Business IT - Think about it.

My close co-workers often moan that I keep rambling about Business Intelligence. I agree with this ! When you have run a global, all-encompassing ERP strategy for your information system, the next thing you want to do is get insight on your business performance and get away from the just financial information reporting.

Non-financial data are the most difficult data to aggregate and give a meaning to. I am refering to human resources data, (age pyramid, training, skill assessment,…) or health & safety (accident rates, occupational diseases ) and last but not least sustainable development information such as carbon foot print, energy consumption, recycling ratios,…

A few days ago I received from a member of our Executive Committee a list of sustainable development KPI's generally agreed in our business segment (engineering & construction) to see whether our information system would be capable of producing them. That reminded me of a paper on Corporate Social Responsibility I wrote for a French influancial IT magazine a couple of years ago so I thought it useful to share some (translated) parts of it here.

The IT contribution to a CSR strategy lies on several levels. We have first to make sure that our own activity is eco-friendly, that is, we have to minimize the impact of the IT carbon footprint, that is understood. Second, IT shops have to proactively idenfity and promote solutions for the entire company to manage its emissions, that is, telepresence, web-conferencing, electronic invoice and document processing, we're in the process of doing …

But first and foremost, the key strategic position for the Information System will be to structure and measure the processes around CSR and sustainability. Very much as SoX requirements have structured the information systems over the past 8 years, CSR needs will structure our systems in the future. Systems will have to be versatile since CSR reporting is still greenfield, they will have to be auditable since the market will want to see year-over-year trends in the annual reports. The overarching approach will make Master Data Management even more crucial. After, purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, ship-to-bill, … this is a new integration approach : comply-to-report.

We are seeing some frameworks being developped, some vendors developping offersto meet new market opportunities. Consequently, the cross-business specificity of the CSR will put the CIO in the unique position of owning the CSR reporting process. Who else can ? His/her business IT team will know across all silos of business intelligence - finance, HR, marketing… - , what will pertain to this new vision of business performance and transparency. The CIO will proactively contribute to the environmental policy of the company, support the corporate social responsibility and provide the means for a consistent and reliable communication on sustainability policies.

This may well be seen as treading on someone else's turf, but in the years to come, I see this as a major shift in Information System governance. BI has just landed right in the middle of these new business essentials.

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After a hectic couple of weeks I wanted to sit down and put in writing my thoughts and take home about the Forrester IT Form EMEA 2010.

The location was great, convenient to get to, but did not hold to its promise : the weather in Lisbon was awful : cold and rainy. The food was great, the wine made it a happy discovery etc… And even better, there was more to this event, I mean the content.

I attended many sessions, all of them I have to say were most interesting, educational and triggered some great thinking on what to do or not to do in my organisation back at work. I would only name a few here.

To start with, the opening session nicely set the scene and George Colony, Forrester CEO, was very helpful to put us CIO back to were we should be with some very relevant recommendations. He talked about a change in the language : since CEO's cannot provide leadership and guidance in our hundred's of projects, they need to be bundled up in about twenty business capabilities that will speak to senior management, opinion makers and stake-holders. On the priorities of those capabilities is that the CIO should develop a point of view to get out of the order-taking mode. I can picture myself in this new situation and would make our technology endeavours much more relevant to the business.

Moving on, Ted Schadler made two remarkable presentations talking about empowering employees. He asked the one most important question : "Who owns employee productivity ?

Ted's point is that employees will do whatever it takes to get the job properly done, "It is easier and faster than what is provided at work and give better results…". This is the situation that the non-empowering CIO ( like me) will have to face. Ted's analysis focused on the four technologies that will empower users in a more stronger fashion : Social, Video, Mobile and Cloud. About which usage he says that the CIO will "be at risk if he does, curse if he does not". That positively struck a chord with me : I am definitely not empowering my people and I must sit back, look back, think back and move forward.

• Mobile : we've done a lot but the iPhone pressure is building up - Benjamin Gray's talk was enlightning and is helping me defining an approach - employee-owned tools are a revolutionary move
• Video : clamped down for the time being as a desperate attempt to save the network - cannot hold on to that one for long…. I'd love to use it for IT change management purposes as well
• Social : I am like a prophet preaching in the desert, it is my role to promote it. I need to find champions
• Cloud : at least here, I am ahead of the pack since no one knows what it is about (that includes the IT guys too)

My context is not so much about empowering employees facing definitely empowered customers since we are in a B2S business (I have just coined that one, S meaning State as in gouvernement and local authorities). It is very much providing people relevant capabilities to build the information workplace. In this way, Ted's HERO speech led nicely into Tim Walter's presentation - though I find daunting the work I have yet to undertake in order to climb a few steps up the intranet maturity level. At this stage of wrting, I would start getting very depressed about the magnitude of the task ahead, that would be without Andrew Bartels keynote on Smart Computing. Andrew sends us with a mission, or a game plan as he calls it : the CIO must understand the critical items in the balance sheet - that makes an excellent conversation topic with the CEO - Then he/she must understand what business technology can do to address these C-level topics , identifying which aspects of the Smart Computing stack can help. Andrew's presentation was the homecoming of the CIO, his review of the past upteen years to finally take us to where it matters most : taking the foundation technologies of Smart Computing to apply the 5 A's to process applications and vertical solutions. A great piece of IT-losophy.

This is it, I am now under pressure to provide something trendier, smarter and funnier than the Blackberry to my corporate users ! It's interesting to see that RIM is doing very well in the US market as well as amongst the European teenagers but still, its robustness, reliability, excellent integration with Lotus failed to seduce non IT professionnal.

Earlier this week I was caught off-guard by one of the Board members who was feedup to be mocked by his proud iPhone-owning wife whilst he was using is Blackberry. As has was pointedly waving it in front of me, he inadvertently dropped it on the floor and split it open. I was so pleased to show him that it was still working !

I have the feeling that the truce is over and that the smartphone battle has started in the Enterprise. I have set out my IT teams to assess :

• Security
• maintainability
• supportability
• Training
• integration
• Apps dev and roll-out

and alternatives as well !

I am not sure where this is going to lead us, but definitely to a lot more work ! On the otherhand, this may be a great opportunity to enhance personal productivity, push more data and business information technology to staff out in the fields and provide value and recognition.

I'll report back where we stand and where we are going to go. Challenges lie ahead, innovation and progress as well.

I have been tweeting like a little bird for a few months. As a CIO, I did it first as an experiment, as a 2.0 geek, I did it for fun. Here are some thoughts and feedback.

Twitter is a two way street, you talk to people, you get yourself known, you have a voice. However, you are part of a global conversation and you get to gather a lot of exciting and up-to-date information. Some say that having more followings than followers is ill-balanced, I personally reckon that it is irrelevant but one should care to tweet in a regular fashion. You can just si there dumb in a conversation.

Followings and followers are linked by an interest : they form a community of interest. This link would be a hobby, a friendship, a family relationship or a professionnal interest. The latter was my choice as whenever I need / want to air my feelings about the World or in a more mundate fashion, what I spent my week doing, I have Facebook for this and friends are responsive. I use Twitter for Business IT related topics.

At this stage, I find that I have been using Twitter as an RSS feed : people whose opinion I am interested in tweet their latest posts on blogs and I follow their short URLs if I feel like it, if the 140- chars tease (should I dare tweaser ?) is attractive enough or relevant to my concerns.

I am not a compulsive blogger so I do not tweet my posts so much but I do retweet those of I deem worthwhile. This is probably as much as I tweet.

There are additional dimentions to Twitter which I have not explored yet : the #FF Follow Friday, the #tagging, exploring timelines, lists and so on.

One other dimension has not revealed its full potential to me, is the marketing aspect to it. Yet, as a CIO, it is not my primary concern in the type of business my company operates.

I would summarize this initial experience as - select your followings carefully with an shared interest and not too verbose - as a courtesy to others, retweet rather than re-use and thanks for being retweeted - be there and be visible - un-follow when you are not interested, it will make your visits worthwhile - bookmarks the tweeted URL, you'll loose them otherwise - explore, look around and try the features - before adding real-life friends or collegues, make sure you have enough tweets and feel comfortable with the concept. You'll make a fool of yourself otherwise

And use Twitter for a purpose, otherwise you could be gobbled up by the tool and miss out in the real life !

So, follow me on Twitter and I'll follow you and we can exchange about IT perspective and trends.

SCROUSS.

I thought I should write about innovation. This topic worries me for there are many hurdles in the way in these troubled days and I keep wondering what to do not to lag behind. Not a chance to rely on chance !

I find that :

1. in times of financial constraints, money earmarked for innovation may be cut off even before training budget.
2. most business processes are supported by information technology, so innovative processes should be even more so/ Thus innovative solutions are some time hard to be identified and promoted as such
3. In a traditionnal organisation, IT, as a backoffice service, may not be considered as a vector for innovation
4. The innovation process itself requires technology for ideas to blossom

So, where does this leave the innovation-enthusiastic CIO ?

Reduced financing may not be a hindrance to innovate, ideas are priceless in every meaning of the word. Money may become necessary when it comes to the pilote phase (suppliers can be draughted in ) but before that stage what may only be required is time, time to think, time to experiment, time to learn and search. Time is alledgedly money but may also come without a price tag when management pushes the organisation around.

I once heard a good definition of innovation as being the intersection of an invention and business process. This is really appealing as this makes the bed of Business Information Technology. Isn't it what IT shops do all the time ? On the othehand the most pessimistic may look at most IT endeavours as energy spent fixing, updating and optimizing but certainly not as breakthrough contributions.

Back to my third point mentioned above, innovation feeds the ambiguous and unusual feeling of "invented-here" syndrome. So, IT organizations need a differentiating factor to be on the competitive edge of innovation. In my opinion, only matured organizations capable of promoting transverse collaboration can foster innovation. Others would see every players keep their cards close to their chests.

My fourth point would be that innovation requires a different way of working, sharing ideas, experimenting from a normal design effort. It can be the yeast for this, allowing people to collaborate in a global, round-the-clock fashion, communicate off-line and on-line without constraints. This is where IT should strive in the innovation process. Keeping the ideas flowing, making brainstorming fun, speeding things up. Background work, so be it, but with a good chance to come in the light.

Innovation is key for any commercial organizations to keep a competitive edge. As long as IT can self-promote as a facilitator to the innovation process, it will be seen as serving the business and may even get a chance to be heard and earn some recognition for what it should be doing : bringing new technology to improve current ways of operating or even open alternate roads forward. Wouldn't this be great and rewarding ?

I wish everyone a very happy, successful and prosperous New Year - in the weeks to come I'll try to think about the technos I am going to focus on this year and report bacK. Bear with me...

I am in the process of exploring all collaboration and social networking tools and it sprung to my mind that using Twitter without a blog was pointless in terms of communication. Owning my domain, I thought I would start a blog on technology. I can be a user, tester and contributor.

I'll try to be focused and add value as I go along exploring the concept. I also opened an account on bit.ly to be in the mood...

And who knows, someone may even read my blog posts ?