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

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

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

This is about the 20 millionth blog post or article that has been written with some reaction to last week’s *new* Google Chrome OS announcement. For the most part, it was a surprise announcement – mostly because it was not leaked to the press.

I have posted about Google in a mostly positive light (“Google: No brag, just fact”; “What’s the Thing with Bing?”) but I do not own any Google stock or have any financial interest whatsoever, directly or indirectly. And, my point-of-view is going to be widely different than most of what is out there. Since I am not wedded to any particular technology, all I have to ask is, why would or should I care (as a CIO, consultant, consumer, etc.)?

I have read some great posts (PC Mag’s Michael Miller; CIO.com’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) that have really thought out and carefully presented the author’s arguments in the following major categories: 1) Microsoft killer; 2) Linux killer; 3) gives Google the keys to the world; 4) is it really ‘open’;  5) is this really ‘new’? All good questions and perspectives, but the answers don’t really mean much.

So, to the fundamental question: why would I (or you) care? I guess I would care if it changed my (or your) life in some way or another, positively or negatively. So, if I am a CIO, I might be concerned about this throwing a monkey-wrench into my carefully thought out strategic technology plan.

Maybe I was planning on rolling out Windows 7. But, now, I might be worried that I am going to be playing the IT version of the game “52 card pick-up”.

Now, as a consultant, I might welcome all of this uncertainty. Consultants get rich when there is a lot of head-scratching going on and someone has to come in and tell the folks what to do.

As a technologist, I might be fuming (or celebrating) that this is going to be marginalizing the good work of the open source community and related foundations that have coordinated and sponsored projects to get some cohesion in a smaller set of more robust Linux distros. Why might I be upset? With Google “branding” and financial might, they might be a force that pulls from, rather than nurtures, the continuing development of mainstream (read Ubuntu) Linux. On the other hand, I might now have many more opportunities to work on the newest of the new things.

As a consumer, I can already get a netbook with Linux and OS X on a Mac, will there be something magical that happens with new product capabilities?

Naw. Bottom line is that the CIO will move forward, as planned.  The technologists will have spirited debates like they always do and groups will splinter off – as they always do. As a consumer, I’ll just be wondering what new feature I will get to pay for in some new gadget.

At the end of the day, it is all about innovation, competition and all the things that need to keep happening to advance the state-of-the-art and either create new value or steal more share of what is already there. Microsoft still stands out in the ‘crowd’. Of course, that ‘crowd’ is becoming one of more or less equals.

And I never, ever, thought that Java would be an Oracle product.

So things change.

And that is exactly what we want. Without it, we still might be running Windows 98 SE. There is so much stuff out there, it will be decades of disruption before the things we talk about now are as ho-hum and boring as telephones, flushing toilets and electricity.

Until then, it will be like Al Bernstein once said, “Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.”

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

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

Why would I care?

I already have a hammer in my toolbox – Google. If Bing was there first, perhaps it would be in the box instead of Google.

Every time I open a browser window, Google greets me with little fanfare, an occasional art curiosity to add a subtle touch to the spirit of a holiday or some other social theme.

I even switched my default home page to Bing, to see how it felt. In a day, I was back to Google.

There is a lot of money to be made with every point of share of the search engine pie. Bing is a curiosity, at the moment, and has picked up a few points. Maybe that is a good thing. Market leaders should always feel the hot breath of a competitor from time-to-time.

But, this is Google’s ‘turf’. Live Search with a new paint job just isn’t enough innovation for me.

To be fair, I have a potentially opposite situation with browsers. I have been using Google Chrome to see if it can pull me away from IE8. Say what you want about IE. But, like Google search, IE was in my toolbox first. I have built my online existence around it. IE8 is nice, although IE7 almost lost me.

So, what’s the thing with Bing? For me, interesting, but not worth trading.

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”.

Like the human brain, which, in a lifetime, is barely tapped for 10% of its ultimate potential, the organization “brain” is woefully underutilized. A number of studies and surveys have consistently shown that enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) software, such as SAP, Oracle, etc. are underutilized.

As Albert Einstein was once quoted, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together, they are powerful beyond imagination.” Such a proclamation will only be true if there is a significant change in the approach that knowledge workers take to their jobs.

Mr. Davis suggests that organizational change may be the answer:

“As business intelligence divisions spring up in organizations across the globe, the same question is being asked: “How can we unlock the value of our data?” At Heidrick & Struggles, we believe that the answer lies in implementing an appropriate organization structure and in identifying and appointing the right executive — someone with superb business acumen combined with a sound technical understanding — and tasking them with delivering real business intelligence.”

In a very weird way, I actually agree and disagree, simultaneously, with this statement. For a company like H&S, an organizational solution is going to feel like the absolutely right thing to do. After all, that is one of the main things that they do. For organizations that commit to this approach and throw the full weight of their senior management commitment (and funding) at sustainable levels, it may work out very well.

But, there are quite a few brilliant people who are many times smarter on the subject of business analytics and business intelligence that will tell you that knowledge is a process that begins with data (“D”) and moves along a progressive transformation process into information (“I”) then knowledge (“K”) and ultimately, wisdom (“W”).

If the CIO owns the “D” and the “I”, and the CKO owns the “K”, who “owns” the “W”? Is there a collective ownership of the wisdom of the organization? Will we be seeing “CWO”s in our future?

It was back in 2000 that, with great assistance from Bill Odom, I drew the following picture. At the time, I was a first year CIO trying to stand up a new joint venture. With as close to a clean sheet of paper as one could get, we were architecting the mission of IT from end-to-end. And we got the chance to build it.

Since then, a lot has changed in this world. But, some things stay the same. No matter what the advances are that enable us to do things better, faster, cheaper, it still comes down to people and how people do things. Remember Einstein’s quote above.

Another brilliant thinker that captures the essence so well is Peter J. Thomas who writes in his recent blog post:

Business Intelligence is not just about technology and cannot be effective in isolation. To live and breath it needs to be part of a broader framework covering the questions that its users need to answer, the actions that they take based on these answers and the iterative learning that occurs in the process.”

At the end of the day, there is nothing I would like to see more than knowledge-based business processes executed by knowledge-savvy workers (and anyone else in the value chain) benefitting knowledge-enabled customers.

But, to see that idea realized, we have to understand and deal with the three main challenges that we previously identified.

1) Collecting information about customers is relatively easy. CIOs have been pretty effective at collecting data through transactional and automated data collection. So good, in fact, that most organizations are “drowning“ in data. In most cases, it is in multiple formats, fragments, repositories etc. Master data must also be dealt with, but, given the unbelievable chore of maintaining it, master data is often an “attic” filled with junk mixed in with the useful stuff.

2) Analyzing is hard. The issues cited in item 1 give the first clue why this is so. First, as previously noted, we are drowning in data. Second, the data that describes the data, i.e. “Master Data” and gives it purpose and context, is often an overburdened mess. Efforts at standardization of form and meaning collapse under their own “weight”. It certainly does not help that many companies are actually companies of companies. There are so many pieces that are pulled together via acquisitions, “carve-outs”, reorganizations, etc. that base lining and normalizing company data so that historical analysis can be done is like boiling the ocean. At a minimum, this becomes an activity that I call “data mashing”.

3) Disseminating it is very hard. While products are evolving to provide robust tools that will essentially offer “composite” applications that sit on layer(s) above the legacy applications and data stores, few organizations and their business processes are set-up to meaningfully “plug-in”. What will happen to all of the spreadsheets!?

Having said that, I am not sure that the answer lies with a new executive in the organization, driving the organization to come up with its business intelligence. Indeed, it is the remnants of the middle manager and senior analyst layers that are closest to the actual in-place and functioning business processes and work-flows. They know the business rules. They know how things “really” work. They know how to handle situations that come up that require judgment and understanding of the facts of each case.

Too many businesses play with fire by running in the margins with their knowledge workers. Thus, a problem exists where these folks are highly marginalized and “one-deep” on the resource chart. They are essential members of the business teams for everything that the business wants to do. What happens if they get hit by the proverbial bus, retire or quit?

Looking through this lens, creating a new silo, or a new organization matrix that adds a new “boss” for these individuals does not, in my opinion, get the organization the knowledge and wisdom that it needs to sustain and grow.

Ironically, this is one of the major business problems that service-oriented architecture (“SOA”) and business process management (“BPM”) is/was supposed to cure. The problem with SOA and BPM is that they are BIG ideas. BIG ideas usually require BIG money, time and resources. Of course, the expectation is also for “BIG” results, which would make it all worthwhile.

Going beyond this point would far eclipse the scope and intent of this particular “Rant”. Getting back to the question that was posed in the title of this post: “Does Business Intelligence require Intelligent Business?”.

Organizations are structured, for the most part, in verticals a.k.a. “silos”. Having efficient, well-designed, ubiquitous cross-functional processes that work is still a rare find. In that regard, a new executive and organization that creates the silo-to-silo (i.e. “horizontal”) channels and portals may have promise. But, hierarchy still rules the day and there is personal “safety” in these turbulent and vulnerable times for incremental approaches.

This sort of “incrementalism” does not create a noticeable increase on overall organizational business intelligence. To the extent that transformational change brings the IQ of the organization to new heights, then there is hope for creating an intelligent business.

Is there a chicken or the egg story here? What comes first – the chicken or the egg?

In organizations, what comes first – business intelligence or intelligent business?

There is, of course, no absolute answer. It could be said that if not an intelligent business then what worth business intelligence?

What do you think? Please offer your comments.

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved