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 !

Flexible or efficient ?

When the going gets tough, the tough don’t get going anymore because companies cut cost. In the last 4-5 years the economic, governance, and policy uncertainties across geographies, markets, industries and sentiment in general, have had an overall negative bias. We saw recessionary trends that never really went away; an after taste remains even today. Companies that have globalized continue to see challenges in some situations every day thus keeping the teams on their toes.

Cost cutting or management has become a way of life; we have all been through these cycles or what management types call S-curve of investments and cuts; the corporate strategy and agenda oscillates between cutting costs and creating efficiency when lead indicators of performance reveal that growth is stunted and profitability is taking a hit. The onus of efficiency many a times rests with the CIO who has a micro view of every process. Sooner or later the process reaches a break point within the constraints.

Green shoots that bring promise of the era of growth has most companies scrambling to invest again; with the herd mentality everyone then wants agility, process flexibility, and an ability to respond to the market faster than equally ill-prepared competitors. Why are you unable to deliver new functionality faster ? Market will not wait for us to build systems at leisure; IT is not aligned to business reality, they do not understand business priorities and how to deliver to them.

The CIO retaliates and cites budget cuts in the past when the going was slow; when IT and business teams had some spare time, we decided to fine tune efficient processes rather than building new capability that could have helped retain market leadership. All good things take time to build and deliver; now putting more men on the job does not solve the problem. If you (Business) continue to look for the perfect solution, we might not complete before the next recessionary cycle making all the effort pointless.

This tug-of-war is played across many enterprises with no learning applied from past cycles of cuts and investments. It is like a knee jerk reaction to external factors that throws strategy out of the window and the company to the mercy of fickle minds and men. The short-term prevailing over the long-term takes away the flexibility to respond to market shifts with no latitude to adapt. Thus benefits available with sustained investments thus continue to stay elusive.

Can organizations and CIOs create a balance between the efficiency and flexibility agenda ? Is such a position desirable and achievable ? Can IT help the cause ? I asked these questions to a few learned CIOs; everyone nodded unanimously to the fact that cost containment drives every few years has taken away a lot of energy. The yo-yo keeps them and their business folks running to stay in the same place. Discretionary budgets not being available now, the tussle for flexibility is an uphill journey.

Turning to a consultant amidst the group for wisdom of the ages, there was no solace in what she offered as advice. She propounded the obvious: stop investing and cutting cost in spurts. Don’t lose sight of your direction; focus on your customers, explore cloud, analytics…. With no real input coming from this quarter, we decided to brainstorm the issue. The nemesis was universal and thus participation eager; while we did not solve world hunger problems, an outline emerged that offered some promise.

The new engagement model with outcome based payments holds a lot of promise; as CIOs engage with the partner ecosystem to link outflow to projects delivering to business metrics, two things will change. Firstly business will have to define outcomes and their commitment upfront; this will impact discipline of execution and the ability to stay focused. The second change will be the acknowledgement of the role of IT in business excellence putting the CIO in the driver’s seat should s/he choose to take on the opportunity.

Are you ready ?

The mobility conundrum

Take any event, survey or discussion with a vendor, or pick any IT magazine or newsletter, all of them have something on mobility and integrally linked to that is BYOD. Mobility has prominently featured in the top priorities in every survey. It has become as discussed or more a subject as BITA (Business IT Alignment) was a decade back. There are views and opinions on everything going mobile from business process to commerce from company to consumer and everything in between.

With number of innovative as well as hair brained ideas vying for attention, there is little to choose from for a CIO. Every one of these comes with a theory and hypothesis to change the world or transform the way business is done and information consumed. These range from recognizing your customers to agile delivery of information to senior management or pushing alerts to the sales or distribution teams. The need for instant approvals to various requests is no more a proposition cutting ice.

When I met a consultant from one of the big and respected IT and Management companies, the dialogue soon veered towards what is happening in this space. Everyone is talking about mobility and related challenges of managing the device, security of information and the big issue of non-company owned devices that connect to the corporate network. He went on to postulate that the future holds a lot of pain for the CIO who has to manage the diversity with new devices mushrooming every day.

So I challenged him to illustrate what he has seen of the deployments across companies that he has surveyed or CIOs met. What kind of applications are becoming mainstream ? Beyond sales force automation, reporting and maybe order entry by field staff, are there other use cases that have gained acceptance ? He mentioned insurance agents and banking relationship managers using mobility to sell their services; but these are corporate deployed and largely laptops with limited customer information if at all.

Then, where is the need for mobility ? Are CXOs demanding information on sales or other KPIs real time or by the hour ? Are knowledge workers expecting to carry their work from the desktop/laptop to their tablet or phone ? Is the shop floor crying for a mobile device or a transactional worker like Finance or HR executive expecting work enabled on a mobile device ? What information and process needs the velocity that mobility enables ? And if none need it, then why is mobility a big deal ?

Most mobile devices, managed or unmanaged, are connected to the corporate network for email access and to some extent on collaboration (read messenger or chat). Most organizations stopped supplying phones a while back and very few have procured tablets beyond the sales or field staff. The information the phones carry is corporate email and almost all users have password protected their individual or corporate device. Loss of phone gets the finder mostly an inoperable device which could get unlocked only by luck, rarely by brute force.

Information contained on tablets could have some value to the finder if again access can be gained bypassing the security. MDM or Mobile Device Management solutions are an insurance cover over and above protection that we all enable on our personal devices. A disabled email id or active directory will anyway prevent email and other information sync immediately. Security vendors whipping up paranoia would like you to believe otherwise by painting a grimy picture of revenue and reputation loss.

I am not propagating that enterprises stop looking at mobility or mobile security; what I believe is that review each case on the business value that can be quantified. Do not base your decisions purely on the spread sheets that vendors want you to use for TCO/ROI. Stop following the mobile information security hype and deploy pragmatic solutions; you are not following your competitors to pick up their lost device, likewise your competitors are not following your people around. Take care !

Achieving business agility between ERP and Cloud

An intense debate between two CEOs ensued while I was listening with concentration to them; there was no debate on the need for every business to leverage technology to stay ahead of industry growth curve. Both had experienced success, but there was indeed a bone of contention. One of the leaders vehemently recounted the inability of ERP solutions and vendors to address the market dynamics. He cited many instances where the ERP vendor as well as his IT organization took longer time than business could afford; small solace that his competitors also used the same solutions and thus had similar issues.

The other CEO countered with an equal number of scenarios when the specific ERP had indeed been ahead of others. Now every ERP solution provides a complex array of parameters and settings that can be manipulated to provide functionality for most business processes. This complexity also becomes a bottleneck when any change is required. It is rarely as agile as other smaller solutions that can quickly be customized. CIOs have had difficult discussions on this aspect with Business and Vendor alike. The monolithic nature of the solutions indeed poses a challenge. Not that there are too many options, so the technology ecosystem has created multiple layers to manage the agility requirements.

Grudging acknowledgements later, both glared at me as if to validate their arguments and then turned back to each other. Before they could continue, I pitched in with thoughts on the new opportunity that has everyone confused and wondering with benefit statements ranging from better ROI to TCO, time to market, productivity, and the panacea to all ills that face every enterprise that uses technology.

This brought a smile to the face of the second CEO who began to lecture on the future being cloudy and why current IT models will no longer survive. He elucidated the benefits of the new disruptive paradigm the Cloud is and why enterprises should be embracing this. Now the other looked imploringly at me to help him and I could not refuse the request. After all I had broached the subject so I had to provide a perspective.

Differing flavours of clouds offer different value propositions; the viewpoint put across by the CEO related to Application and Software as a Service. Both offer an easy way to deploy and get started on any new business area or process. The most widely accepted scenarios are sales force automation and collaboration; for SME the benefit is limited upfront investments and no worries about managing complex technology. Beyond these mainstream business process remain firmly grounded in corporate data centres.

Irrespective of their physical location, the big ERP remains the same animal, big monolithic and complex. Separating processes like sales force or collaboration (read email, chat, etc.) does not in any way create an opportunity for agile business process alignment for the rest of the enterprise. In fact with the cloud, the base expectation is that business processes are standard and can thus be uniform across multiple companies. Clouds provide faster start points, but the change ability remains similarly constrained. A question from the audience inquired about ROI models for evaluating Clouds; that is another story for another day.

The two CEOs representing a large business house and a leading global ERP vendor acknowledged the reality and it was time to move on. The CEOs and CIOs listening to the interaction went away with both sides of the coin clear (?) to create their own agenda and discussion in their enterprises.