Selling to the CIO – Do’s and Don’ts

I was reminded this week of a presentation I gave to the Sun Microsystems  sales team when I first started the CIO gig back in 2004 (Thanks Leo). Seeing that I’m about to transition jobs from the demand-side to supply-side, I figured it would useful for me (and to share with my readers) my preferred engagement style (and annoyances) with IT suppliers.

Do’s

• Initially contact me through a trusted source
• Research my industry, company strategy, IT budget and environment and ME
• Articulate your product or service’s Unique Value Proposition – upfront
• Keep it real – be honest and transparent – build credibility and trust
• Teach me new concepts – make me a smarter business leader
• Provide a ‘ballpark price’ when asked
• Effectively ghost-write the business case for me – make it easy to get the investment approved internally
• Find the common ground and inject some humor and character
• Follow up all questions and actions within 24 hours

Don’ts

• Cold call me and ask for a meeting – CIO’s get 10+ calls a week like this and don’t have time to deal with them all
• Make initial contact with my boss or business unit peers
• Ask me to recite the IT strategy before I understand what you can deliver – keep the discussion relevant
• Try to sell me something I’ve just implemented – do that research
• Send me gimmicky gifts in the mail
• Say “I want a long-term partnership with you” – of course you’d like that
• Try to sell me something without a concise list of benefits and costs
• Tell me you have no reference sites/customers in my State (or Country in some cases)
• Keep calling me every 3 months when I asked you not to

Yes, some of this advice is tough, even arrogant some may say, however in my experience it’s the reality of many CIO’s.

Know thy business (economics)

We’ve all heard it. Effective CIO’s genuinely understand the business; its strategies, people and processes while always thinking in terms of the (quadruple) bottom line.  The fact is Information Technology leaders are well placed to gain these insights, having an enterprise-wide view of the company’s demand for new technology solutions and an ear to the ground supporting day to day business operations. In my case, I felt compelled to better understand the economics of my business.

Best way to do that? Swap jobs with the Financial Controller I thought – and then made it happen – for three whole months!

So, two weeks in to the FC gig what have I learned about the economics (more-so the financial management challenges) of a large Government business enterprise? Without giving too much away, here’s a taste.

• Every dollar counts. Investment and loan interest rates and terms are constantly watched and optimised.
• Investment decisions are made on a much greater scale. Having now authorised multi-million dollar payments and business cases, it really puts the governance around a say, $10k software request, in perspective.
• Think there’s too much regulation in IT? Think again. A multitude of financial statements and ratios are required on an almost daily basis to a variety of Government owners, regulators, auditors, the Board, its sub-committees and executive management. There’s no room for typo’s or minor calculation errors here – accuracy is king!
• Financial modelling is complex, comprehensive and long range. Yes, I know predicting IT investments over three years is hard (some technologies you will be using haven’t even been invented yet) but consider the huge number of inputs and volatility of external factors into a 10 year financial model!

So yes, while I have so much more to learn about my business’ economics, I do have a new found respect for the finance team, their complex challenges and responsibilities.

The directors’ view of IT

Having spent the last five days learning to think like a company director, I thought I’d share some of the salient points for those IT leaders about to pitch that major investment or 3-year technology plan to your board.

The facilitators at the Company Directors Course made it extremely clear where directors minds are focused when reading board papers and listening to management presentations – Risk, Strategic fit, Financial viability (always with their thoughts on solvency), Legal compliance and overall how the proposal will benefit the company and therefore its owners/shareholders.  Importantly, directors have fiduciary duty – a legal obligation to act in good faith with due diligence to the company.

So, next time you are preparing your proposal and board presentation, put yourself in your company director’s shoes and think about:

1. How your proposal delivers the defined company objectives and strategy
2. How does it affect the balance sheet, the income statement and the company’s cash flow position?
3. What can go wrong? – risk considerations and financial sensitivity analysis under different scenarios
4. OH&S, Trade practices, environmental, climate change, privacy and Intellectual property considerations – these are ‘hot buttons’ for  directors
5. Finally, making sure you demonstrate a structured approach to your decision making (6 thinking hats, 5 whys, Decision tree) and the triple bottom line ethics considered.

All this (with a dose of shiny and impressive technology demo) will help convince (and impress) your directors  – and deliver a better decision for your company.

10 tips for high-performing IT teams

I’ve been pondering this question over the last few months … What really makes your IT department a high performing team? Figuring I was missing something obvious or a secret that only super CIO’s had discovered, I did some web research combined with some great advice from my leadership coach.

As usual, the answer is not rocket science. The key is strong leadership, mature IT processes and culture of teamwork and commitment to shared goals. Below are my top 10 tips for IT leaders (and teams) to aim for:

1. Firstly, recruit talented, committed, insightful technologists & business-savvy people.
2. Give them responsibility and autonomy. If you are constantly needing to step in and micro-manage you may have the wrong people.
3. Lead and engage your team to help create a business-aligned IT strategy and plans – create shared performance goals around the outcomes.
4. Provide funding for effective IT operation, service and project management tools and processes. Let your team model best-practice office productivity techniques.
5. Allow time for innovation, team-building and social events.
6. Provide LOTS of different learning opportunities – on the job or at a course.
7. Multi-skill your team members and allow them to rotate around roles.
8. Make sure your team’s new ideas (and grumbles) are listened to. Ask for feedback regularly and act on it.
9. Communicate what’s going on in the business with your teams. Be transparent with corporate news and do it quickly. IT staff expect news in real time!
10. Be flexible around working hours and locations if feasible. IT teams can still be very effective working remotely (and at odd hours) with unified communications tools today.

Enterprise Web 2.0 – here we go

Well, here goes.

My company is about to launch into the great social media frontier to better inform and engage our customers, communities and stakeholders in water related topics. Not exactly a leading edge idea these days, I know, but a great step forward for e-government nonetheless. I am really excited by the prospects of the social media channels to help South East Water to be more accessible and  ‘customer driven’.

We are carefully starting to publish more content on the web, and now have a company Twitter feed and a YouTube channel. A Social media specialist is kicking goals by training management on the potential for social media as a consultation medium and building awareness and organising new content on the web.

As an avid  social computing consumer and enterprise web 2.0 evangelist, I’m excited by the prospects.

If you’d like to follow our progress and contribute to our organisation’s strategic directions, it’s just a click away.

What are your company’s plans for Enterprise Web 2.0?

Talk from the top

Having been CIO of South East Water in Victoria for six years has not diminished Marcus Darbyshire’s excitement for the job. In fact, he says he has the best job in the company. How many people can say that and actually mean it? Voice&Data’s Merri Mack finds out why.

Darbyshire was the IT Operations Manager for the utility for five years before taking up the role of CIO. Working with smart people, always having interesting and challenging goals ahead and having IT as a recognised centre of excellence for the utility are just some of the reasons for Darbyshire’s happiness. One suspects making a difference by using technology in an innovative way for his customers is also a key motivator for his job satisfaction. He enjoys the enterprise-wide view and being jointly accountable for bottom and top-line growth.

The successful implementation of a transformational unified communications solution and virtualising the data centres, and plans for replacing the ERP system and implementing a new CRM system are the major projects engaging him this year. Darbyshire is eager to maximise the value from the company’s investment in document management, project management and collaboration tools from OpenText and Microsoft.

South East Water’s CIO is experiencing increasing levels of sophisticated cloud-based applications entering the company’s application portfolio. “Each month I’m seeing an old application being replaced with a new cloud application. Software as a service is really getting traction now,” said Darbyshire. He is also excited by the prospects of data deduplication for reducing costs from archiving and recovery.
South East Water is one of three Melbourne water utilities. Servicing over 1.3 million people, the water utility manages $2 billion of infrastructure and assets, has over 800 employees and has a combined IT budget of around $12 million a year. In addition, South East Water provides IT services to other utilities in Victoria and interstate and also in New Zealand through its alliance business.

Unlike other organisations that suffered cutbacks during the GFC, South East Water has been trying to increase its efficiency while servicing a growing population in south-east Melbourne, which is creating increased demand for IT services. This meant that Darbyshire and his team had the challenge of quickly recruiting and integrating 30% more people into new IT project teams.
When recruiting, Darbyshire emphasised that the right cultural fit for his IT team was vital. “Our company’s vision is about providing innovative solutions for a better future. It’s critical that my team help our business deliver the strategic priorities and solutions that our customers are demanding,” he said.
Darbyshire is very excited about how social media is being used in enterprises to better engage their customers and communities. He works closely with the marketing and communications team to ensure South East Water is a leading utility in this area so it can more effectively engage with its customers. “Our customers have great ideas which we can use and feed back into our business and strategy,” said Darbyshire.

Darbyshire is conscious of having before- and after-work hobbies, creating a balance between work and pleasure and between mental and physical activi- ties. He is a regular at the gym most mornings and is a fervent photographer; in fact, he is so passionate about photography he said, “I’d almost give up my day job for it except the pay’s lousy.” A further interest is being an active technology blogger; and because he wants to be the best leader possible, he is an avid reader of personal development books and websites.

Marcus Darbyshire is the Chief Information Officer at South East Water. He is the past IT Operations Manager and has also been an IT Project Manager for the utility. As CIO he has delivered reliable IT operations and successful IT projects while engaging his clients with innovative technology solutions, strategic planning and effective IT governance.

IT and business “Line of sight”

Every IT department claims they are aligned to ‘the business’ but how well understood is this by everyone in the IT team?

My team with the help of corporate strategy and HR staff recently undertook “line of sight” workshops that helped everyone see how the work they do contributes to the corporate vision and strategic priorities. This helps to ensure everyone is “rowing in the same direction”.

The strategic linkage is further underpinned through the documented IT strategy and plans – which outline the major projects, initiatives investment planned in response to the corporate plan. IT Management then openly share their incentive goals and major projects with the team to create a transparent understanding of where efforts should be prioritized. Then every IT team member develops their own ‘SMART’ goals that have a clear connection to corporate objectives, backed up with development plans (specific leadership competencies and technical training).

Finally, to ensure outcomes are achieved in a constructive and collaborative way, everyone is required to demonstrate how they live the company values (or guiding principles as we call them).

As you may recall from an earlier post, our challenges and major projects are shared with our business partners and suppliers so that they also have the ‘line of sight’. So far it all seems to be working very well; The team is acutely aware of their significance to the company, shared goals are encouraging even further cooperation and everyone really is ‘rowing in the same direction’.

The visual resume

I’ve been looking at a lot of resumes of IT professionals lately and was pondering over what attracted me to spend more time reading a particular candidate’s CV’s. So many are dry, textual and fail to outline the applicant’s unique value proposition or even business value of their achievements.

I did some research on video resume’s which still seem to be in their infancy, despite the available technology and ease of home movie-making now. Anti-discrimination laws appear to be a major roadblock here too. That lead me on to the visual (AKA PowerPoint) resume. This seemed to be a maturing middle ground where candidates can stand out from the crowd and highlight their achievements and individual flair in an eye-catching way. Clearly it needs to be backed up with a more traditional document resume’ and a credible interview, however I believe this is an innovative way to get noticed (and fully read) by potential employers.

So, to set an example, I spend a few hours translating my LinkedIn profile to a very visual PowerPoint presentation and uploaded to Slideshare.net. And voilà, here it is.

Analysing feedback with word clouds

How do you analyze freeform feedback to identify issues and trends?

I recently asked my team of 50 IT professionals for some feedback on how I could be a better leader for them. Rather than just analyze the email responses in the usual way I got the idea to cut and paste all the feedback text into wordle.net to create a word cloud.  Below was the result. Kind of funky hey? Quick and free too!

The word cloud is presented in a different way than you would usually read sentences allowing you to synthesize it from a different angle (and perhaps see a trend that you may not recognize by the traditional approach).

I also fed our IT strategy into the wordle sausage machine to see how it was represented in a word cloud. This  highlighted some important initiatives that didn’t feature prominently enough in the word cloud, prompting me to revise the strategy document and reiterate some key projects.  I have found wordle a terrific way to summarize a textual document from another angle. I’ll be using it again.

PS – Thanks to Dave Lourdes for letting me know about wordle. Great tip!

IT Asset management – for your best assets … your people

As technology management professionals, IT departments are often great at planning their annual project portfolios, infrastructure replacements cycles and even longer-term, business aligned initiatives. We all know the old adage “Our people are our greatest asset”, but do we plan and manage our IT ‘people’ assets with anywhere near the same level of detail as we do those boxes of iron full of ‘ones and zeros’ in the data centre? I know I didn’t.

Working closely with my HR department, we have recently created an IT workforce plan that:

• Sets out the purpose and direction of IT (from the strategic plan)
• Scans the external and internal environment for risks and potential impacts to your people
• Documents and reviews the team’s structure and reporting relationships
• Identifies key positions and succession plans
• Outlines the IT team’s demographics (Length of service, classification, age, gender, teleworkers)
• Performs SWOT analysis on your staff
• Identifies HR gaps and an action plan

Using the IT workforce plan in conjunction with existing performance management and training/development plans helps give my already high-performing team the level of planning and care it deserves. I suggest every IT leader give this a go.