By Ken Norland
Associate

If you’ve been in the IT world for any length of time, you know that large IT projects often go awry. Luckily, there are many ways to improve the chances that your IT project will succeed. In my last article I discussed the importance of getting an iteration of your project into end users’ hands as early in the process as possible. This gives you time to adjust mid-stream if necessary (and it usually is). Today I’d like to discuss a closely related topic: Allowing time in your IT project plans to actually make these adjustments.

Most Projects Need Multiple Iterations

Especially when creating IT project plans for large development projects, you need to assume that the project will require multiple iterations. Why? Because:

• End users need to see early iterations, so they can provide much-needed feedback (as discussed in my last article)
• Testers need to see early iterations, so they can de-bug their tests while the project is being developed
• The project team might run into unforeseen technical difficulties, which can require additional iterations to resolve

By Paul Hoekstra
Associate

It has been estimated that over 70% of all system outages are a direct result of changes that have been made to the operational environment. It's no coincidence that at many organizations, IT has in effect lost control of the production environment and is in constant firefighting mode. The regular unpredicted downtimes, missed deadlines and cost overruns deteriorates the value of the IT organization as a whole and the trust in the CIO in particular.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

Regardless of what services you wish to outsource – Manufacturing, Data Center, Applications Management, Call Center, Business Process or Supply Chain – there are multiple ways to approach your outsourcing journey. As with any significant transformation of your business model, it is always best to follow an organized and methodical approach. The exact approach you choose will be determined by many things, including:

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

In today’s highly competitive global environment, many companies are asking the question, “Is outsourcing right for us?” The short answer is probably a qualified yes. In my last post I presented some of the benefits of outsourcing. Some part of almost every organization could undoubtedly benefit from an outsourcing assessment. But which part?

By Paul Hoekstra
Associate

As an IT executive and consultant I've seen firsthand that many IT organizations are struggling to deliver relevant services to the business. There's a misalignment between what the CIO is trying to do and what his or her counterparts in sales, customer service, finance, human resources, etc. are trying to do. And what I've seen is that this absence of business / IT alignment often stems from the IT group not having the people or approach to understand the business from an operational point of view.

As a result, I often see situations where, for example, the HR Director goes directly to a cloud provider and simply buys a solution – reducing the IT department's involvement to just doing a security check and integrating the solution for the login. This diminishes the value of IT as an organization, which in turn leads to inefficiencies and ineffectiveness across the entire business.

Mark has joined CIOPS as an Associate.  Here’s his recent article on CIO Leadership styles:

Neustar Inc. is a global information services provider and a leader in connection science, but it faces the same challenges as any other organization. For Mark Tonnesen, the chief information officer, chief strategy officer, and vice president of operations, the focus remains on the end consumer, and how to deliver a product better, faster, and cheaper.

“We may be selling our products and services through a B2B model, but we still have to consider the end consumer as we think about design, packaging, and delivering those products and services,” Tonnesen says. “To me, the new challenge is how we can package those in a way that we can deliver them faster, continuously meeting or exceeding their expectations, so we have the immediacy of new features and functions, or pricing and discounting and packaging together as one.”

Read more at Sync Magazine...

By Stephen McGrady
Associate

As I mentioned in a previous article, I’m a big believer in Enterprise Architecture Planning. However, I’m also a realist. I know that in today’s hyper-competitive and very fast-moving business environment, about the only enterprises that are enthusiastic about going through the full nine-month or one-year EAP process are government agencies. Everyone else needs results now.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

Life at a Nonprofit

For the past 2-1/2 years I’ve been the interim CIO at the YMCA of Silicon Valley – my fourth non-profit client since 2009. My experience is limited but I’ve seen a trend emerge.

Senior executives at non-profits are usually wonderful people who are very passionate about what they do. They’re very good at focusing on their mission and the services they offer to meet this mission. They have a clear understanding of who their constituents are. More often than not they have spent their entire career at their current organization or one that’s similar.

By Ken Norland
Associate

In my previous article about “5 Ways to Improve the Chances of IT Project Success,” I stated that the first thing you need to do is to pick the right project manager for the job. While this is really not a big deal for small projects, for large projects that involve lots of people, picking the right project manager can mean the difference between success and failure.

6 Things to Look for When Hiring a Project Manager

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

As an information technology consulting firm, CIO Professional Services specializes in information technology strategy and business/IT alignment. To better understand why organizations seek us out for assistance, we spoke with Ed Barrantes, Chief Financial Officer of the YMCA of Silicon Valley.

As described in a previous article, we’ve been working with the Y to help them overcome their very significant technology debt. They had a situation where systems had not been updated in over two decades! Here’s what Ed had to say about working with CIO Professional Services, and the 5 key values that he feels we bring to the table:

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

This is the third installment of our series on the outsourcing lifecycle. The first article provided an introduction to the outsourcing lifecycle and its five phases. The most recent article was about Phase I of this lifecycle, Assessing and Documenting Outsourcing Opportunities. Today we’ll do a deep dive into Phase II: Evaluating and Selecting a Service Provider.

This phase starts with the creation of a Request for Information/Proposal (RFI/RFP) and concludes with the selection of an outsourcing service provider.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

It is an unfortunate reality that most outsourcing deals fail to reach their true potential. Over the course of assisting many clients with outsourcing, we have found that the following seven things, either alone or in combination, are the major causes of dissatisfaction with outsourcing:

By Stephen McGrady
Associate

I’m a big believer in Enterprise Architecture Planning, the detailed planning process that looks at how an enterprise will use information to support the business, and provides a blueprint for handling data, applications and technology.

While the process of creating an EAP can be lengthy – typically six to ninth months – the end results can make a significant difference in the IT organization’s ability to meet business needs. From my standpoint, I think the key benefits include:

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

Considering hiring one of the big systems integrators (SIs) to help you with a large-scale project? This could be an excellent move. After all, the big systems integrators are known for their expertise in identifying, designing and deploying complex IT solutions for the enterprise.

Unfortunately, hiring a big systems integrator usually means big teams and big bills. It can also be a financial train wreck, as many of these organizations are renowned for bidding one thing and then by accident or design presenting change orders and scope creep that leads to much higher costs and longer schedules.

By Mark Tonnesen
Associate

If you're a CIO you've probably heard the question before, usually asked by your company's CEO, finance executives or operations leaders: "What's the value of IT?" And chances are the people asking this question have expected a metrics-based answer involving a close look at the percentage of revenue spent on technology, the number of projects delivered, the percentage of on-time and on-budget deliveries, etc.

Stop Asking the Wrong Question

As far as I'm concerned, though, "what's the value of IT" is the wrong question to ask and the wrong way to look at IT's true value. Here's why.

By Steven McIntosh
Associate

It's no secret that the vast majority of people who work at technology companies are men. Unfortunately, this is a serious problem that impacts these technology company's ability to succeed in an increasingly diverse economic world.

Why Technology Companies Need a Diverse Workforce

Today most technology companies are only getting the benefit of a single point of view. This not only breeds a lot of "group think," it can also make it hard for the team as a whole to truly understand many of the members of the companies' target audiences.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

Thanks to the wonders of technology and transportation, today many (if not most) business processes can be performed almost anywhere in the world. As a result, your organization has countless options for global sourcing – so much so that analyzing all of the options can be challenging.

To assist you in this area, CIOPS has developed a matrix that serves as a succinct strategic framework for illustrating your global sourcing alternatives. Here’s what you need to know…

By Rocky Vienna
Principal

Good news! Businesses have never been closer to their customers. In fact, with the popularity of mobile apps, you can literally be in their pockets. Bad news – it’s a two-way street. Customers have immediate and impactful tools like Yelp, Twitter, and Foursquare to provide feedback to others on your product and services. A bad review can cause a feeding frenzy and negatively impact your brand.

These realities help explain why large companies have heavily invested in Big Data and Analytics. These platforms allow companies to reap the rewards of improved prospect-to-customer conversion rates, increased customer loyalty and the ability to quickly respond to service issues. And all of these things, in turn, help prevent the negative online reviews that all companies dread.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

The Path to Becoming a CIO

If you want to be a CFO there's a fairly prescriptive list of things that you need to do to rise through the corporate ranks. For example, most CFOs start their careers working for one of the major accounting firms. They have CPAs. They understand general accounting, taxation, transactions, how to deal with board members and banks, and so forth.

But if you want to be a CIO there is nothing that remotely approaches a prescriptive list of what you need to do to get there. There's no special curriculum and no widely-accepted "must have" certification.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

We deliver a lot of fractional CIO and interim CIO engagements at CIOPS. In fact, over the past six or so years we’ve seen the demand for fractional CIOs in what we define as the mid-market (i.e. organizations with sales in the $250MM to $1BB per year range) increase by around 60%. This is more than double the 25% or so increase in demand that we’ve seen for interim CIOs.

While I don’t have any actual studies or data to back this up, from where I sit it seems that more and more organizations are reaping the benefits of using fractional CIOs. Here’s what you need to know…