Green IT savings not so easy to obtain

My monthly copy of ComputerScope arrived in the post today (on writing this I am reflecting on how funny it is to still receive such things in printed form - but I like it). There were a number of articles on Green IT and how it can save money. There is no doubt that Green IT can reduce costs but given that for most organisations in Ireland power and cooling is only a small part of their IT budget (if any - often it is not charged to IT but to some more generic facilities budget) you have to ask the question is this where IT should start to look to reduce costs. Of course it should do the easy things like turning off equipment, reducing the number of printers etc. and build green considerations into future upgrade plans, but you have to ask the question - are there not bigger fish to fry first in reducing the IT budget?

Before you say - I know I am ignoring the whole green agenda!

Long Live Social Media

We had a workshop today of the senior management team in our technology practice. During our meeting we discussed social media and how we could help clients with their social media initiatives. The conversation quickly turned to how we could use social media to do a myriad of things from our own web preference, to public sector and private sector clients etc. It was refreshing to see everyone at the meeting really engaged and excited the possibilities social media could offer us and our clients.

Long live social media.

The importance of a taxonomy

Today I attended a meeting at which IBM described their Infosphere product suite for information management. During the presentation we discussed their Business Glossary tool which led to an interesting discussion around the importance of having an agreed business glossary (taxonomy). The discussion centered around the fact that business and IT people don't speak the same language and in many cases even business people don't share the same language. A couple of examples were used to illustrate the problem. One example involved six directors in a telecommunications company who thought they understood what an active subscriber was but when they got together to agree the definition ended up having a big row. The other example involved a Bancassurer where the meaning of an active customer in the banking part of the business meant that they were alive whereas in the life assurance business it meant that they had died.

I think these are fantastic examples of why we should all be careful in any discussions we have regarding any topic in assuming we are using the same language - I know this has gotten me into trouble to me a few times at home as well! :)

Social Media campaign update

I promised to add updates regarding how the planning for the social media campaign was going. At this stage I have considered who the target audience is and am currently thinking about the following being the key elements of our campaign:

1. Traditional email survey
2. Traditional on street survey
3. Engage with Irish bloggers to build awareness and drive traffic to the email survey
4. Provide twitter updates for feedback and regular updates
5. Create a specific website with relevant content and blogs to drive traffic and get qualitative feedback.
6. Create a facebook page with links to survey and twitter updates etc.
7. Do press releases with traditional media

Next step is to meet our PR agency to review.

What is a CIO ?

I was recvently reviewing some research undertaken by Deloitte and Cranfield University regarding the role of the CIO in business today. The research identifies five different kinds of IT leadership and argues that organisations require these different leadership styles as their use of technology matures.

The first style of leadership is the traditional IT manager or IT director whose primary role revolves around the provision of infrastructure, communications and systems. This style of leadership is called for where IT is seen purely as a support function for accounting, billing etc.

The second style is the Evangelist CIO whose role is to raise the profile of IT in the organisation and sell the idea that IT can deliver business value. The CIO seeks to convince his peers of the transformational power of IT through vision and delivery of capabilities that improve operational performance.

As the power of IT becomes more recognised within the organisation a CIO who is able to lead by example is required. This is what is called the Innovator CIO. This CIO should propose how IT can support the delivery of new products or services and deliver competitive advantage to the organisation. He should also try to encourage the use of technology in this way throughout the organisation and not build his own empire around it.

The facilitator CIO is required to support the next stage in the evolution of the organisation. The role of the facilitator CIO is to ensure that technology pervades every part of the organisation and is used on a horizontal rather than on a departmental or divisional basis.

In the final stage the organisation is sufficiently mature and the use of IT sufficiently embedded in the organisation that an IT manager or IT director is what is really required and not a CIO, thereby bringing things full circle. At this stage the facilitator CIO should look to move themselves into a different CxO role.

While these CIO role definitions are somewhat utopian I nevertheless find them insightful and think that they may prove useful to anyone who is seeking to expand their role beyond that of an IT manager of IT director or indeed a CIO.

More detail on these roles and further research on the role of the CIO can be found in the research report at http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,cid%253D237072,00.html.

Launching a Social media campaign & survey

At the firm at which I work we are about to launch a survey and social media campaign in order to understand public opinion around a particular issue. It will be the first full social media campaign that the firm I work for has launched and to be honest I am pretty excited by the idea. Being technologists we have a pretty clear idea of what we want to do but, having contacted our marketing department, the next step is to meet our PR agency to understand their perspective. This meeting is a week or so away but in the meantime I will work on building out the approach.

I will provide updates as to how things are progressing. Keep reading!

Opinions on Oracle's Acquisition of Sun

Much has been written about the impact that Oracle's acquisition of Sun will have. Ultimately I think time will tell whether the benefits outway the downsides for organisations which 2 years ago had BEA, Oracle and SUN as independent vendors. There is no doubt that Oracle's ability to put together an entire software stack from application to disk is a compelling one, but I know customers I am talking to see potential downsides especially on the commercial side as they effectively become locked in to Oracle. Customers are also concerned about what this means for Java and MySQL.

But there are many views out there in the Industry, I thought it would be worth summarising a few.

Forrester Research. Forrester believes it introduces uncertainity for customers, but that it may be a defining moment in the IT industry as it will trigger a new IT model as it integrates application technologies with virtualisation, cloud computing and automation to reduce costs associated with IT.

Gartner believes that deal opens up more options for existing Sun and Oracle customers but recommends that customers lock Sun in to long term hardware contracts and proceed with caution around middleware products until Oracle releases a detailed roadmap. It also suggests that any customers thinking of migrating away from Sun hardware delay this until it is clear what Oracle's strategy and roadmap will be.

The Oracle user group is more positive seeing it as an exciting development mainly because it is a technology acquisition and that Java will now be under Oracle's guardianship.

The following link http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid41_gci1354198,00.html provides a more detailed overview of what is being said on the web.

Social Media expectations of service providers

I am talking to a service provider about assisting them with making the case for an enterprise social media strategy. They have done some preliminary work with social media tools in a particular area of their business which has been reasonably successful but now wish to think about rolling it out across their business.
This led me to think about how a service provider would use social media tools. Of course the first question has to be how would their customer base like to and even expect to interact with them. Traditional web presences for service providers have been around view and paying bills on line, getting static information about products and services and sometimes some limited customer service. I wonder what people want today - would I join a facebook or myspace community around a particular service provider (I don't think I would myself), would regular updates around products, services and service outage issues be useful (I think so), would I like to interact online for customer service queries (yes), would I like information or instructional videos or podcasts (yes), would I read a company blog (probably).

I would be interested in others thoughts or experiences. Let me know.

The Printer Saga: To replace or not to replace

Our colour laser printer is broken. The current printer is a lexmark laser printer, but the firm also has a range of Nicoh printers which are outsourced and whose cost is based on a one off up front cost and a price per page printed.

The current LexMark is terminally ill and needs replacing. The question now is what to replace it with - another lexmark or a Ricoh. Today I assisted the IT department in developing a three year TCO model for each printer. It was surprisingly complex and involved taken into account all sorts of costs such as the initial purchase or upgrade cost of the printers, what kinds of documents are printed on the printer (different types of document have different coverages and therfore ink usage), cost per page (quite difficult to determine for the lexmark) etc. I produced a pretty simple model to compare the TCOs but had to make all sorts of assumptions and exclusions which may ultimately be wrong and mean we could make the wrong decision.

IT Cost Reduction Lessons Learned

I recently assisted a medium size organisation in identifying opportunities for reducing their IT cost base. I learned a lot in the process.

Background.
The organisation had a federated business and IT model with only a limited of number of functions operating on a shared basis. Each business unit had its own IT function who was funded by the business unit and operated primarily with its goals in mind. Each business unit and IT unit had its own business and IT head. Given that there were a half a dozen or so business units this made for a lot of stakeholders when you add in the central stakeholders such as the CIO and his team.

The project was ultimately successful but was very challenging. Below are my key lessons learned from the project:

1. Stakeholder management is key. Everyone knows this is the case in any big project, but every so often we need to be reminded of it. Take the time to identify and understand the objectives of each of the stakeholders right at the start of the program. Knowing where they are coming from will give you at least some chance of managing them during the program.
2. Understand that people are threatened by the program. Everyone knows that headcount reduction is a possible outcome of any sort of cost review. It's important to remember this in all your dealings with people.
3. Be able to provide evidence to back up your assertions. If your are proposing that a particular path will save money be prepared to back it up with evidence. You will loose credibility if when challenged you are unable to support your hypothesis. This will also give ammunition to those who wish the program to fail.
4. Set expectations early. Be clear upfront about how you will assess the cost and benefits of any cost reduction initiatives identified. It is important that everyone understands that figures will be derived on a top down or bottom up basis and that further work may be require to fully qualify individual initiatives.
5. Understand the company culture. Be sure you understand the company's culture and work within or around it. Failure to do so can result in unnecessary resistance to your work.
6. Get your financial baseline right up front. Having discussions around today's costs at the end of the engagement is counter productive.
7. Involve finance in the program right the way through. They not only have to sign off on your proposal but they also can be a vital source of information.
8. Perhaps most importantly if you are from outside the organisation, find some within the organisation that is committed to the exercise, understands the organisation's politics and can help you navigate around the inevitable landmines.
9. Use someone external to assist in the program- it is a good source of external ideas, avoids group think and focuses the mind of those involved.
10. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. Enough said.

The value and cost of information

In the past year I have noticed an increasing awareness and need within organisations of all types for accurately and up to date information. In meeting after meeting with clients information has been discussed as a major issue for their organisation. These conversations are fascinating but what characterises most of them is a lack of knowledge as to where to start or the inability to build a business case. The business case for improved information management capabilities in an organisation is really easy to see but difficult to quantify in many cases. I advise clients to think of two things: 1) How much is the information in their organisation worth - most organisations haven't considered this but when they do usually agree that it is a very large number. I personally like the approach that asks executives to consider how much their organisation would be worth if it were sold without any information. Most agree that this would only be a fraction of the price of the organisation with information. 2) Consider how much it is costing them to maintain their data today. Again most organisations don't have a good handle on this but know it is a lot. When all costs are considered, both in IT and the business the number becomes very big. Building a business case around these two concepts is sure to grab executive attention.