Cloud based offerings encouraged Shadow IT, problems brought them back to Core IT

The launch of the new disruptive solution was well attended by CIOs and Business alike; some of the early adopter customers spoke highly of the solution, especially the business who claimed freedom from IT after integration was done with existing ERP solutions during implementation. Euphoric pronouncements elevated the solution to the next best thing since the spreadsheet came into their lives. The going was great until some of the audience started digging deeper into the success seeking clarifications.

Yes the solution was easy to deploy, it is Cloud based; we pay as we go based on number of users (aren’t most licenses like that ?) and there is also an app which I can download and use when I am traveling. There was some help taken from IT for integrating with the ERP and then with the CRM and yes they had to work on cleaning the data feed. No it is not complete freedom from IT as the system administration and user rights management is still done by the IT team; but I can build my own reports and workflows !

Opening up the conversation in contrast another customer mentioned that many of the users don’t actually use the mobile app which was seen as a prerequisite for selecting the solution and paying a premium. The self-service model had started with a bang, but was floundering with users now wanting IT to generate the information and insights for them to consume. The novelty factor had gone down with other work taking precedence over extracting information on demand or accessing it while on the move.

Who wants self-service was a discussion that suddenly filled the room much to the embarrassment of the organizers who attempted to deflect the discussion and bring it back to the merits of their solution and why the prospects present should seriously explore their brand of snake oil. A senior CIO refuted the claims that competition did not offer the same agility, flexibility or feature set which was grudgingly accepted with a counterclaim that some existing customers had been transitioned from competition.

Conventional IT a score of years back did pose challenges to agile deployment of solutions and at times delayed success with challenged projects. A decade back the same IT organizations began to push the business to actively participate in creating mobile engagement models, pushing the realms of self-service across functions. Initial candidates were travel and expense, followed by Employee and Manager Self-service driven by Human Resource solutions, though some even today continue parallel paper processes.

Closer to the beginning of the current decade, service providers proclaimed victory over IT by wooing the business with solutions that could be bought with a swipe of the credit card. You can get anything you want without asking your IT folks who normally say NO to everything; the promise led to a smattering of success and large number of headaches for IT who were being called out for tasks like opening up ports on the router, data dumps (instead of integration with on premise systems) and rescue when something did not work !

The last bastion was management reports, dashboards, and analytics moving to the Cloud with a promise of self service; what they got instead was garbage in-garbage out ! Some power users did manage to hold on for some time, they succumbed when on-demand analytics and complexity of data across sources needed them to go back to IT for real-time integration. The shift to collaborative design of solutions between IT and Business brought back the success which alluded companies in solo forays.

Today most solutions are pushing the limits on self-service with mobile first strategies (browsers are passé now). Leave & Attendance, Travel & Expense, Approvals of all kinds are all mobile; the rest require a login from a larger screen – tab or laptop or desktop. Thumbing around is the new way of working with no time limitations; what started with email pings on mobile is a flood of notifications vying for attention. Everything is urgent and requires hyper speed and attention stretching the already extended work day.

IT has embraced the self-service culture even though it puts higher demands on resources; data security requires locking down devices and monitoring, and diversity of devices increases complexity of deployment and maintenance. CIOs are also innovating with new technology disruptions pushing the envelope to automate everything in sight. On the flip side, busy executives are happily delegating some of the critical and important work downwards compromising the quality of decision making and possible outcomes.

I wonder when the breakpoint will be reached !

If your CXO buys Cloud based solutions without IT involvement, is it Shadow IT ?

At a marketing conference the CMO was childishly wide eyed seeing technology options on display which he was unaware of. His IT team had been talking about some of the solutions and benefits that could be created for the enterprise, he had not focused on them leaving it to his team. Now having seen possibilities, he wanted to get the tools and technology into his fold as soon as possible. So he asked the vendor to deep dive with his team to ascertain how quickly they could adopt the solutions.

After the song and dance, demo and reference checks, he was convinced that the solution is exactly what he needed. It was superior to the current laborious manual process followed which always ended up just a little late in comparison to required timeline. IT had been chasing him for a long time, but he did not understand technology; so he had deflected the discussion to his team who were always looking at the operational aspects of the solutions rather than the big picture that needed to be defined.

The CIO and the IT team gave up the chase since it appeared to be a futile exercise; other parts of the enterprise were happy to collaborate and implement new age solutions and appreciated their contributions. Thus when the CMO saw the solutions on display at the conference he was overawed and wanted to make up lost time as soon as possible. The vendor convinced him that he did not need support from IT as the solution was cloud based and required no infrastructure except an internet connection.

Weeks later the solution was procured and deployed quickly; it was easy enough to use, did not require training, worked on their laptops and most smartphones, allowed analytics that the business wanted, and was quite affordable with monthly subscription which he could fund from his budget. Integration to existing data sources was not considered since his team had almost all the data in spreadsheets that they used to conduct analysis and created customer engagement models; the CMO believed he had a good deal.

Months later he presented outcomes from his new baby in the Management Committee Meeting to a round of applause which he beamingly accepted. The success story continued for a while as the marketing team leveraged the solution which provided better outcomes than the earlier manual way of working. The dream run would have continued except that they reached a plateau and to leverage new functionality now required help from IT to integrate with existing data sources to move to the next level.

Success creates arrogance that can be the undoing not just for the individual but also for the team. Emboldened by success of his earlier indiscretion, he hired resources to address the requirement. Unfortunately to get what he needed, there was no way to circumvent IT and thus he approached the CIO who feigned surprise and looked adequately stunned at the request. The IT vendor had apprised him of the purportedly illicit relationship which the CIO did not confront since it was running of its own steam.

The CIO did not throw tantrums neither did he chastise the CMO; his demeanor and approach to the request had the CMO confused on whether the request would be reported to the CEO or discussed in the Management Committee meeting or the CIO will now ask for his pound of flesh or he would just acquiesce to the request. The CMO did know that if he did not get the required data feed, the fairy tale would come to a horrific end which would also mean opening the proverbial can of creepy crawlies.

With benevolence the CIO asked for an all hands meeting with Marketing in which he explained the impact of the CMO’s request. There was a need to understand the elements required, security of data in motion and at rest, ability to maintain the interface while ensuring that exceptions are addressed, and finally data quality. In the manual world, marketing team had increasingly spent time managing some of these issues. The CMO realized the complexity and sensing no animosity with relief agreed to work together.

Cloud based models will entice CXOs to explore uncharted territories as they have low entry barriers and easy pickings to validate use cases. I believe that CIOs should proactively offer assistance to such forays rather than blocking them considering business ownership increases chances of sustained adoption. Conventional mindset would paint this as Shadow IT or a threat to the supremacy of the CIO; I see this as an extended arm of IT which can create win-win propositions for business, IT, and vendors.

That rogue app

We need IT support and expertise to scale up the application; there are a few enhancements and some bugs that need to be fixed. For us it has worked well for the last year and we believe that it can deliver similar benefits to other parts of the company. You know the efficiency it has given us has helped meet our targets and we now measure favorably on most KPIs. Can you organize for the resources at the earliest ? Thus started a discovery of an application that had gone business critical !

The company had engaged a big name consulting firm to help in a business transformation. The project had been announced with big fanfare and branding that had everyone excited with the potential outcomes. The initiative took off quickly with key process identification and definition of measurement criteria. Review meetings began with the realization to promise while dashboards sprung up all over the place. These charged up everyone and the movement spread quickly.

Everyone applauded the effort which was cascaded to a few sites with the same level of success thereby ensuring that the model was robust and scalable. The consultants had created a working spreadsheet model that automated the critical process chain and helped improve the decision making. It worked well for the select set of users who proudly displayed the results to anyone and everyone who wanted to know more about their success. People moved on to other things and soon this was forgotten.

The CIO had no inkling of the spreadsheet becoming mission critical to the unit and the slow virulent spread of the solution. It did not cross the business teams’ mind to move on to an integrated and scalable formal application that would integrate with the data sources rather than continue taking data dump and manipulating to get to where they wanted. No one challenged the process as it slowly crept on until the data size became unwieldy and a few locations wanted to tweak the model.

That is when the CIO was approached to rescue the situation. They wanted a technical resource to help fix and deploy the solution. It was a precarious situation for the CIO whether to push back or fall in line and support the business critical application. There was pressure from the stakeholders and some CXOs to support the solution. The easy way out was to let go; after all, the project did have visibility and everyone knew about it, so why make an issue. But that would have set a precedent !

My friend was not known to be politically correct and ready to take a stand on principles; for him that was the only way to do things. And that’s what he did; he asked the team to submit the documentation of the system based on which the team would determine whether the program could be supported or redevelopment was the way out. He went on to deplore the situation with the CXO responsible and instructed his team to follow his diktat. Reconciliatory moves to find a compromise were brushed aside brusquely.

This was not a typical case of rogue or shadow IT that ignored the IT function or the CIO intentionally. It was never expected to become a business critical solution to be deployed across locations. Every function uses spreadsheet to address simple data capture, analysis or sometimes address tasks that conventional solutions are unable to fulfill. Quick and dirty spreadsheet or other out-of-the-box solutions are typical to any company today. They crystallize the need which IT is able to qualify and address.

I do not believe that there is a singular way to address this situation. All approaches are correct in the context of the situation and the reality of the involved stakeholders. It is important to address this tactfully without burning bridges. My friend knew the boundaries in which he could push back and where he needed to take a step back. Post acknowledgement of the issue, he asked the team to support the scale-up of the application in an integrated framework that had everyone move ahead.

What would you do in such a situation ?

The IT Orphanage, happy ending ?

Last week when I wrote about orphaned projects, applications and solutions that find no takers despite them having started life as perceived business critical process or need, many of the readers wrote back with their stories of orphanages within their companies. The problem has been around for a long time since the time IT departments started developing software for ever changing stated and unstated business needs. The idea of alignment between Business and IT thereby took shape and still remains the subject of discussion.

Rarely did the CIO bring this to the discussion table with customers or at Management meetings as the failure was largely attributed to insufficient business engagement and understanding; compounded by the fact that there were some broken systems and challenges that kept the IT departments busy just to run business as usual. So everyone worked in expectation of creating a better tomorrow driven by new and disruptive technology trends and new solutions that promised to solve the issues of the past and future.

The protagonist CIO in the earlier post (The IT Orphanage) had a big white elephant sitting on his lap and the enterprise had written off the project as a bad experience. More than a dozen man years of effort seemed a waste and the solution had no takers. The team was disheartened, the business indifferent, and the vendors wondering what next. The CEO was not interested in funding the project further and wanted to cut losses and move on. The situation seemed hopeless.

Undeterred, the CIO called the team together and captured the sequence of events from the initiation of the project. Step by step they analysed the methodology, the plan, the data elements, the solution pieces and the overall architecture, and finally the business need and benefit. Everything appeared to fit in; they could not find anything wrong with the technology. They went through the business objections and the critique of the results one by one and that is when they discovered the real cause.

The impacted business users were being challenged by the outcomes; they were feeling threatened by the results that expected them to give up their old way of thinking. The actionable insights that the solution proposed required the business to unlearn what had worked for them so far and approach their customers and the market differently. A consultant would have classified this as a change management failure; however this went a little deeper than just change management.

So the CIO farmed out his team to selectively target some of the empathetic users; they adopted a struggling business unit and worked with the business head to help her. Having been pushed to a corner and labelled as an under-performing unit, the business head was happy to use any help possible. She became an ally and agreed to work with the team. The team worked in their spare time, over weekends, to meet the new partner’s requirements. The vendor pitched in with no fee to recolor the elephant.

Over the next six months everyone toiled and sweated; the business started showing an uptrend and quickly turned profitable. The business head emboldened by the success redoubled the efforts embracing the new state of nirvana. In management meetings she started talking about the tools of her success and how it has helped them grow. She urged others to discard their cynicism and give a fresh look to the solution that was probably ahead of the evolution curve in the industry.

With the numbers speaking rather than perceptions, grudgingly the CEO endorsed the way forward and slowly other units came around. The ramp up was quick and the fire spread quickly giving the company a distinct leadership position and advantage. Fresh investments gave the project a boost and the team a great sense of achievement. Success has many fathers and soon everyone wanted to talk about how they had supported the project earlier. The orphanage had one less member now.

Soon after, the CIO quit !

The IT Orphanage

It had been a long search, far and wide, across the oceans; many able men and women working as teams traversed the globe in her quest. A few options were shortlisted but discarded very quickly when some deficiency was uncovered with deeper analysis. The rigour redoubled, the pursuit unwavering, the promise of reward for the long-term kept them going. Their leader encouraged the team though the journey especially when they appeared to falter and give-up.

Almost a year into the expedition, the quest finally came to an end with what appeared to be a perfect and made to order ending. The leadership team got together to discuss the outflow; she was expensive and required high maintenance. No one had the courage thus far to take such a risk. However the promise of the future convinced everyone that it would be worth the investment. So they all agreed to part with the precious gold coins and get her on board. High risk, high return said the treasurer.

She was welcomed with a lot of fanfare, the headman chose a name from the many suggested and the message spread across on the new unique acquisition. Everyone contributed to setting the expectations that rose in unison as if in a crescendo; everyone watched the future with euphoric anticipation. Smiths and specialists from all over the world got together to define outcomes that she would enable. Progress was slow and soon people started paying lesser attention focusing on their daily chores.

Life continued as usual with occasional reviews that highlighted challenges to understand and adapt to her whims. The workmen toiled day and night for many moons encouraged by their leader who did not give up belief. Two winters later the team broke off into a joyous dance; everything worked as designed, all the links delivered, the input validated, the outcome was as expected. Rushing to the leadership team they demonstrated the end result, chests puffed with obvious pride.

Celebration was called, everyone wanted to be associated with success; anecdotes of arduous journey spread with friendly banter.  After almost 18 months since the start day, the project had gone live and was churning out results that were unfamiliar territory but delivered business outcomes the leader had believed possible. The competitive advantage gained using the new technology was evident and accolades poured in locally and globally for the unique pioneering solution.

Too good to last, some of the naysayers found reason to challenge and doubt the results; conventional wisdom did not support the new solution; thus they were able to sow seeds of doubt which spread quickly through the enterprise. The initial success was passed off as stroke of luck and not sustainable. With no supporters, almost everyone went back to their old way and deserted the solution as a bad dream and mistake. The solution thus joined the IT orphanage.

Applications and solutions that the IT team developed bur no one really used; solutions that were bought by users only to be discarded with no one to support them; applications and reports that are always urgent for development but rarely complete UAT; and if they do, hardly anyone wants to use them, they all finally find their place in the IT orphanage. These have no owner, no user, and no parent to support them. Once relegated they rarely if ever find a benefactor who is willing to support them.

Every organization has a (un)labelled orphanage that sometimes gets very crowded especially if the CIO and the IT team is unable to assert themselves or if they collectively work to create solutions that are disconnected from business reality. The CIO needs to highlight such instances transparently and openly to either change team behaviour or improve chances of success; and/or change business engagement and ownership that rarely if at all any need to be assigned to the orphanage.

P.S. Within a year the project was revived by the CIO and has stayed a success now for over 2 years; that is a story for another time.

Risk is a 4 letter word

It was a conference of supply chain heads who had gathered to discuss and debate their collective future. The themes revolved around agility, efficiency, constraints and opportunities; all in a day’s work for a CSCO or a Chief Supply Chain Officer. I was invited to talk about IT lead supply chain innovation and why CSCOs need to partner with their CIO to be successful. It was a good feeling that other functions are looking at IT and their CIO to help them win.

The conference agenda was similar to what CIOs typically see in an IT event; a few vendor sponsors who want to sell their wares, in this case warehouse automation solutions; select IT vendors pitched in to discuss Warehouse Management and Transport Management Systems. Then there were a couple of luminaries from the supply chain world who were looked upon as beacons of success to share their winning formula. And finally a few odd men like me not from the domain to talk about collaboration and synergistic success.

The half day ended quickly enough which happens when you are having fun; the evening transitioning into an informal gathering of the speakers and the participants. CSCOs are a smart lot who know what they are doing and how to get there. They also acknowledge internal and external dependencies that aid or curb their success. IT is one of the key tenets to their capability to execute; thus there were a lot of questions to probe how CIOs perceive the partnership.

We all know that most CIOs are always willing to partner with other CXOs to create change; when there is equal or more commitment from the other side, it is a recipe for a winning team and results that matter. As the discussion unfolded I heard some good stories and some filled with angst and agony. A mixed bag if there was one with fingers pointing in all directions. So I started digging deeper.

A CSCO began narrating his journey towards creating improvements in warehouse processes with some IT enabled automation; the journey took twice as long as promised and thrice as long as expected. He also talked about his struggle in getting his CIO to agree to evaluate a warehouse management system. The CIO kept throwing back questions and never took the steps forward to understand the challenges on the ground. He had almost given up his quest to use IT for competitive differentiation and then budget not being a constraint started creating shadow IT organization to fulfil his need.

Another one talked about his CIO being the best partner creating quick and dirty solutions to solve every business challenge despite budget constraints; he praised the IT teams pragmatism and alliance with the supply chain team and warehouse managers to improve inventory turns and reduce labour required. Analysing the situation with some additional questions, it was evident that the two CIOs approached the opportunity differently.

Apart from everything else that includes alignment, business understanding, etc. that everyone talks about as qualities that a CIO should imbibe, the risk ability of the CIO has direct correlation to how often s/he is able to create a WOW! moment. Everything safe equals no risk; and no risk also mean that innovation takes a back seat. As long as the CIO plays safe, s/he is bound to slip on everyone’s perception. Business will find a way to overcome; the CIO can decide to be a part of it or will sooner or later find him/herself relegated to the background.

I believe that CIOs should give up inertia and work on their risk ability to stay successful. I close with a collectible quote from Keith Johnstone: Those who say 'yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'no' are rewarded by the safety they attain. 

The micro-app nemesis

If you have looked for an app on Apple’s App Store, I am sure you have faced a Google search kind of frustration with hundreds of applications purporting to do the same stuff, one better than the other, or many times just a me too. So some of us end up downloading more than one to try and then decide which one is better; many a times we don’t end up discarding the others. Check around with friends who would have downloaded say an “Alarm Clock” and it is quite likely you will find that their app is different. You may be tempted to download that one too, just to try !

I met a CIO who was showing his angst on the fact that there were more than a dozen applications within his enterprise for travel approvals. While some were a result of “forgotten” acquisition synergies, the others were created by Shadow IT for departments to address short term need. These sustained themselves even after the corporate version was deployed. And now to top it all, almost all of them had mobile versions for different mobile devices thereby multiplying the number of micro-apps that were floating around.

The resulting collection of travel approval micro-apps exceeded a number that crossed the tipping point for the CIO. There was an uneasy silence on the table as she described the chaos and now the support expectations when some of them failed to work with the clamp down or rationalization of applications. Sympathetic nods followed as new governance processes were discussed and general agreement that the actions taken were fair.

Most of the micro-apps on the App Store are written by enthusiasts and programmers wanting to showcase their prowess. They test waters with free apps, and then add features and a tiny charge. Some start-up companies too indulged in similar bunch of apps on the store getting a few hits and lots of misses. How did this suddenly become an industry with 10 billion downloads in such a short span ? Because you can !

The simplicity and ability to create such apps is I guess one of the reasons that contributed to this explosion. Consumerization of the handheld device has given rise to the opportunity that had to be capitalized upon. The slowdown/recession encouraged the blurring of the lines between work and life, while everyone wallowed in the need to stay connected 24X7. The pressure is now on the CIO to stay ahead of the game and deploy even more processes that can be accessed on the mobile. Even if you have already formulated a mobility strategy, review it frequently to stay on top of the situation.

But what about the increasing number of micro-apps that are being downloaded, sanctioned or otherwise ? No one knows what kind of vulnerabilities they create; what will they lead to in the future ? Are they the future support nightmare ? Only time will tell; until then tread cautiously, create the micro-apps required, test the ones you may want to endorse from the store, and pray !