CIO Connect

Barb’s Blog BI – Fact or Fiction?

Agneta Sjodin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:12:52 +0000

As Gavin left our meeting last night he said, with enthusiasm, ‘I didn’t know that BI could be so exciting’. He had attended a lively discussion about Business Intelligence in Utilities Companies led by Alexandra Gillies of Bord Gáis Energy based in Dublin. We had people who had gone partly down the road of BI and others who were just considering it.
Alexandra took us through the current landscape in the Utilities industries where there is lots of data, but less of it being used to inform decision making than perhaps there is in retailing. She then looked at the BI landscape from the researchers and consultants points of view and contrasted the needs of retail and the needs of utilities. There was certainly agreement in the room that experience in retailing BI has very little resemblance to the needs of industry.
We spent some time discussing the Data Warehouse construct looking at the practical issues around pulling information from disparate systems and putting them into a place that they can be made available. We talked about the skills required and the change in business culture, roles and responsibilities this will cause. Alexandra made the point strongly that this is not a project like ERP and CRM, it’s a permanent change because the information needs of the organisation will always be changing and growing to meet changing business requirements. So where do these roles sit in the organisation – with the Chief Information Officer or elsewhere? It certainly has IT involvement, but what about the rest of the business? Do they own it?
Alexandra outlined the journey that Bord Gáis Energy are on, the way they approached it and their current stage. It’s a 5 stage journey and Alexandra believes for utilities, this could be a journey of more than 6 years to reach full Optimized level, particularly with challenges offered by products like Smart Meters. The journey starts with small targeted wins. Bob talked about how his Quants had used weather data across the organisation to benefit several areas of the business as a practical example of the use of BI.
As always much of the power of these meetings is sharing the insights – the lessons learned. Her advice:
• This will be challenging

• Don’t rely on the ‘experts’ – they probably haven’t done it before in your industry

• You must have strong business sponsorship

• This will take time

• Don’t wait till tomorrow – start today – start small, think big – there will be important learning from this

It will be a journey

We had a great session led by Alexandra Gillies and she made a prediction of the direction of BI and the delivery of BI facilities by the major application vendors. We all hoped fervently that her prediction is fulfilled.

All walked away with things to consider – and that is a sign of time well spent .

The Holey Grail – the Single View of the Customer

Neetta Bhatti — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:09:29 +0000

No, not a misspelling.

Very few organisations have a really good understanding of their customers. Organisations in retail, such as Tesco, are probably much better at it than almost anyone else. But across industries and in most sites, this information may as well be kept in a sieve.

Last night we had a discussion around this subject led by Tony Andersen ex Easyjet Chief Marketing Officer and Andrew Cobb VP Business Services Director of TKX

So the Chancellor says 5 more years!

Neetta Bhatti — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:06:29 +0000

I’m not sure I haven’t spoken to anyone that didn’t think things were going to continue to be tough here in the UK, and across the rest of Europe. The Irish certainly think so.

What do we do about it? We can pull up the douvet and use it as an excuse, or we can review our business plans and figure out how we are going to make lemonade out of these lemons.

We are probably going to grow at less than 1% per year. But what does that really mean?

We can budget for a level of activity that stays pretty much the same the next few years, only replacing equipment when it breaks or at least is fully depreciated. We can keep salaries the same and make sure that we come out the end in the same condition we are now. That’s certainly one answer.
We can decide that we need to take market share from our competitors.

Barb’s Blog – CIO Action Plan 2011

Lucy — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:39:32 +0000

I’m sitting here in sunny London (yes it really does shine here!) looking at the CIO Action Plan for 2011 that we produced as a result of last year’s Annual conference. The topic was Business as Unusual and we collated all of the great ideas from the conference into a series of questions that CIOs should ask themselves as they plan for the following (this) year. The questions were based on assumptions of what would happen this year. By and large, the issues were as we expected. The plan covered 5 major areas but the first was Leadership. As I have met with many CIOs this year, this is still uppermost in many of their minds. The expansion of the CIO role beyond the traditional IT role, the CIO as a Leader and up skilling the IT leadership team to support the CIO have proved to be ongoing activities this year. I have had the delight in seeing several CIOs expand their role into the COO or similar role. But that requires a strong and flexible IT leadership team doing more than support – stepping into the space left by the CIO as he or she takes on the wider responsibility. So, the challenge – is your leadership team ready?

A prediction for London based staff

Lucy — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:08:34 +0000

Sitting on the train into London on a Friday, reading about the potential strikes on the underground and thinking about the future – as you do. Transportation into London can barely cope with peak hour traffic now, and we know that the Olympics is going to turn the difficult to the impossible. CIOs are starting to think about how they can keep their organisations functioning during that time next year and the logical answer is home working/ remote working and implementing the infrastructure to make it work. The Olympics are not just a couple of inconvenient snow days, so it will have to be a robust solution. We’ve talked about it for years, but the realistic number of home based staff is low, and the numbers on public transport is still increasing at an alarming rate – particularly if you are one of the ones that are elbowing for a seat!

Let’s add to that the consumerisation of IT – Power to the People – or to put it another way, the staff’s expectations of what can and should be done by their organisations.

So the prediction…the Olympics will start a sea change in working from home, and even those organisations who did not accept it in the past mostly for cultural reasons will now see an increasing proportion of their staff not coming back to the office in anything like the numbers they did before the Olympics. And we know in the war for talent, particularly in the South East, talented people will be able to argue that in this connected world, there is no reason to sit on London transport for 2 hours every day.

So, do you think I am off the mark?

Talent Development and Management

Alistair — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:58:54 +0000

In many ways, talent has always been – and will always be – a critical area. Take McKinsey’s seminal ‘War for Talent’ article, which 10 years ago was one of the first calls to arms for leaders in the talent area.

But now, more than ever, it is important to take an all-encompassing approach to talent. And that approach needs to be moved forward a stage in order to transform our ways of acting.

Recent experience from “Best Practice in Talent Management”, reinforces the importance of the issue.

Commercial management drives sustainable transformation of the IT organisation

Alistair — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:52:14 +0000

I am always taken with counter-trend ideas and wanted to share some thinking I have been developing during the past few months.

We have matured beyond seeing outsourcing as the “silver bullet” that we – or at least our CEO and CFO colleagues – believe it to be. In my work with colleagues on our forthcoming outsourcing report, it is clear there is a new level of maturity connected to sourcing and a growing awareness of the associated governance challenges.

Yet the prevailing orthodoxy still seems to suggest that to outsource is to transform; using external provision to drive change has to be the right approach. After all, the supposed benefits are well-rehearsed:

Outsourcing gives you access to economies of scale
It gives you access to flexibility, no employee contracts and by-passes the need to communicate with unions
External provision gives access to expertise, best-in-class processes and technology, that you may not have been able to attract and retain for your own organisation
You can share the cost of technology refresh with the industry, without having to charge to your own organisation’s profit and loss (P&L)
It can help with the details of financing, moving spend from capex to opex
External provision reduces the leadership challenges of having a large organisation and enables you to focus on the key activities of your senior colleagues

But despite the well-rehearsed benefits of outsourcing, might there be another way; a method that does not tie you down or lock you in, that keeps all your precious customer data in-house, and that frees you to innovate?

Most importantly, is there a means to learn and develop as individuals, and as an organisation? Is there a method that removes all the boundary management resource issues, and all those unhelpful drivers of a separate P&L?

Such an alterative would certainly help In Europe, where money continues to be tight and uncertainty still prevails, and the idea of committing to long-term projects is anathema. So, what if we took the established service catalogue approach and really implemented the model thoroughly? Such an approach might enable a breakthrough. At this stage, my thinking suggests:

Networking: It’s all about learning, really

Alistair — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:55:04 +0000

Now here’s a thing I asked myself recently – what is a mainstream organisational and leadership development consultant doing working in a business with a heritage in networking?

Terry Waite – Backscratch and Barter – The Art of Negotiation

Barb — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:08:35 +0000

Despite the snow, the student protests and the train service we made the dinner with Terry Waite CBE last night on the topic of Barter and Backscratch – The Art of Negotiation. What an experience! Most of us negotiate constantly with our families, our colleagues, our suppliers and our customers. But how different it is, when peoples lives and liberties are at stake. And as Terry’s story played out – his own. He gave us his simple plan for negotiation, which we could easily replicate in our professional lives:

face to face encounter
build a relationship of trust
get to the reasons why (the hostages were taken in his case)
create a resolution where all parties walk away with dignity in tact.

He also talked about his conditions. He has certain ethics or rules by which he lives. And he will not break those for others or ultimately for himself, even when his own liberty is in danger. How many of us, by slice and dice, have compromised on our own internal ‘rules’?

He then illustrated these factors with his own rich story, told by a master story teller. We were all spellbound, listening fascinated to his experience.

Out of the Sandpit into the Workplace – Making Social Media Count

Emma — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:36:32 +0000

At last Thursday night’s CIOnet event, we were joined by two guest speakers: Rob Gray, regional marketing manager at Google Enterprise; and Andrew Abboud, CIO at City University London. Over 40 CIO and IT leaders shared their experiences and had their questions answered on how to position themselves, and their organisations, to take advantage of social media.

Andrew kicked off the evening by sharing his personal experience as a CIO and the practical use of social media within the firewall. Starting with ‘Dilbert’, he highlighted two key messages: you can’t ban social media, such as Facebook and Twitter; and the culture of the organisation is crucial. The language used within an organisation is imperative, so ensure you use the correct terminology that will work for your business, be that social media, social networking or social computing.

The landscape of social media is rapidly changing. In 2007, MySpace was the largest social media network; now in 2010, Facebook has taken over, despite being a network which didn’t even exist six years ago. What will the next six years bring? Will we see the ‘death of email’, which is already being perceived as a non productive tool?

City University London has created a suite of collaborative tools to ensure they are reaching out and communicating with their large community. A tool such as a profile directory helps people understand and know their company, and encourages people to share knowledge and ideas. All files are saved on the directory and it’s the individual’s choice whether these are shared or private. A community has been built for the management team; this has removed conversation via email and the problem of inboxes being full of conversations. Blogs are utilised as and where conversation takes place; this allows an individual to keep the level of personalisation, rather than trying to tailor words to a large audience. Blogs also allow for people to comment and to share their own thought process. Within City University, people also use the social media tool Wiki, and more so for management meetings, where minutes are saved. The approach allows directories to be cleaner and removes the issues around password protection.

From Andrew’s experience, the senior people within any given organisation need to use social media, support the technology and take advantage of the gadgets. Such a strategy changes environments to pull versus push. One member of the audience voiced this in terms of “people, purpose, and passion”.

Andrew’s presentation neatly transitioned into Rob’s, where he gave the audience a completely different perspective as a marketing head. Rob shared with the audience examples of what has worked and what has failed dismally. One strategy included searching tweets, which can help the business understand trends. Other businesses, such as Virgin Media, have used twitter to help their consumers raise complaints. Companies such as Salesforce.com are now providing cloud based CRM environments to ensure businesses have real time feedback via such tools.

Facebook is a completely different beast altogether and many organisations are asking whether they want to be involved. Rob showed the audience one particular example, via Starbucks, for whom have 18.5 million people have connected and ‘liked’ Starbucks. The chain then issue coupons, marketing campaigns and gain peer-to-peer and friendship referrals.

From an advertising point of view, Google does not play in this market space and instead uses YouTube. If they wish to market something internally, such as from an MD speaking to launching a new product, YouTube is used.

Rob swiftly showed the audience some further online tools such as Google Moderator, which allows people within the organisation to submit ideas of how to work smarter or more cost effectively. Internal Buzz, on the other hand, allows people to share what’s going on within the organisation. Google Docs and Google Apps, which take away the pain of having many different spreadsheets or working documents, create collaboration and encourage working teams to share and work together.

Across both Andrew’s and Rob’s presentations, the key message was that social media is worth exploring if your business needs to work together, share knowledge and work more productively. Not all social media tools are right for everyone, or for the business, so work out what your end goal is then find out what can help you reach that objective. In short, just give it a go.