Blog Posts

As we dive into the New Year, a myriad of IT trends are unfolding — from Amazon’s success with the Kindle Fire, to Facebook’s expected IPO and RIM’s ongoing business challenges — that make it easy to be distracted. But from a macro viewpoint, there are only two key metrics that require your laser focus: keeping pace with technology and staying relevant in your market. Everything else is background noise.

That’s not to say you and your staff should ignore the astounding rate at which iPhones and Androids are entering your workplace. And you should clearly be concerned about the recent security breaches affecting 24 million Zappos customers.

On a daily basis, however, you — like CIO Larry Bonfante — are probably finding ways to incorporate mobile devices and social media into your enterprise and moving back-end systems to the cloud. At the end of the day, as Larry writes, you aren’t just buying technology, you must answer the question: “What matters to our clients and consumers?” (You can re-read Larry’s Smart Enterprise Exchange blogs for other tips on IT leadership here.)

Nowhere is the customer more of a No. 1 priority than in the retail industry — and that mandate is only growing stronger. At the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in January, several speakers addressed ways that social media, business intelligence and mobile devices will make or break retailers in the coming year — and it’s not just CIOs who are involved in these strategies. DSW’s Harris Mustafa, EVP Supply Chain and Merchandise Planning and Allocation, spoke about smart ways to leverage customer data and mobile technologies, as did several CMOs, brand managers and CTOs. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru looked back and ahead at key retail IT trends.

We want to help you stay focused, too, and are offering expert advice on decision making this month and next on Smart Enterprise Exchange. In addition to Pete DeLisi’s thoughtful comments about decision making in the age of speed, book author and Babson Professor Tom Davenport will provide community members with a preview of his upcoming book, Judgment Calls, next month. Tom and co-author Brook Manville discuss organizations that have successfully tapped the diverse and deep knowledge of their people — often using collaborative technologies — to build an organizational decision-making capability.

We also feature an insightful Q&A with Randy Gaboriault, CIO at Christiana Care Health System — another industry sector where IT is making dramatic changes to everyday business. In recognition of this important sector, we've added a Healthcare common interest group to the Smart Enterprise Exchange. Please join it and post discussions, comments and ideas to share with other like-minded IT executives.

How is your business staying relevant in its market and using technology for customer satisfaction? Join the conversation and share your wins and thoughts with your peers on the Exchange.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

You’re doing well in your career. You’re dedicated, skilled, technically competent, a recognized leader in your company and a valued employee. Your performance reviews are excellent, and your manager has complete confidence in your abilities. So why would you want (or need) an executive coach?

This is a good question to consider, so I offer some insights here that apply generally and also specifically to IT execs who want to flourish in their careers. First, in a recent article in The New Yorker magazine, a renowned surgeon talked about getting a specialized surgeon’s coach who could give him feedback on how he performed in the surgical suite. Although his outcomes were good, his reputation was impeccable and his interpersonal skills were excellent, he felt he was too comfortable, and wondered how he really did in all aspects of his work life and how he could improve. Knowing that he could not be objective about his own behavior, the surgeon decided that an outside set of eyes and ears would provide a mirror to his actual behavior. He wanted to improve, so he hired a coach.

Also consider this: In their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler write about how changes in medicine, technology or finance will not work effectively without the appropriate behavioral change in the user. You can give out millions of mosquito nets to prevent malaria, but if people do not use them, they are useless. Vaccines prevent illnesses as long as people get vaccinated. The authors call this phenomenon "bio-social science" and think that in the 21st century, it is key to changing behavior.

How does this related to IT executives? It’s often said that people with technical training put less emphasis on interpersonal skills. But behavioral change requires a change in how we perceive the world and a trusted way to learn the new behaviors. Having a coach to reflect and build on what you do well is part of how extremely successful people stay at that uppermost level. They can assess your skills and work on nuanced behavior may result in better outcomes for you and your business team.

If we become complacent in what we do and stop striving for better outcomes when we are already successful, we also assume that we cannot change the behavior of others—an important trait for high-level managers. Many also think executive coaching is meant for the problematic or dysfunctional individual. But, in fact, all of us could benefit from the outside perspective on our behavior that coaching provides.

As The New Yorker article suggests, just as the best opera singers have singing coaches, the most celebrated athletes continue working with personal trainers — even when they are regarded as the best in their sport — and the top CEOs have coaches to use as sounding boards, shouldn't you have an executive coach as well?

Numerous start-up cloud vendors are busy hyping their "Security-as-a-Service" wares, with requisite promises of turnkey "Security in a Box" and the like. But enterprise CIOs have tough questions about the validity and reliability of such firms and their services — as well they should. Securing a global IT infrastructure is paramount — with millions of dollars and customers at stake, not to mention a company's tarnished reputation if a major security breach occurs. It’s wise to ask whether such a mission-critical task can be entrusted to a third-party host.

That’s why Matthew Clark, Senior Director of IT at telecom provider Qualcomm in San Diego, is taking a cautious approach to cloud services. "Trust and security in cloud computing are big deals to companies,” he says, and too often cloud providers are more concerned with protecting their own business than the customer’s. As a result, “We are very, very cautious about what we allow to be put out into external clouds," Clark says.

Lina Liberti, VP of the Security business at CA Technologies, understands the concerns. She told me recently that, "Some of these new-to-the-market Security-as-a-Service providers are great for small to midsize business, as smaller firms are more likely to take risks in order to realize the benefits from a cloud deployment." But, she warns, outsourcing large enterprise security to a new, immature vendor is a risky consideration.

That doesn’t mean a large or growing enterprise can’t take advantage of the cost and resource savings cloud security offers; they just need to partner with companies that have hardened enterprise-grade security tools delivered as a service.

Peter Hinssen, one of Europe's leading tech gurus, noted that "CA [Technologies] realized that cloud was going to happen faster than anyone else anticipated, and the company has taken a leading role in this market. Hinssen believes that CA Technologies also is out front with its Identity Management-as-a-Service as well.

The company recently released several cloud solutions aimed at the identity and access management (IAM) security market. The CA CloudMinder portfolio, for example, is morphing the firm's long-established IAM solutions into hosted, subscription-based security services for customers. With the new services, CIOs no longer need to purchase, install and maintain their IAM tools via old-school methods (as applications on CDs, for instance). Now, they're available in the cloud as services customers can procure or buy or license from CA Technologies.

Besides its experience with enterprise data centers, CA Technologies provides trained support 24x7x365 — critical to most global online enterprises. These “comfort factors” may boost Security-as-a-Service among skeptical CIOs — even those like financial and healthcare CIOs, who need to meet stringent requirements and regulations with their cloud deployment.

To me, that's hope, not just hype.

Larry Lange is a freelance writer on the business of technology and a contributor to Smart Enterprise magazine.

While the cloud eases many administrative tasks, it doesn’t absolve IT from basic management responsibilities. And capacity planning is one of those.

CIOs may erroneously think that they can scale back this process since they no longer have to know, down to the terabyte, how much storage and processing power they’ll need to allocate for future growth. They assume that the cloud service provider, using the almost ubiquitous idea of cloud bursting, will allocate appropriate resources. Not so.

While this sounds great in theory, CIOs can’t assume it will happen. In fact, they must continue to own the process of capacity management — especially in a hybrid cloud environment — integrating it with tasks such as provisioning, workload placement and migration, and performance monitoring. The goal is to strike a delicate balance between maximum infrastructure utilization and optimal service delivery to consistently exceed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and drive business value. If they don’t achieve this balance, say experts, departmental users will simply purchase and allocate cloud-based services on their own. After all, if IT doesn’t allocate enough bandwidth, internal and external storage, and application seats, performance will suffer, affecting productivity and end-user satisfaction.

While you may think about architecture differently in a cloud environment, “You’re still going to need test environments, and you’ll need to plan for the growth of software and the hardware that supports it,” Lora Cecere, Partner and Analyst at The Altimeter Group research firm, told me. “Business analytics, performance and memory analytics, and virtualization software [need to be kept] in-house,” she adds, and they require a specific type of capacity planning.

Automation’s Role

Virtualization may make capacity planning even more crucial since storage growth can “hide” in virtual data centers. Henry Steinhauer, a Capacity Planner at Presbyterian Healthcare Services based in Albuquerque, N.M., says storage virtualization is something his company struggles with. His virtual machines (VMs) request storage automatically when they reach a certain, pre-set threshold, but that can cause problems, he says. “Rather than having the applications specifically request more storage, it’s being requested through VMware, so the cause for storage growth is somewhat masked,” he says. “[Storage] automation has not quite caught up with the [application] request process,” but it is critical.

Just as in the past, IT has to examine and plan for service performance assurance, making sure provider SLAs are met. Cloud computing relies on statistical multiplexing, load-balancing mechanisms, and multiplexing algorithms, so the CIO must focus on these functions and the impact they’re having on the overall environment. Automation is the only way to handle these functions, since agile and virtual applications may move from system to system, changing the way the data is interpreted by the applications.

Steinhauer says he uses automated capacity planning tools that help him create a baseline “normal” for a specific VM or cloud so he can watch for problems or lags with applications. “We’re thinking, ‘Do we expect this to be happening, or is it outside the norm?’ We know that different applications have different profiles, so we can pinpoint potential capacity problems ahead of time,” he says.

Tony Lock, Program Director at the Hampshire, U.K.-based research firm Freeform Dynamics, says Presbyterian Healthcare Services is among the minority; few CIOs have deployed automation in either the active capacity-management process or VM deployment. Most are using capacity management to ensure that their organizations have sufficient resources to meet relatively predictable on-site requirements — not for the dynamic nature of virtualization. This will have to change, Lock says. “Internal cloud models potentially offer great flexibility, but they do not provide infinite resources.” There will be times “when resource capacity will be in short supply and decisions will have to be made on which workloads could be moved onto an external cloud or shut down,” says Lock.

What are you doing to ensure that you’re planning correctly for the cloud? Have you automated these tasks? Share your experiences and successes.

Karen Bannan is executive editor of Smart Enterprise magazine

I’m not sure if you have seen or experienced Coca-Cola’s new freestyle fountain machine. If you are addicted to “sugar water” (in honor of Steve Job’s famous quote to former PepsiCo CEO) then you can skip the rest of this paragraph as you’ll have been through this a dozen times already. As you can see in the picture it doesn’t look like a regular fountain machine. It’s colorful and has a touch screen interface. But what is best is that it allows you to create your own flavors. You can choose your standard Coca-Cola beverages but then add a flavor like cherry, lime, raspberry, and so on. I have a secret love for cherry coke and so I create diet cherry coke or cherry coke zero. I also tried raspberry coke zero and then decided cough syrup with my lunch wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

So Coke essentially innovated by taking elements from other devices and merged that with new trends to create a new device. But most importantly they created an experience. In the constant cola wars this is something that has to be key for a company like Coke. I’ve heard constant discussions at the machine when a person walks up with a friend:

What should I make?

Maybe I’ll try Sprite with Vanilla this time.

I had that last time so I’m going to try Coke Zero with Lime.

All this turns an incredibly mundane task into something memorable. Ultimately that experience at that restaurant with that Coke product becomes more memorable and likely makes the business and Coke more successful (i.e. $$).

What also impressed me was seeing an employee change one of the beverages that ran out. They pulled up the water screen and touched several of the bubbles in the background in a certain order to bring up an admin console. They then walked over with a new cartridge of Diet Coke that looked exactly like a copier ink cartridge moved it across the fountain door and the door opened. Next they popped out the old cartridge pushed in the new one and closed the door. They were done (and didn’t have any ink on their hands). I was amazed by the design and simplicity of administration. Coke borrowed concepts from lots of different common devices and made it simple. As Leonardo da Vinci said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” From a technology perspective Coke used a touch screen probably for a few reasons. Its fun to “touch” and it’s something that consumers are comfortable with today. Oh and it’s cool.

So now back to IT and Service Management. How can you create an enjoyable experience when interacting with IT, for example the Service Desk? How can you innovate and leverage existing elements to create a new device, service or experience for your end users? How can you create a service that gives the customer flexibility or choice?

Is the term “enterprise architecture” echoing through the halls of U.S. state and local governments? Not quite, but that doesn’t mean that the practice is not having a quiet and compelling influence — and maybe a growing one, as well. Fiscal pressures are leading some state CIOs to think that their clout may increase if they can help see their governments through these tumultuous times and create more of a “state enterprise” across agency silos.

That’s my takeaway from a recent conversation I had with Doug Robinson, Executive Director at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), and Eric Sweden, the nonprofit’s program director for Enterprise Architecture and Governance. While enterprise architecture (EA) maturity varies state by state, the discipline itself has become integral to meeting state CIOs’ top priorities. As a result, EA is being integrated into plans to accomplish these public sector goals. According to recent data from NASCIO, those priorities include consolidation and optimization, budget and cost control, governance, the cloud, shared services, and security. (As you can see from this 2008 interview with John Gillispie, former CIO for the State of Iowa, consolidation has never been far from state CIOs’ minds.) The way I read that, pretty much all are closely linked with fiscal dynamics.

Optimize and Harmonize

Let’s start with one example of how EA can pack a punch: “States that are trying to get a handle on their budgets to be more efficient will use EA approaches to optimize and harmonize,” explains Sweden. “They may not even call it EA, but they are going through the process of EA.” After all, while doing straight-line, across-the-board percentage cuts to IT services may have the virtue of simplicity, isn’t it wiser to understand what programs and activities are and aren’t delivering what’s needed — and then work a strategy out from there?

“Where you cut and what is the rationale” is particularly relevant to the current budget crisis, he says. “Maybe you should be investing in some areas and completely eliminating others; and the disciplined thinking of EA is helping with that,” Sweden says. EA’s strength is that it relates to the big ideas of managing complexity and understanding the impact of change. “Enterprise architecture drives people to think through processes, the organization and information, and [we hope, to] apply some wisdom to decision making. We don’t care about EA and project management for its own sake, but for its outcome, which is better services to citizens, more effectiveness and efficiencies, and removing redundancies to optimize the enterprise.”

Another example of EA’s impact on state CIO priorities: Before moving services to the cloud, you’ve got to understand which services are good candidates for the transition. EA provides the foundations for assessing how close a match a cloud provider’s database and data architecture are to your own, for example, or how you would go about switching relationships in the future. How about one more impact for good measure? If state and local governments are to transform by way of shared services, it’s likely that services-oriented architectures (SOA), and their reusable components approach, will play a role in that metamorphosis.

“Enterprise architecture is embedded in the decision making on all these priorities,” says Robinson.” It’s going to be the foundation.”

Overcoming Obstacles

This is not to imply that there aren’t challenges to implementing enterprise architecture practices and principles. Among the challenges: The discipline may not always be represented in overall advisory councils or governance structures; the generally higher CIO turnover at the state level means that leadership perspectives and visions may change more than they do in the private sphere; and funding decisions at the federal level may limit what CIOs and enterprise architects can do.

But, perhaps there is a greenfield opportunity in some challenges, too, such as the growth of social media usage by state officials and what that means in terms of creating architectural policy frameworks for acceptable use, accountability, retention and transparency — all very critical requirements in the public sector. There are security issues, too, and NASCIO has just issued a core services taxonomy for state IT security programs that could help states create more powerful security architectures. “From the birth certificate on, there is a tremendous amount of personal information” available, says Robinson. It’s important, therefore, to protect it from both the infrastructure side and the policy, audit and compliance side, he says.

Here’s a question for enterprise architects (whether you go by that title or not) on Smart Enterprise Exchange and Smart Architect who work in state or local governments around the globe: How do you see your discipline being leveraged to support priorities, and what more would you like to see?

Over the years, return on investment has been the economic litmus test for most business spending — and IT in particular: For CIOs, a purchase either can show hard-dollar payback or it can’t. ROI was also the bottom line that brought IT under scrutiny of finance departments and auditors.

Certainly, the “go, no-go” rules loosened up a bit when productivity, competitive advantage and other “soft-dollar” results were considered. These intangibles were always difficult to measure with standard calculations such as net present value (NPV) or total cost of ownership (TCO), but they remained the exceptions — one-off purchases or solutions for individual departments or users.

Today, many old metrics and processes seem to be fading, and exceptions are now the rule. Many believe that with the proliferation of social media, consumer devices and cloud computing, for example, new ways to determine ROI — if such approaches even exist — are needed. And some are even claiming that ROI is not only the wrong metric to use, but that it doesn’t exist in reference to social media. Can this be true? If so, how can sound purchasing decisions be made?

We have discussed the economics of cloud and virtualization on Smart Enterprise Exchange in the past. As I wrote previously, “Most conclude that there is no one-size-fits-all ROI calculator that tells you when to go to a cloud model and how much you will save or pay. The most definitive answer about lower costs seems to be that you probably will see savings; but as with warning labels on medicine bottles, results will vary with the situation.”

My advice at the time was: “Conduct your typical due diligence by analyzing contracts, negotiating with providers and starting small.” But I am starting to realize that this type of traditional approach just may not work in the more amorphous world of social media.

Marcio Salles, who blogs about social media with a Brazilian perspective, recently included a great infographic in his blog on Smart Enterprise Exchange. Provided by MDG Advertising, the graphic addressed the ROI of social media for marketing purposes. In sum, it acknowledges that this is a “contentious” topic and offers several ways to measure effectiveness. Among these: going beyond click counts to include revenue generated, reduced returns, conversion rates, and positive brand mentions or feedback, among others.

Still, the company says that many factors such as closing business deals, encouraging new partnerships, quicker information retrieval (which translates to lower costs) and particularly, recruiting new talent, are “intangibles.” Among specific platforms mentioned, Facebook and Twitter were rated highly, and YouTube holds out the most promise. But how can their use be monetized?

Dozens of other recent blogs and consultants have raised the issue of social media ROI, too, and lots of discussion has ensued. Sean Jackson, Chief Financial Officer of Copyblogger Media, and Sonia Simone, Chief Marketing Officer, treat the subject in a lighthearted blog here but also raise some good points. Specifically, they conclude that revenue should not be a success factor for social marketing efforts. “The real measurement of return lies in the profits created from your culture of marketing.” Another social media executive offered some alternative metrics here, while a marketing strategist says not to worry about ROI — just move ahead with your plans.

But I suspect that marketing has different requirements than IT does. Would CIOs get buy-in for large-scale projects based on this advice? Typically, large global enterprises — especially those in regulated industries or with strict guidelines from their boards — need strong business cases for new investments. Has that mindset changed with social media? Must it change?

I believe that the landscape is evolving, but slowly. Uncertain financial returns are still inhibiting social media rollouts, according to many sources, including a recent InSites Consulting research report from the U.K. And even those who last year created social media ROI calculators are going back to the drawing board to make revisions.

CIOs can’t afford to stall and haggle over every purchase and every departmental request, and I agree that “calculating the ROI of social networks is not rocket science,” as this blog states. Nevertheless, sound decisions are key to good leadership and investment decisions should be based on more than popular trends or gut feelings. That’s the point of view Peter DeLisi takes in an upcoming new blog on Smart Enterprise Exchange next month.

Let’s keep this conversation going. What are your experiences in this rapidly changing market sector? Are your corporate purchasing requirements keeping pace with new media? Are RFPs and ROI finally a thing of the past?

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

Additional resources/ related blogs:

• A Framework for Social Analytics, Altimeter Group http://www.altimetergroup.com/2011/08/research-report-a-framework-for-social-analytics.html
• Social Media ROI http://mashable.com/2011/11/15/social-media-roi-measure/
• Social Media and B-to-B Marketing http://directmarketing.thomsonlocal.com/Win/News-Archive/Marketing-News/?storyId=84622
• Social Media Marketing Use Growing http://www.brafton.com/news/even-with-social-media-marketing-use-growing-implementations-just-beginning

Enterprise architecture is getting greater recognition in the academic realm, which clearly is a testament to its growing importance to the enterprise.

This fall, Kent State University kicked off a new master’s degree program for enterprise architecture (EA) — a program the university says is the first in the nation. The EA program is one of five concentrations in the university’s new Master of Digital Sciences degree; the university has already been offering EA courses as part of an undergraduate program as part of its School of Digital Sciences.

“Enterprise architecture is becoming increasingly important to both the IT and business side of an organization, but is not yet a common area of study in academic programs. Our Master of Digital Science degree was designed as a professional master's program to complement an undergraduate degree by adding depth in one or two additional areas — essentially a technical alternative to an MBA,” says Robert Walker, Director of the School of Digital Sciences at Kent State. “For a graduate in an IT area such as computer science or computer information systems, adding expertise in enterprise architecture is a great way to open the door to new career options.”

A gift from the Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE) to Kent State University’s new School of Digital Sciences is funding the courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The EACOE is a practitioner-based association for the EA profession and is focused on establishing professional standards, conducting research, providing information, and promoting professional and career development. The association offers practice-based certification, professional networking and knowledge-development opportunities. The EACOE is donating to Kent State a five-year license to use its courseware in the School of Digital Sciences’ curriculum, a gift valued at $3.2 million.

Kent State’s new master’s program is designed for working professionals or new graduates who have a degree in a related area, and who want to round out their technical knowledge with topics outside of their degree area. The master’s program launched in August, and 15 students are currently enrolled.

Denise Bedford, who is currently the Goodyear Professor of Knowledge Management at the College of Communication and Information at Kent State and also a certified enterprise architect, says that while there are a number of good training programs available to professionals, most are just five-day courses. “If a company wants to have people who are really well-trained and thoroughly trained in enterprise architecture, it takes more than five days.” Bedford serves as a faculty member in the School of Digital Sciences. (In our feature, Agile Business Begins with a Formal EA Program, Bedford and other experts will discuss how businesses can support technology, organizational and business goals by formalizing internal enterprise architecture efforts.)

The EA concentration at the graduate level consists of five courses, including an introduction to EA. A course description for that reads:

Facilitates the alignment of IT and IS (information systems) investment decisions with business goals. Enterprise architecture is increasingly used in industry as a result of the continued emergence of new technologies and ongoing pressures to re-engineer business processes to achieve improved efficiency and greater customer focus. Enterprise architecture identifies the main components of an organization and the ways in which these components work together. The components include performance and strategy, people, business capabilities, applications, technology, knowledge and information, as well as financial and other resources. 

The university also will offer courses on business architecture, management of Enterprise Architecture, data architecture and application architecture. To earn a Master of Digital Sciences degree with a concentration in EA, students must successfully complete 32 credit hours of graduate courses. In addition, Kent State’s graduate EA program is being delivered online.