Being a Guerrilla CIO means you are focused on striking a balance between agility and innovation, reusing available resources and technology, to avoid unwieldy procurements and their associated risks. As the economy continues to sputter along and IT budgets are still tight, The Guerrilla CIO must allow the delivery of quick wins to the business which can make a real competitive difference in organizations.

All CIOs today are driven by a cost-reduction mantra; many of us have been focusing our organization on a set of core services and then optimizing them, either by strategic sourcing or by reengineering to make them as efficient as possible. Managing our IT project portfolio and helping the business improve processes and enable growth or efficiency through strategic use of IT has always and will always be a CIO’s main objective.

2011 has been an average year. The economy is still sputtering along and budgets are still lean. I have been a good CIO this year and have met my budgets and finished all my projects.

I have tried to be really good by being the best CIO I can. So Santa, this year, I would like the following:

•  A low-cost cloud service solution that can be secure with a SLA that I can work with.
• How to get my data to provide accurate business intelligence and analytics.
• A migration plan to Windows 7. It is time we move away from Windows XP. Really it is time.
• Applications that can be deployed to mobile devices. These iPads are popping up everywhere.
• More Siri voice activated devices. I love having conversations with electronic devices.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – #1 game of the year.
• A lower golf handicap. Okay maybe you cannot help with that, so throw a few lessons in my stocking.

 Thanks Santa and Merry Christmas.

P.S. I left cookies and milk for you on the SAN. Please help yourself but please don’t drop any crumbs. The server manager hates picking up crumbs off the array.

All companies face the challenge of ‘knowing’ what information it holds and of being able to access that same information instantly. Organizationally, a company holds this knowledge information in three forms:

• Paper – Traditional Information
• Electronic – Modern Information
• Tacit – Employee Knowledge

A successful electronic document management (EDM) solution must handle the management of these three information types and provide mechanisms for relevant delivery to all staff.

Whether today or tomorrow, it is clear that a company must use a document management system to remain competitive. Paper is the largest ‘database’ within a company  and the most difficult to access and an EDM solution is necessary to manage and access information held in paper form.

What are the typical comments about EDM?

1. It is slow (perceived or realistic)
2. Putting documents into EDM is cumbersome
3. There is duplication of work
4. It is not available when I need it
5. I cannot find things when I need it

There are several components required for a successful installation of an EDM:

Ownership

EDM is an enterprise-wide application. How can you say you have EDM if it is only installed in one or two parts of an organization on a small percentage of desktops? An agreement to install EDM company-wide requires ‘ownership’ of the project at the highest levels. A president or EVP has to say, “Let’s do this!” This same senior executive then has to declare ownership and direct the project through to its conclusion.

Leadership

The Executive owner will not have time to be the day to day leader of the project. This requires someone senior and knowledgeable and reporting directly to the Executive owner. This is a full time position; don’t kid yourselves that an already busy executive or manager can handle this as well as his/her other duties and responsibilities.

Adoption of EDM system will never get off the ground if it does not have executive support. Enlist the support of a key executive who understands the advantages of the system, and champion it not only to staff members, but also to other members an executive team. Executive buy-in will be essential in many ways. Not only will this encourage buy-in, but it will also encourage a smoother implementation by having executive support for gathering inter-departmental information. The executive should be able to lead a multi-departmental committee, which will be charged with gathering all of the appropriate information from each department or business unit. Having a committee made up of all stakeholder business units will serve the purpose of making sure the needs of each department is considered in the implementation—which will also lessen the likelihood that the system will be ignored.

Change in Culture

Most people do not like change. The first and major change is to make everyone realize that everything ‘at work’ is the property of the company, not the individual employee. There has to be a change in culture.

The change in culture takes time and has to be ‘sold’. You have to explain to each and every employee what you are doing and why you are doing it and what the benefits are to the employees. You must not keep it in secret and not try to ‘force’ it onto our workforce.

A culture change takes time and not every employee will be won over and not every employee will be cooperative. You must be prepared for this; and be happy with a 90%-95% acceptance.

However, you can lessen the pain of this cultural change by making the actual implementation and operation of EDM as non-intrusive and as easy as possible to use. A successful EDM implementation should bring significant productivity gains; not productivity losses. Employees are not stupid; if they find their normal work taking more time rather than less time after the EDM implementation you are in trouble.

Other reasons for non-use may be resistance to changes in business processes, perceived inefficiencies, or the simple occurrence of the “we’ve always done it this way” syndrome. All these issues can be easily overcome with open dialogue and transparency.

Get Employee Buy-In

Getting employees to buy into using our EDM system does not begin and end with writing a policy and sending out a memo. It starts with getting key staff members from each stakeholder area involved in the process. The creation, routing, and approval of documents involve key processes that these people know best, and the EDM system will impose some changes in those processes. There is bound to be resistance and possibly some resentment, especially if changes are made without their input. Seeking input from employees ultimately serves two purposes: (1) it lessens the likelihood of resistance and resentment, while (2) allowing management to get valuable insight into the processes that they are going to or need to change.

The process of seeking input from employees involved in document creation will also help to improve business processes involved in content creation—these processes are seldom improved with top-down renovation alone. In addition, the gathering input will give management an opportunity to find out what key objections are likely to occur before they become a problem.

Project Plan

Without a clearly developed project plan you will never know when you are going wrong.  This plan must be flexible; it is supposed to change as you progress and learn and react to feedback from employees. Without a plan there is no clear path of what you are changing or measurement of these changes. Without a detailed project plan you will not be able to quantify and qualify our success and/or failures.

Understanding Current Processes

Every department is a snowflake in that it is unique. This frequently comes up in the form “our department is unique in the way we work.” In a literal sense, this is of course true – every process has tweaks and details that are unique. However, underlying this uniqueness there are structures, typical patterns and categories that, when understood, make it easier to get to the final “tweaking point” needed to round out a good installation. Implementing EDM will serve as a starting point to reexamine our past practices that may have grown organically and been reactive and to make them more efficient.

To be successful in implementation you need to understand:

• How you currently work
• How you want to work
• What standards and procedures you currently have
• How those standards and procedures will need to change (e.g., email policy)
• What information you currently have (or think you have)
• What information you plan to have after a successful implementation
• What you plan to ‘convert’ and how you plan to ‘convert’ existing information
• How many people need training and the types of training required

An EDM system is more than just storing paper electronically. It is about improving process and you cannot do this unless you understand these processes. You must find documents and follow it through the organization. Storing is the first step but you must also make sure that information gets transmitted to the right people.

All of the above require someone (suitably qualified) working full time to investigate, document, present and eventually, gain agreement on.

Start Small

Don’t try to eliminate all paper in one fell swoop. You must pick processes or groups of processes and digitize them one by one. Map a process; implement the system and then move on to the next process. This will help us focus on adoption in smaller bits. It will also allow you to perform a ‘lesson’s learned’. This is a tedious process but necessary to gain buy in and understand how to move forward.

Remain consistent

People do not like to change. When implemented, EDM will take longer to electronically file a document than it does to print it and file it on a network drive. That is true because you are capturing more information but this extra work on the front end will help save time later in retrieving documents and will speed up key processes. You must explain the benefits clearly and keep on top of people to make sure they follow the new procedure. Starting small will help you do this. Keeping procedure to a minimum upfront will allow staff to adopt the system.

Training

You will not be successful unless you train your employees; it is major part of changing the culture and of the selling process.

In the process of “hand crafting” ways to keep track of documents in the past, users will inevitably have created procedures for naming and storing documents that may have been useful to specific individual users or jobs, but are either not necessary, inefficient, or even counterproductive in the context of an EDM system. In addition, most employees do not get the most power out of the program’s capabilities. As with any other program, adequate training can multiply the effectiveness of a document management system many times.

Follow-up

Follow-up is as important as the initial training. One of the problems with a rollout is that after the initial training, employees got “up to speed” and were able to do their basic work. However, very rapidly, the minimum they need to know to get their work done becomes the maximum they actually do know. And over time, that knowledge tends to shrink due to natural entropy (the tendency of any system or body of knowledge to deteriorate without outside input). Most employees do not explore further, increase their knowledge or find better ways to do things. There are two kinds of follow-up that I recommend.

First, after the initial rollout and training, circulate items from a “Tips and Tricks” list via email about two or three times a week for a month or two. This has two functions:

• First, it reminds staffs of things they may have heard during training but forgotten. It tends to both reinforce training and expand their knowledge at an early stage (it is much more difficult later on).
• Second, it encourages them to believe that people are paying attention, willing to address issues, etc. It encourages users to ask more questions and helps fight passivity.

The second is to sponsor “brown bag lunches” on an ongoing basis, perhaps every three or six months, where particular topic or topics are explored. Again, this serves to reinforce and expand knowledge, and because one person’s question will have actually occurred to several people, you get a reinforcement effect that tends to expand staffs’ knowledge and help keep all  users on the same page.

An EDM is not going to automatically take your operation to the next level but if you use the tool correctly you will see strong incremental improvements that will cut cost and speed decision making.

This season, as short as it was with rain and the early snow in New York, I made an effort to become better at golf. I tried and tried to get my handicap from 25 to around 20. It does not sound like it would be that hard but it was. It was a goal I did not achieve. It was difficult.

Much to my wife’s dismay, I am a weekend golfer-actually a Saturday morning golfer. I play with a group of guys of varying handicaps and ages. We all struggle to form a complete game. There are some days when our game is on point and others when we can’t get the ball off the tee box. Three putting is the norm and a birdie is something we just dream about. Days I think all amateur golfers struggle with. This is the reason why we are not making money doing this professionally.

To people who never played the game (and those that do play); golf does not make any sense.  That maybe the beauty of the whole thing. You take the club back and go smashing at a small white dimpled ball that could literally do just about anything. Your scores are never the same. Every hole  is played differently. Some days, there are no words to really describe what just happened. I have learned not to thrash at the ball to get it to go further but it is hard when you are playing with guys who effortlessly can hit it 200 yards. Consistency is king in golf and Ican never do the same thing twice even though it seems it should be simple.

What is the fascination with hitting this little ball around some of the most beautiful manicured lawns in the country? For me, it is a game played with myself and to try and beat myself. Can I beat my past score? Can I repeat my swing to be consistent? Deep down I do have a game or at least pieces of something. I feel the need to challenge myself and be the best at what I do. Golf is something I am not good at and therefore I have that fire buring inside to master it. And maybe that is the appeal of the sport. We will never be good at it but we strive to attain perfection.

My goal next year is to try and put all the pieces together and be more consistent. I learned this season it is not how far you can hit the ball but how many times that really matters. I am going to play within my boundaries and strengths of an easy gentle swing where control and repeatability is more important than if I can smash it 200 yards.

I am looking forward to the 2012 season…

When pitching IT solutions, do not take a technical approach. Leave the technological advantages for last and only after you have captured the attention and interest in your money and resource saving IT virtual solutions. Make the following three points when explaining your ideas.

1- Savings Over Time. Present factors that can ultimately lead to big savings on capital expenditures on hardware/software showing that purchasing fewer systems will improve the bottom line.

2- Time Savings. The idea will lead to more time spent on critical projects that add value and dollars to the bottom line. This free time can be spent on strategy planning and moving the enterprise to a higher operating plane.

3- Increase Performance. Performance can be improved without having to buy more keeping a tight budget.

Back up all the above with KPIs. Hard graphical data trending over time always captures everyone’s attention. It is hard to dispute the cold reality of numbers.

I have been to cities all over the world but I consider New York home. There is an electricity that resonates from it and an excitement when you are in it.

I am a born and bred New Yorker. Born in Brooklyn, grew up in the burbs, worked in the city my entire professional career. There is more to being a New York CIO then knowing the best pizza joints or being able to curse like it is my first language.

Being a New York CIO means having to hustle every day.  New York CIOs are always on the go. Rushing from meeting to meeting; doing things at 100mph. There is no slow pace for us. We operate at light speed. We talk fast, think fast, work fast. Anything less and we are left behind. We are product of the environment we work in and live it. A city that is always on – 24×7. Going from uptown to downtown in a blink of an eye.

We are the CIOs that have survived blackouts, blizzards, protests, strikes of varying sorts and 9/11.  We tend to walk around with a little more gusto than those who have not experienced such events and can brag how we got through it. We wrote the book on disaster planning .

It is true, if you can make it here you really can make it anywhere….

Financial Management:

• Percent of IT cost vs. total revenue of the
  organization
• Percent of keeping the lights on cost compared
  to the total IT cost
• Dollars saved due to productivity improvement
  initiatives
• Average seat/resource cost trending over (Month
  to Month)(Quarter on Quarter)(Year to Year)
• Actual spend vs. budget (Month to Month)(Quarter
  on Quarter)(Year to Year)

Project Performance:

• Percent of projects completed within schedule
  and budget
• Percent of projects exceeded their original
  schedule and/or budget by xx % (we use 10%)
• Percent of project time consumed by rework due
  to defect fixes and scope changes
• Number of known defects released to production
• Percent of projects initiated without an
  approved business case

Operations Management:

• Business critical system/application uptime
• Average turnaround time for fixing production
  incidents
• Number of production incidents by severity
• Percent of service requests/tickets closed
  within the SLAs
• Average time to resolution for service tickets
• Business time lost due to unscheduled downtime

Information Security:

• Number of security breaches/incidents in systems
  and infrastructure
• Percent of systems/applications compliant to
  security policies/standards
• Percent of security patches applied within
  timelines/deadlines

The above KPIs have been graphed in Excel using the raw data collected. Again I track on a weekly basis which make it easy to slice and dice the data when asked. We have now started the process of incorporating this information into a dashboard format. We are using a product from iDashboard to help convert this data. It is recommended that a developer be involved to write scripts to interpret this data. Taking raw Excel data and importing in iDashboards was not clean and required additional coding. The end result will be to see this information in a clean graphical format wit the push of a button.

Is getting a job through your father’s influence “wrong”? Is the best way to open doors is through your father’s name? I am not sure. Over the years I have heard others using their father’s name to open doors that would not be open to others through normal means.

I never had such opportunities. I say this with a hint of jealously as I write this post. I wish I could say my career had been boosted by parental connections obtained on the 17th hole. Who knows where my career would be. Both my parents were working class who had very few friends that also struggled. So hitting them up for a job for their son was the last thing my parents had on their mind.

If the IT department is running off doing their own thing I think that is a failure of management to provide oversight and guidance. This implies other issues within the organization.

Why is there this stigma that IT is off doing its own thing? We “keep the lights on” so the business can perform the act of doing, well, business.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/articles/yshoppingarticles/648/100-things-your-kids-may-never-know-about/

Available does not equal best by Eric D. Brown

Transitioning IT from a technical focus to a business focus by IT BS Watch

How to Kill Projects and Develop Agile Programs Part 1 by Isaac Sacolick

Free Answers From Google On How CIOs Can Be Better Managers  by Jim Anderson

First day on the job as the new CIO you notice 3 envelopes in the top drawer of your desk. The first envelope says “Open Me.” Inside is a note from your predecessor that provides insight on the organization, issues, culture, concerns, etc. You read it, throw it in the trash and go about your business as the new CIO. A year later you’re not happy with the progress of the organization and you remember the second envelope that says “Open me if you are not happy with the way things are going.” You open it and a single word is written on a piece of paper; “Reorganize.” You take the advice this time and spend several months forming teams and reorganizing hoping to get results linked to the business. You call it “IT Transformation.” Another year goes by and things are marginally improving but you are still unhappy with the results. The business is unhappy with IT and the CEO is unhappy due to growing costs. You notice the third envelope that says “Open me if things still are not the way you would like them.” You open it and it says; “Create 3 envelopes.”

The moral of the story is to not get hung up on big transformation projects and reorganization to create yet another organization that is not functional. Make changes in small, manageable pieces and make sure any change is linked to improving the business of IT or the business of your company.