The Costs and Benefits of Enterprise Technology

My technology chops lag a bit behind the writers and readers of this blog. While I am taking the Piwowar EBS challenge along with Chet, Floyd and others, my day to day activities are more focused on trying to blow hot air onto the frozen middle of enterprise technology management. Chet recently retweeted a good question that got me thinking, reading and (now) writing. The question was:



That post linked to a super article called Upper Mismanagement from The New Republic. It discusses how many executives, having risen up from finance instead of operational backgrounds, are probably incapable of leading American manufacturing today.

We see many of those same problems in IT. Those leaders who come from a finance background tend to be focused on showing the money (or the savings), while the technical leadership are just as focused on innovative technology. That often leaves the more operational business folks hanging in between, trying to keep the business going - doing more with less.

One problem seems to be that the wrong people are making the decisions - for the wrong reasons. This is an organizational problem: the right people are not in the right place. Technical, financial, and business folks all need to work together to create the solutions that will best advance the organizational mission. Too great a focus on any of those areas will potentially endanger the goals of the others. Jake spoke to part of this divide in his OOW 08 presentation (slide 9):



What about solutions?

In a recent seminar on financial management for IT, we worked with Intel's Business Value Index model. When you have a few minutes, read this white paper: IT@Intel White Paper Using an IT Business Value Program to Measure Benefits to the Enterprise. I'll provide the first line as a teaser:

Intel's IT business value (ITBV) program has shifted our IT investment decision making process to a customer-focused, data-driven model that demonstrates the impact of IT on Intel’s bottom line.

Yes! Right on! Isn't that what we all do?! I'd argue that if we all did this even half as well as Intel we wouldn't have as many questions about "finance killing IT" or "IT costing too much" or "IT not serving business needs."

I encourage all of us to read this paper. It explains how Intel's model "works by evaluating IT investments along three factors: IT business value, impact on IT efficiency, and the financial attractiveness of an investment." I love how they are ranked.

The key to the success of the Intel model seems to be accurate measurement of all three factors. Cost is frequently measured, but not always accurately. How often have you seen a solution implemented without provisions for its total cost? IT efficiency is measured less often. Business value is typically implied in requirement gathering, but I often see operational metrics missing once a solution goes into production. One example comes from a business intelligence project I am working on. In all of our work to help our business owners develop KPIs, we came up short on defining those metrics that would indicate how well IT was performing. See a good post from CIO magazine on developing metrics for IT.

So, if it is easy and obvious to do the right thing around measuring the benefits of IT to the enterprise, why is it not done consistently? I used to think it was just me, or just my organization, or just my industry (Higher Education and Research). Since I have been in school and doing a bit of consulting, though, I find my peers in all industries are singing the same tune. Perhaps one answer is implied in the New Republic article referenced earlier in this post. Perhaps we are not preparing ourselves and those around us to take the lead in this area.

Here is a good recent publication from my industry highlighting the shifting roles in IT leadership. I would argue it is not that different in other industries. Nor would I argue that any of this is new. Here is a similarly good recent publication from the CIO Executive Council called the State of the CIO 2010. I also recently read some great old school management principles from IBM's heyday. They are enjoyable and still applicable. Check out especially the "IBM management principles and practices" and the "Quintessential quotes."

Please find the comments if you love or hate any of the resources I've included. Please also drop a comment if you have an answer to the question of "will 'show me the money' kill IT?"

Thank you @oraclenerd and @brhubart for getting me thinking, reading, and writing. Now I can shed the slacker tag for a spell and get back to my work on the Piwowar EBS challenge (I am still on hardware and OS, ugh).

Ted [ linkedin | twitter ] is Vice President for Communications at the Higher Education User Group, MBA and MSIS student at the Johns Hopkins University, Director of Administrative Systems at MICA, and slacker at badgerworks.

MySQL Friday

Each month we have an IT All-Hands meeting.

Last month I was promoted to Senior Vice President (SVP), because of my superior management techniques.

Today I was promoted to CEO! Unfortunately it only lasted for a few minutes. I happen to resemble our new CEO (and I'm always pining for a promotion) and they thought it would be funny (again) to bring me up.

I hugged the guy behind me, shook hands with people next to me and ran up to the front. I wanted to shriek, like the people do on The Price is Right, but I didn't have it in me. You gotta have fun at work right?

Well, after that it got serious. Our new Director (at WellCare, Directors are executives, one step up from managers and one below VPs) who heads our architecture team (and release management) got up to discuss where he would be taking us.

Slide one:
From 3 database engines to 1.
From 4 programming languages to 2.
From 3 OSs to 1.

Wanna guess what question I had?

"So, what database engine are we going to use?"

I knew the answer, but I take every single opportunity I get to make my point.

"MySQL."

Being on the datawarehouse team, I was confident that Oracle was not going away.

He went on to explain:

"Legacy applications would be maintained but everything going forward would be done in MySQL."

A flurry of questions came from the crowd so I was unable to followup immediately. I could feel the room come alive...it was weird (I think I'm still hopped up from the events that took place today).

Our CIO asked if there were any more questions or comments.

I spoke up.

I have two points.
1. If it's about cost, move all of the one-off applications into just a few Oracle instances. From what I can tell, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 100. Let's say 5 databases, datawarehouse, our production OLTP and one for others. All you need to do is assign them different schemas, voila! Cost is much lower and there is a very big chance to reuse code.
2. Actually, I can't remember what my other point was. I think it had something to do with putting the logic in the database, that Java was the fad a few years ago, Ruby was the big thing now, what would it be in 5 years? Will we have to rewrite all of the logic then? (I guess I do sorta remember).

After that, someone asked about the two programming languages. Not a great answer from the crowd's reaction. Then someone asked about the OS.

The crowd was riotous (if that's a word). The CIO had to calm us all down.

I made a remark that he hadn't danced yet (one of our former hazing techniques for new employees) because I didn't want it to be completely personal, or just to ease something that I started.

After the meeting, I spoke with the Director. Oracle will be gone in 20 years because of the open source databases, it's being commoditized (not sure what that means). SOA is the wave of the future.

It was a polite conversation. I told him I look forward to learning from him but that I will probably never be sold on that idea. Fewer moving parts, simplicity, that's what I want.

I then spoke with the CIO, told him that once the decision was made, I would support it and keep my mouth shut (or find a new job).

I sent an email to the VP of the Director's group (after a couple of beers...idiot!) explaining my rationale.

One of the biggest reasons we chose to come to Tampa, to WellCare specifically, was because it was so young and immature. I would have the opportunity, if I could prove myself, to shape the future of IT here.

It's nice to have a voice.

Anyway, it's Friday, I'm prepped to spend all weekend at work to get this project delivered that was due in November. Have a good weekend!

Oops I've Done it Again

By it, I mean I've sent another rant to my CIO. Here's my first one that I sent to Dratz before starting my own blog.

Fortunately, we've developed a bit of a rapport. I still should not do this type of thing on a holiday when it could be days before I hear back...it just makes my mind wander and wonder if I will have a job come Monday.

Update

I still have a job...I really need to stop this.

Good Day to Worse Day

Today I got the opportunity to have lunch with my CIO.

A few weeks ago I sent him a manifesto, which I would now classify as more of a philosophy. He kept promising me he would articulate a response via email. Being the CIO of a Fortune 400 company, I figured he had better things to do than to write out an email to me. So I offered him up a trade, lunch in exchange for the email. Surprisingly, he agreed.

Today was the day but I fully expected him to cancel; surely something else would come up. Nothing did, but he did move it back by 15 minutes.

Down to the cafeteria we went (I was really hoping to go out to lunch, just to get a ride in his Porsche Gemballa). We sat in a booth and started talking. We discussed everything from my group (excellent group of people, talented and fun), using MySQL databases for one-off projects (I was for putting them in a single Oracle database), to the state of our current OLTP application (crud).

He mentioned user-defined fields (OLTP) and I told him about one instance where someone in our company created those in an internal application. I didn't say anything at the time because it was not in my group and I didn't want to call someone out for something I thought was wrong. He told me I should have, that it would be in the best interests of the company. Then he said something that I have heard him say in our All-Hands meeting, "Let me be the one that makes the wrong decision."

That sealed the deal for me. I have liked him and what he has done since he got here, but that one comment told me that he took his job as leader seriously. I was thoroughly impressed.

So that was the good (great) part of the day. I felt great because our CIO listened to me prattle on for an hour and listened to me. He even used one of my analogies (well, not mine really) in his management meeting a short time later.

Now on to the worse part.

The application I have been working on for the last few months required an Emergency Fix (EFIX) because they had detected a bug. I realized quickly that I was the culprit. Something that had worked previously was changed by me in an effort to re-factor the code. It wasn't broken. There was no specific business requirement to re-factor it, I just did it...and screwed it up. The ironic part is I had just sent out an article to my co-workers about discipline making good developers.

I told this to the Business folks, what I had done; and apparently I hadn't earned any brownie points with them because they escalated it to my boss and VP. Which of course had to go to the CIO as well...

I definitely screwed up. There's no way around that. I know better than that. Oh well. It was certainly a lesson in humility. I'm just thankful I still have a job...