Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

Insurance Core Systems Modernization: You won't hear this from an industry analyst...

2013-04-29T06:00:00.000-04:00

Carriers have lots of rules that govern everything from rating and underwriting to policy processing. Most carriers attempting to replace their policy administration system forget about this important point and discover too late that the number of rules will more than like overwhelm a new core system.

Smart insurers focus first on product configuration and rating migrating legacy systems to bespoke rating engines. Carriers often have multiple rating engines tied to policy administration systems, web portals and other systems which leads to inconsistent pricing, compliance issues and the inability to develop innovative products.

Many industry analysts fail to tell their customers that the rating engines that are locked into most policy administration systems are often inflexible and lack the ability to scale. Some carriers have even figured out that they don't really need to replace their administration system and just needed to focus on externalizing their rating and rules...

Why do some IT leaders always advocate for hybrid approaches?

2013-04-15T11:15:00.000-04:00

In your career travels, you may have ran across those IT leaders who always seek middle ground. The glow about achieving a hybrid approach. While this approach is popular, this often results in both suboptimal leadership and business outcomes...

Ever heard the phrase: Shit or get off the pot? What happens when you seek to choose a hybrid position? Are you OK with half of it being in the pot while the other half runs down your leg? Leadership isn't about appeasing people but more about achieving necessary outcomes when tend to be towards one side over another.

People love to be reasonable.Striking a balance makes the person who is attempting to strike it appear a reasonable sort of person. Who wants to be unbalanced? After you have looked at the pros and cons and understood the competing arguments, you should balance them out, yes? But when someone strikes a balance, they rarely say what balance has to be struck and why. Instead, they throw this phrase in as the final justification.

It allows someone to come into a discussion and own new midway territory that is hard to argue with. Talk of balance can be reassuring when actually, what is needed is a radical rebalancing of priorities. No balancing is required when the scales come down firmly on one side. In short, striking a balance is woolly and platitudinous, neither ideal when you are dealing with a statistical reality. Fewer targets, just like a little bit of ham for a vegetarian or the Pope agreeing to share the Vatican with the devil, is still the wrong thing to do...

When do screenshots become a documentation worst practice?

2013-04-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

It is common for modern computer documentation to be filled with screenshots, demonstrating how to use every field and control of every window provided by an application. This leads to thick documents with little long term useful information...

There is a significant cost related to keeping documents in sync with the software they describe. If the documentation is being developed at the same time that the software is being developed, it is possible that screen layouts will be changed at the last minute, requiring last-minute changes to the documentation. When a new version of the application becomes available, a whole new set of screenshots must be generated and inserted into the document. This leads developers to avoid improving screen layouts or adding valuable features due to the cost of updating the documentation.

In many enterprises, there are review processes for pretty much everything that gets created, including documentation. Whenever we go down the path of focusing on screenshots, we get drawn into a trap of then also worrying about whether we are using the right icons or other aesthetic considerations while ignoring substance.

Does someone truly benefit over the long haul in having documentation that shows a First Name field should be populated with a first name? I have observed that if user interfaces require documentation then it tends to point to a lack of focus on usability while developing the application. What if we decided to do the exact opposite and find ways to make documentation history?

Should screens for enterprise applications be self-documenting? Many screens tend to mirror the needs of the data to be captured vs focusing on what is the outcome the user wants to accomplish. Think for a moment about your most favored enterprise time tracking application. Does having a box of rows and columns where the user has no freakin clue as to what to put where feel like a request for documenting screenshots or does it feel more like an opportunity to do things differently?

An outcome focused timetracking application would have a totally different interaction. Consider the scenario where a team of people are assigned to a long-term project and for the most part do the same activities on a weekly basis. Imagine a timetracking application that upon signin knew who you were and started with a simple question of: Did you do the same activities this week as last? and simply copied them using whatever logic is appropriate...

Three criteria that industry analysts miss when it comes to selecting a standalone rating engine? (Part One)

2013-03-12T10:00:00.000-04:00

Many carriers are realizing that they need alternatives to maintaining rates and rules in legacy COBOL. Many Tier One carriers may have jumped the bandwagon too early and purchased rating engines with sticker prices into the millions without realizing there are better viable alternatives in the marketplace.

First and foremost, industry analysts tend to compare surface-level product features and usually are blissfully ignorant as to understanding subtle architecture nuances. Please note that many industry analysts gather information solely via survey methods and may not come from a technical background. Below are three architecture considerations that are absolutely vital in gaining insight from a vendor prior to purchase.

1. Microsoft Excel: I recently observed an insurer complain about limitations in using spreadsheets for actuarial modeling who created a RFP for a better solution. Interestingly enough, they chose a product based solely on analyst features that also happened to simply wrap Microsoft Excel! While this particular insurer didn't have technical expertise to understand the trap they walked into, one clue would have been to look at rating engines that ONLY run on Microsoft Windows.

2. Cloud: Does your rating engine vendor restrict how you deploy the product? Two different insurers I frequently interact with have a strategy to migrate away from physical servers in their datacenter towards virtual private cloud in HP datacenters. One insurer was sticker shocked when their vendor quoted them a ridiculous price under the guise that they couldn't measure deployment and therefore had to purchase an unlimited license. The other insurer fared even worse. The vendor required the insurer to purchase an entirely new product.

3. Mobility: Another insurer is currently working on a game changing mobile application that will allow their captive agents to perform extensive quoting in the field. Their current rating engine vendor unfortunately doesn't have an offering that works with Android. The carrier now has to run two different rating engine products.

I will be attending the ACORD LOMA event in Las Vegas and am game to share experiences and perspectives on the other marketplace offerings over dinner. If you won't be attending this event, but otherwise want to discuss this in more detail, just drop me a note at james.mcgovern@hp.com using your WORK email along with a few time slots and I will setup a conference call via Outlook calendar invite as a followup.

The secret relationship between Annual Performance Reviews, Hitler and You!

2013-02-25T11:30:00.000-05:00

You’re probably a nice person, how easy would it have been to persuade you to play a small part in the Holocaust? In an interview between former Nazi Officer Adolf Eichmann and the author Hannah Arendt, the author asked Eichmann if it was difficult to persuade people to send all of those Jewish people to their deaths? Eichmann replied that it was actually very easy because bureaucratic language allowed it. They simply had to say that they had “no choice”—that they were just “following orders.”

Much of the annual review process is a measure of how well you practice followership. Why does IT continue to miss deadlines, go over budget and almost always deliver late? Is it for the same reason that the masses are following a Hitler-like leader?

Let's remember that Hitler was democratically elected and was really good in using leadership-oriented words. Eichmann and his fellow officers used the word Amtssprache (office talk), to justify their horrific actions during the Holocaust. It was policy, I was just doing my job. I was just doing what I was told to by people in charge.

But you wouldn’t do that would you? How easy would it be for you to be persuaded to electrocute a stranger into unconsciousness despite their screams for you to stop? I bet if you were to look at the annual reviews of those whom you personally consider leaders, they are the ones that buck the trend, do mediocre at best in terms of how they are measured on their annual review but otherwise kick ass at delivering high quality working software, on time and below budget.

Be careful when you hear the word leadership being used in a sentence. Everyone has a different definition...

How to fake leadership...

2013-02-18T09:30:00.000-05:00

Let's face it, the call for leadership in corporate America is alarmingly loud. Yet, somehow many who rise the ladder to ~~management~~leadership ranks, tend to fake their way through it. You can probably find lots of articles on becoming a genuine leader, but very few on how to fake it. Let me show you the way...

Below are several ways you can increase your fake leadership potential...

The more you do, the better value you are. Everyone knows that there is only one thing worse than doing the wrong thing right and that is not doing enough of it.
Delivery is job one. Doesn’t matter what you deliver, as long as you do. Just like postal employees with a heavy round at Christmas, what is IN those parcels is irrelevant, just get delivering.
Walk very fast. You need speed to ensure dynamism. The older you get, the greater the need to gallop down corridors to maintain your aura of urgency.
Relationships are key. The currency is popularity. Popularity among others above and alongside you. But don’t be too popular. That way lies flavor of the month and last month was January. Don’t be a February because March comes round soon enough. Do something more simple like bringing in donuts periodically.
Always agree with your boss. You come in very handy when there is never dissent. Being labeled as a team player is more important than having any form of conceptual integrity. This is the sole reason why so few Enterprise Architects and no one in Information Security ever becomes CIO.

Assclown Blogging

2013-02-14T06:39:00.003-05:00

I have been known on occasion to comment on other blogs but never look inward as to how mines could have been better. Today's blog is on why my blogging is reminiscent of assclownery...

When I first started my blog, I had zero thoughts as to what I would write about. I simply said I would share whatever I was thinking about at the time. Sometimes, my mind plays tricks on me and encourages me to vomit on paper. My brain won't rest until the post has been written.

Remember those index cards we all learned how to use in elementary school in order to structure my thoughts. Well, truth be told I never learned how to actually structure much of anything. I wonder if there is a closet liberal hiding in the body of a conservative.

My blog sometimes even suffer from basic clerical mistakes that any spell-checking program would have caught. For some strange reason, I almost never see these mistakes until after I have clicked post. I guess I am hypocritical when I encourage others to pay attention to details.

Some people think I am a rebel without a pause. Letting it flow is an outlet that hides the lack of self-reflective behavior. Being the proverbial bull in the china shop is priceless. I could of course remix my blog posts to better classify my posts but find delight in the romantic notion that someone stumbling upon it will want to be the human search engine and crawl everything I have shared looking for little nuggets of insight.

I wonder if people reading my blog have ever figured out that my blog isn't about technology but all about me? I have convinced myself that a random mix of posts is a better way to tell the world, the random mix of my life. As a technology DJ, I frequently attempt spin Public Enemy and combine it with Mozart. After all, success is in the mix.

Some think I am a storyteller, others a hopeless romantic. In my own mind, I am an activist where the goal is for people to take up a cause, to stand for reason and amplify some of the otherwise hidden goodness that people on our planet have to offer each other...

Five Mistakes CIOs make in asking analyst firms to create vendor shortlists...

2013-02-02T17:32:00.000-05:00

I have lots of friends who are industry analysts and have over time come to appreciate the variety of tactics some use to take money from large enterprises. I am of the belief that if I publicly suggest a better way, that the marketplace for innovation will improve and that the best products/services will thrive...

1. Choosing analysts that have never walked in your shoes: Analysts come from a variety of backgrounds ranging from journalism to consultant to even having been a practitioner in an end-user company. While it is possible for those who are journalists to learn the nuances of products, just like consultants they have never had to live with the choices they have made.

2. Not understanding analyst bias: Many CIOs remain blissfully ignorant as to which vendors purchase services from analyst firms and which vendors choose to skip paying fees. If you are going to trust an analyst firm to help you create a short-list, you should demand that the analyst firm provide full disclosure in this regard. Even after disclosure, you should ask for an even number of choices of vendors that both subscribe to the analyst services as well as a few that do not.

3. Not understanding analyst revenue streams: Some analyst firms have gotten particularly good in helping customers build shortlists. In this scenario, if you are replacing an existing system can you truly trust analyst guidance? Is it in the best interest of the analyst firm to get you to switch to something new where they can create an engagement or to tell you as part of a "seat" that there are ways to achieve your outcome without requiring a rip and replace?

4. Not understanding interoperability: Nowadays, whenever you purchase an enterprise application you will more than likely integrate it with other enterprise products. Having an understanding not just of functionality but system qualities such as the performance or security measures that a vendor took when developing a product will help avoid many headaches down the road. Many analyst methodologies are simply based on anecdotal conversations with marketplace players, industry analyst relations professionals and sending out surveys that almost never ask for any information around performance benchmarking, applicable information security standards, etc.

5. Not understanding integration vendor coupling: Whenever you purchase a product, it will almost always require professional services. It is important to know upfront whether the required consulting services can be delivered by others in the marketplace or solely by the software vendor itself. Not having choice in integrator will most certainly increase the costs of implementation.

IT Staffing Firm Worst Practices

2013-01-28T17:02:00.000-05:00

Sooner or later, you will be contacted by an IT staffing firm whom will wax poetic on their best practices. To that I say, let's analyze a few of them...

Recruiting Process: Clients hire staffing partners to do something clients aren't capable of doing internally. If that is the case, why do you see so many agencies posting client requisitions on job boards. Is there much value being added in an agency firm spamming Monster and every LinkedIn group they can access?

Turnover: There are times where clients go to staffing firms for access to low-cost resources. This however doesn't mean that clients want frequent resource turnover. This is almost guaranteed in scenarios where staffing firms want to maintain margin by sticking it to candidates. Sadly, turnover doesn't just effect candidates and also applies to staffing firm personnel as well. Why are these positions filled with college grads, professionals who failed as sales people or even worse homemakers who are looking to make spare change.

Database: Yes, your database is proprietary, only that it is probably not a real database. At best it is a contact application that maintains a file pointer to a resume. I do acknowledge that it is filled with more names than you know what to do with, but what is its value over simply searching LinkedIn?

Loyalty: What good is a big database if few candidates contained within want to do business with you? Let's face it, there is little loyalty in the world of staffing. If you only reach out to candidates when you have an "opportunity" but otherwise can hear crickets on the other end when they reach out to you, then what should clients expect?

Job Descriptions: Candidates are more than capable of reading a job description, so you don't need to read it to them. What you do need to do is proactively have answers to candidate questions such as the type of work, the compensation, amount of travel if applicable and of course a sense of the role related to work/life balance.

Lean Thinking and Zero-Based Budgeting

2013-01-23T16:00:00.000-05:00

In zero-based budgeting, every line item of the budget must be approved by the business. This is distinct from asking for a delta increase or decrease based on prior numbers. In reviewing a zero-based budget, no reference is made to the previous level of expenditure. Zero-based budgeting requires the budget request to be examined thoroughly at each revision.

While I hate the supposed bureaucracy that can emerge from zero-based budgeting, I believe there is an immense opportunity to eliminate wasteful spending as well. If IT wants to align with the business, it has to have clear insight into past, present and future spend and focus on utilizing money in the best way possible...

What is the purpose of education?

2013-01-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

Dropout rates are increasing and American kids simply aren't keeping up with kids in education. I wonder if the towns you live in and their boards of education have any level of understanding that kids might be bored of education?

As a parent of two school-aged children, I sometimes wonder if I am alone in observing the increasing mismatch between traditional curricular standards of content-based instruction and the new forms of thinking required by our digital, distributed workplace?

We are no longer in the industrial age where routine thinking skills were a core requirement. Henry Ford was a proponent of education primarily to create a steady supplier of workers for his factories and to ultimately turn them into customers. Today, those routine thinking skills are increasingly performed by machines or outsourced to countries with lower standards of living and freedom than the United States.

Regardless of whether you have children of your own, taking an interest in how the board of education either fulfills or fails in educating children should be of interest to you. If you have a pension, a 401K or any type of investment, the ability for it to provide a return in your retirement is directly correlated to the success or lack of the ability for the board of education to make education less boring...

McGovernTheory: Thoughts on Successful Living...

2013-01-11T10:15:00.000-05:00

In reflecting on my career, I am come to appreciate that I have done many things wrong but also a few things right. First and foremost, I think the thing that I got right was the acknowledgement that in order to have a career, one doesn't have to dedicate and inordinate amount of time and energy but must be savage in their devotion to their trade/craft.

I am the poster child for the introvert community, yet I am savage when it comes to extroverted activities and the need to connect to others. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn understanding who are the movers and shakers in hopes of catching an emerging trend before someone else. I use Twitter specifically to connect, interact, and network with various communities of interest to me whether it is about enterprise architecture, information security, martial arts or even sophomoric humor. Through these interactions, I have been lucky enough to make some good friends.

I have been fortunate enough to find a group of like-minded individuals who listen to my rants and screeds and openly amplify them with passion. The people who have made me successful are the ones who themselves have embraced their otherwise unknown celebrity status to not just improve our trade/craft but to also improve the human condition. Whether it is support for noble charities such as the Wounded Warrior Project or initiatives such as Kiva, they are doing their best to help others do their best.

In the circles I travel, I have surrounded myself with successful people who are selfless. They are consummate professionals who engage in giving speeches at industry conferences, sharing their thoughts via blogs and even contributing to open source projects even though they have a day job and a family. They never make excuses about how busy they are and always find time to do the right thing.

Is university research fundamentally broken?

2013-01-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

Picture yourself as a grad student at a major university asking yourself and others what is the incentive structure for research? You write amazing things in cryptic university-like humorless monotone in order to get them published in journals that are not read by practitioners very often. Now compare the ability to write in the human voice using social media where you can simply post something that can be seen, read and interacted on by tens of thousands of people overnight. How should a modern college student rationalize this experience?

As someone who has been published in prestigious journals such as the IEEE Security and Privacy, I cannot answer understand why I did this, what was I chasing and what was the prize I won after being successful in completing the mission.

Should I find other soapboxes to share my rants and screeds, kinda of like what I am doing now? My two sons who are respectively eight and eleven already have accomplished more in the way of peer review, broadening the body of knowledge and other altruistic goals by simply participating in creating content via Twitter and YouTube. As a parent, if they were to ask their college educated Dad, whether they should handcuff themselves to closed source models of peer review, I wouldn't know what to say. I suspect that many of my college-educated peers would be in the same predicament.

As a book author, I have come to learn that much of the peer review processes are less about livability and more about acceptability. Peer reviews are all about gaining consensus approval rather than actually creating something new, compelling and innovative. The marketplace rewards innovators over mere publishers. Look at the business models of Apple and compare it to publishing houses who still maintain old world thinking. One is growing and the other is dying. I hope you are smart enough to understand which is which.

A university should educate, stimulate and titillate the mind expanding beyond arbitrary borders which many do a fine job in achieving. I still however wonder why sage wisdom allows antiquated research models that have proven themselves ancient to still survive. They are on life support and are dying slowly. We need some heroism Kevorkian style. Are there any University Professors willing to pull the plug...

Should the Government Expose those who are lawful Permit Holders?

2013-01-07T08:30:00.000-05:00

Without getting too political, I am of the belief that the government should NOT expose the information of those who lawfully hold gun permits. If this information was exposed, it could lead to interesting consequences.

In the State of Connecticut, the sexual offender registry allows any citizen to lookup who is an offender in their neighborhood. The law also provides protection for the offenders. If a person harasses in any way, a convicted sexual offender they can be subject to arrest, yet if a person harasses a lawful gun owner, the penalty is less. Does this feel equitable?

If you are a lawful permit holder and also gainfully employed where you can't bring your guns to work with you, don't you think you just provided a map for criminals looking for weapons to easily find them? The other side of the argument says that criminals may also have a map to those who are not armed, making it easier to commit henous crimes against people who cannot defend themselves with deadly force.

The topic of gun control is politically charged which will cause stupid legislation to occur. What if we instead focused on mental health which both Democrats and Republicans can agree are necessary to address? We have to be very careful as to what personal information we expose and should establish boundaries as to what one does or even has in their own home. After all, I suspect we all have habits that we wouldn't want to be made public due to legislation...

Government IT procurement processes are a big fat joke!

2013-01-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

I have always scratched my head as to why the Government needs to have bureaucratic procurement processes that are incredibly slow and time consuming. If you understand that people want to be paid for their time, then increasing the amount of time spent will result in an increase in the amount charged.

In the enterprise sector, it is almost rare for a large contractor to beholden to a single enterprise. The supplier wants to diversify their revenue sources. Enterprises equally want to see other enterprises as customers of the supplier which may be reflected in reference checks or other practices. There are situations where the suppliers to the government have only one customer and the procurement process has the ability to destroy the competitive market and create monopoly suppliers.

Taxpayers can't afford the kind of "transparency and accountability" that has developed. Worse yet, the ability to foster proper relationships has been eroded by "manufactured" procurement scandals such that buyers isolate themselves from the information they need to make good decisions, or structure mutually beneficial contractual relationships.

Part of solving the fiscal cliff is not to just pontificate about government transparency but to ensure they are using best practices of large enterprises and not just ones invented within the government itself...

Five IT Predictions for 2013

2012-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:00

Many industry pundits and thought leaders use the changing of the new year as a reason to make bold predictions. Guess I am no different...

So, here are my top five IT predictions for 2013:

Developers will become more important but less empowered: Long gone are the days where developers were respected and treated as equal members of the project team. Nowadays, they are subservient to project managers, architects and even the cafeteria workers and cleaning staff in most corporations. Many CIOs are starting to acknowledge that outsourcing to India got them rate arbitrage but little else and therefore are bring work back onshore. As the US developer ranks get rebuilt, they will go through many pains to become first-class IT citizens.
CIOs will be forced to spend millions on remediating the plethora of insecure mobile applications. In many respects, mobile applications are actually less secure than their web counterparts. Communities such as the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) are busy understanding all of the nuanced ways that mobile applications can be compromised. This is being done without any press from analyst firms such as Gartner or Forrester. Smart CIOs will start having conversations with even smarter Chief Security Architects whom are either on their payroll or work for firms such as HP, Security Innovation, Cigital or other firms and start to acknowledge that if you install an enterprise application on a device that is controlled by someone else, that the attacker has an unlimited amount of time to decompile it and study.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is dead. The new conversation will focus on PaaS. The average corporate CIO is being encouraged to think about their business first, then applications then infrastructure; in that order, yet much of the cloud hype is bass akwards. Once the hype disappears, the media will finally come to their senses and start publishing articles of interest that are more business-aligned.
Industry Analysts will still treat non-commercial open source as a step-child. Many understand that the Internet would not exist if it were not for non-commercial open source, whether it is Mozilla for browsers, Apache for Web Servers, Bind for DNS, etc. Increasingly, enterprises will start to care less about what vendor a particular piece of software comes from if any and instead focus on whether a piece of software meets their ultimate requirements. Customers sometimes don't care if it is vendor-backed or not, yet analyst firms will continue to play various misdirection tricks to hide the fact that there is no pay-for-play to be had.
Big Data will Flame Out and be replaced with a focus on Small Data. If you sell database software and related hardware right now, you are more than likely rolling in the money. Sooner or later, the fad of information architecture will catch up to the point where it needs to demonstrate real return on investment. Many firms are growing their usage of big data techniques but few have generated massive ROI. The focus will shift away from the insatiable need for more data towards focusing on architecture styles that keep data as small as possible.

Obama and Tobacco Smoke Enemas

2012-12-22T20:23:00.002-05:00

Tobacco Smoke Enemas (1750s – 1810s)

The tobacco enema was used to infuse tobacco smoke into a patient’s rectum for various medical purposes, primarily the resuscitation of drowning victims. A rectal tube inserted into the anus was connected to a fumigator and bellows that forced the smoke towards the rectum. The warmth of the smoke was thought to promote respiration, but doubts about the credibility of tobacco enemas led to the popular phrase “blow smoke up one’s ass.”

This has been reintroduced in Washington D.C.

How CIOs enable vendor lock-in

2012-12-17T07:32:00.000-05:00

You are an enterprise CIO with a limited budget to implement a strategic enterprise application. Your shop isn't disciplined enough to put the brakes on the business continually asking for enhancements. Your procurement department gets involved and adopts the mindset that everything is a commodity and therefore the price should be as cheap as possible. The only thing that gets procurement to change their mind is the melodic words of mass customization...

Any customized service or product configuration creates switching costs that increase a customer's willingness to continue buying from that particular vendor rather than bidding out every opportunity. The trick is to ensure that whatever high-end services that are developed, can't be duplicated by their competitors without great effort even when you violate the NDA and share the vendor's intellectual property with their competitors in order to bring down price.

As we encourage IT to further align with the business, it is almost certain that the vendor community will become participants. A highly desirable brand name, or a product in heavy demand by your customer’s own customers or users, can be very effective at pulling vendors products through the enterprise. The “Intel Inside” advertising campaign creates pull-through for Intel. When Mattel offers Toys-R-Us an exclusive arrangement for particular configurations or for products with their own consumer brands such as “Barbie” or “Hot Wheels” or “Harry Potter,” it is making itself indispensable to this very tough customer. For organizations that hire Accidenture, they often find themselves hooked like crack addicts when they can no longer access their services.

What if the CIO stopped espousing partnership and actually decided to be genuine in creating true partnerships. Each organization wants to protect themselves and retain/obtain as much money as possible. Relationships are critical on both sides. Both parties desire innovation and both can benefit from respective innovations, thus true partnership. If your enterprise processes focus on rate arbitrage, contract word twiddling, attempting to commoditize your vendors intellectual property or other worst practices, it is certain that your vendors will have no choice but to respond with tactics that ensure vendor lock-in.

Another CIO worst practice for Business/IT alignment

2012-12-14T07:37:00.002-05:00

It goes without saying that many enterprises are taking advantage of global IT outsourcing trends in hopes of reducing IT labor costs. Many organizations have procurement practices that are thorough in maximizing labor abritage but otherwise fail in reducing cost over a longer time horizon. More importantly, their approaches to outsourcing tend to increase the misalignment of vendors you work with.

Whenever a CIO creates an organization where the majority of IT staff aren't employees, it becomes equally important to focus on the need for business-aligned sourcing. Which sourcing vendor feels more aligned to you? An approach frequently used by Cognizant where they put account teams onsite that do nothing but walk the hallways asking your IT team their staffing needs without any form of ownership to outcome or the model used by firms such as HP and IBM that take a longer-term view by focusing less on staff augmentation and more on managed services.

In order to get business-aligned sourcing right, we need to turn most outsourcing decisions upside down. Let's start by analyzing enterprise behavior and understand where things go wrong...

CEO: We need to save more money. Outsource more!

CFO: I mandate outsourcing at every possible opportunity (even with it is boneheaded to do so) to cut costs

CFO: I have advised those lovely folks in procurement to review outsourcing bids and select the low-cost provider.

CIO: We are already thin on subject matter expertise and outsourcing will jeopardize our ability to support the business

CFO: I don't care about the business, but I do care about costs. Find a way to get the business to accept the lower quality that India outsourcing firms deliver and no you can't use higher quality firms such as HP or IBM

CIO: As my talent walks out the door, I am left with those who can't find jobs elsewhere. Besides, I want my bonus so I better focus on whats in it for me and let everyone worry about their own fate. Maybe I need to hide the activity under the banner of leadership

CTO: Hey CIO, WTF! the availability of our systems has decreased 10X since bringing on Cognizant and Infosys! The Business: How come I don't get the same level of quality that I did before?

CIO: Business customer, we have brought you losts of cost savings that you can use for invest projects. Don't worry about production uptime. The experience you are suffering is attributable to transition

CIO: This Indian outsourcing thing is going to cause me to lose my job. After outsourcing I realize that critical skills are lacking.

Outsourcing Sales Guy:Don't worry, CIO we got lots of people who can walk the hallway and solicit your directs for job reqs. We are really good in placing butts in seats!

CIO: If outsourcing isn't working well for us, the simple answer is to outsource more!

CEO: Our biggest competitor has outsourced, I should rally the team and frantically ask Why aren't we outsourcing more?

CIO: I will further reduce head count and lower costs. We need to go offshore for service delivery — now!

Does this conversation feel somewhat familiar to you? Does this feel business-aligned? Do you know that there are better ways...

Remote Worker: Six Benefits

2012-12-13T07:56:00.002-05:00

I am going onto my second full year in being a remote worker. In my travels, I often mention that my office is officially in my basement but that I periodically spend time on the living room couch and use a Home Depot bucket as my desk. On more than a few occasions, I have been asked how often do I visit a physical office which I usually respond that there is one close by but since I do not have government clearance, I am forbidden to enter.

Most remote workers I know, seem to do so only in a part-time basis. You know, they are still on the fence. They may work from home a few days a week and hotel it in the office for the remainder. For me, I like the fact that hoteling is not an option for me and therefore I must find solace in the comfort of my own home.

There are six benefits to being a remote worker that I have discovered that I wanted to share with others in hopes that they too will find their inner zen.

Productivity: In environments that still are primarily dominated by the office culture, you will find the need to spend wasteful time on socialization activities that do not necessarily contribute to the bottom line. I do not miss the amount of energy I used to expend with a former employer on the need for "presence" and am now focused solely on getting shit done.

Gas and Insurance: In days past, I used to fill up my tank about every seven to ten days. Now, I can go two to three weeks before filling up. This means that I have at some level become more green and am doing my part to contribute less to the greenhouse effect. More importantly, with gas prices so high, I think I have given myself a $50 a month bonus. Bet you didn't know that if you do not use a vehicle to drive to work, you can get significant discounts off auto insurance. For me, this fact has saved me about $300 a year.
work/life balance: Once you shift mindsets from hours to outcomes, lots of possibilities become reality. For example, I know attend pretty much every school event, field trip and parent/teacher conference of my two kids and without having to necessarily ask permission to be out of the office. While many employers are usually accomodating, the simple fact that I have been able to remove the administrative task of asking also results in time savings.

Lower Stress: Pretty much all work environments have their stress factors. The key is in your ability to quickly and easily remove it. Earlier in the week, I found myself frustrated with a bureaucratic process, yet was able to relieve stress by immediately yelling at the top of my lungs lots of explicatives. I have been known periodically to put Wutang Clan and Ozzy Osborne on blast. Bet you can't do this in an office setting.
Multitasking: I also like the fact that I can multitask. You know, throw a load of laundry into the washing machine and get hyponitized in watching it spin. In life, we have lots of little tasks that simply queue up. My queue in this regard is very small. Part of achieving personal Kanban.
Casual dress: It goes without saying that I also spend less on my wardrobe. Casual clothes simply cost less than business casual clothing. There are days when I don't bother to get even casually dressed. The ability to dress in a way that makes you personally comfortable, aids in productivity, time savings and most importantly ability to engage in providing value to your employer, anytime, anywhere from any location...

Three ways CIOs ensure failure of large IT projects

2012-12-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

If we define "failure" using the definition of number of projects that are late, over budget or lack sufficient quality, then I have observed more of my fair share. In a previous life, I was an Enterprise Architect for The Hartford (A Fortune 100 Insurance Carrier) where we frequently worked with Accenture, IBM and Cognizant. During my tenure, I not only observed failure, but managed to observe patterns that makes failure a CIO repeatable best practice...

Now, that I am on the other side of the table, I too sometimes reflect on the practices of competitors and brainstorm better ways to help clients not fail. Sometimes, I am wildly successful by being radically transparent while at other times, I couldn't find the right words to convince that their strategy was suboptimal. Over the past year, I have been shifting my thought process away from Agile Software Developing towards Lean Thinking and therefore have spent a lot of time understanding Toyota. Since, I have cars on my mind, I will attempt to classify CIO-level failures into three buckets using driving as the metaphor since the CIO is usually in the drivers seat:

Consulting Firms will let their clients drive the car into the ditch: Consulting firms are sometimes too willing to accept client changes in scope, targets, priorities, etc during a project thought it was not the best way or even a safe way. Consulting firms sometimes do this out of fear since much of the business generated is done based on relationships. Change orders tend to also bring with it, more revenue so the coin-operated partner is increasingly less likely to not at least consider.

Using the analogy of the car, instead of following the map and planning the route, we instead resort to sudden jerks at the steering wheel. No wonder clients run off the road.
The wrong person is put into the drivers seat: Here is another area where a CIO will fall victim to melodic words of a partner who assigns someone who possesses charisma and has the gift of gab but otherwise is lacking in other necessary skills. When we tend to value personality traits such as being an extrovert over abilities required to deliver such as strong technical leadership, things have a way of going wrong very fast.

Choice in personnel should not be made on the fit of the consultant to CIO or even business customer for that matter, but should instead focus on the overall fit with the team. Think Democracy here.
Driving without gas in the tank: No matter how thorough the current state assessment is, there is always an important detail or two that is left out. Sometimes, there are questions that consultants would like to ask but are barred in exploring them for a plethora of reasons. At other times, a CIO may be either unaware or not completely forthcoming about cashflow, profitability, management capability, business outlook or other issues.

Sometimes this results in the pursuit of goals that are more about declaring victory early rather than delivering value to the business. Over time, when you have a model that is based on allowing at least two varying perspectives, interesting things are guaranteed to happen.

Why I despise status reports (and you should too)...

2012-12-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

I wonder if I am somehow unique in that I almost NEVER ask my team to provide me with status? My mantra as a leader is to be savage in reducing the amount of administrivia that development teams work. While I can control it for others, I do suffer in controlling it for myself. It is important to acknowledge the reason why status reports exist in the first place. The root cause is simply attributable to human nature. We focus on meetings that are primarily designed for people to get answers to questions—not explore answers but get answers, so they’re looking for information, looking for status reports.

Most of our inbox is filled with status reports—when is this thing going to be ready, when is it going to ship, what happened and that sort of thing. Even when we are engaging with people, we tell stories about events. What happened, tell me the story. If you put all those things together, all of them are about the results of what’s going on. They however aren’t so much about the why.

As someone with an engineering mindset, I tend to learn not by the current status of any situation but the root cause. If you are building bridges and you have built hundreds of them successfully, what have you learned? Now ask yourself how much you can learn when a bridge falls down?

If you think about the reports that people have, just the first layer of that system for understanding current reality, if they’re good reports, they tell us whether we have a problem. If they don’t even tell us about a potential problem, I’m not even sure what the point of the report is.

Second, they should tell us where we have a problem, or at least help us figure that out. Many reports don’t do that, but if they’re really good and the problem is of a certain nature, reports should be able to tell us where we have a problem. Even so, they still really never tell us why we have a problem. For that, we have to go to the source – we have to go to how the work is done. Whether it’s direct observation, we go and actually see the problem, whether it’s process maps or value stream maps, or a mechanism to get into how the work is designed and managed and improved.

We sometimes wax poetically about finding root cause, but sometimes we simply need to understand cause and effect. Many leaders don’t really understand how the problems are being generated. We often have much more focus on the results than we do on why we’re getting the result that we get.

Interviewing for a position where I am an interviewer...

2012-12-01T07:49:00.001-05:00

On the chance that you ever interview for a position where I am conducting the interview, you may find it important to note what I think is important...

It goes without saying that I am savagely focused on technology over just soft skills alone as I have ran across more than a few buzzword puppets in my travels. But of course, being a student of the human aspects of technology, I do find myself on occasion paying attention to a few areas of concern. Below are four areas that are almost guaranteed to influence my decision.

Inability to use free time. I don’t want to see a candidate who has no additional interests or personality beyond what’s required to get a job in their industry. You need to show you’re a human being, not a robot. I love to see candidates with hobbies or even those who have taken on a second job—it shows you’re able to make good use of your free time to expand your skills and interests and this is a quality that’s likely to spill over into your professional life.

Unpreparedness. If you show up at the interview without having a working knowledge of the company, what its mission is, what type of work it does, who its clients are, etc., do not think it won’t show! I will be able to tell from the get-go if you haven’t done your homework and fully researched the company. Come armed with a few additional questions to ask at the end of the interview to show you’re already engaged in the company’s mission. This line of thinking doesn't just apply if you are interviewing for a position, but equally apply when you are a vendor attempting to sell a product. On more than a few occasions, I have gotten annoyed with Oracle sales teams for showing up at my past employer without having a clue as to what our business is yet waxing poetically how you can help us grow revenue.

Job hopping. If you’ve had tons of different positions in the last two years, or tend to leave a company after less than six months, this could signal you’re flaky, difficult to work with, or at the very least, unsure of what it is you really want to do. That doesn’t mean you need to lie on your resume – simply be honest with the hiring manager about what exactly has caused you to switch companies so many times. There are times where you need to escape working for ass-clowns, but this shouldn't be repeatable.

Shady online presence. While I do not adhere to the practice of checking a candidates Facebook page under the belief that this is wrong, I will look at their online presence in general. I want to understand how truly engaged you are in your industry. You will make a big impression if you have a twitter account and/or a blog.

Do HR people have value in a Lean Thinking culture? (Part Two)

2012-11-27T14:00:00.000-05:00

Let’s be clear. Automated pre-assessment tools that deter unqualified candidates from finishing the application process is a good thing! It reduces the amount of time spent on non-value activities.
But if qualified, talented candidates are not finishing the application process because it is too lengthy or they don’t see a compelling value proposition, your strategic, well placed recruitment media, sourcing, and SEO strategies were all for naught!

Is it the job of HR to figure out how to exclude people in a culture of diversity and inclusion? One should be scared of recruiting processes that filter for exclusion vs inclusion for selection. If top talent can make or break an organization, how often does HR ever ask itself what are they doing that may be an impediment to recruiting it.

Anyway, in the world of automation whether it is monster.com, dice.com or even LinkedIn, HR needs to look at their processes and make them leaner if they are going to win the battle for talent. It goes without saying that the starting point should be the web site that candidates interact with. Below are a few tips that can make things better:

Limit your pre-assessment questions and tools to a few ‘high impact’ questions that eliminate unqualified candidates but are short enough process for your top applicants to finish.
Review your application. Are there questions you can eliminate or ask at a later time once the candidate is engaged in the process? Nothing can be more frustrating than a long, laborious application to fill out!
Are your job postings and online marketing materials compelling? Is there a strong enough value proposition for the candidate to not only start, but also complete the online application process?
For passive candidates, do you provide an online chat feature to allow them to easily gather more information about a position before applying?

Metrics drive the world. If you are experiencing a 30% abandon rate in aggregate, is this good or bad? If your marketing materials aren't compelling and the marketing department focuses on marketing products and services but not talent within the firm, what should you do to influence their approach? Do your job descriptions solely list all of the skills you desire in a candidate and describes the work they will do but doesn't make an emotional connection by describing how they should feel?

There are a lot of questions that HR people should be asking themselves, but aren't. At the end of the day, it is up to HR to also align with the business as IT has a head start and they may not want to be last to the table...

Do HR people have value in a Lean Thinking culture? (Part One)

2012-11-26T16:00:00.000-05:00

Why don’t HR people measure? Surely, they can use many of the best practices learned from the Big Data movement. After all, how many suboptimal timesheet processes exist within large enterprises that can be mined for value beyond their current financial purpose?

How many enterprises make an additional business qualification mandatory for new job postings? Most HR departments do one of two things: They don’t measure anything really or measure every input under the sun with little idea as to why it might be important, and even less idea whose job it is to achieve the output.

Do you measure absenteeism? But of course. Why? We like to know who’s absent. Wrong answer! It should be: we collect and analyze absenteeism statistics to aggregate trends and conclusions for our key business customers so that they can work on reducing absenteeism levels to our 2.4% target.