Talking with a consultant years ago, he told me that “time is my only inventory”. Essentially, he was saying that “time is money”. Over the years since, I have considered different ways of looking at this concept. Since we are all here for a finite period, you could look at it as a statement that recognizes that time is an asset that is in limited supply.

Tied-Up

Eventually, I considered how fungible time is, in this context, and extended the idea to “time is my only inventory and has a short shelf-life“.

In other words, it expires. It is not infinite and should be used wisely. But, no matter what you do, it is the ultimate “use it, or lose it” proposition.

Which brings me back to the first question at the top of this post: “Tied up in meetings all day?”

For most, the answer is “yes”. Much has been written about how to make meetings more effective, productive, shorter, so I am not going to take that up here. What I will state is the obvious: meetings are one of the greatest thieves of time; of our only ‘inventory’; of our most precious and finite asset.

The fact that we call it being “tied-up” should be a clue that we are, perhaps, being held against our will; would rather be doing something else; or are not having a wonderful time. A bit more seriously -by tying us up, meetings are  limiting our effectiveness and ability to take care of business. The gravitational pull of all the things that are happening outside of the meeting room are mind-numbing and degenerating to the meetings themselves. Distractions are everywhere, as all manner of devices are beeping, vibrating, flashing, ringing, and keyboards (or thumbs) raging to text or e-mail or otherwise engage some outside party. ‘Can you repeat the question’ becomes the most common response to questions raised in the meeting.

How does this happen in the first place? Scheduling over the top. This idea that forces outside of our control can swoop in and take our time, even double and triple book our time slots, has flat-out got to stop. This is where leadership has to control the ‘tone at the top’, not by an edict to stop all meetings, but through more subtle, rational, trusting, respectful, aspirational and inspirational means – a strategy of “selective engagement”.

Selective engagement (Google it) is primarily a concept use in geopolitics and foreign policy. Realism, practicality, strategy, leadership and priority are key foundational elements.

The best leaders I have seen know (or figure out) how to selectively engage their teams and the issues and opportunities that they are arrayed to pursue. They know how to set expectations, provide direction and not unnecessarily “tie-up” the entire staff to deliver a message to one person.

So, as leaders pull boxes of an organization’s time “off the shelf”, they need to consider that there is no such thing as restocking or back ordering. Our inventory of time is non-returnable and non-refundable.

Picture Copyrighted Material of www.123rf.com

Now a new name has become popular – consumerization of IT. This will soon be shortened to simply “consumerization”, much like cloud computing became just “cloud” . Consumerization is currently being defined by the marketing departments and at the various conference circuits i.e. Interop and is reaching critical hype mass.

For CIOs and any member of the IT department or function: think broadly — this is less about giving corporate e-mail access to iPhone users or enabling social media through the firewall than it is about federating a governance model within your organizations.

What is IT governance? The question should simply be what is governance? We need to drop the IT out, as if there is or should be (or ever was) a difference from organizational policy and decision making. While you are at it, put less think time into “controls”  directed at the users. Instead, the view needs to be the very system and data models in place and how users, excuse me – “consumers”, are exposed to them.

Because your employees have arms and legs, your company’s data walks into and out of the building every day and has for decades on laptops, cell phones, thumb drives, USB drives or through the VPN to home machines. While you were controlling things by clamping down on BlackBerrys and auto deleting corporate e-mail when the mail box limits were reached, users were forwarding messages to MobileMe, Google, Dropbox, Hotmail.

Look for a lot of articles, posts, conferences, Gartner and Forrester research, etc. on consumerization. Look for vendor hype to include scare tactics that your data is melting right before your eyes! Of course, new products are on the way.

For CIOs: Don’t panic, no knee-jerk is required. Think beyond iPads, iPhones, Android as devices. That gives you the feeling that you can control. Instead, think about the way your business needs to do its business, fundamentally, and work with the business to come up with practical strategies for their consumers.

Bottom line: get to a point where you deeply understand the issues. My bet is that many of you are not there yet. While you are at it, start to become aware of the term “frictionless”.

It is not as if this hasn’t been tried before. Different day different hype bomb. I think I see another one coming: “consumerization” of IT.

Now our demise will come from the individual with his/her iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device.

Ultimately, if you are a weak CIO, you will be pushed around. The successful ones I know do not sit around fretting about their worth. They are focused on understanding the needs of their organizations and delivering the IT capabilities.

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

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.

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

Apparently, there is no shortage of ways to generate revenue for cash-strapped government programs. Now we hear of New York Senator Charles Schumer’s idea for a 25 cent tax on calls to offshore call centers.

From CIO.com:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation that calls for taxing companies that transfer domestic customer service calls to foreign call centers. In a prepared statement, Schumer said the $0.25 excise tax is designed to provide incentive for companies to keep call center jobs on American soil.

Of course, this “incentive”  is highly unlikely to have its desired effects for the following reasons (and probably many more):

1. This will cost everybody 25 cents more for each customer service, help desk or other such call. Either the government will get the 25 cents, or a US-based service provider will be able to charge its US business customer higher rates (up to 25 cents per call) than the offshore provider.
2. The cost of doing business will increase as companies will have quarterly disclosure filing requirements, related audits and other bureaucracy-related fees.
3. The cost and size of government will increase to administer the program.
4. The switching costs to move already-implemented business process solutions from offshore centers to onshore centers would likely exceed the “benefits” of bringing the solution back to the States.

Other than this government’s insatiable appetite for taxing its citizens, what other reason could there be for imposing such a tariff?

With midterm elections less than 5 months away, populist programs that tout job creation/protection will be the rage.

In a blog post at OutsourcingPortfolio.com, it was noted that:

the National Association of Call Centers (NACC)  reported that US call center employment has generally grown – even through the current great recession…

So, are we trying to fix something that is not broken? No. We are breaking things further by creating an even uglier climate for businesses trying to succeed in America.

Further, from CIO.com:

According to Schumer’s plan, companies would have to certify annually with the Federal Trade Commission that they are in compliance with the offshore call center rules, or be subject to civil penalties. But the logistics involved in actively policing offshore call center traffic could prove much more costly to the federal government than to companies that outsource overseas.

Bottom line: another government money grab that increases the cost of doing business (thus killing job growth) and adds to the cost and size of government.

©2010 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

Why would I do such a thing? Why would anybody? Simple – it fills (or at least promises to fill)  a major void and lots of gaps that many of us have. Anybody with one arm longer than the other from lugging around laptop poundage knows that light, powerful, practical — AND fun, slick, cool — is quite a gap filler.

Most of all, though, is that it won’t be long, in my humble opinion, before business and personal computing is forever blurred by the phenomenon of  ”bring your own device”. That device can be an iTouch, iPhone, iPad, iMac — i-anything — as much as it can be a net book, tablet PC, laptop, desktop, smartphone or even Web TV.

It will soon make little sense for companies to be acquiring, distributing, managing and dealing with PCs for individual workers (except for the shop floor or other dedicated or location and function-specific scenarios). Indeed, many people have gear at home that is better and faster than the crippled, locked-up, expensive and unfriendly standard-issue work machine that they get every four years or so.

Desktop virtualization, what some call the “dynamic desktop” is the answer that abstracts the user personalization and experience from the actual device. Corporate policies and security are managed at the server and most any device can be supported for access to the company’s e-mail and internal business systems. Even more sophisticated and powerful applications such as engineering can even be served up to the right device.

Back to the iPad. I am a road warrior. I am sick of lugging things around. I use the devices that I want to use and work with my clients to connect to portals and the cloud rather than taking one of their laptops. The iPad form factor will be copied, morphed and will ultimately be a metaphor for a simple, functional and WOW device that can connect to something like Citrix’s XenDesktop and act like a work machine when it needs to.

So, it is not so important that it is Apple. They have simply shown that they are the current kings of tapping in to the unmet needs of the market which is causing a movement away from the malware infested, middling laptops and PCs that can’t do much of anything practical anymore.

©2010 Tomko Tek, LLC All Rights Reserved. iPad picture grab Copyright © 2010 Apple Inc. All rights reserved

Night Blue Sky and Tree of Light

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

In a recent post on Ars Technica,  Emil Protalinski gets Microsoft’s take on this phenomenon:

“Overall we are finding our call center volume is down significantly more than we expected,” Barbara Gordon, vice president of customer support for Microsoft, told CNET. The drop in the number of calls doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Windows 7 has fewer problems than Windows Vista. Microsoft added two online resources leading up to the operating system’s release that may have made the difference. “What we have found is we are seeing far more take-up of self-service…forums and Twitter to get responses.”

I have converted all of my office computers and laptops (except the Macs of course) to Windows 7 (saving one Vista Ultimate and XP SP3 for specialized apps). My own experience was generally less installation headaches (except finding certain drivers).  Where I was pulling my hair out with Vista issues, I am wasting less of my small company resources and finding more outlets with answers.

What has your experience been?

By George M. Tomko

Many 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