chase zander

Chase Zander Forums – IT Director Report and Change Director Invitation

Peter James Thomas business, change management, management, technology , ,

Following on from my series of posts about the inaugural Chase Zander IT Director Forum that I helped to organise earlier in the year, a report covering the event, which was held in Birmingham, has just been released by Chase Zander themselves.

Anyone interested in learning more about what goes on at these events is welcome to view the document, a PDF version of which may be downloaded here.
 

 
The next Chase Zander event is the Change Director Forum (attendance at which moved me to write the very first article on this blog: Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus). This will be held in London on the evening of 9th July 2009 at the following venue:

Address: St. Clement’s House
27 – 28 Clement’s Lane
London EC4N 7AE
Nearest tubes: Bank or Monument
Map: click here

 
Registration starts at 17:30 and the event itself kicks of at 18:15.

Details of the programme will be published nearer the date.

Attendance is free, but prior registration is required. Please mail Emily White at emily.white@chasezander.com or call her on 0870 997 9014.
 

Some thoughts on IT-Business Alignment from the Chase Zander IT Director Forum

Peter James Thomas business, change management, it business alignment, technology , , , , , , , , , , ,

This Chase Zander seminar, which I earlier previewed on this site, took place yesterday evening in Birmingham. There was a full house of 20 plus IT Directors, CIOs and other senior IT managers who all engaged fully in some very stimulating and lively discussions.

As I previously mentioned, our intention in this meeting was to encourage debate and sharing of experiences and best practice between the delegates. My role was to faciliate the first session, focussed on IT-Business alignment. I started by sharing a few slides with that group that explained the research we had conducted to determine the content of the forum.

Click to view the introductory presentation
Click to view the introductory presentation as a PDF

After sharing what in my opinion was a not wholly satisfactory definition of IT-Business alignment, I opened up the floor to a discussion of what IT-Business alignment actually was and why it mattered. We used some of the other slides later in the meeting, but most of the rest of the evening was devoted to interaction between the delegates. Indeed the ensuing conversations were so wide ranging that the theme was also carried over to the second session, hosted by my associate Elliot Limb.

Territory initially covered included the suggestion that IT should be an integral part of the business, rather than a separate entity aligned to it (a theme that I covered in my earlier article Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus, which interestingly I penned after a previous Chase Zander forum, this one focussed on change management). The group also made a strong connection between IT-Business alignment and trust. A count of hands in response to the question “do you feel that you have the 100% unqualified confidence of your CEO?” revealed a mixed response and we tried to learn from the experiences of those who responded positively.

The relationship between IT and change was also debated. Some felt that IT, with its experience of project-based work, was ideally placed to drive change in organisations. Others believed that change should be a business function, with IT sticking to its more traditional role. Different organisations were in different places with respect to this issue – one attendee had indeed seen his current organisation take both approaches in the recent past. It was also agreed that there were different types of change: positive change in reaction to some threat or opportunity and the less positive change for change’s sake that can sometimes affect organisations.

Suggestions for enhancing IT-Business alignment included: being very transparent about IT service level agreements and trends in them; focussing more on relationships with senior managers, the CEO and CFO in particular; better calculating the cost of IT activities (including business resource) and using this to prioritise and even directly charge for IT services; applying marketing techniques to IT; learning to better manage business expectations, taking on more realistic workloads and knowing when to say ‘no’; and paying more attention to business processes, particularly via capability maturity modelling.

It was agreed that it generally took quite some time to establish trust between a CIO and the rest of the senior management team. This might be done by initially sorting out problems on the delivery and support side and, only once confidence had been built up, would the CIO be able to focus more on strategic and high value-added activities. This process was not always aided by the not atypical 3-5 year tenure of CIOs.

Later discussions also touched on whether CIOs would generally expect (or want to) become CEOs and, if not, why was this the case. The perspective of both the delegates and the Chase Zander staff was very interesting on this point. There was a degree of consensus formed around the statement that IT people liked taking on challenging problems, sorting them out and then moving on to the next one. While there was some overlap between this perspective and the role of a CEO in both having their hand on the tiller of an organisation and challenging the management team to meet stretch goals, there was less than a perfect fit. Maybe this factor indicated something of a different mindset in many IT professionals.

In the context of forming better relationships with business managers and IT trying to be less transactional in its dealings with other areas, the question of why there were so few women in senior IT positions also came up. This is a large topic that could spawn an entire forum in its own right.

Overall the meeting was judged to be a success. From my perspective it was also interesting to meet a good cross-section of IT professionals working in different industries and to talk about both what the different challenges that we faced and what we had in common.
 

 
Continue reading about this area in: The scope of IT’s responsibility when businesses go bad
 

Busy week

Peter James Thomas site update ,

I will be facilitating the Chase Zander IT Director Forum in Birmingham on Thursday evening and am also attending a CIO Magazine event earlier in the week, so there will be rather less blog output than is customary.
 

The Top Business Issues facing CIOs / IT Directors – Results

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, it business alignment, technology , , , , , , , , ,

Back in January, in collaboration with Chase Zander, I started a process of consulting with senior IT managers to develop a list of the top business issues that they faced. This exercise was intended to shape the content of a IT Director Forum that we were planning. This will now be happening on 26th March in Birmingham (for further information see this post).

Questionaire Responses
The Top Business Issues faced by CIOs / IT Directors

Back then, I promised to share some of the findings from this study. These are summarised in the above diagram. The input was based on public comments made by a selection of senior people on the CIO group of LinkedIn.com, plus e-mails sent to me on the topic and feedback received by Chase Zander.

A textual version of the data appeas below (sample size ~60):
 

  Issue % of Votes  
  IT / Business Alignment 27%  
  Cost-saving 13%  
  Managing change 8%  
  Status of the IT Director 8%  
  Legacy Systems 5%  
  Customer focus 5%  
  Enterprise Architecture 5%  
  Business Intelligence 5%  
  Avoiding the latest and greatest 3%  
  Cloud Computing 3%  
  Only one response 17%  
  Total 100%  

 
I would like to thank all of the IT professionals who contributed to this survey.
 

An invitation to Chase Zander’s IT Director Forum

Peter James Thomas business, it business alignment, technology , , , , ,
Please click on the image to view the full-sized invitation
Please click on the image to view the full-sized invitation

Some time ago I posted about about the IT Director Forum that I was helping Chase Zander to set up. This is happening on the evening of March 26th in Birmingham, England.

Seminar topics: People who should attend:
  • How Business and IT be better aligned?
  • How IT can add more value while being more cost effective?
  • IT Directors
  • Managing Directors
  • Senior Business-Facing IT Professionals

A summary of the research that led to developing these topics may be viewed here.

Rather than just making presentations, the objective is to have round-table discussions with delegates sharing their experiences. I will be facilitating the IT / Business Alignment session and Elliott Limb will be handling the Adding value with IT session. Elliott is an IT and Business Leader and Author of forthcoming book Credibility – Bridging the IT / business divide.

At present, there are a few places still available. Any UK-based IT managers who are interested in attending can contact Emily White (emily.white@chasezander.com or 0870 997 9014) to make a reservation.
 

The Top Business Issues facing CIOs / IT Directors

Peter James Thomas business, it business alignment, technology , , , , ,

 

chase-zander-h78 cio-magazne

I am collaborating with Chase Zander to set up an IT Directors’ Forum for later in the year. Rather than focussing on technology issues, our idea is to focus on the nexus between IT and business, something that I am obviously interested in given my background.

In the IT and change projects I have led, I always prided myself on going an extra mile to understand user requirements. One way in which the group of us organising the seminar is trying to get such user feedback is from LinkedIn.com and specifically the CIO Magazine group (you will need to be a member of LinkedIn.com and the group to view this).

The question that I posed there is as follows: –

I’m looking for business-focussed topics for a CIO / IT Director forum that I am helping to arrange. I would be very interested in what areas are at the top of people’s priority lists.

The forum is for senior IT people, but it is not going to be focussed on technology (there are enough SOA seminars out there already). Instead possible areas would include:

  • Managing the ever increasing pace of business change
  • IT / Business alignment; IT Governance / prioritisation
  • Managing IT in the current economic climate
  • The interplay between IT strategy and shorter-term tactics
  • Increasing the influence of IT at the board level.

Of course some of these overlap. The seminar is meant to be a forum for discussion between delegates, not just presentations. If you were to go to such an event, what topics would you like to discuss? Thank you in advance for your help.

Peter

There has been a lot of very interesting feedback to this question, showing once more how helpful the on-line community can be in addressing issues.
 

 
UPDATE: The results of this survey are now available and may be viewed here.
 

Thank you to Sharm Manwani

Peter James Thomas business, change management, it business alignment, technology , , , , , ,

Sharm Manwani's Blog

Sharm is Associate Professor of IT at Henley Business School who I was lucky enough to hear speak at the recent Chase Zander Change Director Forum. He was kind enough to link to the article, Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus, that I wrote about this seminar on his blog at Computing.co.uk (the specific article may be viewed here).

I would recommend people browsing through Sharm’s articles which provide a sharp insight on technology’s contribution to business change.
 

Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus

Peter James Thomas business, change management, it business alignment, technology , , , , , , , , ,

Home for Business People and IT Practitioners?

Chase Zander were kind enough to invite me to their recent Change Director Forum, which took place on 11th November 2008 in London. As per their web-site: –

The event focused on IT-Enabled Change and sparked an interesting debate from the floor into the issues facing change programmes and projects which often rely heavily on the introduction of new information technology.

Some related items began to spark ideas in my mind: –

First, one of the speakers, Dr. Sharm Manwani from Henley Business School, referred to a survey of senior IT managers which asked them about areas in which they felt a lack of skill might be reducing their effectiveness. The area that came out as most important was “interpersonal skills”. Many people also said that they lacked in-depth knowledge of their organisation’s business, but this was not seen as a major problem by respondents.

Second, during what proved to be a lively debate, many attendees made reference to “IT” and “the business” in the way that one might juxtapose Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. This is a common refrain whenever IT managers are gathered together. Often a key issue is whether IT or the business (again that juxtaposition) should own projects, or strategy development, or technology budgets.

Third, Dr Manwani, in what was an illuminating talk, presented a chart which featured “in between” roles such as “business solutions manager” or “programme manager” which are intended to form a bridge between IT and the business. He also questioned whether there might be better ways to bring business and IT together.

To my way of thinking, if you need to form a bridge between IT and the business, then you are already facing a major problem. Even in today’s web-enabled, always-connected world, it appears to be acceptable for IT and business to be viewed as something separate: Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus. It is OK for business leaders to express a lack of knowledge about IT and for IT leaders to express a lack of knowledge about business; in some organisations it may even be a badge of honour for both “sides”. The word “sides” appears in inverted commas intentionally; this world view is a major part of the problem in my opinion.

Maybe I was just lucky enough to spend the formative years of my career in an organisation where IT was the business, but I would argue for a reassessment of the spurious dividing line between IT and business. I believe that IT is a business discipline and that the best IT managers are business managers. They are people who have a particular skill-set that they can bring to business challenges; in this respect they are no different to sales managers, or finance managers or any other manager with a specific hinterland of expertise and experience.

In many ways, it seems that IT managers are happy with the perception that that are somehow different. They may even revel in the mystique of the “dark arts” that they and their department practise. Perhaps being seen as different helps self-esteem. Less positively, in disavowing their full business role, perhaps many IT managers are content to retreat into their speciality. It is maybe comforting to have the middle-men, such as business solutions managers to act as insulation and to take the blame when things go wrong. How often have we all heard IT managers cite poorly defined or shifting business requirements for systems’ failures? How often is the lack of a clearly defined business strategy offered as an excuse for the lack of a clearly defined IT strategy?

I believe that these types of complaints are indicative of a pernicious problem in IT management. It is human to look for others to blame when things go badly, but if IT managers do not properly understand business issues, if they do not become part of the overall business management team and if they allow themselves and their departments to become semi-detached, then they really only have themselves to blame.

So, rather than ending on a negative note, let me repeat my call for IT managers to start to view themselves more as business managers. In embracing the ever increasing tempo of modern business and better understanding the dynamics that drive this, IT managers can both be more effective in their roles and also enjoy themselves much more at the same time. Surely those outcomes merit what is probably not an enormous investment of time and energy.