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Cheryl Smith
CIO West Jet, CEO emeritus/CIO emeritus McKesson & Keyspan
 
Cheryl’s presentation, The First 90 Days, delivered insight into the process of getting started as a CIO.  She stressed the importance of getting to know your your direct reports and writing down exactly what your boss expects from you.
 
Cheryl emphasized documenting the exact state of your new IT organization before developing a cohesive three-year plan. Her five point baseline included People, Processes, Plan, Budget, and Technology, all the while keeping track of lessons learned along the way.
 
She stressed the importance of staying on the antelope diet!  The analogy of The Lion, the Chipmunk, and the Antelope taught us the lesson that, as “lions”, we must focus on large changes or we will starve to death (eating chipmunks and barely scraping by, rather than thriving on a more robust diet of antelope.)
 
Her 90-day plan outlined the importance of identifying specific destinations (goals) before one embarks upon a journey, carefully quantifying the organization and using the benchmark of hallmark Fortune 100 companies as a comparison.
 
My biggest takeaway was her concept of “IT Big Rules.”  Instead of focusing on a multitude of certifications and a portfolio of best practices and methodologies, Cheryl encouraged the establishment of 7-10 Big Rules that are simple, easily implemented, and quickly incorporated into the organization’s culture.
 
Cheryl is a model leader, imparting both wisdom and experience. Here’s her profile.




Patrick Burton
Director, Enterprise IT, Washington Post Media
 
Patrick’s contribution to the program brought home the importance of technology leaders being involved in the Business, not just leading technology. As the core business of the Washington Post expands into both media and education, their Enterprise IT is growing to meet newly emerging needs.  Patrick led us through the challenges brought-on by his organization’s move into digital media while maintaining a foothold in traditional print publishing.
 
The various strategic considerations of a Buy versus Build media delivery solutions illustrated how valuable an IT organization is to the business they support. He challenged us not only to lead and apply technology well, but also to be fully engaged with the business we support. Of course, his role as Director of IT at a national media organization positions him well to extoll the potential of social media in our interactive world.
 
Patrick articulated the need of our IT organizations to be nimble and fully engaged with the objectives of the business, balancing the support of traditional technology with the need to innovate.
 
Read more about Patrick. 



 
Bruce Barnes
CIO Emeritus -Nationwide Financial Services
 
Vendor management strikes fear in the hearts of most CIOs .  How does one maintain technology standards while encouraging innovation in a large organization?  What order of magnitude cost is reasonable for outsourced services?
 
Bruce skillfully and boldly navigated this “minefield” topic.  From the basics of supplier management strategy, metrics, and supplier relationship initiation and termination, we learned how to extract full value from our supplier community. We leaned that, as more budget is expended through suppliers than internal IT staff, a well-articulated strategy is a must.  
 
It seems that few companies buy against their architecture standards because their standards are not detailed enough to guide buying decisions.  Cowboys (maverick buyers) are expert at circumventing guidelines.
 
Bruce showed us that Vendor Management can be distilled into four primary questions: What do we keep? What do we send elsewhere? If elsewhere, where specifically? How do we manage the whole thing?
 
Bruce told several stories illustrating the value of superior vendor management, encouraging metrics that include outcomes versus deliverables, stressing a win-win with suppliers.  I enjoyed the story of how he negotiated several analyst firms to work together in their agreed to respective strengths to benefit his organization.  No doubt about it, Bruce has demonstrated strengths in vendor management!
 
Read more about Bruce.




Rob Rennie, PhD
VP & CIO Florida State College (FSC), Jacksonville
 
“Next” is the topic and jumping the change curve is the way forward!  As old peaks and we are on the “edge of chaos” the time to catch the new curve is upon us.  Failure to make the transition precipitates an organization’s demise. 
 
Rob’s session made me think of Apple as the untimely death of Steve Jobs has propelled them “Now to Next.”  I will be revisiting this topic in the coming months and years as we watch Apple execute its next curve.
 
Value creation for IT is the execution of leadership and innovation, and Rob’s organization has fully embraced the digital education age, moving toward direct cognitive enhancement.  Rob’s strategic elements focus on experience, opposed to control in an “anything, anywhere, anytime device/platform-agnostic” environment.    
 
I was impressed with FSC’s use of a digital content system enabling a rich collection of online education opportunities.  I see a correlation between online education and the growth of online shopping.  I wonder how brick & mortar schools and stores will ultimately evolve?  If we don’t have stores, we can’t try on clothes and generate demand; so, if we move to online education how will we generate new content?  Will educators take to building their own content and the degree institutions pick them up based upon demand, paying the creators for content?  How will the balance evolve, this too is something of interest to watch.

Some of Rob’s rules were interesting to note, here’s my favorite three:
1.)    Hire for pure intellectual horsepower
2.)    Vacancy more valuable than average employee
3.)    Learn to thrive on chaos

Read more about Rob.

I’ll start with the takeaways from Thornton’s remarks sprinkled between CIO Posse working sessions.  As a Futurist, Thornton maintained relevance to the future and the concepts of collective learning, it’s history and where we are today… “We will always be behind” and the thought that “Tomorrow is going to be crazier than today”.  There is no way to deny our current state… my takeaway is that it is easier to accept our condition and work incrementally toward solutions than think we can gain full control in our rapidly changing IT environment.  Failure to accept some chaos and work toward incremental progress would seem to frustrate and impede progress.  We need our creative minds to solve problems not worry about our inability to control, much the way a believer might access faith instead of fear or hope instead of fatalism.

Curve jumping, the notion that paradigm shifts move us from the progression of one problem solving focus to another.  Whether addressing a technical or leadership challenge it seems we are moving from one curve to the next in succession.  Knowing the historical curves and where we are today help us move more rapidly to the next with creative solutions. Watch Thornton discuss Curve Jumping.

Green IT is intrinsic to new technology, particularly virtualization and more optimized efficiencies as we move toward cloud computing.  This is even more important to military applications where one must bring all power and cooling along.  It was discussed that better instrumentation and network management allows the US military to manage systems remotely, with the savings being greatest in the number of support personnel that are not deployed through better remote management.  Not only does the military have to bring its own power and cooling but huge numbers of contractors, leading to even more support resource requirements.  Imagine if Apollo 13 brought 10,000 support people to the moon with them instead of expertly instrumenting the spacecraft and using experts on Earth to solve complex problems! That is the future potential of enabled Network Centric Warfare.

IT Voting Booth, the concept that IT leaders vote on technology using money as ballots… this seems so simple yet true.

The 43 hour day… multi-tasking we leverage today brings us to a 43 hour day… and it keeps getting longer.

Finally, Thornton’s talk on the planning and objectives of Christopher Columbus’s mission to the New World compared to the CIO’s leadership objectives was not only funny, but true.  None of the stated objectives of the Columbus mission had the requisite resources allocated to its accomplishment.  No diplomats, no businessmen, no soldiers, no priests were on board the ships to accomplish the stated missions… you’ll have to attend a future session to get the full picture.

Stay tuned for a future blog on each of the CIO Posse salient points.

Read more about Thornton May.

His personal story of 9/11 and the lessons learned during the lengthy recovery effort only reinforce the importance of proactive crisis avoidance, sound documentation practices, and a holistic approach to IT Management. Detailing the creation of the Command Communications Survivability Program (CCSP), Budd recounts the people, practices and pitfalls that led to the resurrection of the Pentagon’s communications systems in the wake of the 9/11 attack.

Fred’s 911 Pentagon Recollections is full of insight and valuable lessons for any senior IT executive. After reading this, you’ll never think of IT Service Continuity Management the same way.

Read More.

Firefighters implement a proactive approach to solving problems. They don’t ask if a fire will happen; rather, they ask themselves what they need to do when a fire breaks-out. Many times, technology professionals run around responding to what are affectionately referred to as “fire drills”. We put out “brush fires;” we deal with problems reactively. And that’s because most organizations have neither the processes in place nor the documentation necessary to take a proactive approach to problem resolution….

Just as the firefighters don’t engage a fire without the requisite background information, we must not tackle network problems without proper and accurate documentation…. However, acquiring the documentation necessary to the critical problem resolution process is a daunting task. Manual documentation of complex systems can take months, if not years. Fortunately, you now have tools at your disposal to complete most of these tasks….

The Rapid Network Rendering tool distills the information necessary from existing data collection stores on the network to develop a data rich Microsoft Visio network diagram. This information is aggregated into a common data set that is stored in a central Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This data is then used to display data rich network diagrams.

The bottom line here is that up-to-date and accurate documentation is vital to your success in the network business, just as the firefighters’ knowledge of a building’s contents is vital to their success. Invest in your success by developing a system to keep your documentation updated in as real-time as possible.

Read More about our Rapid Network Rendering™ tool and Apalytics’ proactive approach to Crisis Avoidance.

Even organizations using identical collections of products are likely to have disparate technology fingerprints. These differences can arise because: network configurations require varying degrees of customization; the way a product is used can differ substantially from one organization to the next; and network-monitoring practices range from the obsessive to the negligent.

When it comes to the technology of his enterprise, the CIO must be both a geneticist and a sociologist. He must have a firm grasp of the “DNA” of his network, and he must understand the societal framework in which his technology is used. In addition to understanding the core components of his network, the CIO must understand the people and practices that put the “ridges” in his technology fingerprint. He must understand what his users need from his technology, what their emotional responses to his system are. And his understanding must not be limited to a snapshot of the present moment. His understanding must have an historical basis: to do his job properly, he must understand how his users’ needs and responses to the technology have changed over time.

In my 25 years as a practicing Critical Problem Resolution specialist, I have diagnosed hundreds of debilitating network problems. When I arrive on-site, the root cause of a major network issue has rarely been identified, much less remediated. As we perform active and passive system analysis, facts begin to emerge. We compare what we have discovered to the theories that guide our work; the incongruities between observed fact and known theory help us to identify possible causes of the debilitating issue. We can then propose a mitigation plan, which we validate before implementation.

Our ability to rectify these debilitating problems is rooted in two primary factors. First, our efforts have uncovered new information integral to the resolution of the problem; and second, we interpreted that information in such a way that we could recommend a paradigm shift that would remedy the debilitating issue.

After such an arduous adventure, thinking clients often ask, “How can we keep this from happening again?” In the past 25 years, we’ve been asked that question a lot, and our response is always the same. We offer them the following set of best practices: the five pillars of Technical Systemization™:

1. Architecture Ownership
2. Business / Technology Integration
3. Problem / Change Management
4. Decision Support Metrics
5. Application Development Optimization

Our Technical Systemization™ methodology is fully supported and compatible with Internet, ITIL, and ISO standards and principles. It works for organizations of all types and sizes – without altering your organizational structure. We assemble multidisciplinary, virtual teams that deliver training, create artifacts, and implement best practices across both technological and organizational lines, collaborating in a manner similar to the one used by our divers intelligence agencies as they span the demarks between governmental silos to execute coordinated responses to terrorist threats.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be writing quite a bit about the things the issues that are most relevant to your ongoing efforts as a senior IT Professional. Stay tuned, and please feel free to comment on our posts; there’s a lot we can learn from each other.