In 2011 CIOs better prepare for some chaos

It's that time of the year again... the list of new year's resolutions, predictions and outlooks on Enterprise IT for 2011 are all over the place. Anything new? Nope. Anything surprising? Nope. 

Sure 2011 will be the year of social media, careful steps into the (enterprise) cloud, increasing your bandwidth, going mobile, Windows 7, advanced analytics, iPads and other tablet-like clones, digitizing the enterprise, renewing and virtualizing the data center and the renaissance of the new CIO. But frankly my dear, this is the same list as in 2010, 2009 and 2008.  But aren't we forgetting one thing?  Yep, doing a reality check.  

Most companies have suffered from the recession and what will companies do when they are in dire (financial) straits?  Right, they slash the budget.  And guess who is the first in line to walk away with less money.... it is the CIO. 

If you have not invested in innovation, you are out of the game in 2011

Over the past years, most innovation budgets have been cut to the absolute minimum because IT executives could neither convince the board nor demonstrate a tangible ROI for most IT-enabled innovations.  In parallel, baseline budgets (i.e. keeping the lights on) were also subject to downsizing.  

Outcome of this equation is that your IT shop is running on obsolete and old-school technologies.  Any innovation or change budget left is used to either do a renewal of core systems, make the first step towards SOA/SBA or virtualizing the data center.  It could be worse, some IT departments still haven't adopted portfolio thinking either in the projects or in the services arena. You would be surprised to see how many companies are still struggling with CRM, SCM, ECM, DMS, BI and other first-gen business technologies.  So putting the 2011 wish list into the right perspective and seeing all those innovations topping the list, then I'm afraid we'd better wake up and smell the coffee.  No chance the CIO can increase the innovation budget if IT operations are not run in an efficient and effective way.  No way he will get funding for social media, cloud computing or mobile technologies if the business still goes without a single customer view and swears by Excel as the holy grail of data reconciliation. 

So what's my bet for 2011 priorities?  Well the same as 2010, 2009 and 2008... back to basics, building up core capabilities, on-time delivery of strategic IT initiatives, bringing the run budget down to an acceptable level, efficiency & effectiveness and creating operational efficiencies through automation. Of course, business/IT alignment should also be added to this list but then again - shouldn't business/IT alignment be one of those recurring action items on every CIOs new year's resolution list?  Wishing you all the best for the new year and may all your ambitions become true....

Letter to the CEO and CIO

Dear Mr. CEO and Mr. CIO

I just finished my report and business case for launching an Enterprise 2.0 program for your 1000 information workers.  We are now in the final phase of our Enterprise 2.0 discovery track - a five day track where we have focused on
- Creating awareness on the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0
- Discovering the business benefits of web 2.0 in the organization
- Identifying current information bottlenecks 
- Mapping new attitudes and solutions on 2.0 technologies
- Building the business case for launching an Enterprise 2.0 program

We have identified how typical information bottlenecks reduce the throughput of your information workers and lead to a serious amount of waste in your enterprise. In this context, we simply define waste as lost productivity as a result of:

1. Not finding information
2. Recreating content
3. Reformatting content
4. Sharing and distributing content.


If we take the average knowledge worker's time spent on information tasks and include these factors in our equation, our analysis shows that a whopping 30% of your employee's time is wasted. In other words, your employee spends 12 hours per week on tasks that could easily be avoided. If you want to find out more about how you con boost productivity with E2.0 tools, then you might want to read this article too. You might wonder what is causing all this waste?  Well, to a great extent technology is causing most of these information bottlenecks:


- Multiple information repositories
- Ineffective search tools
- Poor information architecture
- Information overload
- Irrelevant communication
- Meetings culture
- Version issues
- Islands of emails
- Fear of transparency/openness

Combine inadequate tools with a "closed" culture and you end up in a dysfunctional situation. Fear of openness, weak leadership, lack of empowerment and the like put up barriers to effective knowledge and information sharing and ultimately affect the bottom line of your organization's corporate performance.

Your organization with a 1000 employees consequently faces an annual productivity loss of € 20 million. And the maths are quite easy here: based on input from Human resources, you spend € 60 million  on personnel costs on an annual basis.  This implies that you loose 30% of productive output as a result of the above mentioned information bottlenecks.

Reducing these waste factors in your information and knowledge processes will free up time. Time which can be spent more productively on value adding activities such as development of new products or services,  relationship building, bonding, learning and training just to name a few.  These trade-off effects will create growth in the middle and long term and consequently will add a multiplying effect to the gains generated by Enterprise 2.0.  Exciting, isn't it?

In your case, Enterprise 2.0 will help to save your organization roughly 10 € million over 3 years on top of other less-tangible benefits such as improved employee engagement, employee retention, agility,   improved decision making or employer reputation.

Enterprise 2.0 will open up new opportunities for your organization in today's climate of cost reduction, operational efficiency, risk mitigation and business growth.  It will enable you and your management to achieve your targets and allow you to jump the next curve because today it's not about being the fastest nor the most intelligent.  Today it is about getting to grips with the new normal and be responsive to change.  Enterprise 2.0 is indeed about change - change needed to survive in today's corporate jungle and become the fittest of the pack.

Quantum Information: qubits and bytes

For geeks and eager knowledge seekers:

• In 2008, Google became the World's most Powerful Brand for the first time, beating out GE, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.
• YouTube consumes as much bandwidth this year as the ENTIRE internet in 2000
• The traditional media are hurting: US Newspaper circulation in 2008 is the same as in 1978, when there were 100 million fewer people in America.
• There are 1.4 million new broadband users in China every month.
• In the second quarter of 2008, 74% of all email received worldwide was spam.
• Today 1.5 billion devices on this planet have Internet access. By 2012, this number will d ouble
• Online advertising in the US alone is a $21 billion dollar business.
• Facebook has more than 80 million users... It was launched only in 2004.
  
• The total volume of digital information is more than 400 exabytes. That is 400 billion gigabytes or more than 60 Gigabytes for each person on earth.
• Last year, more transistors were produced on this planet than grains of rice at a lower cost.
• Roughly 40% of all Internet users worldwide have mobile internet access today. This figure will triple by 2012.

We are at the dawn of another revolution.. the quantum information revolution. Quantum information is the result of fusing quantum mechanics and information science. It adds a new dimension in the way data will be stored: quantum information is not stored in bits but in qubits.

The classical information science sees storage, transmission, and manipulation of information in a bitbased context. Information is encoded as bits—the ones and zeros of the binary number system.

In your and my computer information is stored as bits on physical systems (Hardware). Billions upon billions of bits are stored on the device's hard disk.

Computers, cellphones and the Internet are all products of bit-based information science, and one reason these bits work so well is that they normally work without errors or ambiguities. Bit-based information has to be error-free or else the exponential growth in complexity and speed of computing devices would eventually lead to chaos.



Quantum mechanics in turn describes the world of the very small—the submicroscopic world of elementary particles. A revolutionary aspect of quantum theory is its prediction of fundamental ambiguities.
Physical properties of objects such as their positions or velocities may coexist in multiple states - a condition that is inconceivable in our macroscopic world...and in the world of conventional information science so it seems.

Quantum information is stored in “qubits” These quantum bits have a value that can be one or zero but can also be both zero and one at the same time. In a way, the bits are managed in a chaotic way... Chaos theory meets Moore's and Parkinson's laws...


Quantum information leads to a complete new way of looking at information. The processing of quantum information requires hardware that can deal with the laws of quantum mechanics as it is happening in very small, isolated systems such as individual atoms and photons.
Seems like we will all be having some kind of nuclear device in our backyard to store our 60 gigs of information in the near future. Not really my idea of Green IT to be honest.

Yours sincerely inspired by Controlling the Quantum World: The Science of Atoms, Molecules, and Photons (2007) Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA)

The evolution of IT

For those who wonder what we actually do... this vid explains it all. How technology has evolved over the last half a century and how IT is now fundamentally reshaping the way we are doing business and running our organizations.

Grab a cup of coffee, push the play button and sit back, relax and enjoy!

Chief Creativity Ape

I like to read James Gardner's blog - bankervision - especially his last posting made me laugh. Apparently, at IBM labs, they have now gone completely bananas and give themselves swirling titles like Innovation Ninja and Virtual World Evangelist. Living in a 2.0 world thus means reinventing your own role... you are not an Enterprise Architect anymore, you are now the High Priest of Architecture, CIOs become Fusion Shamans and Process analysts are now proudly put forward as Semantic Network Engineers. As from now on, I will go by the name of Chief Creativity Ape and have recently revamped our IT department into Peanuts & Technology. If you want to see how this has had a positive impact on our organization's culture, check out last week's office party.

my favourite blopic

Some friends of mine recommended me TED.com - an entire site dedicated to innovation and the lot.

clipped from www.ted.com

I found some interesting Video postings on collaboration - one of my favourite blopics (mash up of blog and topics ;o) Although collaboration seems to be the next big thing in social computing, it does not seem to be picked up in a professional (read office) environment - or more particularly in the financial services world.

The business benefits are there, that's for sure! And what's more, they have a true value for many industries and/or domains :

- increased productivity
- accessibility of information and people
- improved exchange of information
- community building
- proximity
- social networking just to name a few.

for further reading, I can recommend a McKinsey article or two on next-gen Internet technologies - dox @ your disposal in 2.0 section

Despite all the positive vibes around collaboration, not many companies pursue a real collaboration strategy... still wondering why though : are they afraid that their employees will openly voice their concerns? Loose control on the content?

Wake up guys, freedom of speech plays a crucial role in the democratic ecosystem of our social computing era. Ignoring these trends will not make it any better - Give us a call if you want to find out more

Why IT needs more right-brainers

For decades, core industries were ruled by left-brainers : left-brainers are smart people with mostly scientific degrees, analytical skills, driven by ratio and logic and proud possessors of an MBA. They were the epitome of the knowledge worker in the Information Age.
These are the people that you will usually find in an IT department : programmers, testers, functional and technical analysts, IT managers just to name a few of them.

According to Daniel H. Pink, writer of a Whole New Mind (see my shelfari) times are changing : Western Society wants and needs something more nowadays. He cites three forces for this : Automation, Asia and Abundance.

Automation : Left-brain processes can now easily become automated
Asia : What we can do here, they can do in Asia for a quarter of the price
Abundance : L'embarras du choix obliges product manufacturers to go beyond utility and price - Design is now leading.

In a world where the perception about IT is not so positive, technology is seen as a pure commodity (read Why IT doesn't matter by Nicholas Carr) and outsourcing is considered to be the next silver bullet - you will understand now why your CIO needs to shift gears and strive for more alignment with his business counterparts.

1. If you can only manage the supply side of IT (keep the company running) you can bet on it that your technology boutique will be closed down and shipped to Bangalore.

2. Providing standard solutions and services will not impress your executives anymore : the IT vendors are on the outlook for underperforming IT organisations and are preparing hostile take-overs as we speak. Due to their economies of scale, global network and expert centres, they will insource your basic IT services and do it cheaper. With attractive presentations, business knowledge and slick sales talks they go straight to the CEO and talk about risk, service quality, innovation, ROI, business continuity and quick time to market : In fact, they don't do geek speak anymore - their messages are tailored to such an extent (design) that it becomes more appealing to the not so tech-savvy audience.

3. Innovation : to boldly go where no ITer has ever gone before. Literally thousands of definitions exist for innovation but they all have one thing in common: creativity.
If you can only look at the world through "rational and logical" glasses, you will never be able to come up with a new idea, aesthetic concept or creative dimension. Too bad that 95% of your workforce was hired for their straight thinking skills and number crunching abilities.

These are exactly the reasons why your IT department needs more right-brainers : people that are creative, communicative, innovative, holistic, artistic - characteristics which are not so easy to automate or imitate.
They know how to make a compelling business case, speak the business language, are empathic and become true relationship builders. Your right-brainers are seen as enablers and allies instead of technies that live on another planet.

Find these people in your department and foster them - they have the innate power to initiate change and inspire their peers. Business/IT alignment will not happen by itself, nor will innovation. You need actors that diffuse this corporate philosophy and create room for innovation.

As a conclusion, the following statement by Davila et al. tells us why IT departments must see innovation is an imperative and not as a nice to have :
"Companies cannot grow through cost reduction and reengineering alone...Innovation is the key element in providing aggressive top-line growth, and for increasing bottom-line results".

Mental note though, first get your act together and make sure that you can manage your supply side (i.e. cost reductions, operational efficiency, security) before your CIO starts talking about innovation and business/IT alignment. So don't start to lay off all your left-brainers yet as you still need them - Sounds logical, doesn't it?