Are custom solutions really a viable option in the current state of IT applications ?

Being a market leader has its advantages; you can get away with a lot of things, customers tolerate a lot more than they would with startups or mid players. The market looks up to you for direction and whatever you do gets imitated quickly. Even if you are not innovating or creating new products, your copy outsells others by virtue of base effect. After all reaching the pinnacle of success and building a reputation takes a lot of effort and you have to do the business better than everyone else in the same business.

That is how it appears from outside to the external world and to a large extent from within to partners, employees and customers; because most of them don’t get to see the machinery that runs the business. In the background the robust technology solutions keep the business running with every transaction for every customer across products, geographies and hype waves that keep appearing with regular frequency. Inefficiencies if any surface as customer incidents and get addressed efficiently.

When news emerged that a top 5 leading global company wanted to engage domain and technology experts for their planned technology refresh, it was big news in the consulting industry. Everyone who had any experience in the industry wanted to pitch for the business, at least part of it if possible. It was well known that the company had a collection of all kinds of technologies somehow intertwined and operating together; being early adopters during the mainframe days, they had custom developed everything they used, well almost !

With the evolving software solution market, many younger and smaller competitors had embraced the COTS world (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) and successfully keep moving ahead of the technology curve. Thus they enjoyed the benefits of automation with faster and cheaper processes which did give them the advantage of being able to react fast to market. On the other hand, the company continued to stay with their legacy bespoke solutions serviced by a large contingent of people who had spent decades in the company.

Innovative products by the leader were quickly copied by the nimble with a technology edge; the reverse too happened fairly quickly which belied imagination of the market considering the size of the company. It was fairly evident that custom tech solutions did not slow down the leader. People poached by competitors talked about tight alignment of objectives between business and IT as the secret sauce; legendary leadership and culture had sustained the business through difficult and good times.

A century of existence ensured they were miles ahead of their nearest competitor, but the gap was slowly and surely being bridged. Retirement of first and second generation of IT leadership brought some doubts about sustaining continued success. The next generation technology leaders had grown with COTS and found it challenging to continue the existing paradigm. Since the company had gained leadership position and sustained it well, and status quo was not an option, they approached the predicament with kid’s gloves.

And that is how the market went abuzz with an opportunity that sought qualified expert opinions on the future path. Should they move to a COTS model ? Sustain their existing seemingly crumbling monolithic yet fragmented solution ? Rebuild a replacement solution ground up with the experience and domain expertise within, or take a hybrid approach with parts of the legacy being chipped off and replaced with COTS ? And there was the Cloud and what not to consider in their new reference architecture.

Debates grew with every consulting company worth a name throwing their hat into the ring; some approaching the situation directly with the new IT leadership, few used Board level contacts and many pitched to different parts of the business; each had an opinion and pushed a viewpoint based on their frame of reference and comfort. Consensus eluded them with the landscape confusing them even more than where they began from; finally they decided to engage a few individual experts and go at it themselves.

My view: re-architect with best of breed COTS, prioritize investments and set a stretch timeline. Involve people across layers, make sure that quantum of change and potential disruption is known upfront. Execute with chip and consolidate actions while leveraging core domain expertise that runs the business. That part of legacy would be the last piece to change. COTS offers one key advantage that the solution becomes people agnostic, which custom solutions don’t. So the journey moves from legacy to hybrid to COTS.

If you were the CIO or Advisor, which approach would you choose ? How would you strategize ? 

Graduating from a good Manager to a good Leader

There is always the excitement in moving up the ladder, moving to the corner office, getting a C role and title, professional and personal achievement of making the grade. In recent times there have been many first timers getting there with the earlier guard making way by virtue of retirement after a full term or decision to get off the treadmill and focusing on life. Both way the new bunch is full of excitement, charged up and raring to prove their mettle in the cutthroat corporate world of one-upmanship.

Newbies start with a lot of enthusiasm and desire to make a quick impact with low hanging fruits. They push hard at times exposing their naivety while go soft in situations where they could have gotten away. Balance comes to them over a period of getting tossed around while they understand the group dynamics and their impact on the team where they are a new entrant. Most of the older folks are happy to help, coach, mentor, be a buddy should the newbie approach them with due humility of inexperience.

For first-timers, survival in the management group comes relatively easily in comparison to own team especially if the person has come from outside and even more so if team members have had long tenures. Teams can be visibly hostile to the newcomer if internal candidature was ignored though deemed adequate. Such was the situation of the bewildered newbie CIO who approached me for help to get the team to start cooperating and listening to him; even after spending seven months, he was struggling.

He had a good track record as a Project Manager who had managed and successfully delivered complex cross-functional projects. Over a dozen years of work experience demonstrated growth path and ability as he had climbed the ladder to start knocking the door aspiring for the corner office. At his last workplace, he was part of the team that managed an outsourcing contract playing an important role. Overall his resume stacked up on the capabilities required and thus he was hired as the CIO.

Settling down within few weeks, he took some time to understand the business which was new to him; his team was a mix of old and new with a couple having long tenures. Not that any of them would have made the cut, they recognized their limitations for the role they did not get. They found the CIO unsure of himself but easy going and good to get along with. He had played roles similar to themselves until he came on board – excited and wanting to prove himself with all the knowledge he had gathered by association to his CIO.

So he talked big words, Governance Risk & Compliance, IT Maturity Model, Economic Value Add, a language that was alien to the team. His reporting manager took kindly to the young star who he had hired, indulging him in his use of jargon waiting for him to start creating change. Discussions with the new CIO were interestingly filled with possibilities which could have created better outcomes than what the business had experienced thus far. The team however did not know what is that they needed to do differently.

As time passed by, review meetings had better information on progress than observed before, the CIO was a good communicator and spoke with fair conviction. His team continued to toil as usual waiting for some of the new initiatives to take off. They wanted their situation to change, they wanted the respect of the business; they wanted to explore the technology landscape to create better solutions for the business. They did not see any path breaking ideas that they were expecting from their new leader.

With better reports creating visibility on IT activity and projects, he was seen as a good manager who was able to keep the team focused on the tasks at hand improving delivery timelines to some extent, while adding resources to increase the speed of delivery. His persona was efficient, articulate, but someone who had not been able to charge the team to leap forth beyond incremental efficiency. The business needed a different level of leadership that was invisible thus far, the team wanted a leader to lead the way, not a better manager.

With the team, building trust is the foremost task for a leader; the team needs to share the vision and believe in their leader to themselves leapfrog performance to the next level. For the leader it is important to approach the team with an open attitude, listening skills, and empathy. Teams are ready to follow the leader in adversity spurred by a dream and nothing else. The transition from Manager to Leader happens for few, the rest continue to partake a journey that keeps them wedded to acceptable performance.