IT Investment Management News

GAO-11-454T, Information Technology: Investment Oversight and Management Have Improved but Continued Attention Is Needed, March 17, 2011

2011-03-16T23:00:00Z

The federal government anticipates spending $79 billion on information technology (IT) in fiscal year 2011. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) plays a key role in overseeing the implementation and management of federal IT investments. Given the size of these investments and their importance to the health, economy, and security of the nation, it is critical for OMB and federal agencies to provide appropriate program oversight and ...

A Complete View of the Enterprise: Linking Operational and Financial Planning

2011-03-21T20:27:53Z

Read this report from CFO Research Services, which examines why and how chief financial officers are looking to create “highly integrated” organizations by moving from standalone spreadsheets to integrated planning, budgeting, and forecasting systems.

Click here to read the free white paper!

Lies my vendor told me: Tech relationships gone wrong

2011-03-25T10:00:00Z

Unmet expectations, inferior products and services, arrogant staff... There are many reasons an IT-vendor relationship can go off the rails. Read and learn from these true tales.

CIO Watch: NASA CTO resigns over budget cuts

2011-03-25T14:10:00Z

NASA's CTO for IT departs over concerns about funding and the lack of entrepreneurial spirit at the space agency. And Kevin Hart leaves the CIO post at troubled Clearwire.

A Metrics System for the CIO

2011-03-21T04:00:00Z

Metrics can have a very interesting effect. You just have to present them properly.

7 Communication Mistakes CSOs Still Make

2011-03-23T04:00:00Z

For many years, we heard security professionals lament the way they are perceived. Terms such as "the place where good ideas go to die" and "the department of no" weren't uncommon just a few years ago when referring to the security function.

How Kelly Services Manages Risk in the Cloud

2011-03-23T04:00:00Z

CSO contributor Bob Violino recently interviewed Rosie Rivel, senior manager of IT global risk and compliance at Kelly, regarding risk and the cloud.

IT Value Metrics: How to Communicate ROI to the Business

2007-10-08T04:00:00Z

CIOs are always faced with pressure to justify their IT expenditures. Now, new research can help correlate those IT dollars spent with business value accrued.

TCO vs. ROI: How Do You Decide?

2008-01-16T05:00:00Z

When will a new IT product pay for itself versus how much will it cost in the long term: Which do you use most when making a technology purchase?

Measuring Corporate Contributions to an Open Source Project

2009-01-08T05:00:00Z

Open source is looking more attractive to software development managers who need to make their budgets stretch farther, as the enterprise can benefit from FOSS community's contributions (which you don't have to pay for, cool!). But IT managers need to evaluate how to best participate in open-source projects and how to measure their developers' success.

Employee Communication: How to Calculate the Cost

2008-09-25T04:00:00Z

Tips on building a cost calculator to estimate what communications costs will be for moving or adding employees.

The Coming Shift To IT Value Generation

2011-03-22T17:15:35Z

The proliferation of clouds and external service provider appears to be causing a fortuitous shift in more than a few IT organizations: they now have a clear mission to generate value from IT.

This is a sharp contrast from earlier days when the majority of IT's effort was spent the inevitable treadmill of operations, maintenance and upgrades.

And the discussions are now starting to take an interesting -- and promsing -- turn for the better.

An Obvious Mandate For Value Generation?

Look across any set of traditional organizational functions, and you'll see that each has an implied mandate for unique value generation.

For example, at EMC, engineering has to deliver killer products. Manufacturing has to build them with amazing quality and at ever-decreasing costs. Sales and marketing has to figure out how to get these products into customers' hands in a variety of ways. Customer support has to deliver a world-class experience, and so on.

Even support functions, like HR, finance and legal has to figure out how to deliver unique value. Otherwise, the tendency will always be to use an external provider. Why use your scarce internal resources for something that someone else can most likely do faster, better and cheaper?

If whatever your group is doing isn't generating unique value, maybe someone else should be doing the task.

And that's true for IT as well.

A Change In The Air For IT?

Cloud and service provider concepts are starting to work their way into more IT thinking. You don't have to do everything yourself, and -- even for the stuff you have to do internally -- you can do it more efficiently with a private cloud.

Less time on the IT treadmill. More time thinking about how to generate unique value using IT.

It's a refreshing change in perspective when you encounter it. And the discussions I have with customers who are either in this mindset (or approaching it quickly) are some of the most stimulating IT conversations I've ever had.

My first exposure to this mindset came many years ago as I started to meet the IT groups that supported financial traders. They'd kill for milliseconds or sometimes microseconds. Exotic technology? No problem.

I realized that this was because they clearly understood the relationship between better IT capability and value generation. Not a perspective that was widely shared at the time.

But, as of late, I've noticed a sharp pickup in these IT-as-value-generator discussions. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's because day-to-day stuff is better under control, I'm not quite sure.
Whatever the reason, it's definitely a vast improvement over the traditional sorts of IT-centric conversations.

As vendors, it can be a trap. Customer ask "how do I generate more value from IT?". Vendor responds "that's easy, just buy <insert name of product>". Not really what people want to hear ...

I think -- going forward -- the better vendors will be able to step a bit outside of their vendor-ness, and share real insights into how people are approaching value generation from IT.

And I, for one, want to be one those better vendors :)

How Do You Focus The Value Generation Discussion?

Having done this now more than a few times, I've developed a pattern to help stimulate the value generation discussion. I've found it's really more about a mindset than specific technologies.

One part is on the "what", e.g. what are some candidate focus areas to go explore? And, once we have a few of those in hand, I try and foster some discussion on the "how". Doing IT for sustained value generation appears to be subtly different than classical project-oriented IT.

This -- at it's essence -- is a business discussion. Although there are similar patterns within a vertical, there are enough differences between organizations that you can't assume too much.

Key Roles As Value-Generation Targets

One starting point I use is to simply ask -- who are your most important, value-generating workers? If you had to guess, what would be the top 5 value-generating roles in your business?

At EMC, that list would probably include engineering, customer support, pre-sales, sales and a player to be named later :)

Here's the underlying premise: use IT to increase the productivity and effectiveness of the people who generate the most value in the organization. And that's not always the group that's complaining the loudest, or has the most budget :)

This particular discussion can lead you to all sorts of productivity-enhancing topics: native applications on mobile tablets, self-service IT functions, on-demand analytics, collaboration and workflow, enterprise search, app stores -- and a whole lot more.

There's no pre-fab answer here, but once you start digging in to what these people really want and need, there's no shortage of potential value-generating IT initiatives. A caveat: productivity enhancing ROIs can be very squishy, although back-of-the-napkin guestimates can be quite compelling.

Key Relationships As Value-Generation Targets

Just about every organization has key customers or constituents, as well as an ecosystem that surrounds it. This leads to two somewhat related discussions.

First, what can IT innovate to help your organization get closer to its existing customers and partners? And -- second -- what can IT innovate to help your organization get closer to *new* customers and partners? You'd be surprised, for example, on just how many companies have to move beyond B2B to a B2C (or perhaps a B2B2C) model.

This triggers a whole discussion around CRM, analytics, 360-degree customer views, mobile apps, social business and probably a raft of other potential topics as well. All fun stuff.

Information Assets As Value-Generation Targets

Many businesses amass huge amounts of fascinating information as part of their ongoing business operations. Usually, it's just a by-product of traditional business processes, but -- reassembled, repositioned and juxtaposed with other information sources -- this data often can be an amazing source of new business value.

Health insurance companies that have repositories of patient histories, treatments and outcomes. Financial services companies that have intimate knowledge of spending -- and payment -- demographics. Even mundane companies like EMC have intimate knowledge of who's buying what kinds of technologies -- and how they perform in the field.

Maybe you're lucky enough to be setting on potential treasure trove, maybe not, but it's worth a look -- especially if you've got an interest in IT value generation. I always ask the question -- maybe you should too?

The "How" Is Turning Out To Be Different

When I meet an individual or group that's focused on IT value generation, I've noticed that they're not really like the bread-and-butter IT type. They think and act quite differently.

First, they're experts on the business. You can listen to them talk for quite a while without a tech buzzword coming out of their mouths. They really know what their business is today, what it's trying to be, and what needs to happen along the way.

Second, they're willing to invest in innovation. Gather some resources, try something out, learn from it, and decide what to do next. And do it quickly, please.

This contrasts sharply with the traditional IT big-project approach: formal requirements gathering, assemble the business case, etc. etc. Call it "fast fail", call it a lab, call it whatever -- it's about speed and agility vs. building the pyramids.

Third, they're willing to invest in generic capabilities vs. specific projects. They might not be 100% sure how something is going to be eventually used, but that doesn't matter, since they're pretty sure whatever they're doing is likely going to be useful at some point.

Fourth, they are usually willing to aggressively partner. They look far and wide inside and outside the organization for people and organizations who can bring something unique and interesting to the table. It's not the usual customer vs. vendor discussion.

The Road Ahead

My belief is that we -- as an IT industry -- will be rather consumed with this whole cloud thing for the next few years, and then we'll move on. It needs to happen, and -- thankfully -- it's all moving in the right direction.

Whether your cloud is private, public or a hybrid combination, there will likely be a large and meaningful "cloud dividend" that can be re-invested in the business. It will likely be a combination of more time and resources that can now be pointed at IT value generation, coupled with an agile set of services that can be quickly composed to deliver new capabilities.

We'll likely be investing a lot less time and effort in building and delivering IT services -- and investing a whole lot more time trying to figure out how to create new value from what's now readily at hand.

Personally, I find the whole topic of IT value generation fascinating -- perhaps for no other reason that it gives all of us something deeply meaningful to aspire towards.

Study: Breaches Cost $214 Per Record

2011-03-27T21:46:24Z

Cost of Breaches in All Industries Up 5% in 2010
The average cost of a data breach increased 5 percent in 2010 to $214 per compromised record, according to the sixth annual "U.S. Cost of a Data Breach" study by the Ponemon Institute.

Fed Infosec Spending Seen Rising By 9% a Year

2010-12-15T08:31:19Z

Study: U.S. to Earmark $13.3 Billion for Cybersecurity Wares by 2015
What's behind the sharp rise in projected spending? Increased reliance on the Internet, networked systems and connectivity creates opportunities for cyber attackers to disrupt government operations, market researcher Input says.

ERP gone bad: Lessons from real-world failures

2010-11-16T16:48:00Z

Spectacular flameouts have much to teach managers about the right way to run projects

What CFOs want IT managers to know now

2010-10-27T10:00:00Z

CFOs hold major sway over IT projects in tough economic times. Here's what the finance people want tech managers to know before they ask for funding.

Gartner: CIOs Should Plan for Recession No. 2

2010-07-26T04:00:00Z

Gartner says CIOs should develop a list of IT projects that could be postponed or canceled -- if there's a second recession in the next 12 to 18 months.

$1M of IT Debt Below the Waterline of Every Big App

2010-09-29T04:00:00Z

If you get antsy wondering about the implications of ignoring those last-minute fixes when rolling out a big application, now you have ROI ammo to justify going back in for a final polish.

Why IT Costs Must Come Out of the Black Box--Now

2010-08-31T04:00:00Z

Full IT cost transparency is not a "nice to have" anymore, says a new Forrester Research report. It's a required competency that organizations will need to avoid two big business pitfalls and remain competitive.

Top 10 Ways CIOs Can Prepare for Recession No. 2

2010-07-30T04:00:00Z

As Gartner warns IT leaders to be ready in case a second recession hits, CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum shares his thoughts on how CIOs can actually slash pesky budgets. Hint: Unpaid interns, meet Russian hackers!