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Harris Kern - Articles |
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 IT Organization Best Practices (October 7, 2005)
Guy de Meester provides special insight into IT organization where getting the structure right is an ongoing exercise. First the successful must get the right people with the right technical and soft skills. Next the CIO must ensure the organization structure is closely aligned with the way the business is organized and operates. Then the CIO must establish special relationship with different business units. Finally the CIO must monitor key functions to ensure that strategic business processes are properly supported and keep executive management informed. The successful CIO will also need an external view to ensure IT organization manages outsourced activities too.
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Budgeting Best Practices (October 7, 2005)
In this article, the authors bring more than 50 years of collective experience to help in one of the most important aspects of any CIO’s career. They discuss:
* How to approach budgeting for success.
* How to simply break down the elements of a solid budget.
* The role of relationships in budgeting.
* Useful budgeting metrics.
* The budget toolbox.
* A simple budget process flow.
* Budget philosophy
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Eight Simple and Necessary Steps to Architecture Success (October 3, 2005)
How can IT architects begin to achieve an IT architecture utopia? To create and implement a truly achievable plan for IT, the architecture needs to address everything from the key business drivers through overcoming likely resistance. Before you become discouraged, let us introduce a solution—one which we know from experience works.
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First and Foremost: Organization Governance (August 5, 2005)
For a business to be successful, it must grow; in order to grow, it must be proactive in establishing the proper infrastructure to support that growth, whether it is in the form of hard infrastructure (networks, systems, and so on) or soft infrastructure (decision-making bodies and policies). If executed or implemented properly, things that seem nominally necessary at the time of the decision ultimately end up being integral components in the company’s ability to perform its daily operations.
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IT Budgeting Best Practices (July 25, 2005)
More than 50 years of collective experience is combined for this article on budgeting—one of the most important aspects of any CIO’s career. This articles discusses:
* How to approach budgeting for success
* How to simply break down the elements of a solid budget
* The role of relationships in budgeting
* Useful budgeting metrics
* The budget toolbox
* A simple budget process flow
* Budget philosophy
Read more...
The Maturing of IT as a Business Discipline (July 25, 2005)
This article gives a brief discussion on why the Information Technology function should no longer be managed as a cost-center but rather, as a strategic asset of the company. The arguments focus on the historical as well as from the point of view of the value of the IT function to the business.
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Communities of Practice: Continuing the Learning (July 18, 2005)
Communities of Practice provide IT professionals with a venue to exchange ideas and learn from each other. In this article, two prominent facilitators of these collaborative communities share their insights as to how to benefit from them.
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Strategic Outsourcing (July 18, 2005)
Every CIO is likely to face the challenges of outsourcing at some point. Outsourcing involves special relationships between IT and external organizations that provide services—services that critical business processes often depend. Successful CIOs must therefore ensure that these special relationships are properly managed and controlled. They need to understand the different types of outsourcing and their advantages and disadvantages.
In this article, I explore situations in which outsourcing can be beneficial to the IT organizations. I describe what outsourcing is and the options that exist.
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Communication for Excellence in IT Management (July 7, 2005)
In this article Brenda Fox covers an essential skill of all successful CIOs—the special ability to communicate.
Covering many areas, communication means going out and working with users, customers, other business units, executive management, partners, suppliers, and other organizations. It is the only way the CIO can understand everyone’s needs and all the requirements to effectively run the business. It means taking a proactive role in the business—not simply reacting to problems—as well as marketing and selling the IT organization. In order for the CIO to be successful, the CIO must help users, customers, and others succeed too. Brenda Fox discusses
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IT Production Services Function: Building the Ideal Infrastructure (June 28, 2005)
One of the main reasons that 70% of all IT organizations today are still labeled as cost centers and are failing miserably is because of their infrastructures. Infrastructures are in horrible shape as we depict in our IT assessment data. We share with you the data compiled from over 350 IT assessments from Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies but more importantly how an effective Production Services organization resolves many of those issues.
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Partnering for Success (June 27, 2005)
Being able to align IT to the business entails more than just having a statement of direction or plan to that effect. It requires a change of attitude and perspective, a different mindset or view of the world that is able to think in business terms.
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The CIO's Role Today (June 27, 2005)
The role of the CIO has become as varied as the business models in place today. Many CIOs have evolved into different roles from a variety of early disciplines, such as technology, finance, manufacturing, service, and so on.
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8 Steps to Satisfying the Customer (June 14, 2005)
One of the great revolutions in American business that began in the 1980’s (and is still underway) is the ascendancy of the customer. It is now much more than a cliché that the customer is king. And today this is as true for internal customers as it is for external customers. The rise of packaged enterprise systems and the rapid growth of outsourcing mean that IT customers have more choices than ever, and our experience is that they will use them if they are dissatisfied. Yet we still find many IT departments that are not focusing on customer satisfaction and are using their institutional position to control their customers. But over time, by not satisfying their customers they are putting their budgets and continued employment at risk. We are going to discuss some of the principles of customer satisfaction and offer eight suggestions for getting and staying in tune with your customers.
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IT Value Management (June 13, 2005)
IT executives need to consider themselves and convince others to consider them as part of the business not separate from the business. “In organizations where IT is viewed as extremely critical to the business, today’s CIO has not only realized that marketing the IT organization furthers the awareness that IT adds value to the business, but also has acted on that realization through concerted efforts to market IT"
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Investing in Values (June 12, 2005)
Values are guiding principles, basic beliefs that are the fundamental assumptions upon which all subsequent actions are based. As a whole, values define the personality and character of an individual or a group. Values are the essence of an individual or group and provide guidelines by which to make consistent decisions. In reality, values are ideals that are indicative of one’s vision of how the world should work.
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The Extended Enterprise CIO (June 6, 2005)
One of the many transformations in our business institutions during the past decade has been the growing importance of the extended enterprise. As our businesses have changed, so have the information systems that support them; indeed, the information systems are mirrors of that change.
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Technology Strategy: Behavior and Perspective (May 2, 2005)
This article discusses strategic thinking and presents it not as a once a year process or a road to a document, but rather as a perspective that can be developed and taught. It is a behavior that can be learned and must be reinforced at all levels of the organization. “The ability to connect one’s job to a larger mission is not primarily a matter of competence, work ethic or other such traits that good workers naturally possess. Instead, the job-mission connection comes about through communication that starts at the executive level and resonates throughout the ranks.”
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Ten Commandments for Enterprise IT Excellence (April 2, 2005)
This article, based on a study of over 350 Fortune 500 and Global 2000 IT organizations, features a list of the top challenges plaguing IT executives and ten "commandments" for addressing these challenges.
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Business and IT Alignment: Five Strategies (March 25, 2005)
This article, based on a proven approach by a successful CIO, outlines five self-reinforcing strategies for aligning business and IT that reduce the time CIOs must spend in this area by shifting effort from dealing with symptoms to stomping out root causes.
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The HR factor - The Three Key Ingredients to Building A Competitive IT Organization (March 5, 2005)
Each day presents a substantial challenge for IT professionals going far beyond the office. At home, they face personal obligations: kids who want more of our time, the need to cook and to eat, and the fact that the typical evening consists of surfing the Internet, emailing, paying the bills, or helping kids with homework. Most of us would really like to get some time in to brush up on our profession. We would also like to exercise on a regular basis. Yet something has to give. Reality is the high-level pressures will only get worse, making days even more stressful.
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Organizing For Systems Management (February 3, 2005)
Few employees enjoy departmental re-structuring, and IT professionals are no exception. Although IT professionals are involved in one of the most rapidly changing of technical industries, we still tend to be creatures of habit that, like most everyone else, prefer stable and unchanging environments as mo. Newly assigned executives and managers are often notorious for proposing a partial or total reorganization of their entire department as one of their first official acts.
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The Politics of People, Process and Technology Part II (December 20, 2003)
Alas, about two-thirds of the organizations we visit still have walls between legacy and client/server staff. They're organized by technology instead of functionality, which is a direct violation of the Sixth Commandment (keep all production systems equal in the eyes of the IT staff). Everything should be treated equally. The quicker you embrace this throughout your organization the smoother the transition will be. The walls must come down. Many executives argue they cannot disrupt the companies' mission-critical systems on those mainframes. "The legacy staff is already busy-what's the point of reorganizing to mesh the organizations if no one can take advantage of it?"
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The Politics of People, Process, and Technology Part I (December 20, 2003)
Office and organizational politics will never go away. But you can overcome the more unproductive aspects of politics. Even the most difficult situation can be overcome if you create a quality, effective product that's priced right and delivered with a smile.
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Principles of Organizational Design Part I (December 8, 2003)
The glass closet in context
The information age is a new period of change. It is a shift from command and control organizations, the organization of departments and divisions, to an information-based organization. Why is the history of organizational design so important? The "glass house" is designed using Frederick W. Taylor and Alfred P. Sloan's definition of best practices for organization design. Often this organizational design is referred as a stovepipe. IT groups are structured into divisions, department, groups, etc., with a clear division of labor and resources.
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Principles of Organizational Design Part II (December 8, 2003)
Roles and Responsibilities
Defining everyone's roles and responsibilities is essential in a network environment. Demarcation between organizations is fading.
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The Business’ Big Picture (September 5, 2003)
The Big Picture entails the business realizing the IT department aptitude to comprehend and align its desired goals to those of the business. If the IT organization can than the likelihood of other areas within the organization will also be forced to view IT as a business partner and entrust them for consulting work instead of merely looking at them as a support department.
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Consequence Vs Situation (September 5, 2003)
As the META Group research shows that 70% of IT organizations are still perceived as cost centers by their business counterparts, rather than as value centers. We’ve devised the forward movement thinking conveniently named ‘consequence-based thinking.’ This is a new way of looking at situations that lead to a decision whereas the business and the IT organization can change the perception to that of an asset rather than a liability. This is key to an enterprise’s success
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CIO's Influenced by Direct Reports (September 3, 2003)
We've discussed previously how CIO's are influenced by their historical background and by the business environments in which they work in. But it goes without saying that their role of CIO is also many times affected significantly by the reporting relationships. We will discuss how:
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Business Environments Affect the CIO (September 3, 2003)
Historically, varying business environments can affect the role of a CIO. Here, we elaborate on the demands of an environment and how it influences a CIO's decisions.
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IT Production Services - The key component to building a competitive IT infrastructure
(July 10, 2003)
This article traces the evolutionary developments of the data center over the past thirty years. It focuses on the Production Control function of the mainframe environment of the 1970s, and describes how this critical area met its temporary demise in the 1990s. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how Production Control is now evolving itself into a more relevant Production Services function, and being put to use to build world-class infrastructures.
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The History of the CIO (July 30, 2003)
In the early eighties, a new executive title was introduced into business: Chief Information Officer. It was designed as a response to the increasing need to maintain the internal technology infrastructures in which corporations rely. In the late 1990’s as the Internet introduced dramatic changes into our business environment, the role was transformed.
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Key Guidelines for IT Service Management (November 4, 2002)
One way to differentiate your IT organization is to provide high quality IT services. With rising customer expectations you need to provide high quality services today and increasingly higher levels of service in the future. Your customers have little tolerance for downtime, slow performance and slow responses to requests. If they have other choices, they will surely go somewhere else. This article outlines a plan of action to help you establish the highest levels of service and credibility in your IT organization. There are five key steps you need to consider:
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Understanding the Impact of Policies on your IT Organization (November 4, 2002)
This article outlines a simple plan of action to help you identify and understand key policies that can have a substantial impact your IT organization. Along with other important domains like technologies, facilities, and processes, policies capture key elements of your IT organization – elements that must be well planned and well deployed in order to provide cost effective IT services. Because they define the minimum requirements for key technologies and processes, knowledge of policies is essential. As such, this article outlines some steps to help you identify important polices and related elements that affect the way you manage your IT organization.
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The IT Dimension: Capturing the Six Key IT Areas You Must Manage (September 9, 2002)
With a clear understanding of the business and its environment, customers and services, you must optimize the business’ ability to use information to create business value. To be an effective IT organization you need a comprehensive way to architect, implement and manage IT architectures, processes and organization. This article outlines the six key IT areas you need to take care of.
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Crossing the Chasm: Framework to Connect IT to Desired Business Outcomes (November 4, 2002)
Despite all the attention given to returns on IT investments, little progress has been made in linking all the elements of IT to what the business is trying to do. Managing IT investments, and demonstrating IT’s value to the business are more challenging than ever, and most businesses seem to be losing ground.
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The Challenge to CIOs, (November 4, 2002)
CIO's in today's business environment are challenged to deliver more results while reducing costs. Additionally, the business is challenging IT to clearly demonstrate its value. In essence, business executives are demanding to understand how the millions invested in IT truly contribute to the business and what it wants to accomplish.
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Managing Human Capital (May 2, 2002)
This article is adapted from the Moskowitz/Kern book Partnering For Success: Managing IT as an Investment (Prentice Hall, 2002)
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The CEO Roles and Responsibilities (May 2, 2002)
The CEO’s job is to lead. Leadership means setting the agenda. A leader has a vision and sets the direction for the enterprise. The CIO’s job is to supply the CEO’s needs efficiently and allow the CEO’s vision to be realized.
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IT Strategy (May 2, 2002)
This article is adapted from the Moskowitz/Kern book Partnering For Success: Managing IT as an Investment (Prentice Hall, 2002)
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Value Management (April 26,2002)
IT executives need to consider themselves and convince others to consider them as part of the business not separate from the business. ?In organizations where IT is viewed as extremely critical to the business, today?s CIO has not only realized that marketing the IT organization furthers the awareness that IT adds value to the business, but also has acted on that realization through concerted efforts to market IT?
Read more...
The Maturing of IT as a Business Discipline (April 26,2002)
?The basic tool for understanding the influence of Information Technology on companies is the value chain ? the set of activities through which a product or service is created and delivered to customers. When a company competes in any industry, it performs a number of discrete but interconnected value?creating activities, such as operating a sales force, fabricating a component, or delivering products, and these activities have points of connection with the activities of suppliers, channels, and customers. The value chain is a framework for identifying all these activities and analyzing how they affect both the company?s costs and the value delivered to buyers?
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Defining “World-Class” (May 2,2002)
This article is adapted from the Moskowitz/Kern book Partnering For Success: Managing IT As An Investment (Prentice Hall, 2002)
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Web-Centric Production Acceptance (2001)
You've recruited, hired, trained, and retained the best software engineers, architects, and managers in the industry. You?ve established a world-class software development organization for these engineers to work in. You?ve brought the best software development tools money can buy and each developer has a top-of-the-line workstation and a private office. Your glass-house computer room is filled with high-powered file server, DBMS servers, and the latest networking gear. Your software development team has worked for months to prototype, design, implement, and test a web-centric application, assuring every user requirement is met. You've worked with the IT operations staff to put in place a Service-Level Agreement. Your long overdue vacation plans are looming on the horizon and it seems like your project is nearly complete. Surprise! There is still one more task to do before you can claim a successful web-centric software development project's a very, big task. We call it the Web-Centric Production Acceptance WCPA) process.
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The Software Life Cycle (2001)
Many people view the software development life cycle as that time between when a programmer sits down to write the first line of code for a program to when the completed program successfully compiles and executes. Successful software development organizations have much more complete definitions of a software life cycle. These life cycle definitions start with early requirements gathering and analysis stages and proceed through ongoing operation and maintenance. The maturity of a software development organization, in fact, is closely related to its understanding of the software life cycle and the underlying processes and procedures required to successfully develop software. The Software Engineering Institute has captured this in a model, called the Capability Maturity Model for Software. This is a model for judging the maturity of the software processes of an organization and for identifying the key practices required to increase the maturity of these processes. This chapter introduces the Capability Maturity Model and then discusses how it applies during the software life cycle, from initial requirements definition to production acceptance.
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Rapid Application Development (2001)
For the last ten years, many software projects have incorporated the use of "Rapid Application Development" methodologies in an effort to decrease development times. RAD, as it is generally referred to, incorporates an umbrella of methodologies based o spiral, iterative development technologies. RAD techniques range from the simple use of GUI development tools to quickly build prototypes, to processes incorporating complete, cross-functional business analysis. Since January 1997, Cambridge Technology Partners, one of the early practitioners of RAD, adapted their methodology to address the special needs of electronic commerce. Dubbed CoRAD, for customer oriented RAD, Cambridge’s methodology brings together a unique combination of technical, business, creative, and cognitive disciplines to implement high impact, successful electronic commerce solutions. If you are even considering building an electronic commerce application, you should read closely to avoid pitfalls many early electronics commerce sites faced because they concentrated too narrowly on either the technical or creative side of electronic commerce. Furthermore, you need to realize that e-commerce isn’t just about building a web site – it’s about building a whole new business channel.
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Successfully Transitioning Developers (2001)
As IT managers try to evaluate the impact of new technology in meeting the company’s business goals, they must weigh not only the merits of the technology but their ability to successfully transition, then other choices must be made, including hiring different developers or choosing not to implement the new technology. Successful software development organizations are constantly faced with new development tools, new languages, and entire new computing paradigms from which to choose from year after year.
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Let’s Play Together = Internal Support Agreement (2001)
In many of the companies we visit, the applications development staff is located at the division or business unit level. Unfortunately, the support groups reside in different buildings. How does a centralized IT infrastructure support group help scattered corporate developers? These and other issues should be clearly defined in a internal Support Agreement.
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Recruiting the Best Talent (2001)
Unless you have a fully staffed software development organization and are expecting no growth or turnover, you should be concerned about recruiting and hiring the best talent. The best software developers will produce significantly better code than their average counterparts. The top software architects will produce designs that are much more likely to be successfully completed. So how can you find and hire the best developers and architects? One key attribute of organizations that successfully staff for growth is constant recruitment to keep a full pipeline of candidates, even if they currently have no open positions. Another key attribute of successful organizations is hiring from internal referrals. Most companies find there is no better way to recruit qualified software development candidates than through personal referrals.
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The Second Industrial Revolution
The Future of Technology (2001)
Now that we have a good idea of what the era of personalization will look like for individuals, what about for businesses and organizations?
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The Future of Technology
Part One (2001)
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.—John Von Neumann (1949)
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Software Development Has Always Been Difficult (2001)
In the previous article, we defined our own ten commandments for successful software development. In this article, we present some of the reasons why successful software development has always been so difficult in the past. The answer lies in the unique combination of people, processes, and technology that need to come together for a software development project to succeed. If you understand the dynamics of this combination, you will start to understand why there has never been, and never will be, any "silver bullets" in software development. This is a necessary starting point in understanding the difficulty surrounding successful software development. Only by learning from lessons of the past can we hope to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Let’s take a brief look at the history of modern software development and identify some of the difficulties surrounding successful software development it.
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Satisfying the Customer (2001)
One of the great revolutions in American business that began in the 1980’s (and is still underway) is the ascendancy of the customer. It is now much more than a cliché that the customer is king. And today this is as true for internal customers as it is for external customers. The rise of packaged enterprise systems and the rapid growth of outsourcing mean that IT customers have more choices than ever, and our experience is that they will use them if they are dissatisfied. Yet I still find many IT departments that are not focusing on customer satisfaction and are using their institutional position to control their customers. But over time, by not satisfying their customers they are putting their budgets and continued employment at risk. I am going to discuss some of the principles of customer satisfaction and offer suggestions for getting and staying in tune with your customers.
Read more...
Managing Expectations (2001)
Each year Information Week takes a poll of its readers on the top issues affecting CIO’s and IT departments. Each year the issue of aligning IT to the business is at or near the top of the list. Key to the issue of aligning IT is the ability to maintain credibility with which requires properly managing customer expectations.
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IT Infrastructure Support and Development Organization Structures for Supporting RAS (2001)
Whether it’s the 21st or 30th Century, whether it’s legacy, client/server, or network computing or something new coming along in the next N number of years, if you’re supporting mission-critical systems, don’t tamper with something that’s worked for decades. As I mentioned in the past, mission-critical in the IT world is synonymous with mainframe computing. Please don’t let mainframe computing turn you off. Keep an open mind as you read this section. Much of what we discuss evolved from the "nasty" mainframe era.
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The CIO’s Role For The IT Infrastructure Support and Development Organization (2001)
In this article I discuss the CIO’s role as we enter the 21st century. Executives will have no choice but to start focusing at least 50 percent of their time on getting their house (infrastructure) in order. This is due to global competition, business requirements/issues, shrinking IT budgets, and unhappy customers. They will have no choice but to get cost-effective. It’s not too late.
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Production Control Functions (2001)
In the previous article I talk about the importance of having a QA function in the infrastructure development and support organization. This article discusses the group’s responsibilities.
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Production Control = Infrastructure QA (2001)
Production Control was never involved in any of the pre-production activities. Systems were literally thrown over the wall into production. Production Control was never involved until Applications Development said their systems were ready. Nine times out of ten, the systems were not (in the eyes of the infrastructure support staff) ready for production.
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The 10 commandments for Building a ‘World-Class’ IT Infrastructure (2001)
The first step in resolving many of the organization, people, and process issues in today’s IT environments and building a world-class infrastructure is to establish the right methodologies to support a mission- critical production environment. These methodologies have proven to be effective in many Fortune 1000 companies. Very simply put these methodologies are key to ensuring and preserving RAS(Reliability, Availability, Serviceability).
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The War of all Wars (May 10, 2001)
I've had many wonderful experiences spanning my 28 year career in Data Processing from designing new data centers to major technology conversions but nothing compares to what I went through at Sun Microsystems Inc., a 10 billion dollar computer hardware manufacturer headquartered in Silicon valley California.
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War Story (Apr 27, 2001)
This is the story of a county government in south Florida that set out to change their technology base and information systems organization structure. The objective was to provide better service and improve customer satisfaction. Based on this new strategic direction, the county commissioners combined two separate information systems groups and created a new department to serve all information systems needs county-wide.
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I Can’t Believe It’s The Organization Structure (2001)
After doing over 100 infrastructure assessments with Fortune 1000 companies the severity and number of organizational related issues were a big surprise to me and others with whom I discussed this subject. Without a doubt it is the biggest problem with network computing and deserves top billing. The problems with the IT infrastructure support and infrastructure development organizations are overwhelming and not to mention mind-boggling especially because so many of them are directly or indirectly affected by the organization structure.
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Ten Commandments of Successful Software Development (2001)
All great organizations have a vision, a mission, and elemental guidelines for proper behavior that are infused into their people. Perhaps the oldest code of conduct is the Ten Commandments. Since the day Moses stumbled off Mount Sinai, people have applied the idea of condensing their groups’ rules into ten, easy to remember, sentences. Following the lead of Moses, we’ve distilled the successful software development concept into Ten Commandments. If you want to be consistently successful at software development, be sure you always embrace these ten ideals.
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