Enabling Business with an intelligent Business Intelligence strategy !

The company had faced challenges due to change in leadership positions often due to bad hires across positions; decisions were made based on bravado and far-fetched stories that even the naïve would find hard to believe. The pseudo leaders in turn hired a coterie that would make them look good in meetings and talk about the glorious past that remained unverified. The rot at the top soon started bringing results commensurate to the collective intelligence applied to the problems and opportunities at hand.

In a growing market loss of market share and dive in profitability for a steady business could not remain unexplained for too long; the growth agenda and strategy that was outlined with help of big management consultants was quickly challenged by equity analysts while the shareholders listened to the stories with unease. Nepotism running rife through the ranks led to collapse of meritocracy – some becoming victims of their high professionalism and others weeded out as they individually threatened the collective brainpower.

The stock price which had tasted peaks with the induction of the new team started a slow and steady slide shaking up the promoters and the Board, to sit up, take notice and do something about it. Failure of cronyism resulted in tumbling one after another like ninepins but not before they had shaken the foundations of a company that had withstood market uncertainty and thrived in the long history of the industry. Few of the inept skillfully hid themselves from scrutiny and survived the expungement of undesirables.

One such survivor was the CIO who successfully portrayed herself as a critical resource and managed to save her band of followers too. She misrepresented past ties distancing herself from those out of favor; those under her patronage followed the leader saving their skin as the rest of the team watched in amazement. They rode on hard work of few good people, quick to claim credit while ensuring that no voice was raised or heard against their tribe as they strengthened their feeble position step by step.

Taking control of the situation the Patriarch emerged out of retirement and hired fresh management team to take over the shambles, revive and restore the rightful place in the market. Staying out of sight during the initial reviews and analysis, she slowly emerged from the shadows to stay out of the limelight lest her highest level of competency fall short of the rising baseline. The enterprise trundled along recovering some lost territory but struggling in the absence of accurate and timely information from the transactional and reporting systems.

Under the spotlight she promised to create business intelligence strategy to help the company in taking better and effective decisions. The task being beyond her intellectual capacity, she felt prudent to hire a big name consulting company to formulate a plan that would save her skin and earn some brownie points. Budget for the exercise was sanctioned and the consultant brought on board; as they got started an unaligned team mate who was the mainstay of existing business and financial reporting quit.

A specialist was brought in by the consulting company who understood the industry as well as the technology adoption curve for similar enterprises. Within no time he had captured the current state of transactional, financial, sales, and other functional reporting, which was quite basic. He evaluated the tools and technologies, inventory of licenses available, and called a meeting with the CIO and her team to discuss the future roadmap, vision and direction, and get an insider view of the challenges and opportunities.

She started off well, but…: I want to outsource the entire analytics and operations while my team can focus on what matters to the business. My team lead has quit recently and due to that there is a void that needs to be filled. You know we implemented this new ERP system last year and then we also invested in this big name BI tool, the implementation of which is still going on, and my BI lead has quit. I want a strategy for which report should be served from the ERP system and which one should come from the BI system.

The consultant did not know whether to repeat the question or accept the answer at face value; as he mulled over the response, the silence was broken by the CIO again: Why are you confused ? We developed over 200 reports in the ERP system, but hardly any are in use; most users want a data dump and then use it in spreadsheets. The management is upset as the inability of the investments to deliver; which is why I need your help to understand which reports we should retain and which we can move to the new system !

The next day the consulting company withdrew from the engagement !

What do you present to the Board ? A primer for CIOs

Before the turn of the millennium I made my first presentation to the Board; I had butterflies and wasps in my stomach, fluttering and biting. While I had multiple interactions with them – formal as well as informal – this was the big day when either I get the strategy and roadmap cleared, or I go into the shadows where IT had been. Coming in from the outside, the entrusted task was to ensure that IT delivered and my goal was to also get the IT team some respect for the work they did ensuring that business runs with minimal IT led disruptions.

Talking to many Board Members and CEOs it is evident that in the ensuing time, a lot has changed; for one, there is a heightened awareness of IT across the board. Technology has invaded our lives, homes, and Digital Natives are now getting into the workforce. Boards are being challenged to come up with Digital strategies – relevant or not – lest they be caught unawares. Startups have glamourized technology innovation with most Board Members individually investing in the euphoric and at times irrational models.

On the other hand CIOs have catapulted themselves to newer heights and positions by casting aside their technology vocabulary and embracing profitability, cost and process rationalization, discounted cash flow, NPV and IRR, along with customer satisfaction, supply chain agility and everything that was seen as foreign to IT folks. With a vengeance, IT arrived on the scene disrupting old models over and over again leaving no choice for CXOs but to acknowledge that they do need ample doses of what the CIO can bring to the business.

These are not exceptions any more, the laggards are indeed enterprises who still relegate CIOs to work under the CFO wings, starving themselves of the benefit that IT led efficiencies can bring. They have not been able to discard their antediluvian behavior and mindset but continue to expect miracles from the CIO while s/he has to win the sprint and the marathon with no support. Thus IT scrounges for budgets and business support which is reluctantly given treating IT as spenders of hard is earned revenues while the CFO keeps cutting IT budgets.

For the Board too this was the first time IT was presenting a plan; they were curious and allotted half an hour for the last item on the agenda. Walking into the room full of serious looking wizened grey haired audience, I wished I had never asked for the time. But now it was done and I had to get on with it. The Chairman peered over his glasses and asked me to begin. I started by describing the current state of business, growth aspirations, IT challenges (real and perceived) and waited for acceptance of reality as I saw it; nods assured me to continue.

Outlining the vision of a better tomorrow and the day after with some aggressive investments and moves from the business, I kept going while clouds descended outside and it started pouring. I reached the last slide and thanked the audience waiting for a response; silence greeted me and then an applause with an affirmation to the plan. I could have jumped in joy that I made it without getting beaten up for a non-technical presentation that defined new opportunities to expand market leadership. Only then I also realized that my allotted half an hour had extended to three !

What do you present to the Board ? Most of them don’t care about technology options, they want to know how IT will impact business growth, profitability, customer loyalty, retention and satisfaction, efficiency, market positioning or expansion, benchmark with the industry, enable business strategy, or enhance shareholder value. Effectively can IT help the enterprise and its leadership team win in a competitive and disruptive world ? On the flip side, the CFO shadowed IT is challenged to prove ROI on every investment.

The CIO requested a meeting with the CEO to present to the Management team and the Board on some of the path-breaking initiatives that would help the company tactically as well as in the long run. He was asked to vet the presentation and investments with the CFO (his reporting boss). Unfortunately the CFO did not give the attention requested despite repeated reminders; the presentation never happened and after trying all possible options, the CIO left in disgust. The company continues to struggle with their IT while competition has begun to nibble at their market share.

CIO or not, what is your reality ?

New CIO dilemma: Build a foundation or create quick wins ?

He was excited when he joined the new company which had reached out to him to help them in their growth and transformation agenda. The company had struggled to grow in recent times; profitability pressures for a longish time drove the management to cost cutting and product portfolio rationalization. Their IT did what it was built for, automation of now disjointed processes with limited business benefit. They lived in dark ages of IT for more than a decade relegating the company to distant memory as one who could have achieved greatness.

Change of guard within the promoters resulted in induction of fresh talent from lateral and unconnected industries, all of them with some level of credibility. A quarter back he had taken the role of their first CIO followed by a few other CXOs who came in later. They were expected to revive the sagging fortunes of the company with magic from their collective experience. The CIO was a veteran of more than a score years behind him; having evolved with the changing technology landscape, he had the necessary credentials for the role.

In the first month into the new enterprise, he met with all the stakeholders, understood the challenges and opportunities in front of him, conducted a SWOT of his team; essentially creating a map of the terrain he had entered. He welcomed inputs and engaged to assess how they could help create quick wins. As it happens with any new role, this also brought opportunities for the partner ecosystem who reached out to the CIO seeking to understand his agenda and direction, willing to help with technology solutions and strategic inputs.

Lack of IT leadership had led to no real investments in IT over the years creating disparate systems all over; the situation was such that wherever you looked there was a need for attention. The new CXOs wanted to see quick wins within their functions; the IT team was constrained by their skills to deliver. The CIO had to build a team, find some tactical wins, architect the future IT landscape and keep business as usual running. The grass that appeared green from the outside, suddenly the opportunity started looking like a problem.

Over the next few months he attempted to understand ground realities by visiting the manufacturing plants, spending time with sales and marketing, hobnobbing with the supply chain team, and talking to various solution providers. They had lost market leadership having lost ground to global players with large marketing budgets. Competition had deployed solutions ages back and were in the process of moving to the next level of maturity. It took time for the promoters to react to market forces that led to the decline.

All initiatives together would keep him busy for the next three years. His long experience across a few companies had not prepared him for the multi-tasking and agility requirements of creating a transformation agenda. To IT mature enterprises, incremental innovation offers fair return; disruption is rare, driven by shifts in industry, or technology obsolescence, or possibilities created by new technology. His staid progress posed a challenge for him as well as the company; eventually he decided to invest in the foundation against quick wins.

If the situation is opened to discussion and debate, there is enough justification for one direction over the other. The camp shall stay divided into three parts: the first advocating quick wins over long-term to build credibility and then embark on the longer journey; the second reinforcing the need to build a foundation before creating peripheral systems to ensure robust processes support the business; and finally the proponents of doing both simultaneously being the third group. The luxury of choice does not exist in a hypercompetitive world.

Quick wins come with an element of risk which people take based on past experience; unfortunately the business world does tolerate failure irrespective of the cliché “Fail faster”. Most take a conservative approach and attempt to walk “baby steps” towards progress; they reap what they sow. Walking the tightrope and crafting tactical strategies which are balanced with long-term goals and objectives requires confidence and a bit of risk with commensurate rewards. It is the best possible option and the lesser travelled path !

Two paths at crossroads, which one did you take ?

They were deemed a reference customer for the industry and one of the favorites of the big name vendor and solution provider. Over a long period of the relationship they had acquired almost every solution from the same vendor for any business problem. At times the price was quite attractive to turn down the offer, and at times the perceived time taken, complexity of evaluating and then implementing another solution appeared to be too big a task. So the CIO and her team continued to invest with their preferred IT partner.

Life would have continued for them with incremental innovation and harmonious coexistence with their vendor ecosystem had not events overtaken them. The company was caught up in an industry turmoil which required information agility they had never experienced before. Their strategy to stay with one solution provider had given them a basket of solutions for every stated need; the implementations technically successful and were declared live. The business use found them lacking in the new paradigm when efficiency mattered.

Earlier business had continued to use parallel systems and created business critical spreadsheets that became the lifeline for the enterprise. The level of (in)efficiency was deemed acceptable as change required them to actively participate in the definition and building of the solutions. It appeared easier to let the IT organization manage the complexity of IT’s favored solution which ended up becoming a system of records while business users added headcount to solve problems. Now the murmur of disenchantment grew louder.

The CIO was in a fix and wondered why her winning strategy was no longer deemed effective ? They had bought from one of the largest providers in the world and the vendor had in many meetings acknowledged the leadership in implementation of some of the solutions. Business had participated in the selection of the solutions in almost all cases and signed off the choice. Now how could they be pointing fingers and distancing themselves ? Okay, there were some disagreements on the solutions and partners, but …

The applications lead had grown within the ranks and his first implementation of any major system was from this big solution provider. The success of the first big step gave him sense of invincibility if he continued to bet on the same provider. Guess what, it actually worked for a while and the resultant growing arrogance made him deaf to the occasional issue and limitation. After all not every wish list can be fulfilled by the solutions; why did they not admire the brilliance of simplicity of integration of parts from the same vendor ?

The CEO instructed the CIO to benchmark with specific companies to find out how they stacked up in comparison and what they can learn from some of the finest companies. Initially skeptical and full of themselves, the CIO and the team ventured out to explore the world and how others lived. The chosen benchmark had a much awarded CIO who was seen as an early adopter and trend setter. He was always happy to share his success with others and welcomed the team to spend time with him and his IT and business teams.

There were many common solutions deployed between the two companies; they had the same big name vendor as their primary provider and that is where the similarity ended. The CIO had given the freedom of choice to his team to seek solutions beyond the initial investment. In fact he challenged his team to find alternatives just to be sure that they had covered all options before making a choice. They were cautious of the fact that they did not want compromise solutions and were willing to stretch to get the best.

Both companies having started their IT journey had taken different paths at the crossroads; one had gone down the well-trodden path of low risk and reaped the fruits that came along the journey. The other created their own path and enjoyed the journey and the new experiences that it brought. The first was finding her achievements pale in comparison to the risk taker who had the business totally in sync with the decisions, the pains and the success. Two different paths enabling business, two different outcomes, two tales of success.

Which path have you taken and what is your story ?

6 Blind men and the Elephant

It was six men of Indostan,

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant,

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation,

Might satisfy his mind.

So goes an old parable from a few centuries back which has many even older variations across countries with their cultural nuances thrown in. While the object of curiosity does not change, the number of people in the group does and so do their inferences. Conclusions derived too have varied by context of the narrator and the reader or listener though they all end up pointing to one key aspect of human behaviour, i.e. people jumping to conclusions based on their frame of reference and global ignorance.

Corporate world experiences elephants in the room, often leading to embarrassing and hilarious situations for those involved including instances where the elephant was never discovered. My friends have narrated many instances of the sum of parts being larger than the whole; differing frames of reference like the blind men in the fable have frustrated much intent to progress with incessant harping on their version of truth. Then off course there is the wise owl consultant who ends up painting a different animal farm.

The project was critical to the company impacting every function directly or indirectly. There weren’t any alternatives which is why it was a project that everyone agreed to unanimously. The CIO was happy that there was consistent alignment and endorsement of the project with hardly any resource constraints. Mood in the air was exuberant and success was perceived inevitable; everyone involved agreed that it could not have been done better with the transparency in decision making and setting expectations.

Few months into the project the CIO met with his peers to get feedback and inquire if he was missing anything real or perceived. Everyone had a fair view and appreciation for the flawless execution that had followed the project kick-off. Satisfied with the responses he forged ahead full steam; completing one phase and while moving to the next he hit some rough weather. With choppy seas and a pronounced roll, he again went back to the CXOs to check if course correction was required. What he discovered…

First stop Finance, he queried the CFO; everything is fine, it is a great financial accounting tool but… the indirect taxation model is not suitable and we would like to retain the old solution. Head of Supply Chain quipped that Sales & Distribution were good to go but… the planning part was not good enough and he would like to build a custom solution to meet the need. Manufacturing felt that their needs would be met at the basic level however… it did not address the stores and repairs current processes which would require additional solutions.

Marketing was non-committal in their response, master data needs to be fixed by someone before we can comment. Fortunately the Purchase team took to it like fish to water; they loved the solution which they believed will give them wings. Human Resources did not believe that they needed to change whatever they were doing; they were averse to change and closed. Fearing the worst he spoke to the IT team only to realize that the team was toiling away to keep everyone together moving in the same direction.

The disjointed and independent frames of reference portrayed a different view and plane; connecting the dots provided a picture that was far removed from reality. Everyone took a view based on what they saw and how it impacted them; there was no effort to stitch together a bigger or holistic picture. The original dream and expectation appeared a faint memory. Their views reflected a myopic vision in their risk-averse mindset and no one felt like challenging it. I know how to manage my part of the elephant.

The CIO realized the elephantine proportion of the problem where everyone in the functional teams saw a part of the animal they were exposed to and made preparations based on their conclusions. The IT team was left holding the portrait that the solution was expected to be. He contemplated different options and finally decided to leave the incomplete picture as is; he believed that he knew the elephant and how to tame it. After all this was not the first time he was in this situation.

And so these men of Indostan,

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion,

Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!

Was this the best option for the CIO ? What would you do ? To be continued…

Link to Part 2

Predictions from 2004, where are we today !

A decade back almost to the date of writing this passage I had presented to my then management team the rolling 3-year Business Technology plan and hazarded predictions for the future. The plan had components of what we would focus on and required endorsement of business projects which would in turn get budgetary approval. The predictions were another matter; while a decade back opinions about IT were subdued, they did challenge some of the thinking and conventional outlook at that time.

It is not typical to make predictions as a part of an IT strategy or annual plan, at least I have not seen or heard of any, but it has been a trend that I have followed which makes life quite interesting for everyone on the table. It also creates a discussion on which technologies we should explore and invest time in. Some have followed the technology hype curves published by leading research companies while some have been an antithesis to them, my view as I saw the applicability within the enterprise or at times a hunch.

So here’s the original unedited list of 7 published in December 2003.

Web-tone will replace dial-tone. Almost everything will connect to a web service. Well we never got a web-tone though everything now connects to the Internet. Almost all calls and chats and collaboration use the web in some form or the other. Conventional voice communication has been losing minutes for a long time now and is not differentiable from VOIP traffic.

Software distribution will reduce significantly with all applications moving towards the Browser. Some of this was aided by thin client technologies and then the move towards browser enabling most front ends. However that did not last too long with the mobile demanding attention. Starting with WAP and other protocols, with HTML5 now almost all content is moving to the browser

Centralized computing will drive down costs. Well to some extent the centralization did happen with most client server applications dying away. But the new disruption happened with the highly virtualized data centre moving into the Cloud. Everyone promised that costs will come down with higher utilization and buying only what you want. The debate on this one is still on.

Portable devices will outnumber desktop devices. I am kind of proud of this one ! Mobile devices are indeed outnumbering the desktop or for that matter desktop and laptops combined. My prediction did not envisage the tablet and the phablet, it was based on higher speed data connectivity of which I kind of had a sneak preview in my telecom stint.

The distinction between the computer and the network will be eliminated. Maybe I was following someone who claimed that network is the computer a lot more than I would say now; the computing device and the network are intertwined integrally and feed of each other pushing the barriers to levels that were un-imagined earlier.

Skilled senior level manpower will be extremely difficult to find. I wish I was wrong on this one, but it has been indeed extremely difficult to find good senior staff across domains and expertise. I wonder why with so many people joining the industry globally, the available talent should go up. So where do people fall off during the journey that makes it difficult to find them ?

The computer is the next generation Idiot Box. With the computer changing its conventionally accepted avatar and TVs getting smarter, we being enamoured by smartphones and changing them ever so often, I think the devices we use are making us dumber. The computer is slowly getting distant from the user moving away to the cloud or getting into our hands in a 5-6” form.

I can’t say I got all of them correct, neither was I way off. A few years back I wrote about predictions and why they don’t matter anymore. Every year brings a new flavour and then half way through we find ourselves in a wave that we had no clue about. These get named as disruptive innovation and get into the hype cycle which all of us love to follow. No predictions now, let’s get down to some work.

Integrated Best of Breed

Big fish gobbling up the smaller ones has been a natural way of life. Recent times have seen many startup and small-medium technology companies being acquired by their larger brethren as the biggies try to fill voids in their enterprise solution offering or expand their footprint in corporate IT. Innovative ideas and niche solutions have found it easier to expand their market aligning with the big companies while in many cases it was also about survival or the investors cashing out too.

Meeting up with few large enterprise and conglomerate CIOs the discussion veered towards how they are staying ahead of the pressures to continuously adapt to changing paradigms and ensure that the IT architecture stays agile and in sync with business. Everyone had gone down the path of implementing the monolithic ERP, CRM, SCM, … solutions more than a decade back. With (in)organic and global growth the footprint continued to expand moving from single instance to multiple and then back to consolidated deployment.

Depending on the evolution of solutions and enterprise need many CIOs took a call to implement the complete suite of functionality from one vendor; then there were few who decided that they will not compromise on business requirements and find the best fit for what their business needs. Integration as required was addressed using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools which had evolved to allow coexistence of legacy and new systems. The resultant technology diversity did pose challenges for IT which was deemed acceptable.

Staying with one solution provider did have advantages of better integration over the other though not by a huge margin as most large vendors had acquired other companies to fill in gaps in their offerings. Some of the best of breed now became offerings from the same large vendor with support prices almost always going north busting budgets and taking away fiscal benefit which the smaller vendors had offered. CIOs had little choice but to fight tooth and nail to get marginal benefit eventually accepting the new terms.

M&A in the IT solutions industry keeps changing the landscape. While the acquirer in most cases buys to add missing functionality or to get ahead of competitors, there have also been a few to kill a smaller or dominant player in a specific segment. There have been many such acquisitions over the last decade where the solution became irrelevant and by the time it revived itself, the market had changed. This is very evident in customer management and supply chain solutions in which earlier leaders failed to regain their market leading positions.

With new technology and disruptive paradigms driven by consumerization and services on demand being touted as nemesis of conventional IT organizations, solution providers are joining the bandwagon in an attempt to brick-wall their customers. We can offer you the option of cloud, stay with us; list prices are only for small customers, we will give you good ROI on either stack. CIO buying from startups soon discovers that the solution is now with a vendor who they may have rejected in their larger evaluation.

With integration becoming easier over the years across “commercial off the shelf” and cloud solutions, the new wave belongs to point solutions for specific tasks and functions. Almost all of them provide ready connectors to legacy ERP solutions thus eliminating the earlier pain of integration. Today CIOs can exercise a choice along with business to find the best fit for which there are alternatives as compared to the past. And the discussions between best of breed and integrated is no longer relevant.

Predictions about the demise of the larger solutions have been around for a while now; I do not believe that they are going away in a hurry, rather many have adapted to the new situation quite well. The momentum from new and micro solutions will keep everyone on their toes. Acquisitions will continue to change the landscape and the CIO will have to continuously adapt. Business will want agility and legacy will remain entrenched. The future will be uncertain, that is certain. All in a days’ job for the CIO !

Is the CIO an Idiot ?

Congratulations on your new role ! We would like to come and meet you to understand your key priorities and challenges. We can help you in classifying your portfolio of applications, the technology landscape that you have, or consolidation and rationalization strategy, IT strategy and roadmap and help you align to the business. For multiple companies we have helped them optimize their IT operations and save costs. We can move dollars from BAU to innovation. Can we meet you in the next few days ?

Even if you are not new to the role, I am sure that all CIOs (at least I do) receive such messages from all kinds of vendors, consultants, research companies, and what have you with alarming frequency. They claim to have worked with companies who are highly successful in their use of IT; they make it appear that these customers would have remained in a challenged state if they had not come to the rescue with their frameworks and consulting practices that helped them get out of mediocrity to become winners.

They are aggressive in their approach and are willing to go across the layers of the company to get to you, as if the sky will fall by next week if you did not engage them. Some of them have retired or ex-CIOs as primary subject matter experts; most use decade old models as their base which were created by a few academicians. These frameworks can still be applied with reasonable success to most company’s IT portfolios throwing up opportunities for improvement or validating success for a well-run enterprise.

Having known some of their “subject matter experts” in their past avatars, I have never been too keen to connect with them with a bit of credibility crisis staring them in the face. Despite that, surprisingly the number of customers using one or more of these wonderful companies – who have answers to all the challenges faced by the CIO – appear to be overpowering with almost every enterprise that I know on the list. While I knew of some and their reasons, I found it hard to digest.

So I started connected with some CIO friends to ascertain what were their key drivers ? Did they face an identity crisis or they developed cold feet in putting forward their strategy, plan or take risks ? Behind the brave face that they put up in conferences and meetings, were they a bunch of scared or uncertain individuals struggling to figure out how to make things work ? I could not accept my own fears on this hypothesis and gingerly approached the subject lest I create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sigh ! The result was a mixed bag; in most cases the usage was to get endorsement or a stamp of approval from an authoritative source for higher credibility to the project or technology. In some I observed that the organization was risk averse or did not have the requisite confidence on the IT team and thus sought validation of the CIO proposals. Global and local research analysts and the models I referred to earlier give the requisite crutch or platform to the CIO to get endorsement and alignment.

The more interesting insight was with a few CIOs who did need the help to get there. They were bright individuals with technology expertise but limited ability to create a business case or put across a transformation agenda to the Management or Board. They were smart enough to work with these companies to find solutions thereby overcoming their limitations. I stopped applying my filter criteria for evaluation of the proposed engagements from this plethora of value providers.

Considering there is indeed a segment that finds value in engaging such companies (which is why they exist and continue to thrive, demand supply equation you know), my sincere and humble submission to all the wonderful companies is not to assume that everyone they talk to has a problem that they are unable to solve. All CIOs are not equally created, some are bigger Idiots than others, and others believe “I” stands for Intelligent or Innovation …. I think I was an Idiot for some time, and that will pass.