Your IT Governance Coach

IT Governance Decisions for SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being embraced by many organizations as way to both, become more efficient and increase responsiveness and speed. A study by McKinsey and Company reports that 60% of the CIOs surveyed planned to use SOA projects to achieve their objectives. Although some organizations are beginning to realize benefits from SOA implementations, many are struggling with the very thing that is at the core of SOA: sharing services across organizational silos.

This is demanding a more matured governance that was required before. According to Gartner a successful SOA program "necessitates new processes, ranging from governance, through development, to operations." The more organizations that share in the development and consumption of shared services, the greater the return in the initial and on-going investment. However, this complicates the speed and quality of decision making unless the appropriate IT governance is quickly designed and implemented.

Governance at its essence is effective decision making. As such, after ensuring we have a clear and compelling strategy we need to focus on selecting the governance decisions that matter most. There are many, many decisions that need to be considered; however, an organization needs to prioritize them based on their impact to strategic objectives, their impact to business failure if not properly done, and their financial impact. We shouldn't underestimate the work that is required to properly govern just one decision: defining the decision making criteria, the roles and authority, and the governance processes needed to make the decision. This is why we need to be careful to start with the most critical decisions and grow the number of decisions that are in governance control.

Technorati Tags: IT Governance, SOA

Lessons in Innovation from Apple

Most successful IT organizations chose to optimize their organization for either operational excellence, customer intimacy, or innovation. Everything, from competencies, to processes, to even structure need to be aligned to support that strategic anchor. I find it helpful to study organizations that model those anchors to see what we can learn and apply. As a Mac user myself, Apple is a wonderful example of an innovative company. What can we learn about innovation from Apple?

The June 9th issue of The Economist has a cover article entitled "Apple and the Art of Innovation." In this article, and a longer one also in this issue, they talk about the ups and downs of the company, their business struggles and wins, and the influence of Steve Jobs. They also talk about the culture of innovation within the company and I believe we can learn a few things that we could apply to an IT organization striving to be very innovative.

Here are some of the lessons from Apple on innovation:

• Welcome innovation "not invented here." For a company or an IT organization to be innovative, it doesn't mean THEY have to come up with all the great ideas themselves. They need to recognize the possibilities and how the different technologies, processes, information, etc. can be combined to uniquely meet business needs. Apple is great at finding and embracing innovation that occurs outside their walls. The idea of the iPod came from a consultant working on a project, iTunes was bought and then improved, the Mac OS was bought from the Next company, that although Steve Jobs' company, it and Steve were outside of Apple at the time. So be ready to adopt "network innovation" just like companies like Procter and Gamble and BT.
• Pursue Simplicity. Apple designs its products around the needs of their users, and not the demands of technology. Although IT solutions may be complex behind the scenes, they need to be intuitively simple for users. I was just talking with a friend in a company where they just deployed a very expensive and powerful application. The users are disillusioned, "is this all we get?" The IT staff are frustrated because the users are not taking the time to really study all the powerful features and exploit them. Perhaps better design with their users in mind would have helped. I'm not sure how good the iPhone will actually be, but people are going crazy over its perceived simplicity.
• Ignore Focus Groups. This may seem to be a contradiction to the above point, but it's not. Yes it's important to listen to your customers, but we need to do more. We need to understand what customers need, versus what they say they need. Keen observation and imagination are invaluable.
• Fail wisely. When a solution is not working for a company, when they purchased the wrong tool, or wrote the wrong application we then think of "writing off" the investment. This may be a wise accounting thing to do, but we should not write off the knowledge or even technological capital we have gained. We may be able to apply this in the next generation of a solution. The Mac was born from a previous failed attempt, Lisa. The iPhone is coming after a failed attempt with Motorola. Recent Apple computers are based on technology from Next, a company that produced computers that were not very marketable. So, in every failure we can find a gem, but the risk taking culture of an innovative IT organization must be open to it.

Just a few things to keep in mind in our journey towards innovation. Is your organization able to support these ideas?

Technorati Tags: Innovation, IT Leadership

YITGC Getting IT Organizational Design Right

Cobit's control objective PO4.5, IT Organizational Structure is both innocent looking, yet extremely powerful.  It is part of “Define the IT Process, Organization, and Relationships” PO4.  We have all been part of organizations that have organizational structures aligned to their strategy and of those that are misaligned.  Sadly, many of us have also experienced botched organizational design transitions. 

In this podcast I cover the levers that need to be considered when re-aligning an organizations, and the things that need to be kept in mind to make the journey to the new organizational design a successful one. 

Do you want to learn more about this topic? Please listen to this PodCast now by clicking this link.  If you are reading this in the blog, you may also subscribe to it and automatically get future releases for free by clicking the iTunes or RSS orange buttons on the left column.

Starting the IT governance conversation in college

I am becoming more aware of the responsibility we have as IT professionals to help high school students and college students better understand the benefits of a career in IT. Recent statistics show a decline in enrollment in computer science and MIS degrees. I have already started mentoring existing college students and helping recruit. What I had not thought about is that we can start having the IT governance education and conversation with students in other disciplines now. I just read an article in ComputerWorld by Paul M. Ingevaldson, retired CIO at ACE Hardware. In his article entitled "IT, We Have a Problem -- Revisited" Paul talks about his attempt at lecturing about IT governance to a class of MBA students.

His first attempt failed as the students had the belief that IT should govern itself, just as they would govern their own projects. It was not until he went back and used case studies that the students "got" that IT governance begins at the top of the company and as future business leaders they will play a critical role. I got two ideas out of his article: to begin the IT governance discussion early and to use case studies to drive the point.

Technorati Tags: IT Governance

Friendster's Saga Exemplifies Importance of Basic Leadership and Governance

Lack of leadership and governance brought down Friendster.

June's issue of Inc. has a cover story by Max Chafkin on Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster and the issues that turned the first social network site from a promising great business into a relative failure. The story is called "How to Kill a Great Idea" As I read the story I realized that the issues that brought Friendster down are the same issues that as a management consultant I see in so many companies. They may not have the money or visibility as Friendster, but unchecked, they could lead to the same results. People believed Friendster was destined to great success because it was a "bold idea backed by experienced investors and the best managers money could buy." Why did it fail?

I believe that this great talent failed in the basics of leadership: collaboratively defining a direction, getting the entire team aligned to that direction, and creating the commitment to each other, to the team, and to the purpose of the company necessary to overpower all the individual agendas. From a governance perspective it failed in the basics of defining what the critical decisions were, who was accountable to make them, and agreeing on how they would be made.

From the article I read about a management team with as many directions and priorities as they had talented managers. Some were heavily investing in re-writting the code to ease some of the long load times, without getting the engineers aligned that it was the best course of action. "Engineers were not convinced that the big re-write was necessary. There was constant bickering and side projects that went nowhere." Management members were passionately establishing content partnerships without alignment among board members that it was the right number or kind of partnerships to establish. Apparently, there was a "lack of spending discipline" in correcting engineering problems. Supposedly, the board of directors realized the team was dysfunctional, but was "loath to micromanage." What was their accountability?

Great idea. Lots of Money. Fantastic Talent. However, basic leadership and governance principles were not applied, causing synergies, talent, and resources to be wasted. Also causing a disconnect with what their users really wanted or needed. This scenario repeats over and over in so many business from corporate officers to small departments. Consultant Ram Charan says one of his favorite phrases is "purpose before self." If more of us took that virtue as a corporate motto, more businesses would be exceedingly successful.

Technorati Tags: Leadership