First Things First

As you develop your plans for your area of responsibility, you have to address “first things first”.

The best way I know how to develop this idea with you is to use an example of an IT manager that becomes a CIO for a company. With the CIO position, you have to take all aspects of the technology support delivery for a company into perspective. We will go through a high level thought process that a CIO has to work through to develop an overall strategy for the company.

We spent a lot of time discussing the assessment phase of developing an IT strategy, or plan.

Getting as clear of a picture of where you are and where the company wants to be is as important as anything you can do. It’s very hard to hit the target if you don’t know what you’re shooting at and what tools you have to shoot with.

Sidebar: Let’s take this ‘shooting’ analogy a bit further. If you’re preparing to “shoot”

something, it might help you to know:

1. What you’re shooting at , or “where you want to go”:

- is the target moving

- how fast is the target moving - how far away is the target - how large is the target

With the information above, it’s easier to determine what type of weapon you might need to hit your target. You must understand the objective to determine what tools you’re going to need.

2. What are your skills, or “where are you now”.

- do you have the proper equipment - are you trained to use the equipment - is the equipment properly set up

Clearly defining the objective and truly understanding what you have to work with initially gives you the essential pieces by which to develop a game plan that has a high likelihood of success.

The plan simply fills in the gap with a logical set of progressions so that you achieve your result.

Goal

And remember, there rarely exists a straight line “from here” to “the objective”.

Current status

The objective of the assessment was to:

- determine where the company wants to go – the goal

- determine the state of technology services today – the starting point

- begin identifying the issues that must be addressed to achieve the goal – the plan

As we discussed earlier, the manager must start with a very tactical (30-90 day) plan that puts the organization into position as quickly as possible to take on larger objectives that lead to reaching the goal.

At a CIO level, the entire technology requirements of the company must be reviewed, analyzed, and a plan developed for each area that supports every part of the IT organization leading to the overall objectives. There will be competing needs for IT resources from the company, and possibly even within the IT organization. When a CIO creates his/her plan to develop the IT services needed for the company’s overall objective, there is a hierarchy that must be followed.

We looked at this hierarchy earlier. Let’s take a closer look:

When a CIO does his assessment, there is a long list of items that are discovered:

Where we are Where we want to be

Client service capability Size of company

Change management process Growth plans

IT services being provided Business requirements of the future company Quality of IT services being delivered Key technology advances required

Growth capacity of IT services Differences in future client needs Staff strengths and weaknesses New product or service lines required Staff skill gaps Productivity gains facilitated by technology Infrastructure status Cost of IT as a per cent of revenue

Data center security

This is by far a ‘short list’ of all the issues that will be discovered. The point is that the

assessment includes a very disperse set of issues. In order to achieve the goals of the company, most, if not all, of these issues must be addressed to compliment the overall plan that will lead to success. It will be virtually impossible to take care of all issues simultaneously. An effective CIO will establish a set of priorities that follows the hierarchy we showed in the IT Project Hierarchy.

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IT Project Hierarchy

The goal of any real CIO is to work on strategic projects (the part that sits atop the pyramid structure in our diagram). Those projects might be the introduction of totally new products or services that have a major impact on productivity of the company or it might be to assimilate the technologies of acquired companies. Either way, the CEO and other senior managers are eager to get to the part that helps really improve or grow their business.

It would be nice to be able to just go straight for the “gusto”. Unfortunately, it’s not normally a straight line as mentioned now at least 4 times.

The reason we spent so much time on assessment is that the assessment makes up the very foundation that you will build all your objectives on. You will tweak those plans over time but the major pieces of the plan will probably stay intact if you’ve done a good job in assessing the situation.

OK, the race is on! We want to get to some strategic projects (the top of the pyramid) as soon as possible. We also want to be able to have a very sound foundation by which to develop and support new technologies, one that is not only stable but scalable.

It works like this:

- You can’t fix or improve anything if you don’t know what the issues are.

(Assessment)

- You can’t make changes if you don’t understand the problems, have capable staff to do the work, and have a sound change management process in place.

(Staffing, Support Desk, and Change Management)

- It’s very hard to develop software applications without solid systems infrastructure.

(Systems Infrastructure Strategy)

- Before taking on strategic projects, you need to have stable applications in place.

(Business Applications Strategy) - Finally, we get to strategic project work.

This does not imply that many parts of this hierarchy cannot be worked on at the same time. In fact, much of it does get worked on simultaneously. What is emphasized is that before you develop your Business Application strategy, you should have put your infrastructure game plan together. It’s also important to note that when you develop the Infrastructure Strategy, you must consider elements that will be required for your business applications such as:

- what the business applications and technology services will be - number of users that will be using the applications

- locations of the users - security implications - etc.

A strategy, as I define it, is creating the high level plan on how you will achieve the objective.

You don’t have to know how you will achieve your Business Applications Strategy needs when you create your Infrastructure Strategy, but it certainly helps to know what the applications and services are that will be needed for the infrastructure to support. If you are not sure, it should automatically tell you that your Infrastructure Strategy must be somewhat open in order to add critical applications determined at a later date or to scale in size to support an undetermined user