Remembrance Week – Wednesday Nov 11, 2009

 personal  No Responses »
Nov 112009
 

Last year, I wrote about the special debt I feel to Canadian soldiers that defended my birthplace – Hong Kong.  I found more information about the Canadian troops who defended Hong Kong at the Veterans Affairs Canada website.

This year I would like to pay tribute to Company Sergeant Major John Robert Osborne, 1st Battalion The Winnipeg Grenadiers – awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.  His story and Victoria Cross citation can be read here.  Sgt Major Osborn was the first Canadian to be awarded the Victoria Cross and 1 of 16 awarded in the Second World War. His bravery and selfless sacrifice symbolizes the Canadian spirit.  Here is the ending quote of his citation:

Company Sergeant-Major Osborn was an inspiring example to all throughout the defence which he assisted so magnificently in maintaining against an overwhelming enemy force for over eight and a half hours, and in his death he displayed the highest quality of heroism and self-sacrifice.

For more about the defense of Hong Kong, please go to the Veterans Affairs Canada website – Canadians in Hong Kong.

I am thankful to Sgt Major Osborne and his comrades for their sacrifice and I am proud to be Canadian. If you can please take time to spend 2 minutes of silence at 11am wherever you are.

Lest we forget. 

Driving IT Value Realization: The Marketing of IT – Review

 it service management, leadership, management  No Responses »
Nov 092009
 

Last Thursday Nov 6, 2009, I spent a valuable day at the Forrester Western Canadian IT Summit.  The day began and ended with  keynotes and in between there were 3 breakout tracks – CIO, EA and IT Ops.  This post covers a keynote by Bobby Cameron on Marketing IT.  I will write a separate post on Jeff Scott’s (@logicalleap) two sessions.

Morning Keynote – Driving IT Realization: The Marketing of IT – Bobby Cameron, VP and Principal Analyst, Serving CIOs

Here is my summary of Bobby’s presentation highlighting the 3 key points:

1. What key factors improve the perception that the IT organization is aligned to the business?

Bobby provided 3 pieces of research  and a summary of key factors that keep IT a cost centre.

First, “CEOs – 75% are happy with IT overall – but they don’t expect IT to deliver much“.  IT is not seen by CIO’s as a source of innovation or a source of process improvement. We even struggle being seen as capable of managing the people and assets under our control. (Me: we do not have the reliability of a utility yet)

Second, “Business’ perception: Quality of IT’s support doesn’t match importance“.  While the business recognizes that IT is important to reduce costs, improve productivity, acquiring and retaining customers, driving innovation, managing customer relations and re-engineering core processes, their perception is that IT only delivers on these half the time. (Me: putting methodologies like Enterprise Architecture, IT Service Management and Project/Program/Portfolio Management in place helps)

Third, “A more positive view of IT begins with IT doing its job well …“.  Bobby provided a list of changes that contributed to a more positive view of IT like reliability of systems, consistency and quality of IT processes, improved execution of major enterprise projects, etc. (Me:  see my comment above as well as putting a focus on managing complexity)

Bobby’s conclusion was that “Poor communications keeps IT a cost centre“.  If we do not address the following, it is hard to become a trusted supplier or a partner player.

  • making invisible contributions
  • perceived as late and over budget
  • seen as a utility and not a partner
  • only a good as its last failure  (Me: this is really tough for us in IT because no one has created failure proof technology)

2. How can IT leadership become intentional about pursuing this improved perception?  Read more...

IT Complexity Exploration

 enterprise architecture, strategic planning  No Responses »
Nov 062009
 

I had a great phone call with Roger Sessions (@RSessions), CTO ObjectWatch a month ago about IT Complexity.  Over the past few weeks, I got a chance to read about Roger’s approach Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP) in a series of white papers:

Some key points that resonated with me:

  1. Autonomous Business Capabilities (ABC)
  2. Mathematical Basis for Understanding Complexity

Years ago, we used a simplified model to articulate why we needed to build our Enterprise Architecture practice.  The central premise of the argument was that as functionality increases so does complexity.  We proposed using IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture to manage complexity.  See the slides here.

Roger has published a new white paper – The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity on October 22, 2009.  The main sections of the paper are:

  • The Coming IT Meltdown – calculating the costs
  • Cause of Failure – measuring IT complexity
  • Designing Simpler IT Systems
  • Impediments to Simplicity
  • Call to Action

Here is a part of the section on calculating the cost of IT failures from page 5 from Roger’s paper.

Calculating the Cost of IT Failure

To find the predicted cost of annual IT failure, we then multiply these numbers together: .0275 (fraction of GDP on IT) X .66 (fraction of IT at risk) X .65 (failure rate of at risk projects) X 7.5 (indirect costs) = .089. To predict the cost of IT failure on any country, multiply its GDP by .089.

The following table performs this calculation of various regions of the world.
Region                GDP*               Cost of Failure*
World                69,800.00           6,180.48
USA                    13,840.00           1,225.47
New Zealand            44.00                    3.90
UK                         2,260.00               200.11
Texas                   1,250.00                110.68
Canada                1.564.00                 125.00 <– I added Canada – my country

*USD Billions
Table 1. Predicted Annual Cost of IT Failure

Next, Roger explores reasons for IT failures.  Some suggested causes where poor communications between IT and the business and the increase on functionality but neither match the increase in IT failures. Roger introduces complexity as the issue and uses Glass’ Law which describes functionality as indirectly related to complexity.  A 25% increase in functionality results in a 100% increase in complexity.  Here are the 3 main points:  Read more...

  • complexity increases with functionality
  • complexity decreases with partitioning
  • complexity increases with system connections
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