It's not easy being IT

Among the more interesting of IDC Canada's predictions for 2007 issued earlier today (at least from a CIO perspective):
“Infrastructure will be hot again. Companies need flexibility and speed to bring new products to market, to react to a competitor, and to enter new markets. And business recovery and operational continuity remain key areas of investment. IDC Canada predicts that end-users will focus on building the dynamic infrastructure platform that will enable their organizations' strategies.”

It's interesting, infrastructure actually has been sliding down a CIO's list of priorities for some years now. Most CIOs have distanced themselves from infrastructure issues, or more accurately, either delegated it to an individual or technical services team or outsourced it to a third-party almost completely.

Other CIOs I talk to worry about letting responsibility for infrastructure go completely. There are a variety of reasons for this. Part of it is related to the exponential increase in the storage of e-mail documents and attachments, and the subsequent sluggish performance of many corporate networks. (or “operational continuity,” as IDC calls it). But it goes beyond that. If you work for a company that is expanding rapidly into new markets, and entering into areas not very well serviced, you likely will not want take chances with the backbone of your information services. IDC has identifed both business and technological reason for paying attention to infrastructure issues, CIOs may want to take notice.
Posted by Martin Slofstra, 4:25 PM, 1/15/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

Consumers have influence

It's Friday, and that means time for some random thoughts. It's actually been an unusually busy week, considering the time of year.

The consumer influence. MacWorld and the Consumer Electronics Show have come and gone, and although of limited interest to a corporate IT audience, could yet set the tone for what we may see later in the year.

Criticize Apple all you want, but who doesn't want to get their hands on an iPhone? Expect Jobs' creativity and innovation, and flair for product design, to also rub off on vendors who build products for IT and telecom departments.

Classifying the species. I'm just starting to notice this: numerous articles detailing the generic evolution and changing role of the CIO (of which we have published many) are giving way to a greater variety of pieces recognizing that CIOs are not all cut from the same cloth. Are you an innovator, a business leader, a turnaround artist, or something else? Expect to see a variety of assessment tools aimed at helping you, the CIO, have better knowledge of your inner self.

Is this a story or not, I have no idea? For those of who spent too much time thinking (and writing) about the non-Y2K crisis, please excuse us for not knowing exactly what to do. From a press release issued by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA): “The expansion of daylight-saving time in the United States and Canada later this year has the potential to impact the operations of computers and other electronic devices with time zone features, Within the U.S. and Canada, computers, personal digital assistants, video cassette recorders, digital video recorders, phones, and any other electronic devices that have a time zone setting will require a small software update to accommodate the change in daylight-saving time. Otherwise, the internal clocks in the devices could be off by one hour for three weeks in the spring and for one week in the fall.” Consider yourself warned.
Posted by Martin Slofstra, 3:47 PM, 1/12/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

Qualified success
This will be a challenging year for CIOs. Being heavily involved in business strategy apparently comes at a price, and that is the dilution of technical skills that are also required to lead an IT department.

I've completed a number of interviews with CIOs this week, the results of which you can read about in upcoming issues of EDGE and Computing Canada. It's amazing how divergent the viewpoints of each of these CIOs really are.

One CIOs struggles with the fact that he is unable to keep his technical knowledge up to date with so many management and business concerns now on his plate. Another CIO finds having a really good senior person in charge of technical support is a good way to take all his technical infrastructure concerns away, and is not worried at all. A third CIO comments that the technology part has become relatively easy but being able to understand where the business is is anybody's guess and constitutes his real challenge.

Tell us what you think . . . How much do you know need to know about technology to be a high-performing CIO? Is the technology function something that you can readily delegate away? Can CIOs with mostly business, non-technical backgrounds remain successful in the longer term?

You may be surprised at the lack of consensus among CIOs.

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 4:50 PM, 1/11/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

The sleepless CIO

I told you so . . .

So, was I right?
Last May, I wrote an article called Skills shortage 2.0: Canada's search for IT talent. It looked at labour information released at CIPS Informatics 2006 in Victoria, B.C., indicating IT skills, especially business analysts and business intelligence specialists, will be in short supply.

I also quoted at least one CIO, Dave Nikolejsin, of the province of B.C., in an interview who was serious concerned. “We need people with 15 to 20 years experience who truly understand business and IT, and we don't have anybody in the pipeline.”

Nikolejsin says the problem is further compounded by the fact the public sector cannot offer competitive salaries. “After we train these people, they can cross the street and get twice the money.”

It was after that story appeared, that more than one reader accused me of being alarmist and wondering if maybe I was jumping to conclusions based on a visit to one Canadian city.

Well guess what? As part of interviews I am doing for a CIO Roundtable to appear in the February issue of Computing Canada, at least two very prominent CIOs have said that staff retention issues are front and centre.

They are further concerned that all that knowledge that resides in senior IT staff is not easily replaced, and you can bet that the current skills shortage will play out in terms of huge increases in pay and perks given. As well, CIOs are worried that this skills shortage could hamper their company's ability to execute business strategy This is not the first time we have reported on skills shortages in the Canadian IT industry. I count at least four or five serious skill shortages in my time covering the industry.

But because IT is now so intertwined with business, this could be among the most serious.

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 4:00 PM, 1/10/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

The sleepless CIO

I've been spending a good portion of this week calling various CIOs and asking them to comment on where they see their priorities for 2007. The answers have been quite interesting.

It's fairly obvious that for most CIOs, their role has progressed beyond managing the IT infrastructure to becoming significant contributors to their company's business strategy. And the one word I keep hearing is transformation and CIOs have no problem when it comes to long-term thinking.

But read between the lines, and as I wrote yesterday, it's the old issues that keep resurfacing, and it's the little things that keep CIOs hopping.

Sometimes it is a technical problem, other times it's related to winning over the business user. In one of our CIO roundtables recently, Subi Bhandari, vice-president and CIO of Inco, said it best on why it is so difficult to get end-users to give up their old ways and make even the smallest of changes. “I once had an old boss tell me to try switching which side of the bed your are sleeping on with your spouse,' he says. “It sounds simple but see how well you sleep for the first few nights.”

While it's great to be thinking broadly in terms of business transformation, it also pays to think in terms of the smaller gains that can be made in improving your business processes or implementing a new technology.

The old normal

I always get a kick out of hot new technologies lists. The latest comes from research Info-Tech and includes: adaptive security, virtualization, Web 2.0, collaborative technologies, unified messaging, software as a service and voice-over-IP.

Don't get me wrong: each of these seven technologies have enormous potential and do help to create a mood of optimism and excitement for the industry. Talk to a CIO, however, and you get a bit of reality check. Ask them about the big issues of 2007, and you get a different kind of list. Their top concerns are more likely to be around what's old than what is new. Here's my list of 2007 top seven challenges, none of it really all that new:

1. E-mail. As e-mail use continues to explode, end-users refuse to delete old messages and empty out their trash boxes, creating huge storage and backup issues.

2. Operating systems. It's not about which operating system to choose but which version to run and when to upgrade. Thanks, Vista.

3. Skills shortage. Guess what? CIOs are worried. Staff retention will be tougher as wages and salaries start to rise. Be kind and be flexible, and offer people lots of opportunities for growth.

4. Multimedia. The term is seldom used, but there is huge growth in the amount of video streaming and audio files being sent on networks and residing on corporate servers. IT has its hands full dealing with response time issues.

5. Power and cooling. This is our main feature story in the upcoming January/February issue of EDGE and for good reason. And you thought concerns about these two items went out with the mainframe.

6. Integration. This is still the No. 1 issue on many CIO lists Not exciting or interesting, but expensive and time consuming, and seemingly an endless task.

7. Auditing. We can only guess that testing and evaluating IT systems for conformity with industry standards of efficiency, accuracy and security will only continue to grow in importance. Governance tends not to be well understand in areas where IT and business converge, but do be aware of the implications.

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 4:00 PM, 1/8/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

Or, you could just hit “forward”
Apparently, it's easier to get information from your competitor than it is from your co-workers.
According to an online survey of more than 1,000 middle managers conducted by Accenture, 45 per cent of respondents said gathering information about what other parts of their company are doing is a big challenge, whereas only 31 per cent said that competitor information is hard to get.

As for the lack of sharing, part of the difficulty lies in the way managers are gathering and storing information, the survey says, most valuable information is found on individual e-mail accounts, with only 16 per cent using a collaborative tool such as an intranet portal.

That's right, blame the technology ...

Maybe it was also the food

During a recent airline flight, John Bostick, CEO of DBAdirect, a technology managed services firm, observed that various business people on the plane reacted very differently when turbulence struck.

“Some people stopped what they were doing, tightened their seatbelts, folded their arms and tried to wait out the chop,” Bostick says. “Others kept stubbornly trying to write notes, wrangle their laptops or read bouncing magazine articles. And a few, like me, kept switching activities based on what worked, regardless of the number and severity of the bumps.”

Bostick, who writes not-so-modestly about the experience in the January edition of his newsletter, advises CIOs to take technological disruptions as opportunities to transform business practices and processes rather than shut down operations or continue counter-productive activities.”

I guess it's either that, or you may just want to find the barf bag.

Video killed the Yale Star

2006 was a year of comical yet costly e-mail blunders for many companies around the world, and so MessageGate, Inc., a Bellevue, Wash-based supplier of e-mail governance solutions, used the opportunity to compile its top ten list of unforgettable e-mail blunders for the year.

Topping the list is the unnamed financial institution which sent Yale senior Aleksey Vayner video resume on to YouTube. That set up Voyner for all kinds of abuse, and now he is threatening to sue numerous firms including YouTube.

No word yet though on the premiere date of America's Funniest Resumes.

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 2:26 PM, 1/5/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

This Carr is due for a trade-in
Occasionally, I check out Nicholas Carr's (author of IT Doesn't Matter, the book) blog and noticed today he is rerunning some of his earlier pieces starting with the original article "IT Doesn't Matter," first published in the Harvard Business Review in May 2003. He says he is facing an impending deadline for writing a book and has no time for blogging. But by republishing his seminal article, is he leaving the door open for somebody else to come along and question his original thinking? Let's hope so.

Then something crosses your desk, and you wonder if it the sign of something bigger, or even badder, to come.

We've already done quite a lot of articles on the impending skills shortage, and to that, I would sound an extra note of caution especially in the case of software developers: There is coming a huge requirement for technical skills that are vendor-specific.

(For more information, go to Yoh.com and click on “2007 Market Analysis: Employers Fight to Fill High-Impact Positions.”)

I guess this has always been true, whether it's been Java or Windows or what have you. But it's now just as common for employers to cite skills specific to SAS, Business Objects, Oracle or SAP.

In a world where there is growing adoption of standardized enterprise platforms such as SOA, I thought vendor-dependence would lessen, but the trend to vendor-specialized talent seems as strong as ever. And that means lock-in.

By the way, I interviewed Carr myself last year (See EDGE, September Issue or itbusiness.ca/edge) and am still not convinced he is on the right track. Competitive advantage, I think, can still be derived from being:

A. More operationally efficient than your competition (being 99.999 versus 99.99 per cent uptime, for example)

B. By applying advanced software applications to sophisticated business processes; and,

C. By just being faster and more efficient at getting the right information from wherever it may reside, you can have a huge leg up on the competition. (No trivial task, by the way, according to numerous studies I have read.)

I'd love to hear what others now think about this coming up to four-year-old debate. Has all this time past made us any wiser about this topic, or are you just plain sick and tired of people (like myself) who don't want to let this topic go?

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 3:42 PM, 1/4/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

Train smart, train vendor-specific
At this time of year, I read through all kinds of forecasts and predictions, and to be honest, very few things jump out at me.

As for the other important side-effect, this will also have the overall effect of pushing wages up, which is great for IT workers, not so good for CIOs who need to control costs.

Expect 2007 to be a difficult year when it comes to managing your labour needs.

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 4:00 PM, 1/3/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

Your next biggest challenge

As we head into the new year, expect CIOs to continue to shift gears.
As such, your contribution to business strategy, your ability to network with other senior executives and how you discern which new technologies to choose from will remain all-important. None of this, however, is all that new.

Now ask me if I could only pick one single thing, one area to concentrate that will make a difference for you in 2007. You might be surprised to know the answer may be found within your own IT departments.

Your biggest challenge in 2007 will be to find new leaders.

Already, we have seen numerous stories about labor shortages. IT hiring is up dramatically. You already know your staff will need to be developed and you will have to maintain a high level of morale. How about challenging them into becoming leaders?

Maybe it's because I've just come fresh off doing several performance reviews. Or maybe it was because I went through all kinds of leadership training myself in 2006. But I really think it is all about good leadership.

We, however, almost always think of leadership in terms of ourselves. And while there is all kinds of evidence to suggest CIOs in Canada have become good leaders, it's really the level of leadership you can instill in others that is a much greater determinant of success.

Chances are also that your own middle rank of IT management contains all kinds of untapped potential.

Make it a personal challenge to create and nurture more leaders among them. Put them into leadership training but also be prepared to mentor them.

You will be greatly rewarded if you do.

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 3:37 PM, 1/2/2007, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

Three things to remember
I've just literally gotten of the phone with Sam Greenblatt, the newly appointed chief innovation officer at Computer Associates. I asked him the obvious question: of all the technology trends out there, which should CIOs pay most attention to in 2007?

He honed in on three:

1. Virtualization. Being able to manage and connect a wide range of processors seamlessly should forever put to rest any argument about which platform to run on. “Anything can run on anything,' says Greenblatt.

2. Always on, always connected. You are now able to connect any kind of device to the network whether its cell phone, server, PC or onboard guidance system. It could be anything. And if it has an IP address, you can also manage it.

3. Arrival of the next generation data centre. The industry has arrived at a point where systems can be truly distributed with everything connected and no downtime over a global network “Even five nines isn't good enough,” he says.

It hit me later, the computer industry has come a long way indeed. It wasn't all that long ago that any and all of the above were considered pipe-dreams. Now, if you are a global corporation, all three are the minimum when it comes to establishing your operating requirements. The reality is that all vendors have come a long way when it comes to delivery.

Want proof that things can work? Greenblatt says look at Google, the quintessential model of an always-on, 7 X 24 operating environment – and when was the last time it went down?

Why should this matter to CIOs? That the technology works much better should afford you the luxury in 2007 to think about and explore issues around process improvement, change management, governance/compliance, and the many, many other business issues that have risen to the top of your agenda.

IT departments have only recently gotten to the point where they have incredible freedom in choosing their environments from hardware, to operating system, to development tools to the software. And it's all become transparent to the business user.

It's the CIO who stands to benefit the most.

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 4:45 PM, 12/15/2006, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

When Comdex was great

OK, time for something completely different. The following was sent to me by Steve Pozgaj, formerly CIO at MacKenzie Financial and now a consultant with a specialty in financial services as it applies to IT.
I first met Steve some time in the late '90s. He participated in one of my very first CIO roundtables, back in a time, when CIOs were seldom seen “in public” let alone quoted in the press.
Steve entered the IT industry in the early '80s, and I thought it would be fun to include this reflection. It is reprinted here with his permission.

Memories of Comdex and a failed product launch
by Steve Pozgaj

My best memory of Comdex is as a newly-minted software engineer in 1985. I had been working from 1980, in what was turning out to be the hottest Unix-oriented software house on the planet, Human Computing Resources. By 1985, we had changed our name to the more trendy “HCR.”

click here for more

Posted by Martin Slofstra, 3:00 PM, 12/14/2006, mslofstra@itbusiness.ca

Back to the back office

I now get the sinking feeling that a CIO's job is not about to get any easier as we head into 2007. Look below for highlights taken from research reports sent to my inbox in the last 24 hours.

Back to the back office: There's lots of compelling reading in BearingPoint ‘s “Challenges at Home, Opportunities Abroad: Can Canadian Banks Thrive in the 21st Century?” which explains why Canadian banks must expand globally to survive in the 21st Century.

Significantly, the study finds that regulatory changes will transform (there's that “T” word again) the region's retail banks and claims that the opening of the Canadian market to foreign competition will spur competition within Canada and force the country's banks to consolidate.

CIOs may want to take note: “Whereas the previous ten years were dominated by front-office customer applications, the next ten years will be dedicated to back-office operations, which will be the key to maintaining customer relationships,” the report says.

A copy of the report can be found at Bearingpoint's Web site>

An IT manager never sleeps: IT managers in North American enterprises say their top security concern is not hacking or on-line intrusion, but simply the daily bombardment of th << Back

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