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Archive for April, 2012

Achieve Your IT Governance Goals

April 13th, 2012

“IT Governance: Supply & Demand” is a report based on a Web Forum presented by Allen Greathouse, Director of Corporate IS Governance, Architecture, and Policy at Harris Corporation. It looks at the keys to success in achieving your governance goals, such as understanding your environment and strong PMO discipline. Potential pitfalls are examined, like poor resource management and strategic alignment. Readers will learn about the difference between “doing things right” (Supply) versus “doing the right thing” (Demand). Find out how those two elements play a pivotal role in your organization’s IT Governance.

This report excerpt describes a couple of the different keys to achieving your organization’s governance goals:

“The first key is having that close alignment with business strategy and understanding the role of IT in its achievement. Obviously every company is different but you need to have some type of organization where you get executive alignment. Harris Corporation achieves that by having division IT leads essentially sit in the business. Without their existence someone in IT would be assigned and responsible for a business entity in an executive relationship. They are very close to the day-to-day activities and responsible for the IT component of that business unit or segment. Those leads help tie in those business objectives with the IT objectives. That gives you someone in the business that understands what is taking place. As a result, when trying to sell an IT project or gain executive sponsorship to meet business objectives, you do not have to worry about coming in cold to those business entities.

A keen understanding of the decision making process in your company is essential. In some companies there is one person that makes the decisions in certain areas. For instance, when Steve Jobs was at Apple, when dealing with a design component he was personally involved in that process. You really have to understand before you can document how governance works. Who makes the decisions? The Harris model for governance probably fits best into what is called a federated or federal model. Scorecards and metrics are a critical part of the supply side for governance, or “doing things right.” These will enable you to conduct industry comparisons. Executives want to know where the money is being spent and how that compares to your particular industry…”

IMF members can download the full report on IT Governance: Supply & Demand here.

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Posted in IT Executive Management, IT Workforce, Member Identified Trends, Strategy

Tags: Allen Greathouse Harris Corporation IMF Reports IMF Web Forums IT Governance

Tops-Down Corporate Social Media

April 6th, 2012

Social media has emerged as a dominant force in people’s lives over the past several years. Individuals are using the platform to connect with others and share information on a daily basis. Whether you’re a Facebook Friend or Twitter Follower, you are part of this revolution. However, as quickly as social media has grown on the personal side, it is still relatively new in the corporate sector. Many organizations have begun focusing attention on the bleeding over of social tools into their enterprises. They are looking to use internal social networking as a way to promote their brands and connect with their customers. Some organizations have even piloted internal social tools in an effort to promote enterprise-wide collaboration. Social media is driving business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. As with any other initiative you try to push through the company, it is important to gain support from the executive leadership. In the case of social media, Senior Executives like CEOs, CIOs, etc. shouldn’t be afraid to set the example for their employees. They need to be leading the social media charge and pushing this movement tops-down. A new study even found that social media-active CEOs are more trustworthy. These quotes from Information Week’s article on “Why CIOs Must Be More Social” are pretty telling:

“If CIOs are charged with building a social business, shouldn’t they have a social presence?” Fidelman asked, suggesting that “CIOs who don’t get social might not be CIOs next year.” Yet even in conservative industries like finance, there are CIOs like Royal Bank of Scotland’s Ian Alderton (#4 on the list) who are social standouts, Fidelman said.” -Mark Fidelman, Chief Social Strategist at Harmon.ie

Fidelman recently compiled a list of the Top 25 Most Social CIOs. Here is the Top 10:

1. SAP, Oliver Bussmann

2. Google, Benjamin Fried

3. Pemex, Abraham Galan

4. Royal Bank of Scotland, Ian Alderton

5. Microsoft, Anthony Scott

6. Supervalu, Wayne Shurts

7. Kimberly-Clark, Ramon Baez

8. Jacobs Engineering Group, Cora Carmody

9. Tesco, Mike McNamara

10. Omnicom Group, Kenneth Corriveau

For our members who are interested in corporate social media, we encourage you to check out a couple of upcoming IMF events:

April 26^th – Web Forum on “Social Media’s Benefit to the Business” led by Kandy White from Verizon

June 7^th & 8^th – IMF Innovation Forum discussion on “Corporate Use of Social Networking to Promote Collaboration”

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Posted in IT Innovation, IT Workforce, News, Social Media, Strategy

Tags: CIO Roles Corporate Social Media enterprise adoption of social media IMF Forum IMF Web Forums Information Week

Effective Leadership For IT Offshore Teams

April 3rd, 2012

“Be a Leader in IT Offshoring & Distributed Teams” is a report based on a Web Forum presentation given by Hans Eckman, former Principal (Senior Consultant) for xpanxion (consulting and dedicated offshore IT firm). It focuses on best practices when working with offshore and distributed IT services. Challenges can be magnified with distance. Many companies consider their offshore initiatives as under delivering on expected ROI or in some cases complete failures. Read this report to learn about the best practices, tricks, and pitfalls for adapting activities to optimize projects that work with offshore and distributed project teams.

Below are a couple of paragraphs from the report on tips for successful offshore leadership:

“Create longer team member engagements and retain subject matter expertise. An interesting finding is that team members wanted to spend a minimum of two years in a certain business area. They like the idea of becoming masters of that particular domain, application, or area. On the other hand, it frustrated them to be moved every 2-6 months. Now obviously there are people who do like that variety and can handle it but typically the longer you can retain people aligned to a certain business app or area the better. Take advantage of any time that you can use modeling and examples. Your pictures, diagrams, and examples are going to do so much more than text based documentation to help increase that understanding.

Make sure you are always using clear unambiguous language and define your terms. We are all supposed to have a running glossary but that can change from day to day. Even with some kind of collaboration tool, you need to make sure everybody knows the terms and acronyms. In regards to acronyms, when on a conference call it can be difficult to distinguish certain letters from others which leads to misunderstandings. Try managing through shorter, actionable tasks. Giving long, large, high level tasks increases your chance that you are going to get off path. The shorter your sprints, the smaller your tasks, the better you will perform. Finally, as with anything in life, if you expect you need to inspect.”

IMF members can download the full report on Leadership for IT Offshore & Distributed Teams here.