CIO

The challenge for 2011

Now More Than Ever IT Leaders Need To Drive Change. Enter 2011 and most, if not all, IT Leaders will bear the scars of the recessionary battering of the last few years. The role of the CIO and the role of the IT function are evolving. Directors and senior managers are looking more and more at the pivotal role that IT has to play to enable growth and reduce costs within the business. This evolution is unlike anything IT Leaders have experienced in the past. Weathering the current storm will require IT Leaders to support new business processes that increase profits and enhance revenue, whilst controlling their own costs and improving their own performance.

IT Department Improvement Is Required. In this new environment all the old challenges still remain: strategic alignment, governance, performance and operational risk. However a critical need is to create a “no surprises culture” where the current often “exciting and bumpy” IT delivery ride becomes the exception not the norm. However, there are serious doubts that IT departments can make the necessary changes to deliver on this promise. A recent study by Forrester Research highlighted that: only 28% of CEO’s characterised IT as offering proactive leadership; 34% portrayed IT’s role as poor or mediocre and 24% characterised IT as innovating only when under pressure (Source: Closing the CEO-CIO Gap, Forrester Research).

IT Success Delivers Real Business Benefits. Over recent years it has also become increasingly apparent that IT Leaders can make a serious contribution to the good health of a business. This has ensured that the market imperative for pursuing improvement is very strong. A study by Keystone Strategy, Harvard Business School and Microsoft found that companies with superior IT grew faster than their peers.

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Productivity Improvement and Risk Reduction Are Immediate Goals. Concentrating on cost alone will not deliver better performance. Providing a sub-optimal service for less will increase organisational stress with no extra end-user benefit. Achieving more but without having to demand more is the new focus. In this environment increasing the rate at which work is delivered on time and on budget, ensuring that there are no material service disruptions or critical outages and increasing the speed that new business requirements can be sustained are all very immediate goals for every IT function.

Beating This Challenge Is Possible. British Telecom Defence Fixed Telecommunications Service (BT DFTS) focused their IT improvement journey on creating a culture of rigorous and disciplined execution and this transformed their operational capability. Within a 12 month period they were delivering 60% more change whilst increasing customer satisfaction by 30% with 22% less staff. (Source: The DFTS journey 1 year on, BT DFTS). In recent years Accenture have also transformed their own systems delivery capability by championing the use of software engineering best practices and rigorous operational discipline to improve predictability and reduce project failure costs. Over a 24 month period predictability improved by over 200%, poor delivery costs were reduced by nearly a third and the number of large unpredicted failures shrunk to almost zero.

The Prize Is Worth Fighting For. Delivering this level of transformational improvement is a step change event that systemically and enduringly improves the performance of IT. It is atypical of the change projects that are generally run and success requires strong and consistent leadership, alignment with strategic goals and a clear business case. The gains that can be achieved by this in the real world are impressive. The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute collates results for organisations who have really applied this focus on rigour and discipline to improve performance. Across a portfolio of validated programmes they found that this approach realised significant beneficial business outcomes:

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(Source: Performance results of CMMI base process improvement)

You Don’t Have To Relearn And Reinvent How To Do This. “Achieving more but without having to demand more” and “no more surprises” are tough calls to make however here at Lamri we’ve seen up close how world class organisations do this. We know how to make this change happen and have deep experience of working with our clients to turn these aspirations into reality. We know how difficult it can be to even get started, the challenge of getting practitioners and project managers engaged in wanting to change what they do and how they do it, the struggle to get meaningful cost, schedule and defect data and the barriers that need to be overcome in order to calibrate exactly how much progress is being made and to know how far there is still to go.

Call us to find out how we can help you achieve a transformation in your performance or visit our Services page

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