Benchmarking that Propels Transformation Forward

Digital transformations are even more impactful, and often more disruptive, to corporations and their cultures than traditional IT transformations, which focus primarily on systems. The business value impact can be substantial, as is the risk of failure.

Benchmarking can help crystalize targeted outcomes by identifying what measurements are most important and showing progress against both internal and external guideposts. Whether they are used to compare to a competitor, track current performance, or understand the impacts of an industry trend, benchmarking can serve as a catalyst for achieving transformation goals.

How can IT leaders can drive successful digital transformation through benchmarking?

• Engage Your People
  Ensure that your transformation benchmarking is heavily informed by the people who will actually lead and work on transformation initiatives. While external benchmarks are valuable guideposts, your people and teams know best what your organization can handle.
• Be Clear on Timing
  Benchmark early in transformation scope planning. Delaying benchmarking until you are at the doorstep of implementation risks missing key signals that can come from benchmarking at the outset of business process redesign and the insight that comes from systematically testing and monitoring early stage transformation efforts.
• Support the Leadership Conversation
  Use measures to facilitate a regular executive conversation on your company’s strategic digital health. The right high-level measures give feedback on the pace of transformation that elevates the dialog above the quarterly tug of war. The ability to continue collaborative conversations beyond your last strategic off-site can improve your partnering dynamic and keep the focus where it belongs – digital competition.

When these benchmarking steps are addressed appropriately, several enablers of transformation success are bolstered:

• Clear, shared and measurable expectations and progress milestones are set
• Feedback loops focused on tangible, actionable points are established
• Course correction earlier in the process appropriately adjusts future targets
• Effective communication that demonstrates progress and motivates people and teams

We have more to cover in our ongoing benchmarking series. For now, we would love to hear from you about what role benchmarking plays in your organizations, where you run into challenges and how you are solving for success.

Maureen Vavra

This is the second installment in StrataFusion’s benchmarking series.

StrataFusion Expands Expertise in Digital Transformation and NextGen IT Readiness with Edward Wustenhoff

New Partners, Diverse Experience

StrataFusion understands the spectrum of needs clients face and is expanding its partnership with experts who are solving today’s business challenges.  Earlier this year, StrataFusion welcomed new partner Edward Wustenhoff, whose background brings exceptional expertise in digital transformation, design, management and continuous improvement.

Since joining StrataFusion earlier this year in February, Edward has been helping clients to move their IT infrastructure teams and technology toward the next generation of IT readiness for cloud, containers and distributed micro services.

Edward guides IT organizations to stay aligned with the latest organizational principles, processes and technologies. He brings a strategic mindset of how to transition IT organizations and enable new technologies for business success. Leveraging his deep understanding of all aspects of cloud services, Edward is uniquely qualified to help organizations adapt to the ever-changing landscape of IT technologies and the associated management challenges that come with transformation. With an impressive record of success gained from several decades driving design and adoption of world-class technology infrastructures, global operations management and deep technology provider understanding, Edward adds an exciting dimension of executive-level insight to advise StrataFusion clients.

Before joining StrataFusion, he was responsible for internal IT infrastructure at industry leaders like Netflix and Applied Materials. Serving as a Chief IT Consultant at Sun Microsystems, he developed and published the Operations Management Capability Framework and Model, and the associated assessment service for the Professional Services division. He also was part of the Advanced Internet Practice helping ISPs and ASPs design, deploy and manage large-scale infrastructures.

“The depth of experience that Edward brings to our partnership at StrataFusion adds another dimension of capability to serve our clients,” says Ken Crafford, StrataFusion’s founding partner. “Our clients face many challenges as the business landscape evolves, and our aim is to always have the right expertise to help navigate change and continuously improve.”

Need guidance from a trusted advisor? Learn more about StrataFusion here.

Digital Transformation – is it a “thing”? or is it everything?

Digital Transformation continues to be a theme this year as we see in a number of predictions blogs and articles. But what is it?  Is it a thing?  Or is it everything?

DX has been going on in some form long before we called it that. The buzz today serves to direct our attention to the spectacular — inventing new markets, changing society. But not all companies are going to do that, or even need to. But every CIO needs to be looking at how the delivery of IT services is fundamentally changing, and understand how rapidly changing technology and market opportunities continue to impact their business.

Some things today are making DX harder and riskier than it used to be.  And those same factors also make NOT thinking carefully about DX in your org equally risky.  Some of these intertwined topics include the following:

• Rate of change
• Proliferation of technology options
• Understanding/factoring in impact on IT organizations (and the rest of the enterprise)
• Separating the fundamentally sound tech from the shiny objects
• Delivering new services at the speed the market (internal and external) wants them, with the level of control and security also needed

Planning and managing technology transformations is more difficult now than it was in past years, and it’s difficult to know what to bet on. Change is changing faster than ever before.  With new tech coming out every year and the decisions being made having multi-year horizons, how do you plan and manage the tech roadmap in this world?

This is a topic we work on with our clients, and it’s one we think about deeply at The StrataFusion Group. We’ll share some of our thoughts on how we’re doing that next time…

Reed Kingston

Organization Structure and Digital Business

In the equation of people, process, and technology, getting the “people” part right has been a tough challenge for many companies.  As technology evolves, the roles and talents needed to drive that technology and utilize it to help keep the business competitive requires constant evolution; getting the organization structure right in support of this evolving landscape has been an area we value advising in at StrataFusion.

In an earlier blog we looked at organization structure and critical success factors; now it would be useful to give further detailed thought to organization structure guidelines that are important to both traditional and digital business. Because digital business is different from your traditional data center kicking off this discussion would be some of the most important structural guidelines to consider in assessing your organization:

• Align business facing technology functions to match the business organization, this expedites specification, understanding, and support of business requirements
• Align technical development organizations along development lines and logical technical groupings to maximize development activity efficiency
• Constantly reinforce the importance of key organizational and business dependencies. The goal is to create an environment where cooperation and team focused response become the normal team response
• Create a system of organizational checks and balances. This allows your organization to be self governing, and can highlight important issues
• Be consistent in your approach, limit exceptions
• Separate your delivery function from your development function. A key check and balance that can avoid a lot of pain

Each of these guidelines could support a blog of their own, but the incorporation of these thoughts into decisions concerning how your team is organized and structured can create interactions and behaviors that can be important long term in a digital business environment.

Once you’ve assessed your answers to these questions we also believe that creating an organizational focus around rallying cries or mantra is extremely important. The idea of a mantra gives great organizational concentration, and provides a consistent focal point for how your team should be thinking.

Mantras can be a tool to guide proper organizational response

In creative organizational focus, here are some possible mantras:

• User Ownership of Systems
• Empowerment of the Community
• Standards & Integration
• Make Use of Forward Looking Development Technologies
• Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management Systems
• Right Tool/Right Place
• Flexible Systems
• Global/Shared/Local

Creating a mantra allows your team to default back to a common base – set of values, practices, and knowledge that will help them respond to questions or situations arising that are new or undefined – this is especially so in today’s digital era.  For instance, a mantra of “empowerment of the community” can help instill in your team the concept of insuring their actions result in recognition of the fact they serve a community or business and that it is in their self-interest to empower and equip that community to solve their own problems.  You can have the concept of “travel in packs” – if for those of your teams that exist in a highly competitive situation where stress is high and demands are intense and daily, a mantra of “travel in packs”  reminds them that they can count of your team for backup – you’re more than one person, they’re not alone, so that when if (for example) a website that is up 99.9999 of the time but crashes for a few minutes – upsetting c level executives – you have emotional, structural, and organizational back up.

In thinking about “Global/Shared/Local”, the mantra leads with the idea that things that data can have different types of ownership, some are universal and shared by all but require consistent management; while some can have more than one owner.

That a mantra can create organizational focus also works with another interesting potential which I call the ‘Manufacturing Metaphor’.  In the transformation to digital business this can remind you of how your digital delivery of an information product is not unlike some traditional manufacturing concepts, and incorporating some of those proven concepts into your business could be useful.

New digital business environments can be optimized by incorporating the similar concepts, processes, and flows as exists within manufacturing – digital business hold the same counterparts. For example, concepts of development engineering product engineering in manufacturing can be re-formed into as software development and operations delivery concepts in digital business; the shipping function in manufacturing is the data center in digital business. The terminology changes but the functions are similar, and taking a similar approach could favorably impact your “product delivery” process. Understanding these parallels again provides a framework within which it become easier to understand how to optimally structure your organization – with people being your most essential asset towards success.

In our third and final on blog on this topic we will be discussing the importance of infrastructure readiness on digital business delivery.

John Dick

 

Owning All Clouds

By Doug Harr

As part of my career as an IT executive for the last dozen plus years, I’ve led several companies through a process of migrating their business application portfolio to the cloud.  At Portal Software, that meant deploying SuccessFactors for HR performance reviews, and OpenAir for Professional Services Automation.  At Ingres that meant deploying Intacct for Financials, Salesforce for CRM, and lots of other cloud solutions. The approach for me reached its zenith at Splunk, where we had a 100% cloud business application portfolio, and where 50% of our compute and store capacity was at Amazon. With so much functionality in the cloud the question of roles and responsibilities became a focus for the company. In this very cloud-friendly shop, what should IT’s focus be? What level of administration of these solutions could actually be owned and delivered by departmental owners, such as Sales Operations, Customer Support Operations or HR administration?

As one example, both at VMware, where I was program manager for their Salesforce implementation, and at Splunk, where I was the CIO, we had very strong sales operations teams, and fairly complex Salesforce environments. In those environments Sales Op’s began to take ownership of more functionality in the Salesforce suite. This included user administration, assignment of roles to users, territories to reps, and just about all reporting. This grew to include modifying page layouts, and other configuration capabilities normally owned and controlled by IT. In my view the idea of enabling the Sales Op’s team was attractive for several reasons: (1) they wanted the power to do these things (2) they were not waiting for IT on the things they felt were high priority (3) they were closer to the sales teams who actually worked inside the tool, and so they were good at interpreting issues and acting – as good certainly as an IT Business Analyst, or even someone with fairly good technical skills. In these scenarios it freed IT to work on deeper technical issues, level 3 incidents, environment management, integration, reliability, etc.

In another example, at Splunk we made wide use of Amazon EC2 for compute and storage capacity. In these cases, IT System Admins were not needed – environments were spun up and used directly by personnel in Engineering and Customer Support. This was an amazing success, and it freed IT to work on monitoring usage, working deals on cost, and managing the overall vendor relationship.

Not every department has a team or individual ready to own or take a major role in the management of a SaaS or IaaS platform. For every HR department that manages Workday, there’s a finance department that does not manage Netsuite. It depends on the tool, and the personnel. What I’ve found is it can also depend on the CFO and management of a business function – some execs are happy to have these resources placed in the business, some are more afraid of  “shadow IT spend” or they’re caught up suggesting that IT can’t deliver and granting this power is a cop-out. Actually, I had a moment like this at Splunk, where I had not adequately updated two peer execs on our intent to get more deep IT skills hired into Sales Op’s, and had to sort that one out, to make sure everyone understood this was not a shadow operation! So there can be bumps in the road, but in my view adopting this approach is inevitable really, as software platforms and micro apps are becoming widespread, and so is the ability and desire by departmental teams to be more involved in the direction of how those tools, platforms, and apps are rolled out and used.

All this speaks to the future role of IT, and I for one have lived that future, as least in part. It’s one where IT is more strategic, focused on vendor/portfolio management, integration and security. To be sure some functions that are broadly used across all departments, and some that are task specific, still accrue to IT in most cases, or to partners that offer elements of typical IT as a service (think Help Desk). But done well, each department owns more of its technology, feels more in charge of its future, its technology adoption, its responsible use, along with other benefits. And, IT focuses less on being everything to everybody, maintaining disparate queues of backlogged work, and more focused on higher level matters, transforming the business for the digital age, and accompanying delivery of more complex technical solutions.

Right where we should want to be.

@douglasharr

Welcome to Cuba

By Sharon Mandell

Introduction

It is an exciting time for Cuba, with its doors opening, and the positive impact this will have on commerce, IT, and global cultural integration.

Obama recently issued a presidential directive that seeks to institutionalize and cement his policy changes toward Cuba and encourage further engagement even after he leaves office. Obama called the presidential policy directive “another major step forward in our efforts to normalize relations with Cuba” and said it “takes a comprehensive and whole-of-government approach to promote engagement with the Cuban government and people and make our opening to Cuba irreversible.”

The landscape of technology and IT in Cuba, where it is currently, and how it will evolve is also of great interest.  I have been fortunate to be one of the earlier travelers to a newly opened Cuba and have witnessed first-hand where IT can go, in light of present challenges. I am going to delve into these challenges and sketch possible scenarios in a couple of posts.

Business didn’t take me first to Cuba; it was my daughter’s university research and my love of ballet. As a person whose business and technology career largely started overseas, however, I was eager to see what was true and what wasn’t about technology usage there. Whenever I travel to a new country, I’m eager to see what the environment looks like – visiting the tech marketplaces of Tokyo or Hong Kong, for example. Or participating in my company’s recruiting efforts at an international university campus.

My daughter was struggling on her first visit, adjusting to a new language and, more surprisingly, finding people who would engage with her openly. Our communications were largely limited to 30 minute WhatsApp sessions, given the ongoing embargo and still closed telephone networks to US companies. With the limited time (wifi remained very expensive, even for an American, at the time) and narrow bandwidth we had for our daily “conversations,” it was hard for me to understand her struggles, and I decided to make an unplanned trip to support her efforts in person.

Before leaving, I went online to see what I could learn about Cuban technology – I quickly found some published computer research and attempted to reach out to a few University of Havana professors in Computer Science. It was late June 2016, however, and most folks I could communicate with were unavailable for the summer.

Cuban culture, remnants of the past, steps towards the future

The contradictions began before I even arrived on the island. First, I was somehow upgraded to first class on my flight – always a welcome event. Still, it felt strange, as I was flying Cubana, the national carrier of a communist nation. As we drove through Havana to our “casa particular” in our restored Chevy, I could recognize the long term relationship with the Soviet Union in the Ladas, and the present day trading partners in the Kias. Despite the embargo, it wasn’t long before a motorbike appeared with an HP printer strapped on the back of it. While I didn’t see all that much computer technology that first trip (it was often a Dell) cell phones were oppositely abundant. However, many were of the pre-smartphone generation, and my iPhone couldn’t connect, so for the first time in a long time, I was on a forced digital holiday.

Cell phones weren’t the only thing that didn’t work for an American — neither did your credit or debit card, despite the recent announcements about financial openings. Commerce was, and I suspect is still, almost entirely conducted through cash. The first cadeca my daughter brought me to was even closed early, because it had run out of cash.

During that first trip, wifi was still available in limited locations (mostly upscale hotels) and if you didn’t want to lose your shirt paying for it, it meant standing in long lines at ETESCA offices to buy the access cards with the codes approximately $4/hour. While I was there, however, 11 new public hotspots (based on Chinese technology) were lit up and the price dropped by half. The buying process shifted, where most of the $2 cards were sold out early in the AM. Now, as a tourist, one buys them on the street from the guys who woke up earlier than you – with a 50% markup and risk of getting arrested, but still easier and cheaper than before. Recently it was announced the entire Malecon would be lit up, and I’m sure that will change the economics and process again.

ERP – To the Cloud

By Ken Crafford

Part I

ERPs are strategically important as a “must-have” capability for most companies. They are a major investments, and a large component of total IT spend. CIOs know that getting the ERP aligned with business drivers, while remaining efficient and cost effective, is imperative to a company’s long term strategy and financial success. And they understand the importance of being nimble and keeping up with the constantly evolving needs of their business customers.

Historically, ERPs have been large and complex and expensive to implement and maintain – think Oracle and SAP legacy ERP systems. While they may be hosted or running in the cloud, you still have to maintain and upgrade them, and with that comes significant risk and cost. Keeping ERP’s current and adapting to new business requirements also consumes significant portions of IT spend.  And, if your business is changing quickly, it is very difficult to be keep up with those changes when you are running these very sophisticated, and accordingly, very complex software products.

This leads to the question of what are the alternatives?  Many of our clients are looking to the cloud for solutions that can meet their requirements for functionality, cost, and flexibility.

Solutions are indeed emerging, but with some caveats.  As we have seen in other areas – CRM being a primary one – there are great platforms for delivering top tier solutions.

However, before ERP in the cloud would be ready for prime time, both the applications and underlying platform technology must be rock solid.

The platform architecture and capabilities are critical to how the product will scale to meet your demand, how the vendor can add functions and features over time, how you can add enhancements that don’t break when the vendor updates the core product, and the extent of the ecosystem of supporting solutions that run on the same platform.

And so the crux is not just whether cloud ERP products have the functions and features that you need – you must also look at the underlying technology platform and the ecosystem of products and services that are part of the complete solution.

Fortunately, the market is evolving very quickly and we are seeing some solid cloud ERP products emerging that are based on great technology platforms, and provide a solid foundation for a product that you will probably be using for the next 10 years.

In future posts I will be calling up some examples of these solutions and how they can be leveraged.

Stay tuned.

 

StratraFusion – Values

 

The pace and evolution of enterprise technology more than ever calls for strategic advice on how best to use this technology to optimize your business.

We formed The StrataFusion Group as a unique technology and business consulting practice based on knowledge gleaned from practitioners and their years of in-house “hands on” leadership and experience. Our Partners have driven technology and business strategies in disruptive Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing enterprises and firms, and they bring years of practical knowledge into solving each opportunity in its complexities and challenges.

We advise and assist our clients on how to leverage their technology investments to increase revenue, and improve customer satisfaction while reducing risk and cost.

We originally conceptualized and founded The StrataFusion Group to provide expertise ”for CIO and CTOs, by CIOs and CTOs.” The practice has, unlike many other technology consultancies, continued to emphasize the personal operational experience of our Partners. This expertise is then applied directly to your problems and issues by our Partners — not inexperienced stand-ins. You receive our personal attention and commitment to efficient and effective engagement management.

Our passion is to empower companies to be business innovators by combining leading-edge insights with significant experience-based knowledge of markets, technologies and industries. We focus on adding client value, delivering ultimate professionalism, applying team cohesion to expand experience and focus success, with respect for individual values and goals. We truly seek to earn the “Trusted Advisor” status. When you have a serious technology problem we want you to think of StrataFusion, not Ghostbusters!

We offer proven solutions for the most difficult business challenges, focusing on these practice areas:

StrataFusion Practice Areas

• CIO / CTO Advisory
• Information Security
• Digital Transformation
• Big Data / Cloud Analytics

As we go forward and continue to build on our consulting practice areas, how we were formed, our foundation and core values continue to drive how we approach each company with their unique set of of challenges. Underlying all of our work is our set of guiding principles:

StrataFusion Guiding Principles

• We challenge and reinvent the vision
• We create through teamwork
• We nurture the independent, entrepreneurial spirit
• Our personal and operational competence and professionalism is clear and at our clients’ disposal

We look forward to working with you.

John Dick, Partner and Co-Founder, StrataFusion

Why I Never Look at the Value Case or ROI

By Mark Tonnesen

When evaluating potential IT initiatives, the most common approach is to focus on the numbers and look at the return on investment (ROI) or value case. For example, say your company is considering implementing a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Chances are the CEO and CFO will ask, “What’s the ROI?” Or, “If the new system will cost $10 million, can you show me how it will produce a much greater gain?”

As far as I’m concerned, though, if you’re asking about the value case or ROI when evaluating IT initiatives, you may be asking the wrong question and looking at the wrong things.

What You Should Be Asking when Evaluating IT Initiatives

What gets lost in the value case or ROI approach to evaluating IT initiatives are the bigger questions that are more important than the finance-driven calculations:

• What problem(s) are we trying to solve?
• What is the value to the business of solving this problem?
• What objective/end state can we achieve with this initiative that we don’t have today?
• What’s the best way to achieve our business objectives?
• How important is solving this problem or achieving this objective for the business’ ability to reach its goals?
• How will this help us make better decisions and run our business more efficiently?

Not Everything Can Be Measured (Using the Same Yardstick)

A problem with the ROI or value case approach is that you might be trying to quantify the unquantifiable. For example, say you are considering implementing wireless internet service throughout your office for $XX per month. How do you calculate the ROI on this? You can take a best guess at how this might improve productivity and come up with a number. But that would just be a guess. And it would ignore other factors, such as the positive impact this might have on employee satisfaction or addition benefits such as mobile applications. Once new capabilities are in place and available to the full team, they may lead to unexpected innovations and enhancements that further improve productivity. It is difficult to predict the benefits new capabilities unleash.

The Numbers Can Tell You Anything You Want to Hear

Your team’s best guess regarding the ROI of a proposed IT initiative is just that: a guess. As an example, I once worked with a large high-tech company that was big on ROI. The team worked on a series of technical support initiatives to develop self-service tools for customers. To justify these projects the team put together graphs showing a reduction in customer support cases and calls, and an increase in customer satisfaction.

Knowing what the cost of a support call, the team developed analyses that showed that the cost of each initiative was lower than the cost savings it would deliver and the projects were approved. Unfortunately, the projected savings never materialized. The team neglected to include factors such as growth, customer adoption rates, issue severity addressed by the tools, continuous improvement costs and operational support costs for the tools. An analysis that included all the right factors—beyond just cost—would have helped the company make a better business decision.

Where to Focus: Business Impact

When evaluating IT initiatives, I recommend steering clear of the value case and ROI approach. Rather than pulling numbers out of the air to justify (or kill!) a program, take a hard look at the business impact that the initiative will have. Ensure you are solving the right problem and include measurement points along the way to check whether the expected goals are being achieved.

Mark Tonnesen is a partner at StrataFusion. Contact him at mtonnesen@stratafusion.com; follow Mark at twitter.com/mtonnese.

Rapid M&A Integration

By Mark Egan

• Focus on the people
• Take an aggressive approach to migrate the new business into existing systems
• Plan to complete the work within 90 days of deal closing

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are an important strategy for expanding business. Unfortunately, many times these actions do not meet their intended goals. Although considerable emphasis is placed on technology, products, and new markets, some fundamental issues are overlooked. After working on over 60 M&A transactions, I recommend that you focus on three areas: engaging your new employees, integrating the new business into existing systems, and completing all integration work within 90 days.

Engage Your Employees

First, focus on the people. Make sure that you answer their top three questions:

1. Do I have a job?
2. Who is my manager?
3. What is my scope and responsibilities?

Until you answer these three questions, employees of the acquired company are not really listening and can’t focus on integration work. Be honest with employees, especially if you do not have a role for them, and provide assistance in finding a new role and incentives to work through transition period.

Migrate New Business into Existing Systems

Next, take a very aggressive approach to migrate the acquired company into your existing systems. With few exceptions, migrating acquired company systems over to your internal systems is much easier than investing a lot of time evaluating the acquired systems. Make sure that your existing systems have capacity to support increased volumes and additional businesses. This can be done as part of your IT readiness work well in advance of any M&A activities.

Have a 90-Day Plan

Finally, have a plan to complete all the integration work within 90 days of closing the deal.  Many IT tasks, such as e-mail, unified web site, and personnel systems can be completed on the first day of operation for the merged company. The remaining tasks should be aggressively planned for completion within 90 days. This approach positions your organization to take advantage of the newly merged company to develop new products and services and sell the expanded offering to your customers.

StrataFusion works with clients to develop their rapid M&A integration programs enabling them to improve the overall quality of their work as well as reduce costs.

Learn more about “Mergers and Acquisitions” in StrataFusion’s Knowledge Center and get to know our CIO/CTO Advisory practice.