Ignite Lab

It’s customary at this time of year for the media commentators to do one of two things:

• A retrospective on what 2010 brought – the events, mishaps and surprises.
• A look forward to 2011 – predictions and forecasts of what will take the world by storm and what, specifically, CIOs will need to be able to grapple with.

We’re well into 2011 now, so here’s our take on what we think the year has in store for senior IT executives, but with a twist.  We aren’t technologists; our focus is on what it takes to extract value from technology , and what we believe 2011 will bring is an increasingly loud and clear call for CIOs to go beyond project delivery and ‘keeping the lights on’ – into the whole arena of business value.  We see more and more evidence that senior management teams are waking up to the fact that delivering technology projects to time and budget is only part of the story.  More and more emphasis is rightly being placed on what you need to do to get value from the system long after the project team has gone away.

Will your IT team surprise you this year?

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This is a paper that formed the basis for a presentation given by Ignite director Tim Connolly at the IBC Media Convention in Amsterdam in September 2010. 

It would be easy to start this session on a downbeat note.  If managing change around new technology and workflow were easy, we wouldn’t be talking about it this afternoon.  I could easily start with a depressing list of what often goes wrong … and I will do that in a minute, although I shall try to do it in a positive and uplifting way.  But instead let’s start with the good news.  As a race, we humans are brilliant at adapting and responding to new technology.  We do it all the time.  Look around you, look at every aspect of your life.  We travel, communicate, entertain ourselves, feed ourselves, conduct our financial affairs, wash our clothes and dishes, protect our homes, educate our children – I could go on – using technology that has at the very least been transformed many times over in our lifetime and in some cases has enabled us to do things that previous generations would only have dreamed of. Read on →

We’ve previously written about the emergence of the technology function from the back office and how IT teams are increasingly playing their rightful role in leading and enabling new business models.  Clearly, the role of the technology function must have implications for ways of working, skills and performance measures.  But is the core capability so different, whether you are looking for process efficiencies or leading the transformation to updated or new and innovative business models?

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“Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted” (Einstein)

What gets measured gets done, and we recently had a fascinating conversation with the IT Director of a FTSE 100 company on the topic of IT performance measures.  He’d recently worked with business colleagues to come up with more meaningful measures of his own team’s performance.  ‘Availability across 100% of service desk hours’, for example, has been replaced by ‘availability of business analytic reports, on time, in full and accurate’.  It’s not that service desks aren’t important any more, but business analytics have more impact on the success of the business – decision-makers need timely and accurate information against which to plan and deliver business objectives.  It’s putting the information back into IT.

But these are still lagging measures of performance.  What are the leading measures that IT teams need to sign up to?  How can you measure in advance if IT is able to deliver what the business needs?

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They may be busy cutting every major IT project this country ever thought of, but just look at the leadership and sponsorship that oozes out of their every pore.  Forget their politics, they are in this together and are making every effort to take us all with them.

Not so different from what most big (or even small) systems implementations need.  Generally, you see an embattled IT manager busting all he has to meet the deadline, with the business sponsor giving the occasional set-piece motivational speech (or perhaps just an e-mail).  An exaggeration perhaps, but how often do you see business and IT leaders really showing that they share the same ground?  Let’s see what Nick and Dave are doing….

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The world-record breaking tennis match the other day at Wimbledon captured everyone’s imagination – the heroic players and umpire really battled on to the bitter end.  Of course, it’s always been theoretically possible for such a match to happen – but somehow we prefer our sporting events to have a defined end-point.

It’s not so different with technology implementations –the go-live date is nearly always set as the end point of the project, maybe adding on a week or a month to allow for teething troubles.  But when does the benefit from the new system become apparent?  Usually many weeks and months later, when the users have become accustomed to new ways of working and have found their own ways to make improvements on the, often globally-designed, processes.

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‘In the beginning computers were human.  Then they took the shape of metal boxes, filling entire rooms before becoming ever smaller and more widespread.  Now they are evaporating altogether and becoming accessible from anywhere.’ (About as brief a history of computing as anyone can make it, The Economist, 25 October 2008).

It’s hard to know where to start when thinking about the pace and scope of technology innovation.  Every aspect of our lives has been transformed and will be transformed again.  Some of the wildest predictions in the past have proved to be no more than pipedreams whilst others turned out to have understated the change that followed.  Consider these four quotes as examples:

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