This dated model of IT has been radically (and thankfully) changing within companies today where IT is viewed as a strategic asset rather than a necessary evil.  Progressive IT leaders work hard to make their IT resources champions of innovation within organizations to ensure that business goals and objectives can be supported.  We’ve all heard about the “consumerization of IT” – the idea that consumer technology (like iPads) is being brought into organizations and is driving what IT needs to support.  This is true, but there is another exciting aspect to this trend.  That is the “technifying of consumers“!

By technifying of consumers I mean this, that our end users in organizations are more sophisticated than they were before.  They are more technical from the point of view that they leverage technology in numerous ways outside the organization.  My strategic approach has always been to learn from my clients or the organization I’ve joined with regard to their business.  The end user is always going to know more about the business than an IT person. The end user is the subject matter expert and now that they’ve been technified, as an IT leader I have this wonderful opportunity to recruit them into the strategic IT planning cycle.  Today’s end users will brainstorm great ideas to how different technology can be used to enhance their business.  That is a fantastic paradigm as it sets up progressive organizations to realize exponential value from IT.

To capitalize on this trend, however, IT leaders need to transform their IT group.  You have to create an inviting space for end-users to come to so that they can bring those ideas to the IT team.  You also have to evaluate and change your IT processes and procedures so that they are more enabling.  Rather than being threatened by end-users and their technology requests, progressive IT teams should be welcoming and look for ways to enable those ideas, not block them.  I find it frustrating when inside an organization and I see IT teams hiding behind corporate IT rules (often cloaked under the need for security) so that they can effectively block any good ideas that come from within.  Too often companies look to transform their IT groups by simply offshoring the support function for tier one support and having a bunch of runners to handle break fix issues.  Sure this reduces costs but does it allow for innovation.  In my experience the answer is no.

Instead of embracing that model, or being stuck in the old “IT-against-the-company” paradigm, begin the process to truly change your IT team from “break-fix” people, to thought leaders & enablers.  Carry out a strategic organizational redesign where you look to support the people in your company, not just the hardware in your data centre.  Done correctly, this new paradigm will unlock untold potential for innovation, yield efficiencies in your business and ultimately give you a greater competitive advantage in the market.

That’s a great question.  It ensures you don’t just run off and start at the top of your list or worse, in some reactive fashion just focusing on the latest fire. In today’s blog post I will provide you with a way to take your identified risks and do some analysis on them.

I am going to use my favourite 2-by-2 matrices to perform two sets of analysis on a hypothetical risk list.  Let’s say you’ve completed a thorough inventory of risks within your own organization and have generated the follow list of risks.

1. Backup power not sufficient for long power outage
2. Data being copied onto USB sticks despite corporate policy
3. Security for server room doors
4. Data storage of backups not being done offsite
5. Lack of processes to audit IT usage of systems
6. Need for penetration testing for network
7. Redundant servers for email 2 years out of warranty; may fail.
8. Laptops are not encrypted; risk of data being comprised if lost

Risk Score

This is a hypothetical list and short one at that (I’ve seen some lists that have 20-25 items on them.  I’ve kept it short because it will suffice for illustrative purposes.  When you look at the list it’s hard to know where to start.  What’s most important?  The first step is to establish a Risk Score. For each item you ask yourself two important questions a) what is the likelihood that this risk will happen, and b) if it does happen, what is the impact to my organization.  Score each of those questions on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is LOW and 10 is HIGH.  Once you’ve done that, you can plot each risk on a 2×2 like the one I’ve embedded to the right (click to enlarge).  Immediately you can see in the top right quadrant the risks that should be keeping you up at night!  In non-technical terms, those are known as “scary risks”.  Now you might be tempted to just run off and begin tackling those items, but don’t do that.  Not yet.  Now we need to do the second piece of analysis.

Risk Prioritization

Remember how for each risk listed above we gave them a score, one for likelihood to happen and the second for impact if it happened.  Good, now add those two numbers together and divide by 2.  Now you have your Combined Risk Score for each item.  Now for each risk ask yourself this question, “how complex will it be to address this risk?”  In this question, complexity is a combination of how hard the work will be, how much time it will take, how much money it will take and how much change it might introduce to your organization.  Come up with a score between 1 and 10 for this Complexity Score.  When you’ve done that you can then plot each risk on a new 2×2 with the Combined Risk Score and the Complexity Score.  This piece of analysis will now provide you a snapshot on a single slide that easily depicts where you should start.  Risks that have a HIGH Combined Risk Score but a LOW Complexity Score are your low hanging fruit.  Typically, you should start there and develop the rest of your plan accordingly.

You can see that with only the first half of the analysis, you’d be faced with risks 2,7,8 all having a serious impact and high likelihood to occur.  What if you couldn’t do all of them though…where would you start?  By layering in the second piece of analysis, it becomes clearer that issues 2 and 8 are the easier to begin with in this example.

I hope that you found these two tools useful in prioritizing your own risk.  If you are having trouble identifying or prioritizing risks, drop me a line.  I’d be happy to chat and talk about possible ways forward.

I’m talking about the Bloomberg TV+ app – after having installed it a short while ago, I find that I am often opening it each day when I want to get some good business content.  The content itself is excellent, but content alone doesn’t make a good app.  The app itself has an excellent user interface to allow for a natural ease of use.  It’s packed with various video feeds and dynamically updates itself.  It gives you a mix of On Demand content but also the ability to watch live content.  The other awesome thing is the ability to have video sent via AirPlay to my Apple TV when I’m using the app at home.  Add to that the ability to create your own Playlists and you have a tremendous app delivering top notch content.  Truly a great user experience.

I encourage you to check it out for yourself.  Once you’ve had a chance to use it, please feel free to let me know what you thought of it via the comments.  Getting end-user feedback is always a pleasure and highly valuable to me.

Happy App Wednesday!

I don’t like the use of cloud because it betrays the real value that businesses can realize by embracing this technical paradigm. Clouds are nebulous, immaterial and unstable things. The services that are now available for companies within the manufacturing industry are the complete opposite of those traits. Rather than using the term cloud computing, I prefer to use the term adaptive computing. Understanding this new paradigm can provide cost saving and growth opportunities for companies within the manufacturing sector. There is a real potential for manufacturers to leverage adaptive computing to provide them with flexibility in the way they procure and operate technology.

Why Adaptive?

The best way to understand adaptive computing is to look at a real world example. In working with a 90 employee manufacturing client on the strategic use of IT, there emerged a need to implement a single email system across a number of plant locations. The traditional approach would be to deploy an internal solution like so many companies have done before. This would require an internal server, licensing of software for the server and for desktop computers. Added expenses for backups in the event of some disaster were also factored in. There was also the labour component to set everything up, test and finally deploy.

Now let’s examine an adaptive computing implementation. Companies like Microsoft and Google, for example, provide “cloud” based offerings for email. In the adaptive model, the servers, licensed software, backup infrastructure and labour all reside “in the cloud”, that is to say, it is being managed by another company for you. A simple monthly fee is paid on a per user basis. This manufacturing client had different types of employees.

There were employees who worked on the plant floor and only needed occasional access to email. There were employees who worked within offices carrying out administrative functions, and they had a higher need for continuous access to email. There was a small sales force that was out on the road and they had a need for mobile email. The adaptive model allowed for flexible licensing of services that provided email that was adaptive to the type of end user. Employees that worked on the floor accessed a special web –based email from kiosks, while the mobile sales force
was able to easily and securely access email from a variety of mobile devices.

From the above example, you can see the first reason why adaptive computing is an apt term – the technical benefits can adapt to best fit your organization’s needs. In developing strategic plans with manufacturers, it is important that the business needs drive the technical decisions. Adaptive computing allows for easy provisioning of services to best suit the various stakeholder needs within your organization.

This adaptive quality, however, goes beyond the technical aspect of the solution. The cost of the service is transformed from a capital expense to an operating expense. Rather than needing to invest $25,000 to $30,000 upfront for a solution, this manufacturer was able to turn the cost into a $1000 / month operating expense. This was achievable because the service was adapted to best fit the working needs of employees. Plant floor employees who required less access to email, and were given a slimmed down web version, paid substantially less for the monthly service.

Added Benefits of Adaptive Computing
Our example focused on email provisioning for one manufacturing organization. Adaptive computing, however, spans a wide array of IT services that organization can utilize, such as storage needs, backup, CRM, collaboration and security offerings. During the recent recession, adaptive computing service providers saw an increased need from businesses trying to improve their bottom line. This drove many technology industry players to strengthen their offering, which has been a huge benefit to companies both large and small.

The manufacturing sector has looked for ways to reduce costs and invest in technology that would give them a competitive advantage. Adaptive computing allows manufacturers to leverage best-in-class solutions, while not diverting your attention from your core business. This model of utilizing IT services is often a good fit for manufacturers because it can be scaled up or down depending on needs of the organization, it can be deployed without the need for additional IT headcount and it ensures that you are leveraging the latest technology without having to make large
capital investments every few years.

Pitfalls and Considerations
While adaptive computing offers many tactical and strategic advantages, there are a number of considerations that organizations need to be aware
of in order to mitigate risk and ensure success.

• Location of Data: When your organization decides to leverage an adaptive computing service, your data will now reside outside of your organization. You will need to consider any potential restrictions that might exist for your organization. Often, manufacturers may have agreements with customers that stipulate that their data needs to reside in the country of origin. Be sure you understand where your data will reside before adopting an adaptive solution.
• Security: Completing a thorough due diligence is of critical importance. Often service providers will provide security that far exceeds what an organization can do itself, but in some cases, security measures may be lacking. Selecting an adaptive computing solution that lacks best in-class security measures will leave your organization open to risk and liability.
• Exit Strategy: It is important to ensure that you have an exit strategy in the event that you want to move to another provider or potentially move the service back into your own organization. Avoid adaptive computing services that lock you into proprietary solutions that don’t easily allow you to reclaim your data.

Your Next Steps
If you are considering a move to adaptive computing, there are three key steps your organization can take to effectively plan for the initiative.

1. Inventory all your IT systems and upcoming initiatives so that you can identify potential targets that could be migrated to an adaptive computing model
2. Start with something that is less critical so you can gain some experience in understanding this new computing paradigm
3. Do your due diligence and check reference organizations to better understand what their experience was
4. Understand your current technology environment to ensure that there are no potential barriers to leveraging adaptive services such as insufficient internet bandwidth, lack of connectivity redundancy or other system dependencies.

In following those simple guidelines, you can ensure you mitigate risk, while potentially unlocking an enormous amount of value for your organization.

The app is News360 and it is really an excellent news aggregator app that learns what you like to read and continues to refine the stories it brings forward.  That is a lot like Zite.  What I particularly like about News360 is that you can link it to a variety of social media sites you might use like Google+, Twitter, Facebook.  You can even link it to your Evernote account!  Then News360 goes out and scans those sources and learns about the types of things that interest you.  Post a link on your Facebook wall about the new iPhone 4s and News360 will learn to bring you more articles about that topic.  Tweet something about the latest high speed internet stick for Rogers and presto, News360 will again begin to personalize your experience.

I like this type of application because it curates content for me but makes it simple to refine the criteria that goes into creating my personalized experience.  It is basically invisible to me and requires very little effort beyond the initial setup.  Add to that a wonderful looking user interface with some innovative ways to present stories (the 360 degree view is nice to have scroll by while you are working on something else and simply have your iPad resting on your desk) and you have a winner of an app!  Did I tell you it’s free.

It’s free!

So go grab it and start enjoying another personalized content experience on your iOS device.

I wanted to high light two aspects of Siri that I used repeatedly all last week that drove home the value of this new interface.  The first is for setting reminders and calendar appointments.  Looking back at my reminders from last week I set ended up setting 37 reminders that were a mix of work and personal items.  Using Siri it is dead easy.

• “Remind me next Thursday that it’s parent teacher interviews at 7pm”
• “Remind me to pick up a new power cord when I’m near the Eaton’s Centre”
• “Remind me to mail thank you cards when I arrive home.”
• “Book a meeting for tomorrow morning at 9am to work on presentation.”
• “Remind me to email my presentation when I arrive at work.”
• “Remind me to pick up toast bread and juice when I leave work.”
• “Remind me everyday at 9pm to sign my daughter’s agenda book.”
• “Remind me to call [client name] when I arrive at the office”
• “Book a lunch meeting for this Friday with [name of person] for noon.”

The above is just a sampling of some of the reminders I set for myself.  As if by magic, these reminders were set flawlessly.  Correct dates and times.  Some set up as repeating items automatically.  Some set to trigger only depending on my location.  It is as simple to set as it is to tell someone to remind you.  It’s transformative.  Calendar appointments that take 3-5 steps normally are done in a single sentence.  Again, transformative.

The second is the ability to send text messages via voice.  At first I thought that this would be very useful in the car.  It is of course, as it means I don’t have to type while driving, which is unsafe and a legal no-no.  What has surprised me however is that it is also useful when you are simply running around doing things.

For example, I was walking to a lunch meeting last week and my friend texted me “Have a table” and I simply spoke while crossing the street and said “Tell [person's name] I am on my way”.  Siri then simply sent a text back to that person that said “I am on my way”.  It was flawless.  I didn’t have to slow down, glance down, finger type and send the text.  I simply spoke as though on the phone.  That scenario played itself out repeatedly last week with voice commands like:

• “Tell [person's name] Heading to meeting room A now.”
• “Tell my wife I am heading to the car now”
• “Tell my daughter I’m almost at the school.”
• “Tell [person's name] Running late. See you in five.”

It is these types of things, naturally spoken, that make Siri incredibly valuable.  As people begin to experience this value, they will start to use Siri for other natural language commands and searches.  It is the natural language search that has companies like Google and Microsoft terrified, and rightfully so.

There are many tools that can be used to create a mind map, ranging from desktop software through to the good old-fashioned pen & paper approach.  Over the years I’ve used a number of tools but always seem to gravitate back to my favourite which is MindManager from Mindjet.  It has served me so well over the years ranging from tasks such as planning meetings, capturing requirements, completing RFPs or leading a brainstorming discussion.

This week’s App Wednesday high lights the excellent iPad version of Mindjet’s tool, simply called Mindjet on the iPad.  I had tried to use a number of other mind mapping tools previously on the iPad but they were always lacking in one way or another.  As well, none of them allowed me to easily work with the desktop tool that I’d become so accustomed to.  I was really pleased when the iPad version was launched.

Putting aside the fact that I like the desktop version, and that I like mind mapping itself as a technique, the app itself is wonderful because of how it has been built.  They didn’t simply take a desktop app and port it over onto the iPad.  You can tell that it was designed with the iPad in mind, leveraging the various strengths of what makes the tablet such a joy to use.  It is easy enough to use on the fly in a meeting without the tool getting in the way of the task at hand.  It has an intuitive set of controls.  When you are all done, you can transfer the map from the device via a simple email or by wireless downloading.

If you are a fan of mind mapping, or are planning to try using this technique in your work, then looking at this iPad app is really a must.  Just one more way to make your iPad an excellent productivity device!

• the launch of the iPhone 4s
• RIM’s catastrophic global outage leaves it with a black eye
• Strategic Perspective: Make IT a Revenue Driver Inside Your Organization

I hope that you find the topics today to be entertaining, informative and thought provoking.

To listen to today’s show, simply click the link below.

mips scan podcast – oct14

It has been my experience that strategic planning has always gotten a bad rap.  Strategy has often been viewed as a theoretical exercise, a make work project, that yields a lofty plan that is placed on a shelf to collect dust.  The sad reality is that in many respects, strategic planning has earned that bad rap.  I’ve been inside numerous organizations where past strategic attempts have results in exactly that scenario.  From an IT perspective, which is where I’ve focused most of my strategic engagements, grand plans have often been developed only to find no foothold within the organization to begin adding any value.  I started asking myself the question “why” many years ago.  Why is it that strategic planning seems to yield so little result in many circumstances?  About 6 six years ago, I realized that IT strategic planning was missing an important element, namely, a solid connection to the business it found itself in.  There was often a disconnect between the business and the IT group. Any strategy produced in this kind of silo approach was doomed for failure.

At the time, I refined my approach to delivering strategy to ensure that it began and ended with the business and the goals of the business.  I took the huge cookie cutter approach methodologies and created a series of tool kits that were rooted in understanding an organization and its business.  I called my approach at the time Business First Strategy to reflect the mindset that IT could not be viewed strategically, until a solid understanding of the business needs were established and supported.  In time, I refined my approach to take into account a new dimension that began to emerge back in 2008.  Strategic planning exercises simply took too long.  The longer the time frame, the higher the risk that the strategy would fail.  This was true for a number of reasons:

• stakeholder would come and go.  Organizations changed and often you’d have to deal with different people.
• the business environment changed before you could finish the strategic planning exercise and people would get discouraged that they were dealing with a moving target
• the cost to deliver a big bang approach strategy was difficult to justify and if such an exercise did begin, the strategic objectives needed to provide huge ROI to justify the process in the first place

Taking those factors into consideration, my approach to strategic planning for IT built off of my previous work, but endeavoured to chunk planning done into smaller pieces of work.  Each piece of strategic work would have to standalone and produce value on its own.  That value, if proven to be true, would drive further future strategic engagements.  I called this approach Rapid Strategy, which allowed me to deliver strategic IT plans to organizations within a 90-day period.  This was a real breakthrough moment for me and the many client’s I was privileged to work with.  It allowed me to take my initial toolkit approach and find ways (processes and technology) to accelerate the process.  It’s a “do it fast” and “uncover surprises fast” and “make adjustments fast” and “realize value fast” approach.

Now in 2011 it seems that the strategic planning approach needs to evolve once again.  It’s a natural evolution that has been occurring, but has now been accelerated because of the environment we are finding ourselves in.  The progression has been to take strategic planning from a step-by-step cookbook approach, first to an approach rooted in business needs, then to an approach that was faster and now, for the next step in strategy, to transform it into an approach that retains the value in the first two iterations but added a much-needed third component.  What is that component?

Action!

I first began to realize that something was missing when I observed what happened to strategy I’d done after I’d delivered it to an organization.  In some cases, I stayed involved at the organization’s request and we observed that real and expected value began to be realized from the strategy.  In some cases I remained with organizations through to the completion of the implementation of strategic plans, and again, there was value.  There were instances, however, where I was not involved in the implementation of strategy, only to find out later that the organization hadn’t realized the value they’d hoped for.

After seeing this several times, I knew that the toolkit and my strategic planning process needed to evolve to allow organizations to take action.  There needs to be a way to take strategy from 50,000 feet and put it into action on the ground.  It was from this need that my approach to strategy evolved into Actionable Strategy.  It is important to recognize this changing need in strategic planning for IT within organizations, otherwise, strategic initiatives will be seen as failed attempts and we will once again see strategy getting a bad rap within companies.  I would argue, however, that now, more than ever, the need for actionable strategy is more important that ever for a number of key reasons facing every business out there.

1. The volatile nature of the economy demands that organizations react in a nimble fashion.  With the market changing, a business that cannot react quickly, may find itself losing market share unexpectedly.  Moving quickly, however, does mean that you should be reactive.  Strategic, proactive steps are required to ensure good business decisions.  The same is true for IT.  As organizations find themselves changing course more frequently to navigate the turbulent global environment, IT needs to be able to move quickly with them, but to do so without adherence to an overarching strategy will lead to issues down the road.  You may find that you are reacting too slowly and hence your organization will see the IT function as a hinderance.  You may move quickly, but not assess risk adequately and introduce catastrophic, unacceptable risks to your organization.  You may move quickly, consume limited IT resources (like dollars!) only to find that you have no resources (dollars!) to adapt the next time a sudden shift in the business occurs.
2. The dynamic and disruptive nature of technology is accelerating.  Failure to have a strategy that leaves you with the tools to action it will result in organizations missing out on ways to leverage new methods of IT delivery or technologies that can transform the way your organization works.  Too often IT groups are what I call “ticket takers” – they sit back, wait for a ticket to arrive with an order, and they fill it.  Today’s rapid changes in technology, everything from mobile computing to cloud-based adaptable services, will render the ticket-taking model of IT obsolete.  Organizations that don’t find ways to delivery an actionable strategy that allows the business and IT to move in lockstep with the changing technology landscape will find themselves unexpectedly disrupted in their own industry.
3. End users are rapidly becoming more sophisticated.  They have been accustomed to dealing with other organizations in their personal life who deliver IT services to them that do indeed embrace the new technology paradigm (banks, telcos, consumer electronics, etc).  These end-users then come back into their own work environment and wonder “why can’t my IT group deliver such and such to me”.  Too often these days IT groups try to stifle the leading edge “stuff” that their end-users are trying to have introduced into the organization.  The iPad is a classic example of this.  It didn’t come into organizations from the IT departments, rather, it came in through the front door!  End-users brought them in and IT groups scrambled to figure out how to support them.  Worse, businesses had no idea what value to expect.  There was no actionable strategy in place to do so.  Companies and IT departments looked at this trend as a potential threat (use of IT resources time, security issues) as opposed to seeing it as a huge opportunity to empower and transform their workforce.

It is because of these three very real emerging trends that the importance of actionable strategy has come to the forefront.  Organizations that ignore them do so at their own peril.  They are destined to either ignore strategy all together and accept simply being reactive, or they will find themselves producing (or receiving) strategy that once completed, is relegated to a shelf only to collect dust.  A missed opportunity once again and another black mark against the cause of strategic planning.