Making IT Happen

I've been to a number of industry events recently where the panel discussion / Q&A session has gone in three phases:
1 - bright and breezy - a few gentle openers
2 - key issues - how can the industry attract new talent, be more professional etc
3 - why oh why - how can IT be part of 'the business'?, high profile project failures, we don't deliver what CEO's want etc

Are some IT projects late? Sure. Do all IT investments deliver value? No. But...

Has the IT profession delivered wave after wave of change in the last 50 years that have transformed business and society? Yes. Will it continue to do so? Yes.

That might not make us angels, but I'm happy to be part of an industry that achieves so much.

This title is the current advertising tag-line for Barclays Capital. They ran a two page ad in the FT yesterday, big letters covering the pages:

"Earn success every e-mail, every line of every document, every quick-fire decision, every considered decision, every handshake, every well-judged intervention, every working lunch, every 'i' dotted, every 't' crossed, every "do it again", every double check, every triple check, every percentage point, every second, every minute, every hour..." You can see it here for yourself on Barclays Capital's news release on its "Earn Success Every Day" ad campaign.

Many thanks to their copywriters - that's the best CIO manifesto I have read for a long time.

Reading today's headline on the CW Website "CIOs are winning the business value battle" made me think of our ROI guilty little secret.

Despite putting a lot of time and effort into our SOA programme over the past 3 years, we had never re-used a web service. Whilst I remained committed to the benefits of SOA, it was starting to seem a pretty expensive way of doing point-to-point interfaces. There always seemed to be a reason why an existing web service wasn't right for a new application. Anyway, we've now re-used two web services (admittedly both with additional web service 'wrappers' to refocus them slightly) - the first of many.

Are we the only ones, or does anyone else have a guilty secret they would like to share?

The FT on Monday had a front page article, the gist of which was that companies didn't know what value they got from their IT spend.

This is the front page article... "Big spenders reveal..."

...and this is a more detailed piece on p26: "Big spenders are brought to book..."

I was reminded about these articles by a letter in today's FT which responded with three points: first, how do you define IT spending, second even if you knew how much you spent how would you know whether this is 'right', and third, how do you measure benefits.

My own view?

First, what a coup for Micro Focus, who commissioned the survey. With an annual turnover of $172m this is a fantastic piece of 'free' advertising.

Second, whilst 70% of respondents said they knew how they were spending on core software assets, we will never know how many of them were right. I don't believe for a moment that 70% of companies really know.

Third, to the 48% that tried to quantify the financial value of all their IT assets my response would be good luck, but I'm with the 52%. I'm left with an image of complicated spreadsheets underpinned with swathes of assumptions, that produce the 'answer' that 'yes, IT does add value'.

I do think you can quantify the value of IT in some cases, but in others you can't. The trick for a CIO is to recognise the best approach to articulating potential value to support cases, or real value to present results. For that you need a whole range of approaches. I'll add a list of mine in a few days.

I saw this Google Evilometer post in Steve Clayton's geek in disguise blog this morning - it reminded me of the Process Indicator that I saw a while ago. It is only a prototype at present but it hooks up via a USB to whatever you want to monitor. I particularly like the amber tube - which glows more intensely as whatever you are measuring increases.

Not sure which 3 things a CIO should monitor - stakeholder happiness, talent growth and strategic contribution spring to mind - now how do I measure those. And what should I hook up to the red light?

Six months into the year, and mindful of the credit crunch, we've set the challenge of out-turning 10% less than last years budget on IT - with inflation running at 4% that's 14% of efficiencies.

When we started looking at this we thought there would be carnage, but do you know what? In reality it is driving a bunch of sensible and reasonably straightforward projects to achieve specific cost savings. Applications will be consolidated. Rack space will be reduced via vm ware. Why not set yourself the 14% challenge - you may be surprised what it throws up.

We're also targetting the same efficiencies next year - and again, although we thought it would be extremely tough we are already coming up with ideas. Watch this space.