Interesting thread at Slashdot, based on a vacuous article about why CIOs don’t become CEOs.

Here is my comment as I posted it:

I found May’s utterances utterly superficial and very old-fashioned. First of all, though not many CEOs come from the post as CIO, many top executives have had a stint in the IT part of the organization, learning about what the technology does and how to think about the company as a value producing system. As for the use of Peters and Waterman’s book as a sort of criteria for what constitutes a good CEO, that is laughable – the book refers to companies, not CEOs. And it has been utterly debunked many times.

May’s article would have been right on about 10 years ago. Back then, the reason CIOs did not make it into the top spot (in fact, 40% of CIOs were fired, and the average tenure was about 2.3 years) was because they did not understand that the skills that got you into the top IT position were not the skills that would keep you there.

In CSC, we conducted a survey of CIOs in the top 1000 corporations in the world, and got a surprising result: Of the 40% of CIOs that were fired, only a few were fired for "not producing cost-effective IT". The rest went because they could not communicate with the top management group, were ineffective change agents, or could not contribute to business strategy development. In other words, when you are a CIO in a large corporation, you are no longer the IT organization’s representative into top management, but the other way around. If you cannot make the transition to thinking about the whole company as a system, you are toast.

There are actually quite a few companies where technical competence is visible in top management. Royal Bank of Scotland comes to mind, with one of the most effective IT strategies in the world (a central "manufacturing division" handles transactions, IT, HR, and call centers, leaving the branch network – and they have more than 50 brands – to serve customers and grow the business. UPS, Wal-Mart, Amex, Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada, some of the large airlines, Dell, quite a number of telcos, some insurance companies (I particularly like a German one called AMB which runs many insurance companies off the same systems) and many others have top management that understand the impact of IT and think of the whole company as a system. Does that mean that they come from the position as CIO? Not necessarily, though some of them do.

Being a CIO is about information, not IT. For that, you have a CTO or a CIO office that handles the technical pieces. Most of the top CIOs I know worry about the customers and the customer experience. One CIO of a large hotel chain worries about the speed of the in-room Internet connection – and whether the ventilation is good enough that you can shave after taking a shower without the mirror getting fogged up.

IT is a tool. It is an important tool, but it is what it does for the customer that matters. And the role of the IT organization is not to make IT elegant – it is to make business elegant. If the tools happen to be boring and the CIO not very visible – so what?

Just went off the phone from a Concours teleconference with Tom Davenport, Bob Morison and about 50 other participants. The topic was Competing on analytics, which was also the title of a Harvard Business Review article he wrote in January last year, and which forms the basis for a book of the same title coming out soon. Concours is launching a membership program called the Business Analytics Concours (glossy brochure here). The upshot is a revivial and refocus on business analytics. Following a number of examples of companies (in particular the Harrah Casino) that have had success due to their ability to relentlessly analyze and optimize their performance, value offerings and market opportunities.

Tom is an interesting character and a prolific writer on knowledge management, process optimization and knowledge worker productivity.  He outlined how companies that compete on analytics tend to share certain attributes, such as senior management advocacy, an enterprise approach to analysis (rather than letting the thousand analysts bloom), going first deep and then broad, and paying attention to the development of a strong analytical capability.

My role was to comment and to discuss the technology side: While everyone recognizes that competing on analytics is a question of culture, understanding of the business environment and analytical skill and drive, there is a technology side to it as well. What kind of technologies can enable analysis and optimization, what emerging technologies should IT be monitoring and experimenting with in this space, and how would an enterprise architecture for a company with an analytical bent look different from most companies’ architectures today?

Here are my notes:

• the obvious technologies needed are repositories for data, such as data warehouses and datamarts, as well as business intelligence software for analyzing it
• on a more abstract level, we need technologies that allow for rapid collection (most data is out there in digital form, but it needs to be made analyzeable), structuring (hopefully avoiding human intervention in the data cleanup phase, which is costly) and analysis of a wide range of data (which very often turns into experimentation)
• in particular, we need technologies that let peple develop models from operational data, and redo structuring and categorization in a dynamic and shared way (did anyone say wiki?)
• a short-term path to better analytics may be search technology, which gives access to unstructured data, allows joining of many sources, and does not require rearchitecting and a massive job of initial categorization and structuring
• a sizeable investment in data preparation will kill the analytical impulse in its birth
• long-term, there are interesting possibilities in the kind of data exchange protocols visualized by Van Jacobson, i.e. a form of networks that makes data location irrelevant and pathways hidden 
• lastly: We have to realize that this is a cultural, strategic and managerial issue, and that almost any technology can be used in an analytical way. If you are not inclined to analyze your environment, no amount of technology is going to make you do it. In fact, more technology can distance you from the real world, and make you give in to the temptation of letting people have pre-saved spreadsheets and fixed models rather than the ability to analyse
• an ideal would be to have experimental facilities, where things could be sim’ed out, complete with a button labeled "Make it happen".

This looks like an interesting project, because it goes right to the heart of what companies must get better at in a world where information spreads rapidly, imitation is easy, and you compete on your evolving optimization and innovation capabilty rather than invididual technologies or services.

Don McAskill, who runs a photo sharing service called SmugMug, has a very good writeup on how much money his company saves by using Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) rather than running his own storage solution. Aside from the pure economics (including the tax effect of reducing the asset base,) note the organizational focus implications: Since they let Amazon handle the technical details, they can concentrate on development and customer service.

(Via Scoble.) 

Nick Carr has an interesting post about Sun’s new data-center-in-a-container, or trailer park computing, as he calls it. (Sun calls it the Blackbox.) If you have power and electricity, here are up to 245 servers (presumably, Suns running Solaris) and you can have computing on demand in a very literal sense.

I think this is less important as a product than as a physical prototype for services yet to come. There aren’t that many companies that need rent-a-centers for shorter periods, and those who do can probably do much with dynamic server sharing or perhaps farming some of it off to offerings such as Amazon’s S3 service. But the thinking that went into the configuration and customer interface for the computing container will represent a very significant step on the way to IT as utility, delivered through sockets in the wall (or, for that matter, wirelessly.) What is available in hardware will be emulated in software, eventually.

Update: Bob Cringely has some good comments and the history of how Sun was started. He thinks there is a market for a couple hundred of these boxes, Sneakernet fashion.

Spaf has a good argument for why we ended up with the dreaded monthly password change and why it may not be such a good idea in practice.

Security is always dynamic, so I agree. Plus, I hate all these dratted password things for everything. 

Tim O’Reilly and Paul Kedrosky are both pointing to an article in Financial Times about how many private users now have access to much better equipment and services from home than at work, because the IT department has locked down the infrastructure and are slow to upgrade (for very financially sound reasons, I should say.)

This is not new. I remember interviewing IT executives in the late 90s who sheepishly conceded, when I asked them to send me an email, that they had to go home to do that. The corporate email was within-company only (this was a large international oil company).

The job of an IT department is to act as an intermediator between technology and business, and in doing so, it frequently takes on the role of UN soldier – insulating the two sides from each other to keep the peace, in the process inadvertently limiting the degree of interaction and integration between the two.

I think this is a continuing challenge for CIOs – they are expected to be the technology expert, but their day-to-day information needs leeds them away from the rapid and chaotic innovation that happens in the consumer-oriented market. It used to be that the military developed technology, which then companies bought. Then companies drove the evolution, during the mainframe and mini-computer era. With PCs and then with the Internet innovation became first individual and then consumer-oriented. Now the consumer-market drives innovation, and the traditional CIO better take a study tour to the nearest electronics store.

I am just waiting for the first CIO to implement an entire infrastructure on, say, MS Xboxes running Linux. With iPods instead of dictation machines and corporate accounting done in Quicken (don’t laugh, I have seen departmental accounting done that way.) How about corporate email on Gmail, online office solutions, and the corporate web page via Typepad. It is not only possible, it might in fact be the future. As soon as the consumers have been served….

Google Talk. Enough said. How long before we get a Google TalkOut the way Skype has SkypeOut?

The Concours Group runs a semi-monthly teleconference series called the CIO Staff Meeting, where IT management groups can call in and participate in presentation on various topics of interest. One of my rather pleasant duties is to participate in some of these teleconferences, as moderator and “chief inquisitor”.
Yesterday, our guest was Brad Noblet, Director of Computing Technical Services at Dartmouth College. Over the last three years, he has been responsible for implementing a complete renewal of the network services at the college, replacing three old networks (telephony, data and audio/video) with one unified IP infrastructure, both fixed and wireless.

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So, IBM will buy Ascential, presumably to fill out its software range, which has been missing a good ERP suite.
From a purely economic and technical viewpoint, this one does not make sense. IBM is a company which has as a strategy that they will do anything that creates value for the customer (which really isn’t a strategy according to Porter’s definiton, but IBM might be the only company in the enterprise space that still could make this claim and sound believable.) If the company sticks to anything, it is that they believe in open standards and modularism, as evidenced in their heavy support for Linux, Java, XML and other open standards.
Which begs the question – if your future direction is all about open standards, you really shouldn’t need to own companies and software like Ascential, you could just work with whatever comes down the pipeline and publishes to the right standards. You could have a partnership, recommend Ascential because your salesforcre knew it, but really let the customers decide.
So, I guess the interesting question is what IBM will do with Ascential’s stuff once they own it? Will they reengineer it to become thoroughly open standard and pull the same trick on SAP as they pulled on Microsoft (that is, make the software (which IBM can’t sell anyway) available for free and make their money on modifications, operation and perhaps added hardware sales?)
If that is in the offing, we can look forward to some really interesting years ahead, with competition heating up and utility computing perhaps really happening at last.

Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield has an excellent point in his reflections on Disney’s use of collaborative software – essentially, don’t start it as a separate piece of software, just do it. In this case by sneaking in Newsgator in people’s email programs and not telling them that they really are using RSS feeds.

I can feel an acronym coming: Keep It So Simple Users Participate Thinking Only They Have Emailed Many – or KISSUPTOTHEM™.
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