Posts Tagged ciorant
Twitter ‘As-is’ Service Quality Escape Hatch
Whether it is the all-too-familiar “fail whale”, or the depressing “API Limit Exceeded” message in TweetDeck, users are finding it difficult to deal with deteriorating service levels that are rendering the service unusable for any serious social networking.
Of course, Twitter is “free”. As such, we are told that it is offered to us “as-is” and, since you get what you pay for, expectations that it will be there when you need/want it; fully-functional and void of yo-yoing, syncopating starts and stops; is simply asking too much.
In today’s post by Thomas Wailgum, “Twitter Rage: Can you Really Complain About Outages?”, he makes the point:
Think about it: The fact that I’m not paying a cent for the Twitter service means that I don’t have much ground to place “buyer-seller” type expectations upon the immature service. (This isn’t Salesforce.com downtime or disruptions with internal enterprise systems.) My outrage is tempered by my acceptance of the “free deal” I have with Twitter: You get what you pay for.
While a conventional “buyer-seller” arrangement is not evident, a binding contract is a bargain where the parties each get something for good and valuable consideration. Indeed, as the Twitter Terms state “… You may use the Services only if you can form a binding contract with Twitter…”.
Twitter’s Terms go on:
In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Twitter and its third party providers and partners may place such advertising on the Services or in connection with the display of Content or information from the Services whether submitted by you or others.
So, the bargain is that you get access to and use of the Services and Twitter gets all of the ad revenue, content, demographic information, and the ultimate financial value of their property that appreciates on the backs of the millions of users that expect to be able to have access to and use of the Service. Seems to me to be reasonable “payment” for “services” rendered.
And, of course, there is that “AS-IS” escape hatch. Thus, there is no warranty and I (or anybody else) cannot make a claim for damages. Fine.
But, as far as expectations go, I am not as willing, anymore, to give Twitter an easy “Pass” because they are growing so fast and are not yet mature. The Twitter value proposition is diminishing as my time is being squandered on a service that is not getting better because too many interfaces are sucking the life out of it and too many users are being added to the pile.
I hope it gets better.
Luckily, we, as users, have no obligation to stay with the “service”. If it gets bad enough, we’ll be gone and “AS-IS” will become “AS-WAS”.
Tell me what you think.
©2010 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved
Reports of CIO ‘Death’ Premature
CIOs Must Have the Ear of the CEO
The Chief Information Officer is not a second-rate executive position as some would claim. Also, CIO, does not, as the saying goes, stand for “Career Is Over”. And the CIO position is certainly not “dead”, contrary to rumors to the contrary. As Mark Twain once said, “rumors of my death are premature”.
There is this notion that CIOs deserve a “seat at the table”. The “table” in this sense is the CEO staff, as a peer exectuive with the CFO, COO, and assorted VPs of Operations, Sales, etc. Much is written in blogs (included my own), magazine articles and discussed in forums about the justification for this belief. The main idea is that CIOs have to be more ’strategic’. Supposedly, the mechanism for becoming more strategic is most often termed “alignment”.
Let me so bold as to suggest that things like ‘contribution’ and ‘value’ go right along with ’strategic’. There are plenty of tactical issues with managing a business. Things are dynamic, a flow, requiring a dexterity of seamlessly migrating through issues of business performance: sales, product quality, customer satisfaction, supply chain, etc. Information Technology is clearly threaded through these and other areas of the business. However, the trick is to demystify and ‘dis-abstract’ this stuff so that you are not spending half of the monthly strategy meeting talking about who should be allowed to get a Blackberry or an iPhone.
So, the big picture has something to do with not being the “moron in the room”. True executive ”peers” suffer fools badly. The thought that there is somehow a special microscope for CIOs is nonsense — unless it takes one to see the value that the CIO is delivering. It is more about culture and being in the “club”. The one thing about clubs full of highly-ambitous people is that they are territorial and very picky about letting others inside.
Prior to being hired for a CIO position a few years ago, the HR executive told me that the company was thinking about slimming down the number of direct reports to the CEO. Thus, they were considering having me report to the CFO. My response: a non-starter. If they were trying to reduce the number of CEO reports, I had just the solution: have the CFO report to me.
After an awkward chuckle or two, the HR executive was back to his senses. I wasn’t asking for a seat at the table. I expected one. It is all about grabbing a chair and acting like you belong there.
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Bottom line
quit whining. If you do not have the business-savvy to earn the respect of fellow business executives, then you deserve to be seated in the gallery.
For more on this topic: Business Solutions: Death of the CIO?, by Nadia Cameron; The Death of the CIO–Again, by Brian Watson; Is the CIO a “pinnacle” position?, by George Tomko; and
What Do CEOs Want from CIOs?, by Maryfran Johnson.
Image: Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
©2010 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved
The Gift of Time
Night Blue Sky and Tree of Light
By George M. Tomko
The holiday season. The end of the year. A new year and new decade just up ahead. Most of us are on holiday this week and this is the greatest gift that the season brings us – the gift of time.
We may be skiing, on vacation, digging into another batch of cookies, reading, making resolutions or putting the stacks of papers into some kind of order. But, In general, we aren’t working; or, in wall-to-wall meetings; or planning a weekend cut-over to a new system.
The brief respite that we have been given will end with a vengeance on Monday, January 4, 2010. So we better be ready.
Clear memory, reboot, recharge – whatever you do, take this gift of time and backflush all of the crud and waxy buildup that has accumulated on your brain in what was a brutal 2009.
Quite a number of challenges await your return. 2010 will be a pivotal year. The rate of disruptive technology changes, and the new social contract that will emerge from economic recovery, will drastically test the “elasticity” of the organization to deal with things.
Whatever happens in 2010, it is going to take more guile and determination, intensity, creativity, resourcefulness and tenacity from leaders.
So, enjoy the time off. IT Leaders will be called upon to actually lead in 2010. Figuring things out will take a clear head and the ability to find some think time and plan the moves. We used to call it “blue sky” or thinking outside the box but, first and foremost it requires thinking.
Simple, maybe. But such a simple thing is often sabotaged by knee-jerks and bad reactions.
Bottom-line: Come out of this holiday season thinking right.
Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved
Cloud Computing – a Capital Idea?
Cloud computing boosters use the selling point that establishing large amounts of storage or computing requires no “up-front capital investment”. Pleading before the gods of capital within corporations has been a bane for IT and business operations functions forever. All those appropriation request forms and cash flow analyses – not much fun when you want the servers installed and the software loaded.
What has always been interesting to me is that more thought, analysis, decision-making and accountability goes in to managing the capital investment portfolio than you often see in managing operating expenses. The irony here is that “op-ex” is very often many multiples larger than the “cap-ex” spend in any given fiscal period. If a $400 million company (in terms of revenue) has an operating profit of 20%, then the company managers spent $320 million with likely much less oversight than the $15 million that they might have spent on projects.
At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. Just like leasing became the way to ensure “technology refresh” every 3 years, let’s make sure that cloud computing and all something-as-a-service offerings don’t wind up costing your company more or that the standards of decision-making are usurped by being able to fly more stuff under the financial controls radar.
The saying “you can pay me now or you can pay me later” became a “tag” line in old oil filter commercials where the idea was that you might pay more now for a premium filter but you would be avoiding the cost of replacing the entire engine later. Of course, the assumption is that you would own the car long enough for this to pay off. This was in the era when the majority of people traded-in and bought new cars in 3 or 4 year cycles. Not long after, 3 year leases perpetuated the cycle.
The reality, then, was that most people wound up paying now and they got to do it over and over because later never came!
Another myth that is related is the 3,000 mile oil change. Again, another marketing bonanza because it got people to pay to replace their oil and filters twice as often as the auto manufacturers recommend in the owner manuals.
So back to op-ex and cap-ex and buying infrastructure/software/platforms as-a-service. If I take the op-ex view, it is almost always an incremental view as in year-over-year budgets and the dearth of zero-base reviews. If I take the cap-ex view, everything is an investment and is evaluated as cash-flows over a defined “economic life”. This takes rigor and commitment and the potential for more eyes to see and more ears to hear.
It is not a bad thing to have the option of paying for something as a service. However, it is a bad thing if the selling point is that you get to relieve yourself of the burden of evaluating and justifying the all-in costs of doing it one way or another.
Remember, you can pay now or pay later. Some times, it is nice to get to pay later.
What do you think. Please leave a comment.
©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved
Making Companies Smarter
Readers of my recent post “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?” can find a great post to continue the thought at CIOZone: “Ask the CIO–Do you want more BI & a smarter company?”.
In her post, Lauren E. Bielski writes:
“Nobody wants a less capable organization if there’s a way around the usual trade-offs posed by budgets, time constraints, and the competition. Hence, more talk than ever these days about fact-based decision making— which is pretty revered in management—and more efforts around data mining in an effort to learn more about operations, customers, and winning tactics.”
Good observations. But, are companies getting anywhere with their efforts? Quoting from a recent Aberdeen research report:
“the creation, management, and continual review of key performance indicators can prove to be a difficult process, particularly when large, complex data volumes are combined with rapidly changing business dynamics.”
Yes, it is not easy to do. I would also suggest that asking the CIO to make the company ’smarter’ may not be the best approach.
Net-net, companies have to do a number of things with their culture, vision, approach and, above all, not leave the job to the IT department.
Business leaders will not be able to get away with the abdication of attention and support that has doomed many an ERP implementation. No, they “own” this one. IT will lend its helping hand, but CIOs should push back and push back hard.
The CIO will have enough challenges executing the enabling initiatives.
What do you think? Please offer your comments.
©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Does Business Intelligence Require Intelligent Business?
As I started to develop this blog post, it occurred to me that my working title, “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?” might have been previously used in some other publication. So, I Googled it.
I did find some very close variations, but not exactly in the form of the question that the title poses.
I was led to a white paper, “business intelligence is intelligent business”, by Gerry Davis, Regional Managing Partner, Asia-Pacific for Heidrick & Struggles. In the opening paragraph, the problem is summarized thusly:
“Collecting information about customers is relatively easy. Analyzing customer information for potential cross-sells, increased revenue streams, and improved service is more challenging. But getting the information to the front line in a timely manner and thus providing further competitive edge is proving increasingly difficult for many corporations.”
As we look at this statement, there are three main points: 1) collecting is “easy”; 2) analyzing is hard; and 3) disseminating it is very hard. Perhaps a bit oversimplified. But, in reality, most users will need this to be oversimplified to be able to overcome all their biases about IT, systems in general, any extra “work” that will automatically be assumed and fears about job security. This is said this way, not to be unkind, or even to be negative, but to make sure that the focus is on the right “problem”.
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Do Consultants Deliver Value? (Part 2 of a continuing series)
I started this journey by considering all of the talent that is now out ‘there’ due to the economy downturn and a workforce that is facing an unprecedented number of retirements. That is a lot of experience that could be for sale and, when looking at traditional consulting engagements from “brand name” firms, are customers buying potential, when they could be engaging highly-experienced and been-there, done that practitioners?
I put out a set of exploratory questions to see how people see this.
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Management Issues in the Cloud
As an advisor to CIOs and a well-traveled CIO myself, I have come to appreciate the disruptive nature of technology innovation and the valid (and sometimes painful) introspection that it engenders.
Most of the time it comes down to being the bridge between “geek-ness” and sound business management practice. God bless our technical architects but, if it was up to them, we would be running things with a goal of technology exploration first.
Of course, we have a business to run and customers to serve. The CIO has to provide the ‘glue’ to such fiduciary necessities like internal controls, SOX, regulatory compliance, process management, security, business continuity, privacy, cost management and operational integrity.
Such things are not popular topics when talking about exciting new developments in cloud computing, social media, etc. Eyes roll when process frameworks like ITIL, CoBIT, CMMI, etc are brought into the conversation. So, among the plethora of content posted daily about cloud computing technology and enticing offers to get into new service offerings, it was encouraging to see some content about some basic management facts and considerations about the cloud.
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Take your Vacation-The Future will still be there when you get back!
I cannot believe it. Tomorrow morning, I am back to the ‘real’ world. You see, I have just returned from 16 days of vacation. I did not do a thing related to work, other than tweet some from my mobile. In effect, I put my brain in a jar and let it cool down. There is so much to occupy its time that burn-out or, in my case, flame-out, is a very real possibility.
As I began packing for this week’s business travel, I thought back to an article that I wrote in CIO magazine ‘way’ back in 2002 (available here). It had several themes, but the primary reason for writing it was that I actually accomplished a three-week vacation and felt that the world needed to know about it. By this time, I was less than 4 years as a CIO. However, in that time, I had been through enough global system and infrastructure deployments to fill several careers.
But, that was becoming something I could do in my sleep. 2002 was a time of the coming of age of the business savvy CIO. It was the only way that a CIO would be able to survive-at least those who considered themselves “strategic”. At that time, the average tenure of a CIO was something like 18 months and that wasn’t good for anybody.
At the end of the day, the true revelation about actually taking a three week vacation was more about the fact that I could let go of the techie stuff. I had built a high potential group of managers that were running things just fine. When I got back from that vacation, I was all fired up about diving into the business issues and strategic imperatives.
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