Tuesday morning is my IT team meeting.  Historically this was a roundtable of stumbling blocks, snags, and escalated cost issues.  I think I will evolve this to a punch list of current projects, maintenance issues, and infrastructure monitoring. The 2^nd Tuesday meeting would be an open forum for managers and department heads to formally present new project to a panel of IT personnel.  I feel we need some structure to provide an environment for consistency. Have any or you ever tried something like this?

My favorites are some of the quotes near the end.

These are not at all comprehensive, but they do catch a lot of what I was interested in.

If others have notes they would like to add to these, please edit the post and add your stuff.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Day 1

CIO Bootcamp notes from Las Vegas Interpo 2009

What does IT contribute to this enterprise?

How does this individual move from data to opinion?

• Sensemaking
• Relating
  • Inquery
  • Advocacy
• Visioning
• Innovating – Turning visions into reality

Commanders intent – a clear picture of the desired end state. “What is it boss that you want to happen?”

• Useful to the audience
• In plain English

Communicate with care

Lead people on purpose that matters

• Book recommendation – “Combat Jump” Ed Ruggero

Energy in the workplace – empower and purpose your people

• Users groups – diverse
• What is the problem you are trying to solve?
• IT staff works for you (support role)
• Applications vs functions

List of provocative IT facts

Human network – huge factor

IT is an enabler of business processes

Trust – a key value to build with executives

Speaking in context to users – scientists vs marketing

Proactive – set priorities (budget)

Relate the value of IT services to management and users

People will demonize people they don’t know

Compare capability at home with capability at work

Unit cost / Moores law and demand is increasing

Making users pay for the software they want leads to better decisions

Failure happens

What would our business be without IT?

Return on investment

Sell success

Communicate activities – coming attractions, in testing, training opportunities

System reliability

Garbage in – Garbage out

Technology problems vs business processes in need of fixing

Transparency enables alignment

Relationships across organizations

Continuously earn respect from management and users through good decision making

What do we know?

What can we know?

What must we know?

[] Panel discussion

Louis Cateras – CIO

Bruce Barnes – CIO

Economy – use the recession as an opportunity to reshape the workforce, cut programs not yielding fruit.

Helping show the art of the possible

Have to earn respect through respect

Do more with less – most efficient while leading company

Directness – call it like it is (respect) diplomatically

Trust – Don’t use what you know to get what you want

• Do not betray trust, if told to, then do so with management in the room
• Relationship building – conscious effort to meet with and grow the business folks
• Talk to the CFO etc… especially the people that loath you the most
• “If they are cutting your budget, you are having lunch with the wrong people”
• Establish relationships across leadership
• Strategic conversations, metrics of business, show you are adding value

[] Q&A session

• Demonstrate unambiguous progress on mutually agreed upon business objectives
• Book recommendation “Nudge” Sunstein Author – Choice Architecture
• Rules and Score card in order to win the game
• What are we trying to do?

• Who are the legitimizers of the CFO?
• The people s/he is talking too?
• Are you talking with them?

Stake holder analysis Quad chart – X-axis = Agreement, Y-axis = Resources, ++ Champions, -+ Blockers, — Squids, +- allies

CIO history;

• 1970′s data processing techniques
• 1980′s Technology focused CIO
• 1990′s Internet focused CIO – client server, security and encryption
• 2000-2004 – Business strategy CIO, move away from tech talk, be business enabled
• 2005-2009 – Accomplish more with less CIO, social network

• CIO business leader
  • Influence business profit
  • Tangeable business outcomes from tech
  • SAAS, SOA, Web2.0
• Operational excellence
• Improve business results
• Business strategy and innovation
• Process transformation
• Change leadership
• Team leadership
• Vendor meeting / discussion
• Customer client relationships

Dealing with blockers -

• Ask them to present in your office
• Invite them to your meetings

[] Which CIO will you be?

• Chief international officer – third parties, lawyer, security
• Chief influence officer – master relationships and communication
• Chief impact officer – changes may have huge impact, beyond your expectations
• Chief improvement officer – break it, make it better, “good ideas made better”
• Chief integrity officer – open, honest, clear, uncompromising values communicated to your peers and employees. “Leadership begins with integrity”
• Chief intuition officer – sensemaking, making decisions on future
• Chief integration officer – integrator and mediator of ideas on decisions
• Chief innovation officer – figure out business needs and enable them, risks and take criticism

[] Which will you be?

• Career is over – Chief impediment officer, no business knows, focused on operations instead of strategy, no vision, no drive, gets fired and moves on to next victim.
• Cadence is ok – march in place, don’t rock the boat, some change when required, new leadership, force movement
• Collaborative, Influential, Open-minded – forge business partnerships to rapidly respond, drive company profitability through technology, enable transformation, data sharing and data transparency, ideas come from anywhere

[] Afternoon

Be a visible, valued leader

“If you get them by their parts, their hearts and minds will follow”

“Modify lines of reporting for influence”

“Knees under the table, preferably with alcohol”

“Stamina wins all”

“Deference goes to power, power comes from revenue generation”

Question for the customers – “Help me understand what my organization can do to help you”

What are my first 100 day goals?

• Have talks, they should help to shape those goals
• Identify blockers to success
• work to remove or get around those blocks

” Render awesomeness – People should know what you do, score cards”

• Sell yourself and successes to users and management, but recognize the difference in how you do that with each
• It is easier to lead and manage in a crisis

• Authorizing structure
  • CFO
  • CFO + CIO
  • CEO
  • CEO + CFO + CIO
  • Board

• You have 2 months to affect change before credibility starts to wane
  • ROI decreases
  • Return on liquidity increases
  • Return on capital increases

• Align productivity with tools asked for, if not corresponding increase should be a lesser objective / requirement
• Value – personal goals to objectives, then show it, commit, aligned from front to back

• What are people really thinking?
• What problems need to be soved?
• Platform for value
• What is the business benefit?

• In this recession, use the do more with less / budget cuts to explain how the efficient tools help us to accomplish more with fewer people and less money. Be more innovative.

• What can we drop or leave in terms of surveys or projects?

• Quantifiable benefit written into desired software
• Business case in addition to all the other requirements we discuss at ERB’s + CCSB’s
• Line them all up, live or die, rank what is left, cut when the money runs out, meet quarterly, assess new requirements, place in rank, some fall off the bottom

• IT finance person, great lead into CIO position

• Articulate a vision and go get it

• How do you fund infrastructure?
  • Almost impossible to fund unless you tie it to failure
  • But it does bring value, include it in individual projects
  • You are selling capability, not just infrastructure

• Market shares move by ripping some out of the hands of others at some cost

• Rotations in and around organizations to round you out

• Sit with and absorb workshop problems, look at the osw model, 3 months, document work in that workspace

[] Day 2

• Bruce Barnes started the day with a lecture – Assessing the IT strategy
• What is your strategy?
• Could every person tell me the same thing?
• What is your company’s business strategy?

• Strategy – fundamental plan of action toward a particular outcome

• (see brief)

• In the government, strategic planning is required by law

• The CIO is a travel planner: Lets discuss interesting places to go
  • What do we want to be?
  • How do we make IT strategies planning strategies again?

• What should and IT strategy do?

1. Articulate the current situational assessment

• • Industry
  • Company
  • Competition
  • Opportunities seen

1. Articulates the resulting intended outcome and or competitive advantage
2. Articulates a conceptual plan of attack, as well as the supporting competencies
3. Articulates underlying changes within the existing processes

• IT strategies must be linked to something
  • Know your strategy
  • Share / learn / train your folks on your strategy
  • Level of assessment and response (monitor)

• Questions for the corporate team
  • What is the companies definition of realized corporate value?

• Take ownership – Drive your strategy development process

• If you are going to be transformative, your leadership needs to give you a mandate to do so. It is the leverage to change or overcome blockers.
• Strong well communicated mandate
• Mandate as mantra

• Think far, act incrementally

(insert picture here if you want to draw one)

Geography matters

Why are customers leaving us?

• Service oriented architecture – thumbs up!

[] Dealing with vendors

• Don’t let vendors dictate the cost or the time frame. You say “What can I have for $300 dollars on November 10th?”

[] Russ McGuire

• link to his blog on notes of CIO boot camp are here: http://mcguireslaw.com/2009/05/22/cio-bootcamp/

• Mcguireslaw.com – Sprint guy, rss, blog

“Order takers” moving toward “value creators”

• Voip is dead, Aoip is the way ahead, where Aoip is applications over internet protocol

• Notes to self for work -
  • Mandate moving business to unclass – at least as much as possible, bread crumbs up if necessary
  • www.seamlessenterprize.com – set up an rss feed
  • Microsoft office communications server – do we have it?
  • Mobilize processes – opportunities?
  • Move business to unclass to support telecommuting
  • Investigate Sprint “MyFi” serves 5 people, secure

[] John Shultz (Innovation at Verizon)

• Study product development for creating good requirements

• Ideation – the next great idea
  • Ongoing – active methods to collect ideas
    • Customers – lines of business
    • Improvement programs
    • Industry competitors, analysts
    • Benchmarking
    • Operational teams

• Ongoing process – what are the good ideas?
• Set up an ideation pipeline – meet quarterly

• Note to self, idea pipeline, add to innovation office page

• Evaluate options, prioritize, organizational buy in, staff for success
  • Keys to success
    • Voice of the customer
    • Project management
    • Monitor and course correct – Gate reviews

• Number on mistake – not spending enough time up front

- Garbage in – Garbage out

• Honor the customer
  • Know who they are
  • Know what they want
  • Give them what they want

• The best new products come from good requirements

• See the PDMA handbook of new product development – Milton D. Rosenau Jr.

• Needs uncovering techniques
  • Be a user
  • Watch users critically
  • Interview users and needs

• Post requirements
• Have customers / users approve the requirements
• Validate and update the service description – manage scope creep
• Assume buy, justify build, understand why you must build

“IT service management vs IT product management” – Posted on Jan 21st, 2008 by ITorganization2017 – Inurl 2008/01/21

• Questions for self
  • Who manages our networks?
  • Desktop management?

[] Managing Vendors

• Be able to negotiate – Learn to negotiate

• Notes to self for work
  • Renegotiate maintenance deals right now
  • Renegotiate 80% discount on software
  • Control negotiations process – fair amount of “I don’t give a crap about your software” needs to be evident
    • 3 Vendors
    • Requirements
    • Scoring against the requirements
      • Business requirements
      • Technical requirements
• Don’t say who won, have a stand bye or second place in case the first does not work out

• Detailed joint statement of work
• Clear – we will do these things, you will do these things
• Now is the time to lower costs in IT

[] Terry Conner

• Managing Critical Relationships

• Tech comes, tech goes, management is forever

• People/relationships vs tech

• CIO expectations
  • Business partner
  • IT expert (or reasonable facsimile)
  • Strong leader / communicator

• (see brief)

• Bottom line
  • Leading and managing is a full contact sport
  • Communication is critical – early, often, in person, formal, informal
  • Risks have to be taken but managed
  • Making others successful is a faster ( and longer lasting ) path than self promotion
  • Amazing things can happen

• Quotes
  • The fertilizer has impacted the oscillator
  • Take more than one bullet

• Is there really a top down desire to change?
• Reach down and nurture those that grasp the vision

If you are interested in editing or posting to this blog, as opposed to commenting only, please contact me and I will add you to the list of people that can edit or create posts.

The hope here is simple, share what you know about the problems posted here, and feel free to post problems of your own.

Let’s get started