Posts tagged ‘CIO’
A Brief and Colorful History of Technology in Business
I was asked to give a couple of talks this spring giving my perspective on the current state of technology in business. I always think the present is better understood by looking at the past, so I put together a presentation looking at a) how things have developed over the past 20 or so years (not coincidentally, the span of time I was involved with CIO Magazine), and b) the challenges and opportunities I see businesses in general and CIOs in particular facing during this tumultuous time. I’ve posted a version of this talk on Slideshare, complete with an audio narration. Please check it out and let me know if your view lines up with mine or how you see things differently.
Here’s the presentation (or you can view it from the Slideshare site):
And here’s a link to the clip I reference at the beginning, of the comedian Louis CK on the Conan O’Brien show. The relevant segment is about 1/3 of the way in and it’s about a minute long, where he talks about cell phones and internet service on planes. This bit really defines the problem technologists face in making end users and business partners happy. The whole thing highlights an even more fundamental problem we all face in seeking happiness through external means. Very Zen….
update: unfortunately, NBC has taken down this clip, though there are still a couple of versions floating around on YouTube
Experience Matters
In today’s tough economy, many companies find they must lay off some of their most experienced (i.e., expensive) employees in favor of lower cost labor. But research — and history — shows that experience has value that can’t be achieved any other way.
I’m reading a report just out on “Women CIOs & the Art of Influence” from the CIO Executive Council, in partnership with The Leader’s Edge (you can access the report on the Council’s website). One of the findings shows that when it comes to effectiveness and the ability to influence outcomes, age and seniority matter. Women with more than 25 years of experience and with senior IT leadership titles were more effective than those with less than 25 years on the job and lower level titles. The ability to influence, deemed “very important” by 92 percent of study participants, manifests itself in various ways, including that “more senior IT leaders consider what’s in it for the stakeholder more frequently than do their less experienced counterparts.”
This reminds me of a story I once heard about the founding of Outward Bound, the wilderness-based training program whose stated mission is “To help people discover and develop their potential to care for themselves, others and the world around them through challenging experiences in unfamiliar settings.”
During World War II, someone observed that contrary to expectations, younger, more physically fit sailors had more trouble surviving shipwrecks than their older shipmates. It seemed that experience — having dealt with similar situations in the past — made the older sailors better able to survive, even if the were less physically fit. The owner of a shipping company began looking for a training program for young sailors who seemed to lose “the tenacity and fortitude needed to survive the rigors of war and shipwreck” when confronted with emergency situations. Outward Bound was formed to simulate such experiences and better prepare them to survive.
Businesses should pay heed to this example and make sure they a) retain enough experience managers to help them navigate these challenging times and b) find ways to quickly expose less-experienced managers to situations that will give them the seasoning they need.
My New Twitter Friend: @comcastcares
If you’re anything like me, you hate dealing with large corporate service providers. Phone company, cable company, insurance company — it doesn’t really matter. As soon as I pick up the phone to call, I start to anticipate that a) I’m going to have to battle my way through phone tree hell; b) once I eventually connect with a person, he or she is going to ask me for information I either don’t have at my fingertips or don’t want to divulge; and c) their first line of inquiry into my problem will inevitably put me into a defensive posture. So a lot of times I put off the call in the first place and suffer (or fume) in silence. Not happy. Not good.
Frank Eliason, Comcast Director of Digital Care
So imagine what a breath of fresh air it was for me when, New Year’s Eve, a few days after setting up our new HD TV, I merely dropped a casual line in Twitter: “HD is shiny…. Comcast, why can’t you fix my stuttering signal?” and just seven minutes later got a reply from someone with the username @comcastcares offering to help. A person! Reaching out to me!
I’m not going to go through all the details of what Comcast has done for me as a result of this exchange, but believe me when I say we have been well cared for. In fact, I’m expecting my third or fourth call from Nancy at the Comcast “executive office” (nice touch) today. She got us a prompt service call to begin with and keeps calling to make sure things are alright, since we hadn’t been watching a lot of TV the first few times she called. In the meantime, I pinged @comcastcares (Frank Eliason, director of digital care) on a major outage we had the other day, and he got back to me with what information he could get on the cause of the problem — even though it was hours after he was supposed to be off duty and wanted to go to bed.
All of this is particularly important as companies bundle more services together. We rely on Comcast not only for cable TV but now Internet and phone as well. We need to be able to trust that they’re going to take care of us, and being connected to a clearly dedicated person in one of my most important social networks helps. A lot.
My tweets about @comcastcares caught the attention of Kumud Kalia, CIO of Direct Energy, who was intrigued by the approach. He observed that Comcast is using frequent and sustained interaction with customers to develop deeper relationships and enhance corporate reputation, all the time in the public domain and on free infrastructure. But what was really interesting was Kumud’s musings on where this might go. For example, he wondered if the use of platforms like Twitter might extend to more employee functions so that customers can actually work in concert with individuals – or components - that are a part of a delivery or supply chain. For example, rather than check the FedEx site to see where your package is, what if the truck carrying your package was tweeting where it was and how close it was to its next delivery destination? What if the package itself was tweeting to you as the recipient, to tell you where it was? The same could work for a service or delivery person (no more four hour windows wondering when they’re going to show up!), an airplane en route to the airport, your daughter’s snowboard to let you know where she is on the mountain… (of course the package and snowboard applications would have to tie a Twitter feed into some kind of geo-location signal). the possibilities are intriguing.
In the meantime, I’m impressed and happy that a company I rely on for critical services is using Twitter so well for customer service. And my experience made some of my Twitter-skeptic friends take another look.
The Risks of Being Risk Averse
The paradox of tough times is they usually call for dramatic measures, yet it’s human nature to keep a low profile and avoid risk, both corporate and personal. This is the dilemma facing CIOs today.
As I wrote in a column a few months ago, incrementalism won’t cut it for many businesses in this economy. But according to Paul Gaffney, former CIO and head of supply chain at Staples and current COO of Desktone, that’s the path most CIOs will take.
I had lunch with Paul yesterday (Blue Ginger in Wellesley – if you go, you have to try the Alaskan butterfish). It seems to me the next few years would provide tremendous opportunities for his company, which provides desktops as a service. After all, that’s one of the main areas this year’s CIO Hall of Famers were enthusiastic about. Gaffney (himself a member of the CIO Hall of Fame) pointed out that this group represented not the market but the vanguard. CIOs like Blockbuster’s Keith Morrow, PG&E’s Pat Lawicki, Bechtel’s Geir Ramleth and Motorola’s (former) Patty Morrison might advocate and take bold action into uncharted territory, because they really do understand the new technologies and business models and can successfully calculate the benefits and risks. But the vast majority of CIOs will try to work within the parameters of what they know to ride out the current economic storm.
This is completely understandable – and even, I suppose, prudent. It would be foolhardy for a CIO to advocate a path that he or she didn’t have a pretty good grasp of.
What this suggests to me is CIOs should be finding out as much as they can as quickly as they can about things like desktop virtualization, software as a service and cloud computing. Because in business as in the law, when it comes to missteps and missed opportunities, ignorance is no excuse.
Paul Gaffney
Paul Gaffney led IT and supply chain efforts at Staples and built OfficeDepot.com's e-commerce site. He's now rolling out new desktop as a service capabilities as COO of Desktone.
Life After CIO
For 21 years, I’ve been involved with CIO Magazine - for the past 13 as editor in chief. Now that I’m independent, it’s time to start my own blog. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long, but I guess my identity was so tied up with CIO that it just never seemed right. That and the fact that I was already working a gazillion hours a day.
Initially this will be a site to anchor my online presence, provide info about what I’m doing, and share bits of conversations and insights from the interesting people I talk to every day. Eventually, who knows?
I’m going to spend the rest of this week learning about Word Press and formatting and configuring the site. I’ll also be looking at lots of other people’s sites (today’s favorite is Chris Brogan’s ). Let me know what you like too.
I’m really excited about this — looking forward to doing more than managing things for a change. Jazzed to be in learning mode again. (I plan to take some online classes and maybe a photography course while I’m on “sabbatical.”)
I’m also doing some speaking and consulting – I’ll be writing some about that too.
