Posted by Tim Madewell on Tue, Feb 23, 2010
The Center for Collective Intelligence (http://cci.mit.edu) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is established around the basic research question: "How can people and computers be connected so that-collectively-they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?"
I think this is a fantastic opening question to any software (or services) company looking to establish a solid value proposition. Or to take the position of any IT executive, how will the software connect with my organization, both people and processes, to allow my business to act more intelligently?
While the research and purpose of this Center is much larger and more impactful than a specific software application, it does generate a number of tactical questions and observations relevant to the current state of software today... web 2.0, the Cloud, Software-as-a-Service, On Demand...
Where have the services gone?
The increase of business and enterprise-class software moving to a software as a service (SaaS) or On- Demand model has influenced more than just shifting the infrastructure and models used to host and run the software, cloud based computing has also shifted the cost and service model for corporate software. The services involved with implementing SaaS applications have come under intense price pressure and are demanded to be "in-line" with a model of no up-front costs, recurring license subscription, and in many cases a free trial in some form. On a side note, Lincoln Murphy, Managing Director at Sixteen Ventures recently published a good paper titled, "The Reality of Freemium in SaaS" (http://sixteenventures.com). In many cases implementation services in today's SaaS world means customer self-service or a nominal service charge for a limited configuration and training. Many thanks to the advances in technology and user interface design. So who is responsible for the success of a SaaS implementation and what is success in the SaaS world? In other words, who is responsible for connecting the people and computers?
In the past, the vendor or large system integrators would include the program and project management, communications, change management ...with the scope of work. This was accepted and "in-line" with a model of multi-million dollar software license purchases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital expenditure, and million dollar plus implementation service contracts. Successes and failures aside, in essence the vendor or system integrator signed up to partner with the customer to manage the process integration and change management that goes with the software. Today the project war room is gone, and the "Change Agent" is not included with a SaaS or "Freemium" model!
There is a new partnership model emerging that brings a fresh approach to providing services. The ultimate measure of success for a SaaS business is renewals. Interestingly, this brings the customer and the vendor closer together on the measure of success, adoption and value realization. The exit criteria has not changed...the exit criteria is gone!
What has not changed is the need for strong sponsorship and leadership to change the business and systems so they may collectively act more intelligently. Critical to the success of any initiative and not to be taken lightly even though the upfront commitment in $$$ may be gone. Who will step up in your organization to deliver the leadership and drive change management needed for success? Who will connect the people and the computers?
Posted by Chad Hafterson on Thu, Feb 11, 2010
When a new customer signs up with Innotas and begins working with their Customer Success Manager, one of the first topics centers around Time Management. While most customers want to track time for their IT resources, they don’t always know what types of activities to track, how granular to track, or what the benefits they can get from tracking time. The rest of this post will discuss the benefits and some basics around different ways to track time.
Innotas Customer Success Managers help customers get up and running tracking time as part of their IT Governance implementations to provide one or more of the following benefits:
- Provide breakdowns of time spent on Project, Maintenance/Application Support, and Administrative activities
- Help pinpoint Systems that are taking up too much resource bandwidth to maintain and may need to be retired
- Historical views into where time is spent by IT resources allows you to shift resources to higher priority and higher value activities.
Once a customer decides which benefits are important, the next step is to decide which activities to track time against. Most customers decide on one, two, or three of these categories:
- Project Work – these are your strategic projects and other smaller projects that have a defined start and target date. Resources will be allocated to portions of the project or individual tasks for detailed project plans. Almost all customers track project work as it is the most discretionary (albeit, highest value producing) work performed.
- Maintenance Work – this is typically referred to as “Keep the lights on (KTLO)” and encompasses everything from working help desk tickets, to service requests, to operation tasks, to application break/fix activities. Most organizations don’t plan to track this at first, but quickly realize that most of their work is performed here and that this area has the greatest potential for optimization.
- Administrative Work – this covers meetings, holidays, vacation, etc. Customers are split on this one – some report on it and some simply lower resources’ available capacity to take this into account (for example, instead of capacity of 40 hrs/wk, capacity is set at 36 hrs/wk).
The final step is to decide how granular to track time against the buckets above. Some of the questions that Innotas Customer Success Managers use to help determine this are listed here:
- Project Work - For projects, you can typically track time at the project, summary task, or task levels. Each level adds a slightly higher amount of required setup, so simply choosing task level as it is the most granular isn’t always the best choice. Some questions to help determine the level:
- How detailed are my project plans?
- How detailed are my resource assignments to projects?
- Do I have consistency in my project plans? Do I use templates for project plans?
- Do I capitalize projects or portions of projects? Do I capitalize based on specific tasks or work items, or based on a percentage by resource type?
- Maintenance Work – For Maintenance work, time is usually tracked at the application level with several buckets to capture the different types of work (ie, enhancement, break/fix, support, etc). Some customers also ask about tracking time to individual service requests or help desk tickets. There is really only one question for this area – what are you going to do with the data you get back? The answer to that question will help drive the setup of your applications. Understanding how much time is spent on break/fix for a particular application is important, but understanding how much time was spent on each break-fix item may not be (and may introduce unnecessary overhead on your resources).
- Administrative Work – For Administrative work, time is almost always tracked in a set of customer-wide buckets. Similar to Maintenance work, ask what you plan to do with the data.
Please feel free to comment or ask questions to keep the discussion going.
Posted by Chad Hafterson on Fri, Jan 29, 2010
Welcome to our new blog that will be focused on how to get the most out of Innotas. In these posts, we will discuss many "how should we" and "why should we" questions aimed at improving your PPM and IT Governance practices using Innotas. Our goal is to share our domain expertise gained through many years of experience working with IT Governance solutions and our customers. Posts will link theory with practice by providing examples of how customers use Innotas to improve the business of IT.
While we have several topics planned, this will be an interactive blog - ideally, suggestions for topics will come from our readers and be driven by comments on the blog posts. You can submit ideas by simply commenting on this blog post, through Twitter at #Innotas, or through our LinkedIn group. Many of the discussions here will be translated into documentation and/or how-to videos
The first few topics will include
•How much detail do I need when planning resources?
• What are the tradeoffs between task-based timesheets vs project-based?
• What does Capacity and Demand show me?
Many more will follow, so please check back soon or reply to this post to suggest additional topics. For an overview of Innotas IT Governance, you can watch a 5 minute demo on our website.
Posted by Keith Carlson on Wed, Jan 20, 2010
Welcome to our new 21st Century CIO Blog, where we will contemplate the topics and issues affecting today's CIO including Technology Innovation, IT Governance Best Practices, Partnering with the Business, and the Business of IT.
The experiences shared in this blog will be extremely practical, drawn upon from our shared experiences. My posts will be based on my experience running technology organizations and delivering hundreds of technology projects over the course of 25 years, but perhaps the most interesting stories I have to share will come as a result of the meetings I have with CIO's around the country and the world. One of the greatest benefits of my job is that I have the privilege of meeting with CIO's, listening to their experiences, and understanding the challenges they face daily.
In looking at the challenges facing today's CIO, I'm struck by the recent IBM study of 2,500 CIOs entitled, "The New Voice of the CIO." This groundbreaking study interviewed (in-person, mind you) 2,500 CIOs in 78 countries and 19 industries and discussed their challenges, changing demands, and strategies. One of the most striking statistics is that an impressive 55 percent of their time is spent on activities that spur innovation and 45 percent of their time is spent on more traditional CIO tasks related to "managing the ongoing technology environment." How does this statistic compare to what I commonly hear from CIO's:
- "We spend 25% of our time on strategic activities and 75% of our time on KTLO (Keep The Lights On) activities." CIO, large media and entertainment company
- "IT has a poor reputation for delivery ... the business can't rely on IT." CIO, Major University
- "IT needs to be more fact and data-driven, rather than gut-feel." CIO, Health Care Organization
These are the most common quotes I hear from CIOs. Are these at odds with the results of the IBM study? I don't think so. I think the IBM study is actually a leading indicator of where CIOs are going: they're spending most of their time helping the business, but realize they also need to help themselves.
This is a classic case of the cobbler's children having no shoes. I'm struck by the fact that over $3.4T is spend annually on IT, but most IT organizations currently manage themselves on a cobbled-together system of spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations!
I believe that the most innovative CIO's are working hard to align the strategic objectives of the business with the activities being done in the IT organization. And they're doing it with facts and data. You can't align the business with IT, unless you know the priorities of the business ... and you can't align IT with the business without knowing where IT spends its time. It's all about facts and data.