Why Big Data will turn Chief Information Officers Inside Out

Big Data is going to turn your job inside out in the next 5 years. CIOs should start preparing for the onslaught of transparency that will be created as our customers harness Big Data solutions . Most of us are worried about how Big Data technologies and opportunities will help us sell more and service better. While CIOs are busy figuring out how to drive the Big Data strategy from the inside out customers will be acquiring tools and information that put them in charge of the buyer/seller relationship in a way that will change the roll of CIO forever.

We have already seen the early warning signs. Shopper platforms integrating price comparison tools, customer review/feedback models, social media and inventory data are an integral part of the consumer decision making process. Purchasing a book, making the drive to your local big box store or making an insurance decision all depend on these platforms. As a CIO your role in delivering and supporting these platforms to your organization is simple and driving technical, procedural and operational improvements for your C-suite peers a relatively direct extension of the data that is collected. We are already getting very good at understanding how consumers behave and why when they engage with our platforms.

Here is where the story takes a twist. It is quickly going to stop being about how the customer behaves when we are in charge and start being about how we behave when our customers are in charge. Big Data competencies are going to end up in their hands too. This is going to creep into every part of your supply chain, every professional or personal action taken by your employees, every market segment you create will be invaded by opportunistic customers and every single interaction you have will end up documented and dissected by every vector possible. Welcome to the role of Customer Information Officer.

Giving up every stitch of data about your organization is going to be the new normal for competing. A few will resist at first and when they see customers flocking to more transparent organizations they'll all follow. This isn't about simple metrics like price, availability and service. I am asking you to start thinking about metrics that are so intrinsic to your organization today you can't even begin to think how they will surface in a purchasing decision.

For instance, imagine you live in Lexington, KY near one of the world's largest online retailer's distribution center. You also can see the local big box store as you drive into and out of your subdivision every day. You know you can get the latest Grind of Carnage video game from either source in 24 hours at the same price. However, new Big Data consumer focused apps are giving you some new data to consider. You realize the local big box store has a cleaning contract with the company your son-in-law works at as a manager. You see the majority of social media posts for employees of that local big box store have political leanings similar to your own. You see most of the employees of this store get drive through lunch at a restaurant where your cousin is a shift manager. You see a private carrier in their distribution channel that is headquartered in the same town your brother lives in with his family. Your buying decision has been made and it has nothing to do with the data the retailer wants you to use in making the decision! The same pattern is going to occur in healthcare, utilities and education.

Big Data tools and platforms are removing the barriers to a customer managed transaction. Barriers such as the variable frequency of event occurrence, highly unstructured nature of the data and the sheer volume of information your data provider will have to sift through to answer your one question are all disappearing. Your mission is to start helping your organization look at how their employees, supply chain, and partners reflect on the organization not as a reputation separated from specific products, but integrated into the customer's decision.

CIO Strategies for Combating Nephophobia – the Fear of Clouds

Nephophobia, or the fear of clouds, has fast become a line in the sand for many senior IT decision makers. It seems every day more of us feel forced to land on the issue one way or the other. Board members, stakeholders and the people who work on your team all want to know what your strategy is for Cloud Computing and how it affects, well, everything. Like most things, we all get drawn into the conversation when controversy emerges. Case in point: the recent Azure outage.

There isn’t much point in trying to sensationalize the recent Microsoft Azure outage. Let’s be honest, just between us, we all know coping with system and platform failure is part of the job. AWS has taken outages, Microsoft took one at almost the same time last year and I have a couple fresh battle scars of my own – just like you. If you are in the role of CIO, CTO or IT Director please do not make a simple positive/negative binary decision about Cloud Computing. Control your Nephophobia. Instead, evaluate the root cause of the recent Azure outage and gain some wisdom from what it reveals.

It appears the Azure outage was based on a SSL Certificate not being renewed. I have nightmares, still to this day, about the first time a member of my team told me we took an outage for the very same reason. I know for a fact the person responsible for communicating this to me also has nightmares about having to tell the CIO of the error. We share that misery bond to this day. The point is my organization suffered an outage because of human error – just like the recent Azure outage. The Cloud is not something to be feared, but to be understood. Seeing the frailties shouldn’t encourage your Nephophobia; understanding them should inspire you tackle the challenge of leveraging the Cloud to achieve maximum benefit with manageable risk.

First, you still need to architect for success. If you do not want to take the risk of Cloud storage being unavailable then make plans for resiliency through Cloud hybridization or similar options. Push your technical teams to focus on these issues and make sure they have testable solutions for Cloud outages. You don’t give up much (if any) of the benefits of Cloud computing by being architecturally thorough and prepared. You, the CIO, are the ultimate owner of the benefits and risks of Cloud computing for your business so put the same discipline on your Cloud strategy you have applied to other platform paradigms in your career.

Second, don’t bet more than you can lose. Cloud Computing vendors are going to make mistakes. They are going to experience outages and failures. Understand the odds and the rules of the game. You might very well find better availability, security and accessibility models in the Cloud than you are able to provide. The cost, if managed well, can also be attractive. You can depend on some Cloud Services more than others and the vendors are starting to shake out regarding their strengths and weaknesses. Some business models and technical architectures just beg for the Cloud and others are far from ready.

Conquering your fears, Nephophobia included, is all about being informed and prepared. Public outages and events should be viewed as a chance to educate your CEO, Board or Stakeholders and empower you to develop a strategic view of the Cloud based on business value. Use these events to build your strategy and correlate the plan to real world experiences of those already engaged. If you are engaged and don’t have a plan these events should be your motivation to build one – fast.

Cloud Computing Leadership - Practical Advice

We dropped out of the last post on this topic with:

The Cloud Computing challenges you really face are how will you turn your internal infrastructure into a Cloud, how will you blend your internal Cloud and external Cloud together seamlessly creating a Hybrid Cloud, how will you expand and contract the Cloud to manage costs, how will you take traditional custom application services and share them as application infrastructure, how will you take traditional infrastructure services and share them as applications and how will you organize, train and lead your people through this evolution?

Leading an organization through these challenges is not simple. As a CIO or CTO you simply don’t get a manual guiding you through the process of making these tasks easy. They do get easier as you develop the ability to frame the challenge in a manner your team can understand and pursue. One simple model I have developed with my team is to ask ourselves one simple question: How do we turn Infrastructure into Application and Application into Infrastructure?

This question guides my priorities, investments and leadership model. If we are able to take the infrastructure of our company and make it resilient and elastic – ultimately putting the guidance of it into the hands of our internal and external customers we are making legitimate progress at realizing the promise of Cloud computing. Conversely, if we can take the ubiquitous components of modern applications and offer them to development and product teams as common services built into their platforms for consumption we push the Cloud computing agenda once again. Look at the convergence between IaaS and PaaS in the marketplace and you will see the agenda. This teaches you a great deal about the process of meeting the challenge outlined at the top. You will need leadership and staff to match up to the challenges.

First, there absolutely has to be a mediator between the world of Application Development and Infrastructure/Operations. Many organizations use the term DevOps to describe this role. The role of mediator is critical because both sides need to make concessions in order to develop a mature Cloud computing model. It is important for Application Development teams to give up pride of authorship and use pre-existing and low cost alternatives to custom software development and it is equally important for Infrastructure and Operations people to realize letting development and product teams spin up their own infrastructure is manageable. Furthermore, there is no man’s land of automation between the two that requires a very specific mind set and skill set.

Second, you need to get your Architects on board and have them start pushing an agenda of shared services and platform capabilities. Architects have to start being held accountable to each other. If you don’t have a CTO on staff or the equivalent get one fast. You as a CIO or Senior IT leader need a technical strategist to drive this agenda and support the improvements your entire portfolio can benefit from as well as assist the DevOps team in prioritizing application features that can be described as “cloud aware”. There must be an emphasis on communication, education and leadership for the technologists underpinned by measurable  business success. The critical leadership challenge here is to find someone who wants to build consensus and demonstrate results through adoption and convergence not another developer who believes there is a single right answer. The right answers will be emergent as the collective will of the other architects not a mandate from the chief architect.

Lastly, do not be afraid to separate your traditional Infrastructure and Operations teams into two units: one focused on onboarding new infrastructure, platforms, tools and apps and the other focused on supporting the existing Infrastructure. Over time most of our portfolios will find a way to be implemented in an elastic and resilient hybrid cloud model. However, in the short run we will need to very diligently develop new apps into this model and aggressively modernize some as quickly as possible. While this transition is underway the complexity and time associated with the emerging solutions will be a difficult challenge for traditional data center operations and support functions. Moving part of the team into an onboarding role with the appropriate time and focus to get the new Cloud platforms working will be critical. Understanding the implementation and support model for the apps and platforms we are building in the Cloud is not a trivial shift. If you don’t dedicate people to it for some period of time you risk failing on launch.