Monthly Archives: February 2011

Book Review: Haunting The CEO

Posted by on February 28, 2011 2 comments


Haunting the CEO, A tale of true leadership in an era of IT failure

John D. Hughes ISBN 978-0-615-35600-6

Full disclosure, I was having a hard time finding this book in Canada, the author heard my lament on twitter and most graciously sent me a copy (signed no less!)

There are many books about leadership, and also about leadership within the technology field. These leadership texts are often written by academics based on myriads of statistics and research studies. There is nothing implicitly wrong with these statistics and studies, but it can leave the content a little text bookish, clinical, and dry for some people.

In this book, Mr. Hughes takes us down a different track.

He chose to use the format of a fictional novel, and within its storyline he applies real world leadership lessons that follow a failing CIO on the journey of improving his own leadership and performance. The author paints a vivid picture of a new CEO taking the helm of a struggling business and demanding improvements, or else.

As an executive in the small to medium enterprise, what keeps you up at night?

Answering that question is the purpose of this book. The thing that haunts the CEO and keeps him up at night is the IT function in his business that not successfully improving business results.

Just as a little sugar helps get the medicine down, couching real life, real world, leadership lessons in in this fictional story form makes an engaging read, while providing much to think about in our own leadership situations.

I highly recommend this book to all SME executives. If you are outside of IT, to see that you do not need to be a techie to demand the most from your IT leadership, and definitely to all IT leadership. (or aspiring technology professionals) It clearly demonstrates that the technology leadership function must grow beyond plugging in computers and writing some software code.

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership

-Peter Drucker

On Moving

Posted by on February 23, 2011 No comments

Yes, things have been quiet here!

We are in the final stages of determining whether we are going to pick up and move our offices to a new location.

As you may imagine, that has created a veritable rats nest of proposals, costing, chores and other minutiae that is required when any business moves its facilities.

The upside to all this work of course is that there should be some thoughts or lessons learned from the experience that can go into future posts.

Best Regards

Design Process Backwards

Posted by on February 11, 2011 1 comment

In an interview with Crossing the Chasm author Geoffrey Moore, Chris Murphy at Information Week has a truly great article titled; Global CIO: How Gen Y Can Kill Collaboration Projects.

The article is written as a caution for IT executives not to be doing IT projects (in this case collaboration) for the wrong reasons.

For Business Managers in the small to medium enterprise, one comment made by Mr. Moore is something we often do poorly in managing technology.  And I chose that comment as the title for this.

Design Process Backwards

Outside of technology, we can more easily look at this backwards view. New manufacturing line? New product? In these cases we have looked externally for demand or unmet needs and and considered methods and strategies that can tap them.

At its simplest, if you have 3 kids, and 2 dogs, that little two seat sports car is unlikely to be on the family car list at purchase time. You worked back from your requirements to what tool will meet them.

Yet when it comes to managing technology – we often put the cart before the horse when it comes to spending money or implementing a business process.

As an example, you are looking to create an IT Service Support  Management process, that meaning the sequence of tasks and steps that start with a complaint of some type of IT service failure to its resolution. Rather then start at the beginning, ask yourself first – at the end of this process – what is the desired outcome?

That question then allows you to start from that desired outcome and work backwards through the steps required to reach that end result.

If you don’t work backwards and implement a process in a vacuum, what can happen?

You have seen it or heard it in your life – I guarantee it. How about a technical support call where getting you off of the phone as fast as possible seems to be what is happening. In this case the process was designed to get fastest phone time finished as possible. No desired outcome of fix the customers problem.

This can also happen when looking at particular tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) or resource planning (ERP) as well.

Someone decides that improving communications for customers is needed to stop customer defections, and new tools are purchased and processes instituted.

But?

Perhaps if a close look was made from the outside, it may have been found that customer communication and management is doing reasonably well, but on time and accurate delivery is so completely out of whack that customers defect.

Fixing the broken shipping or delivery process will have a far higher impact than trying to improve customer relationship and communication.

The SMB Takeaway

Start with your customer. Identify exactly what problem you are trying to solve, then work backwards to what technologies or processes are going to get you there. As general managers in the small to medium enterprise I am pretty confident that you already do this type of diligence with operations, manufacturing, or marketing. But you need to do it with IT as well.

Shortening Time To Value

Posted by on February 7, 2011 No comments

A longer article by Chuck Hollis, VP Global Marketing CTO EMC Corporation titled; What CIOs Really Want To Know About Cloud

I gave up trying to define “cloud” a long time ago.  At this level, no one really cares about precise definitions, just the bottom line: what does all this mean to me?

And

As a result, there’s usually a serious conversation at the outset around mapping the potential of cloud concepts into a more specific value proposition tailored for a particular IT situation.

In short, Mr Hollis breaks down this concept of cloud computing into phased discussions;

a) What does cloud mean to me?

b) What makes this hard?

c) Accelerating the journey

The SMB Takeaway

The article  is titled what a ‘CIO’ wants to know – but it is an excellent overview for all executives interested in, or responsible for researching what we are looking for when we talk Cloud.

Book Review: Host Your Web Site In The Cloud

Posted by on February 4, 2011 No comments

Host Your Web Site In The Cloud: Amazon Web Services Made Easy

by Jeff Barr, ISBN978-0-9805-768-3-2


I read a brief note about this book in a technology journal and I ordered it almost a year before it was published. It is not what I expected for one of the following reasons!

Option 1: I misread the note about the target market and subject of the book, or

Option 2; the note was written so far in advance that the target market and / or subject changed.

What I had thought was an Executive Guide to Cloud Computing in general, with an obvious focus on Amazon Web Services, is actually a treatise on doing the work and programming necessary to Git ‘r Dun.

That being said I still want to mention some points about it – written by a programmer for programmers, the text nicely demonstrates the relative simplicity and flexibility you can obtain moving software workloads onto Amazon’s servers. What we call cloud computing. The basic concept is that building an application no longer needs you to bolt servers into racks in your office, you can build and scale it on someone else servers.

As the author states, among the benefits, no up front investment, fixed costs become variable and CAPEX becomes OPEX. Essentially aligning resources more in line with demand.

Using web based services such as Amazon’s AWS does not need to be an all or nothing option, the author provides specific examples and possible business cases where utilizing web services can supplement an existing corporate web site or application. Eg. you just need it for overflow, cyclical periods or usage spikes. (think of the website traffic from companies that are advertising during the Super Bowl!)

The text gives clear, specific samples, demonstrations and do it yourself programming guides to demonstrate what is available, and how to calculate your costs based on what your application can expect in its workloads. Workloads meaning storage, processing bandwidth utilized that your application is expected to use. The examples are specific enough that if you have accurate usage statistics on an existing web site, you should be able to quickly do a rough calculation of how much hosting that application in the Amazon cloud would cost versus your current expense. For one of my busiest web sites that is hosted by a third party provider, that rough calculation worked out to around 40%. (Although I can’t move this web site to a cloud provider such as AWS as it currently uses programming languages and databases not supported by Amazon)

The SMB Summary?

If you are small to medium business executive asking questions about the concepts of cloud computing – or asking; “Is the cloud computing for me?”

Sorry, this text won’t help you.

On the flip side?

If you have already decided to test out or pilot the concept – if you have decided you want to kick the tires – then grab a copy for your development manager.

Due Diligence Still Needed With SaaS

Posted by on February 3, 2011 No comments

When it comes to purchasing enterprise, or line of business software such as resource planning or customer relationship management tools, you don’t need to be a very big organization to have price tags in the 10′s of thousands and more.

With that type of sticker shock, you can see why there should not  be much argument on doing a proper due diligence before purchasing. Your due diligence could include performing research that provides answers to key questions;

Does this tool fit our internal processes and business model?

Does this tool support the needs we have for security, access, integration or compatibility?

Does the vendor have the financial legs to support the product?

When it comes to spending that amount of cash – we want to ensure that we are getting some value – preferably lots of value! for each dollar we spend.

But a funny thing happened on the way to office….

Instead of spending 6 or 7 figure amounts for these complex tools, we can go online and rent them for as low as 20 dollars per person.

And all of a sudden, it seems that the pressure to answer the types of due diligence questions listed above seems to just disappear. Hey! just 20 bucks a month? lets wing it!

But due diligence shouldn’t disappear.

No two businesses are alike. The IT situation you have is going to be different from somebody else. You still need to ensure that the tool you are looking for supports how you do business.

As Dale Vile writing for ComputerWeekly states;

The solution might well be capable of integrating with your accounting system, but finding out later that 20 man days of professional services or a third-party component is required to achieve this is a nasty surprise.

And it is not just large issues that can cause problems. One Software as a Service package I know works specifically (and only) with one single operating system and web browser version. Effectively locking you into their road map!

Think about that – they control when or what type of computer or software you can upgrade or purchase. (the opposite of flexible)

The SMB Takeaway

Just because it is easy to sign up for some great looking tool, does not mean that it will be easy to live with, or easy to move away from a year down the road.

So keep up the due diligence part OK?

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