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.

The Cloud Computing Leadership Challenge - An Introduction

You know the story. CIO buys into Cloud Computing model and the company saves millions. You are carried off on the shoulders of the CFO and forever enshrined in the CIO Hall of Fame. That’s your story right? Dropping the sarcasm for a minute I can guarantee you one thing – that is actually someone’s story. There are real life success stories using the Cloud to increase flexibility, capacity and manage cost. The CIOs and IT VPs leading the charge in the Cloud Computing space are in a position to fundamentally alter the traditional IT approach to value proposition. The interesting aspect of all this is every one of us will end up adopting the fundamental concepts of Cloud Computing regardless of industry or location. How many of you remember the intellectual hallway battles of Token Ring vs. Ethernet or Mainframe vs. Client/Server? Both of the winners were inevitable because they offered opportunities to implement and manage solutions with an emphasis on flexibility, capacity and cost. Cloud Computing concepts are seeping into the fabric of IT for the same reasons. AWS continues to offer Services, APIs and SDKs that make their platform increasingly seamless and straightforward for application development and infrastructure teams to adopt.  Microsoft has recently made significant inroads in deploying service bus and Azure functionality as parts of Windows Server such that migration between on premise and off premise (Hybrid Cloud Computing) is achievable with minimal disruption. Cloud Computing features and concepts are becoming part of what we do and there is no decision to be made – only a course to set.

Now we get to the root of this post. I appreciate we all of have different levels of technical competency and interest. Most Chief Information Officers, even the most technically inclined, have responsibilities that prevent them taking on the mantel of Cloud Architect. I am not suggesting you fight that. Instead I am suggesting you acknowledge the real impact of Cloud Computing on your obligations – the people and how they are organized. Most of the press we read slants Cloud Computing as nothing more than a service bought and used off premise. 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?

In my next post I will explore these challenges in more detail and discuss real life organizational, management and leadership skills to transform your organization into one that can leverage and optimize the emergence of Cloud Computing as an inevitable approach for the management of infrastructure and application services in the enterprise.

IT Talent War: Too many free agents not enough draft picks.

Sports analogies can be painful. They are generally delivered with the assumption everybody in the room has a background that relates to the analogy. However, in this case it would be worthy investment for every CIO or IT Director to research the topic because it is simply incredibly applicable – even if sports are not of great interest to you personally.

American sports teams generally build their roster through two methods. Drafting players that have yet to play professionally (rookies) or acquiring free agents (veterans) through contract negotiations.  Depending on the sport and the governing body in place the rules behind drafting players that have yet to sign professional contracts or negotiating a contract with a veteran player are varied, but let’s ignore all of that and boil the whole process down to two options:

1.       Hire people who can perform now (veterans)

Or

2.       Hire people who can perform in the future (rookies).

So, I can already hear the concerns about drafting because every Chief Information Officer needs to deliver results now and drafting rarely drives that outcome. However, do you think the coach of a sports team has a different problem? They have the exact same problem, but they have better answers! These people are doing what we need to learn how to do.

The coach of a successful team has learned how to:

·         Balance the mix of veterans and rookies to create synergy and

·         Screen rookies to get people who can perform beyond their experience level.

This is not an art, but is a science based on your recruiting process, interviewing process, selection process and benefits/compensation strategy.  How much time do you spend looking at these facets of your human resource management plan and how strategic is your approach? Are you hiring to achieve a composite goal or to solve individual problems? Have you acknowledged that trying to hire all veterans is at best going to be an exercise in realizing there isn’t enough elasticity in the workforce to meet your demand and at worst is too expensive? Do you only hire rookies when you consciously or subconsciously have limited interest in the outcome so it is acceptable to take the risk? Are you willing to play great players out of position to create team success when it is more valuable than individual success?

As a CIO you are faced with increasing demand and decreasing resources - it is critical to create an approach that utilizes the best rookies and the best veterans in a manner that raises the bar higher than the competition can, but you won’t stumble on it – you have to engineer it.

So here are some tips:

1.      Recruit early. Engage with local universities and community/tech colleges. Start to find the next generation of workers before anyone else can. Be a scout not just a recruiter.

2.      Establish a personality and behavior testing program baseline off of your existing team. Make the investment to put candidates through the same testing and try to create complimentary outcomes. Myers-Briggs, Birkman and other tests are very valuable if you take their application and use seriously.

3.      Prepare the people on your team for the challenges associated with onboarding rookies and veterans. If the people in place value the additions and understand how to leverage their arrival the results will be accelerated and dependable.

4.      Never, ever, ever stop recruiting. Have an internal recruiter or strong relationships with external recruiters that always keep candidates moving in front of the organization.

5.      Get to know the veterans well before you get serious about an offer. This is partially covered in the previous point, but the veterans are more likely to be found in settings (conferences, user groups, vendor events) where you can get to know them personally and professionally which is more difficult with rookies.

6.      Be aggressive at skill assessment. Workout the candidates and always inspect what you expect from them.

7.      Don’t be afraid to create evaluation, reward and benefits plan that are out of the ordinary. The issue isn’t how to give more away; rather, I suggest you be creative to create a gap in perception between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Be creative.

8.      Don’t make excuses. I know these things are hard. I know they take money and time. I also know that the companies with the best people produce the best results and no one can afford to sit back and take their chances anymore. Every senior IT leader, CIO, CTO or director needs to get more serious and more committed to their strategic human resource initiatives.

Attacking Complexity: A CIO built it, but can a CIO fix it?

Several weeks ago I was having a conversation with another CIO and the topic of change and the perils of unaddressed complexity inside the IT bubble surfaced. To clarify, I define unaddressed complexity as complexity that exists for any reason other than as a requirement to solve a problem. It is a weed in our technical garden. 

The Chief Information Officer I was speaking with phrased his personal and corporate initiatives on this risk as “attacking complexity.” I love this type of phrasing because it genuinely focuses my thinking on the challenges I face every day and my approach to solving them.  

I started to develop a short list of concepts we should all put into our tool belt as we tackle the complexity issue:

1.       The problem will not solve itself. Simplification and the attack on complexity must be supported by dedicated resources. It is, at the core, an exercise in managing change. Managing change is as much about people as it is about technology and process - boots on the ground will be a requirement.

2.       A value proposition has to be developed that explains and measures the benefits of simplification in the context of those who will be affected. Remember, this is all about managing complexity as it relates to systems and technologies under the IT umbrella. As a result it is easy for us to quantify the benefits to IT when we simplify, but it is less clear how those benefits bleed into the lines of business the systems support.  Additionally, while the “what helps me, helps you” argument is real – I think every VP, SVP and CIO reading this knows a better cornerstone to your argument will be to clarify direct financial, productivity or customer benefits to the users of the platforms that will be simplified.

3.       Set targets, manage progress and report results. You can’t really attack complexity if you are afraid to shine a bright light on the problem. I am appreciative of the politics and risks that often creep into these types of exercises. Also, I understand that regardless of how “simple” we want the results there are many instances where complicated solutions make the most sense, but short term goals can be met by over complicated, poorly architected application/platform infrastructures. Long term success requires and mandates the attack on complexity. To reasonable and successfully manage to long term goals a plan that puts the task and deliverables in play is critical – even if it puts you or me at risk.

4.       Work hard, roll your sleeves up and don’t be afraid to engage directly. It is easy to try and stare at something long enough in the hopes it will go away, but getting traction on the most difficult problems may not require much more than an example. You, sitting in a room learning, partnering and contributing to the process.  Being a bridge from the safety of the systems in place, even if it is too complex, to the benefits of a simplified world is a worthy task for every CIO.

I am certain the ideas and approaches you all have developed are varied and equally worth mentioning. This is just my short list not “the” short list. Feel free to comment and share your ideas.

Post Technical Stress Disorder: Don’t be the CIO unable to run IT

Every day I see two clear goals: lead the team of IT professionals responsible for technology, process and collaboration in a manner that maximizes the contribution towards corporate objectives and cooperate with other senior executives to influence and understand the objectives.

Working with other senior executives as a partner, translator and leader has been the focus of my post technical endeavors. Post technical simply being the time in my career where checking source out of team foundation server and rolling up my sleeves to make some ASP.net changes is no longer part of my daily routine. It is very rare to find a Chief Information Officer or SVP of some critical IT service participating in daily stand-ups, backlog grooming sessions or taking coding assignments with their team in a sprint to meet the objectives of a user story. As a matter of fact, most of the executives we work for or with would probably frown on this type of endeavor as a distraction from your primary responsibilities and concerns.  I agree with them. A CIO has a much broader set of opportunities and objectives than to be the super-coder of the team or the only person who knows how to update the firmware on that one router you should have replaced 5 years ago.

However, the paradox we face is intriguing. A post technical focus is critical to many CIO’s ongoing success; the teams we manage respond better to our leadership when the post technical mindset is skewed by as much detail on how IT works and how the people in IT perform their job as possible.

Fortunately, the people you are managing and leading every day probably have low expectations. Let’s be honest with each other – how many network admins and developers expect you to have relevant technical skills at this point in your career?

So, you are starting to wonder, if my peers don’t expect me to have retained deeply  technical skills, my team doesn’t expect me to have retained deeply technical skills and my primary objective as CIO probably doesn’t depend on deeply technical skills – why do I care? You care because as the senior IT executive in your business you want to be able to manage and interface with your domain. You care because at some level you want to validate the information you are given about projects, technology choices and procedures. You care because you want to be connected to every person put in your care.

If none of those reasons work I will give you one more that should matter to every single person in IT – self preservation.

The next generation of CIOs, CTOs and senior IT leaders are going to retain significantly more technical expertise deeper into their career than the current crop of senior IT executives. These up and coming leaders have grown up with more complicated technology, process and capability than the people currently running the show. They are and will be well versed in agile practices, collaborative styles and tools, social computing and exposure to scripting and source code models as a hobby not a profession.

Many of today’s IT leaders are feeling the stress and pain of not being able to comprehend the practices and technologies of their team. When I see this start to set in I always envision a condition I call “Post Technology Stress Disorder”. A condition where you start to feel disconnected and unable to deeply manage your area of responsibilities due to the natural and relevant focus of your career versus the area you lead. You are managing with a post technical emphasis while the teams are pushing further and further into technologies and practices you have no direct experience applying. Eventually this disconnect puts you into a situation where your ability to directly manage the IT function starts to attrite and you are only able to manage the people who manage IT.

You might find this to be a natural part of a progressive senior IT career, but I would challenge that thinking and ask you to instead see the counterpoint – what could be better for an organization than a CIO able to perform well as a post technical leader and an inspirational technologist for the IT enterprise?

So, assuming you have an interest in maintaining or refreshing your technology management skills you will find the remedy for Post Technical Stress Disorder is simple. Don’t be afraid to start at the beginning. Learn the basics of mark up languages, scripting environments and modern operating systems. Spend time one on one with your team mates. Ask them to show you what they do and how. Go to meetings where technical decisions get made. Learn. You don’t have to be and shouldn’t be the expert, but you will be a better CIO and a better executive if you know how your team members perform their jobs.