.

Franklin Jones said:

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

I can bet you carefully conduct your post implementation reviews. Right? Probably you also conduct customer satisfaction surveys. Right? Go to your desk and search for a review made in 2004 for example. It looks familiar? Did you meet the same issues on the last week steering committee? If yes, chances are you are not alone.

Most organizations simply do not learn from past mistakes and are condemned to repeat them again and again. Post mortem analyses remains hidden in drawers to gather dust. They do not generate any action plan. You should take your lessons and incorporate them in your PMO framework or in your processes.

At the next post implementation review break the consensus and push for an action plan. Do not leave the meeting without a clear understanding of what should be done to avoid gaining more “experience”.
 

You have to read this article of Guy Kawasaki.

Guy touches a lot of areas of corporate stupidity. One area I want to point out is “consensus”. With so many books and articles on team work, on building consensus, power of groups many people seems to forget about “group thinking”.

See also my post on “thermal death of the universe”.

A comfortable organization is a frozen one. Without “discomfort’ people will not move from their current habits (read processes) and the organization will soon became disconnected from its market, from its customers.

Patricia Dunn stepped down from her post as nonexecutive chairman of Hewlett-Packard after HP board spying scandal.
She declared that the spying included “a number of individuals outside the company, including journalists.”
How much harm a little “identity theft” can do? HP just failed the business ethics exam.