cio decisions october2013

CIOOCTOBER 2013 VOLUME 26

decisions

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ITERATING ON THE CUTTING EDGE

FORE! IT HITS THE LINKS

Inside: EDITOR’S LETTER

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION AND THE BOTTOM LINE

Is cloud governance possible when many

of a company's cloud tools are

procured on the sly?

Cloud Governance: Know Thy

Users

SOCIAL COLLABORATION: EIGHT GREAT TIPS

THE FUTURE OF THE CIO ROLE

CIO DECISIONS • OCTOBER 2013 2

EDITOR’S LETTER

BUSINESS TRANS-FORMATION AND THE

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IS THE PHRASE cloud governance an oxymo-ron? On the face of it, many readers would be inclined to say yes. How can CIOs be expected to take charge of the safe and effi-cient use of cloud computing in their com-panies when a hefty percentage of cloud tools and services in today’s enterprise are procured on the sly—IT’s sly?

That’s the question posed in this month’s CIO Decisions cover story on cloud governance. As SearchCIO Senior Features Writer Karen Goulart reports, business users, app developers, any worker who needs compute power and needs it now is out there shopping willy-nilly for cloud services.

The traditional CIO response to shadow IT, I’ve been told, might be to dismiss these

It’s a Cloud Jungle Out There

EDITOR'S LETTER

Linda TucciExecutive Editor

unsanctioned buys as point solutions, there to meet an immediate and narrow need and not something that would upend IT strategy or of CIO concern. But that was BC (before cloud), when computing systems were large-ly on premises and under the command and control of the IT department.

Now, as Goulart outlines, a sounder strat-egy is to know thy enemy thy users, learn from them and develop a cloud services

The traditional CIO response to shadow IT might be to dismiss these unsanctioned buys as point solutions. But that was BC—before cloud.


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absorbing the lessons of our cloud gover-nance story, be sure to take in Goulart’s profile of Tom LaPlante, a CIO in search of the balancing point between high-risk tech-nology and reliable IT services.

And if you’re in a Halloween kind of mood, check out my column on the wolves howling at every CIO’s door.•Please write to me at [email protected].

strategy that not only meets their needs but—here’s the clincher—also does their cloud shopping one better. Just don’t expect the mission to be easy. As Goulart points out, “grab a pith helmet … it’s a cloud jungle out there in the business.”

In fact, if there is a unifying message in all of the stories in this month’s e-zine, it’s that the enterprise IT services challenge is not for the faint of heart. When you’ve finished

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mailto:[email protected]


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JOHN BOWDEN, CIO of Lifetime Products Inc., certainly has his work cut out for him. The privately held Layton, Utah-based com-pany has operations in the U.S., Mexico and China, and is one of the largest producers of recreational goods made from plastic or metal. You may have heard of one of its biggest customers: a little company called Wal-Mart.

Meeting the demands of customers such as Wal-Mart is not for the timid. To help Lifetime Products improve operational ef-ficiency and compliance, Bowden and his team turned to enterprise resource planning and deployed Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP for its worldwide operations, while integrat-

ing the solution with product lifecycle man-agement (PLM).

“This project, like some of the others we have done in the past, primarily focused on business transformation and cultural im-provement,” Bowden said. “More important-ly, it’s transforming how our people work together.”

The transformation has also had a positive influence on Lifetime Products’ bottom line: The ERP deployment increased employee productivity by an average of one hour per day; the total cost of ownership was lowered 50%; and the ERP/PLM integration provided for a 30% increase in order throughput for Wal-Mart. Mobility and virtual desktop in-

Business Transformation and the Bottom Line

ON THE JOB

UPFRONTNews, views and reviews for senior technology managers


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tegration deployment also cut IT infrastruc-ture operating costs by 40%, streamlined maintenance and increased user satisfaction.

Most impressive, perhaps, the project was delivered on time and under budget. The business transformation driven by Bowden, however, did not stop with an expertly deployed ERP system. Bowden also de-ployed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) during the past year, allowing for central-ized control of user desktops and applica-tions and eliminating the need for local IT support worldwide. The move to VDI in-creased data security as well, he said.

For these achievements, Bowden won the Business Value Award in this year’s Search-CIO Enterprise IT Leadership Awards.

That’s not to say there were no difficul-ties in bringing these projects to fruition. The lack of alignment across divisions and company departments, as well as inadequate employee communication, were big obsta-

UPFRONT

ON THE AGENDA

Smartphones Suffuse the Enterprise—Plan Accordingly

In addition, 67% of tablets are purchased by employees. Many of them are also footing the bill: The average worker is bearing about 63% of the device costs and 62% of the data services costs.

As the personal-business lines continue to blur, manu-

facturers will need to create devices with consumer appeal and enterprise security. On the corporate side, organizations will need to reconsider exclusive workplace devices and design policies to better govern the habits of BYOD employees.Source: “BYOD: From company-issued to employee-owned devices,” which surveyed 3,000 workers who use mobile devices, McKinsey & Company, Inc., June 2012.

of smartphones used at work are employee-owned

80+20+z80%


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cles to overcome, Bowden said.The sheer size of Lifetime Products and

the associated vendors it was working with added yet more complexity. The layers of people usually involved with large projects such as this—and the politics that come with those layers—needed to be dealt with during implementation, he said.

One thing Bowden would have done dif-ferently is recognize these disconnects early on—and to be more proactive about disarm-ing those situations.

“It makes it very difficult, just because when you get so many people involved it in-troduces multiple agendas,” Bowden said. “It can hurt the project—it was a challenge for us. And I think it cost us money.”

When undertaking a project such as Life-time’s ERP deployment, Bowden offered this piece of advice: Make sure you have 100% alignment and support from the top C-levels in your company. It’s vital for company lead-

Big Data a Big PriorityAccording to a big data survey by Enterprise Strategy Group, 28% consider big data processing and ana-lytics a top business priority relative to all business priorities, and 38% put it in their top five. Asked how often they update their largest data set, 22% said they update in real time, while 45% update within a day.

UPFRONT

28+72+zconsider big data processing and analytics a top business priority

consider it among the top five business priorities

38+62+z38%28%

BY THE NUMBERS

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group big data survey, 2012.

22+45+33 45% update within a day

22% update in real time

FREQUENCY OF UPDATING THEIR LARGEST DATA SET


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ers to participate, help make decisions and support the user base after the project is completed, he said.

“If at any point in time, if there were even one of our executives that pushed against the project or what the project was to ac-complish—luckily that did not happen—we would have seen catastrophic issues in that area of the company,” Bowden said.

Most important, Bowden knows his proj-ect’s success hinged on how well his fellow staff members assisted his vision. Leader that he is, Bowden was quick to praise those that helped Lifetime Products achieve its ERP/PLM integration goals. “There is no way this project could have been successful [all] by myself. It was a team effort.” —Ben Cole

UPFRONT

WHAT’S THIS?

Competitive DifferentiationCOMPETITIVE DIFFERENTIATION is a strategic positioning tactic organizations can undertake to set their products, services and brands apart from those of their competitors. In order to make an offering compelling in the marketplace, an organization must clearly articulate to consumers the benefits of a product, service or brand and contrast its unique qualities with other competing products. Differentiation can be achieved through packaging, marketing campaigns and after-market product support. Source: WhatIs.com


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UPFRONT

ONE ON ONE

How do you balance innovation with the stabil-ity that IT is expected to provide to a company?You need stability in certain processes. And you need a repetitive integrity in those pro-

Iterating on the Cutting Edge

cesses, certainly when it comes down to things like the financial close process and certain HR processes. You need very high reliability, and you can only do so much in-novation. On the technology side, you can afford a little more innovation, a little more risk, so to speak. Because you’re constantly innovating, you’re constantly pushing the envelope and testing products and testing yourself against those limits.

Bill Millertitle: CIO organization: BROADCOM CORP.

headquarters: IRVINE, CALIF.

WHEN BILL MILLER joined Broadcom Corp. as CIO in April 2012, he was looking for an IT challenge. His new employer didn’t dis-appoint. A major provider of semiconductor products for wired and wireless communi-cations, the Irvine, Calif.-based company estimates that 99.98% of Internet traffic crosses at least one Broadcom chip. Approx-imately 77% of Broadcom’s 11,000 employ-ees worldwide are engineers and computer scientists. IT has to be on its toes, Miller says, and an appetite for calculated risks and information sharing is essential.

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/video/Iterating-on-the-cutting-edge-Talking-with-Broadcom-CIO-Bill-Miller


http://searchcio.techtarget.com/video/Beyond-the-hype-CIOs-can-generate-business-value-from-big-data-tools



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Can you give an example of an IT-inspired innovation that brought business value to Broadcom over the past year?I think we’ve done some things that are very interesting. We’ve continued to evolve our compute grid. Our compute grid is the environment that allows engineers to log in and run simulations on complex circuits.

We’ve continued to work with other semiconductor firms, and we have tech-sharing sessions with those firms, other leading companies, in sort of a nondisclo-sure format, where IT people will sit with IT people. And we’ll take best practices and tune that grid to provide higher degrees of uptime and availability. So engineers can submit jobs from anywhere in the world reliably. If one system goes down, they fail over to another system, and they’re never without resources, which is a very impor-tant to us.

What challenges are you facing with leveraging big data? At what point do the limitations of analytic tools and the infra-structure tools become the bottleneck?You have to segment your data to some degree. The actual data that we store associ-ated with any particular simulation run may only be of interest to a couple of engineers working on that circuit. But the metadata, the larger picture of what our simulation profile around the globe in a year looks like, is very interesting to the vice presidents of engineering, and the product-line heads, who want to know all the resources required to deliver a particular chip or technology. If you can segment that data and use it for analytic purposes, you don’t need to get that down to the lower layers of the data.

What are the challenges with the convergence of data, analytics and cloud technologies?Well, in some cases they converge and in

UPFRONT


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some cases they don’t. Cloud, for example, we use for multiple services that we em-ploy for our employees. We use cloud in the CRM and sales space. We use cloud for our HR system and HR tools, where they make a lot more sense than trying to develop that on our own internally in the business.

We also use cloud in the sense that we use collocated data centers. We do none of the bricks and mortar in our data centers. We provide the compute resources, but not the infrastructure, because there are people in the world that are far better at that than we are. So we do embrace cloud at that level.

In terms of data—the convergence of big data—those data centers hold tremendous amounts of storage. When our engineers simulate semiconductor circuits, you have to remember, some of these chips have 2.5 billion transistors on them—incredibly complex chips. In the simulation runs, to validate that those circuits will perform the

way an engineer believes they will perform, requires tremendous amounts of storage as we go through these chip lifecycles.

We have very large data centers, lots of data, and there’s a lot of metadata around those engineering runs. Things such, as “Did the job succeed, how long did it take and how many runs were made?”—all of that rich information can be used to help us determine what the real cost and lifecycle of a chip development was, so we can look for-ward in future designs and determine what the resources will be. We look at big data very differently than, maybe, a retail com-pany would look at big data. —Linda Tucci

UPFRONT

“We have very large data

centers, lots of data, and there’s a lot of metadata around

those engineering runs.”


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WANT TO GAIN an edge in cloud governance? Grab a pith helmet.

With the consumerization of IT now ex-tending to cloud services and adding to the woes brought on by shadow IT, it’s a cloud jungle out there in the business.

But IT standardization can be a powerful means of reestablishing control while main-taining business agility, experts say. Stan-dardizing cloud services, through service catalogs or service portals, gives CIOs the oversight necessary to efficiently enable the business and keep it secure.

This can only work well, however, if end users are getting the IT services they really need, stresses Ian Clayton, senior vice presi-dent of operations at U.K.-based G2G3. An ITIL and service management guru, Clay-ton suggests that the best way to ascertain this is to embark on a “service safari” and observe users in their natural habitats. The aim is to learn about what cloud tools they use day-to-day in order to discern whether the cloud services they’ve chosen line up with real business needs. The next step is to make it as simple as possible for users to get

Cloud Governance: Know Thy UsersCloud governance in the age of consumer IT begins with making friends with your users, then adopting a clear-cut services approach. BY KAREN GOULART

COVER STORY


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the proper tools. “Behind the scenes it can be really, really

complex, but … IT should stand for ‘invis-ible technology,’” Clayton said.

IT AS TRUSTED ADVISOR TO CLOUD SERVICES

For Eric Hawley, CIO at Utah State Univer-sity, this is all preaching to the choir. In a quest to centralize IT at the school of more than 32,000 students, staff and faculty members, engaging end users to simplify and standardize IT services became his mo-dus operandi. He took his fair share of ser-vice safaris and spent a lot of time talking about work objectives.

“We would simply ask, ‘Show us what you’re trying to do.’ We sometimes came up with a different way to do it, but we’d always make sure the desired outcome would be met,” Hawley said.

The payoff was mutual. “There was less arguing around tools, less arguing around methods of implementation and the focus was on the reason why they asked for what they did,” he said.

Indeed, one indicator that IT is missing the mark is too much talk, said Clayton. Sustained back-and-forth between IT and the business means cloud service offer-ings haven’t been laid out correctly. A key facet of standardization, he said, is creating a consistent set of practices for informing customers of the progress of their request. He likens it to ordering fast food.

“We've all been taught how to order [at] McDonald's: pick a number,” Clayton said, referring to the establishment’s numbered meals. “They’ll get used to it if it works. They’ll start to understand the key func-tions they need to perform, how they think it should work, and eventually say, ‘I just hit this button and the magic happens.’”

CLOUD GOVERNANCE: KNOW THY USERS


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USING SHADOW IT TO SHAPE GOVERNANCEThe bane of the IT organization, shadow IT, is nothing new. But with the growing popularity of cloud services, IT experts have come to realize its existence can work to the benefit IT strategy—provided IT can leave its ego at the door. If IT staff members can establish meaningful communication with the business—perhaps by taking a few of those service safaris—and engage end users on the solutions they’ve adopted on the sly, they will get a sense of what IT needs aren’t being met.

There’s another, somewhat ironic, ben-efit when the business—and segments of IT, for that matter—do an end run of IT. By turning to outside vendors, end users are training themselves to accept limited op-tions when it comes to service selection, according to Chris Ward, CTO at Kittery, Maine-based technology consulting com-pany GreenPages Technology Solutions. He

said he has witnessed this firsthand when dealing with developers.

When developers go to the IT organiza-tion with a laundry list of demands—a certain number of CPUs, vast amounts of horsepower, this many IOPS—in many cases, Ward said, IT will simply build what IT wants to build and tell the developers to “live with it.” This rarely sits well—next stop, Amazon Web Services. It’s not long before that demanding developer discovers that the mighty Amazon also has limitations in the form of a catalogue with select op-tions. Rather than take their business else-where, however, these cloud shoppers take what they can get, Ward said.

“That developer … seems to be a little more OK with it because that catalog exists. It’s not up to him to define what he needs; it’s defined for him,” Ward said.

CIOs should pay mind. “When we bring that to an internal private cloud perspec-



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tive, if we can give users that same level of choice and present them with [a few op-tions], that’s probably going to be good enough. They feel like they’ve got a choice but they’re not getting into the deep, deep weeds,” Ward said.

SUCCEEDING AS AN IT SERVICE BROKERSimplifying IT service delivery doesn’t mean going on autopilot. Offering services should be intuitive and easily self-served, yes, but there also must be established mechanisms to fix problems or improve upon services, Clayton stressed.

A common method for improvement is something IT organizations generally lack, he said—in part because they do not regu-larly engage the business.

“IT brokers need an engagement mecha-nism so they can listen to changing needs and convert them into [the technology],”

Clayton said. Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst at Cam-

bridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., believes the internal service broker concept for cloud offerings will work only if end us-ers understand the concept themselves.

“The broker is only going to succeed if we can change the expectations of our internal business customers that they’re not getting custom-delivered infrastructure,” Bartoletti said. “We’re basically providing infrastruc-ture, on loan, for a certain amount of time.”

Users should have the assurance that IT


“ IT brokers need an engagement mecha nism so they can listen to changing needs and convert them into [the needed tech nology].”

—Ian Clayton, senior vice presi dent of operations, G2G3


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will be on hand to support the infrastruc-ture they’ve identified to do their jobs, but they also should know that IT will make the technical decisions that best serve the enterprise—for example, whether that com-puting infrastructure will reside on premises or in the cloud. “The more that we build that trust relationship, the better.”

CIOs seem to be embracing the cloud ser-vices approach. Ward, the GreenPages CTO, said a major initiative for his firm this year is helping customers develop their own ser-vice brokerages. Many of their customers are being handed down executive-level edicts to “go to the cloud.” The most common reason given? Because business leadership assumes it’s cheaper. “The question you have to ask is, ‘Cheaper than what?’” Ward said.

IT departments should begin by picking a standard configuration out of an Amazon service catalog, then figuring out how much it would cost to deploy that exact configura-

tion in their private data center. More often than not, internal IT won’t be able to do it, Ward said.

“Until you can define what your internal costs are and what it looks like to do an ap-ples-to-apples comparison with the outside, how do you know it’s right? That’s some-thing you have to determine,” Ward said.

DOES AGILITY COME STANDARD?Fewer choices, fewer steps, faster and cheap-


Users should have the assurance that IT will be on hand to support the infrastruc ture they’ve identi-fied to do their jobs, but they also should know that IT will make the technical decisions that best serve the enterprise.


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er with improved governance—but does IT standardization also equal business agility? That depends, says Bartoletti. As cloud and other services are being standardized, by necessity someone’s cus-tomers’ choices are being reduced. They may well see this reduction in choice as a reduction in their agility. They need to be made to understand this could be a good thing for them—and everyone—in the long run.

Bartoletti knows this to be true, because he experienced it as an IT customer in his

own company. When Forrester moved its corporate email to the cloud, he and some of his colleagues worried the options would be limiting. Instead, he observed a worthwhile, beneficial tradeoff.

“What we found out was our IT organiza-tion spent all of their time after [putting email in the cloud] making our internal processes better and bringing in applications that added value, and not satisfying every team’s desire for email support,” Bartoletti said. “We lost some choice but we gained more agility.” •



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ON A BUSY day, anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 people will stop into a TopGolf venue to have a tee-off, grab a bite to eat and enjoy some music or the big game on TV. And the happiness of every one of those thousands of people in some way depends on CIO Tom LaPlante.

TopGolf isn’t a run-of-the-mill driving range; it’s a tech-enabled competitive golf “entertainment experience.” The field of play, so to speak, is like a giant dartboard spread out over 200 yards; 500 unique sen-sor-equipped targets keep score on each mi-

crochipped golf ball by tracking its distance and accuracy.

When LaPlante was hired as the company’s first CIO just more than a year ago, Dallas-based TopGolf had successfully opened two venues in the U.K. and four in the U.S. since 2000. Management’s plan going for-ward was to open a dozen venues every year. Each venue is 65,000 square feet compris-ing 102 golfing bays with interactive touch-screens and hundreds of televisions. With a company goal to deliver the same fun, tech-enabled customer experience no matter

CIO INNOVATOR

Fore! IT Hits The LinksTopGolf CIO Tom LaPlante helps drives the business by implementing stable processes and turning every employee into an innovator. BY KAREN GOULART


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entertainment offerings they wanted to make to guests—and to be sure the business objectives were crystal clear.

From there, it was a matter of filling new positions with the right people with the right mix of cultural adaptability and tech-nical skills to carry out his first major task: getting a new site in Houston up and run-ning. Knowing it wouldn’t be simple, and knowing TopGolf’s ambitious plans for dozens more venues in the years to come, LaPlante kicked into project management mode and created what he calls a site-build playbook.

“We knew what the physical dimensions of the sites would be, and we needed to cre-ate a repeatable process if we were going to be building eight to 10 sites a year. The con-figuration of the hardware and the software and the functionality had to be about 98% the same across all the sites,” LaPlante said.

Everyone involved, from the construc-

which venue those thousands of customers entered, LaPlante realized he needed to ap-ply some old-school IT management to this high-tech business.

“It’s interesting: You have all the latest and greatest technology, but you still need the basics—configuration management, change management—you still need to have all your processes documented,” LaPlante said. “None of that really changes; you just have a lot of new tools and more devices and solutions you can implement.”

CREATING A PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAYBOOK

His first order of business was forging a re-lationship with the business, including the company’s site operations, marketing and general managers. A joint business-IT man-agement committee was formed to discuss strategy—what short-term and long-term

FORE! A TECH-ENABLED GOLF GAME


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scrutiny and revision.One of the biggest takeaways from the

playbook process was the need for open communication and staying on top of change management. When on-site em-ployees think the change they’re making is “minor”—just wanting to switch out a PC or fiddle with one of the 300 on-site tele-visions—problems arise. Making sure ev-eryone understands the interconnectedness of the technology, and making it easier for them to ask for tech help when they need it,

tion team to the technology project manag-ers, documented their work activities for the Houston site. When it was complete, he held a three-day “postmortem” on lessons learned and discussions on how to create a more repeatable process.

“In some ways, there are only a few mov-ing parts—the golf ball, the ball dispenser, a touchscreen game panel, targets with an-tennae, and there’s the software, but they all have to work flawlessly to create the guest experience we’re looking to create,” LaPlante said.

With another site scheduled to open in Austin about six months later, the playbook was put to the test. When it opened the first week in May, LaPlante was pleased to find things did indeed go much more smoothly thanks to the lessons learned in Houston. He doesn’t intend to rest on that success, however; every time TopGolf breaks ground in a new location, the book is reopened to


“ In some ways, there are only a few mov ing parts … and there’s the software, but they all have to work flawlessly to create the guest experience we’re looking to create.”

—Tom LaPlante, CIO, TopGolf


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travel, hospitality and marketing verticals, was immediately drawn to the challenge. “They really wanted to keep on the forefront of innovation around interacting with the guests and making the guest experience re-ally, really special with the ‘wow’ and ‘cool’ factor,” LaPlante said.

Having the right IT skills on board was critical to success. LaPlante recruited 14 people immediately and, nine months later, another 10 to 15 people to get the IT job done—with management’s unconditional support. He also got no arguments when he decided to bring the software development team in-house and bolster its ranks by five people.

“The board of directors recognized we’re a technology-enabled entertainment venue, and in order to really scale up and provide the guest experience they were looking to provide, they needed to lean into technol-ogy,” LaPlante said.

emerged as key needs. Soon, employees will be enabled with tablets and smartphones that will help them not only to do their par-ticular jobs—such as taking orders and pro-cessing payments—but will also allow them to communicate directly to management.

“It’s been a combination of finding very good talent as well as getting support from my peers in the business units,” LaPlante said. “Whether it’s marketing or site op-erations or construction and finance, it’s just everybody pulling together and saying, ‘We’re going to make this work.’”

BUILDING A DEEP BENCH FOR INNOVATIONStaying on the cutting edge of technology, wowing customers, facilitating change man-agement, moving to the cloud and fostering innovation—all while handling back-end drudgery—is par for the course for LaPlante.

But LaPlante, who has a long career in the



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“That’s how we’re going to take new, in-novative ideas and push the envelope with-out impacting the production site,” LaPlante added.

LaPlante wants to instill the mindset in every employee—business and IT—that a tech-enabled entertainment venue can’t rest on what’s working today.

“We’re trying to create a culture where, whether it’s an hourly paid associate on the food-and-beverage line or the CIO or [chief marketing officer] or CEO, it’s everybody’s

To guarantee the same great experience in every location, every time, LaPlante took a page from the world’s top golfers: prac-tice, practice, practice, and experiment to see what works. The company soon will be opening TopGolf Labs—a separate facility created to replicate the actual venue envi-ronment. The idea is to work on perfecting problem areas pointed out in the playbook, as well as test new technologies without having to disrupt regular on-site operations.

Whether it’s a mobile app or tablet or new game or equipment, the technology group will be able to try the new technology and work out the kinks before taking it for a trial run. The physical construction of new sites is now in such a rhythm that the group will have nearly two weeks before a grand opening to try out their latest innovations. This last step is important to the process, LaPlante said, “because you can’t quite rep-licate 102 hitting bays.”


To guarantee the same great experience in every location, every time, LaPlante took a page from the world’s top golfers: prac tice, practice, practice, and experiment to see what works.


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He plans to start it off with folks who are well-versed in hardware and software but eventually rotate in employees from market-ing and other departments, as well as on-site associates, including new recruits.

“When you’re always adding new people, you want to get them convinced that, yes, their opinions and ideas are going to be listened to, and it’s inherent in their job to come up with new ways of doing things.”•

job to come up with new ideas on how we can make things better,” LaPlante said.

To that end, an IT steering committee was recently created to solicit ideas for what ca-pabilities the next generation of technology should deliver. He is also looking to start a mini-think tank within the technology group, designating two or three folks whose main mission is to come up with new ways of doing things and the cutting-edge tech-nology required to support it.



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JEREMY THAKE called Microsoft’s 2012 ac-quisition of Yammer “a bold move” during his keynote address at the recent SharePoint TechCon in Boston. But he also admitted he hasn’t been in a hurry to embrace the soft-ware just yet. You see, Thake is a SharePoint guy. In fact, as the co-founder of the Noth-ing But SharePoint blog and chief architect for AvePoint, a software vendor that pro-vides products and services to support the social collaboration software, he might very well be the SharePoint guy.

All of that aside, Thake is not alone in his

reluctance to also become a Yammer guy. With SharePoint’s strong document-sharing capabilities and Yammer’s zippy user in-terface, the pair should complement each other nicely. But a year after the acquisition, the two products continue to offer similar features that don’t really talk to each other. This has created “tension” for Microsoft customers, he said.

Some of those hurdles will soon be erased as Microsoft gets ready to roll out new up-dates before the year is out. But it won’t get rid of all of the hurdles. According to For-

Social Collaboration: Eight Great TipsYammer and SharePoint: A match made in heaven or ill-fated star-crossed lovers? BY NICOLE LASKOWSKI

THE SOCIAL ENTERPRISE


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rester Research’s new report Is Yammer + SharePoint Right For You?, only those who can “move critical workloads, at least in part, to the cloud” will be able to reap the

full rewards of a tight Yammer-SharePoint in-tegration. Yammer is al-ready in the cloud, and an on-premises version isn’t in the cards, ac-cording to Forrester.

“For those organiza-tions that cannot put a workload in the cloud for security, privacy or compliance reasons, this solution will not be an option.”

Thake’s SharePoint bias aside, much of his talk focused on how to successfully build a social enterprise. Here are eight tips he shared:

1 Break bad habits. Social collaboration is about connecting people, but it can also help companies break out of habits that

are less efficient. Email distribution lists, for example, do not document history the way social collaboration software can, a boon for new employees learning the ropes.

“The reality is social collaboration is just knowledge management,” Thake said.

2 It’s not an age thing—exactly. Don’t get stuck thinking social media is for the younger generation; instead, it’s “a

working age” thing, Thake said. According to data he presented, 70% of

users are between the ages of 25 and 54. Recent data from the Pew Research Center, an American research and advocacy organi-zation, backs those numbers up: 78% of 30- to 49-year-olds use social media; that number dips to 60% for 50- to 64-year-olds.


70% of social media users are between the ages of 25 and 54

78% of 30- to 49-year-olds use social media as compared to

60% of 50- to 64-year-olds


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3 Avoid the friend-tweet comparison. When winding up the pitch for social collaboration software, don’t describe

it in terms of Facebook or Twitter. Instead, focus on what to get out of it at an organiza-tional level.

4 Get ready for the email battle. The In-ternet isn’t always on, but email is always accessible. “It collects onto

your phone, you can reply on your phone offline, and as soon as it finds Internet, it sends those messages off,” Thake said. “The big problem with social right now is that can’t happen. You have to be online.” Thake says this one of the major pushbacks he’s seeing from external customers and internal employees.

5 Prepare to push back against the push-back. If someone sends Thake an email with an attachment or a ques-

tion about SharePoint, he sends them an im-age of a cute, fuzzy kitten—with a gun un-der its chin. Below the image, it reads: “You sent me an attachment so another kitten has been sacrificed. Put it in SharePoint!!!” It’s jarring, unexpected and, yes, a bit twisted, but those are the same qualities that make it easy to remember. He admits this might not be the best tactic for some organizations, but the message is clear: Find a way to retool employee thinking (without killing any real kittens, of course).

6 Find those cheerleaders. Getting em-ployees to embrace the technology that supports the social enterprise

can take an in-person touch. Thake does this when he can, but AvePoint is a global com-pany, and he can’t possibly be everywhere. “You need to have champions in every single office” who can carry out the mission in your absence, he said.



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7 Publish a code of ethics. It’s inevitable that someone will post inappropri-ate information to the platform. Have

a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy or something else that can address unwanted and even bad behavior before it happens.

8 Treat social collaboration as a project. Social collaboration software is not a one-time-and-be-done implementa-

tion. “It can’t just be install a platform and run away,” he said.

Think strategically, plan on what you want to do first, measure your success, learn the tools and train your users accord-ingly.•


Social collaboration software is not a one-time-and-be- done implementa tion. Think strategically, plan on what you want to do first and measure your success.


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“ I REALLY believe we are babes in the woods on this.” That was Jerry Luftman on the difficulty of provisioning and integrating IT services as the three horses of the tech apocalypse—cloud, mobile and social—gal-lop on. “It will be another 10 years until all these technologies are integrated,” he said.

The judgment is still ringing in my ears, and not in a good way. I got a bad vibe about the future of the CIO position. The existential shiver gave me pause, because as someone who’s covered CIOs for eight years, through the cruel aftermath of the dot.com bust, the excruciating implemen-tations of Sarbanes-Oxley and the intense budget pressures of the Great Recession, I don’t put much stock in the recent predic-tions that a CIO’s days are numbered. Trash

The Future of the CIO Role

CIO MATTERS

by Linda Tucci

talk about this relatively recent member of the C-suite is an occupational hazard of the CIO position and a staple of the IT press. But 10 years? Babes in the woods? No exec-utive can be a babe in the woods for too long and not be eaten by wolves.

Luftman is a former CIO, ex-IBM-er and recently retired professor of information systems who now heads his own IT training institute. He runs the Society of Informa-tion Management’s annual IT Trends sur-vey, accumulating over the past dozen years a body of research on CIO priorities, pain points and strategies. And he’s an expert in enterprise architecture. I called him for a story I was doing on best practices for the IT management of services (ITSM in tech talk). What’s considered good ITSM for today’s


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Experienced IT professionals understand you have to proceed slowly, he said, and that worries him. “I’m concerned that the busi-ness people are going to get frustrated with us,” he said. “After all the progress that we made over the last couple of years—collabo-rating with and helping the business, seeing

opportunities to cut business expense and generate revenue—I’m worried they’re go-ing to get frustrated and we will regress right back to where we were.”

I knew what he meant. During the worst economic downturn of the past 80 years, when the Great Recession sunk its teeth

enterprises, with their increasingly mobile workforces and the new technologies that make them possible?

“It’s probably one the most difficult ques-tions on the table right now” Luftman said. “Anybody who says they know the complete answer is someone I would not trust.”

It was easy in the ’70s and early ’80s when everything was IBM, Luftman said. PCs and the client server complicated the integration and provisioning of IT services a bit and, af-ter that, the Internet added another wrinkle to ITSM and a new challenge for the CIO position.

“But what we are experiencing today, I truly don’t believe we’ve ever had anything quite like it,” Luftman said. Any one of the new technologies—mobile, cloud, social—are complex. “There aren’t that many people who really understand the individual tech-nologies; to manage to have them integrated is extremely complicated.”

CIO MATTERS

What’s considered good ITSM for today’s enterprises, with their increasingly mobile workforces and the new technologies that make them possible?


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Mark McDonald during his firm’s 2010 sym-posium. “You own the speed of execution because they can’t touch anything these days without touching IT.”

But this was happening just as social net-working was ushering in “a third wave of capitalism,” and big data and analytics were

revolutionizing business intelligence, and iPads were popping up in the boardroom, be-fore Google Apps, Box, Dropbox … and one billion smartphones staked claims in the enterprise.

The seamless integration and comprehen-sive provisioning of IT services—ITSM’s

into global economies, business came to IT and asked for help. Work with us, they said. And CIOs did just that, automating not just back-end systems but also customer-facing interactions, as payrolls were pared. CIO watchers like me and Luftman marveled at the difference in how IT operations and the reputation of CIOs fared in 2008, 2009 and 2010 compared with the dark years after the dot.com bubble burst, when IT budgets were the first place businesses looked to make cuts. IT staffs were sliced to the bone.

In the worst of the dot.com backlash, the average tenure of CIOs withered to less than two years. For those who survived, doing more with less was their North Star even dur-ing the hay-making days of the George W. Bush era. When the recession hit and kept punching, CIOs were primed, fired up and ready to go.

“You’re not the bottleneck. You’re not the long tail,” CIOs were told by Gartner guru

CIO MATTERS

In the worst of the dot.com backlash, the average tenure of CIOs withered to less than two years. For those who survived, “doing more with less” was their North Star.


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“Bottom line,” Luftman lectured, “IT has got to demonstrate value, and value in terms of revenue.” If that means allocating a big slice of the IT budget to hiring analytics ex-perts and data scientists to find new sources of revenue for the business, do it. Easier said than done, of course. “I would start a blog [about ITSM] to get people to put in their perspective on this,” Luftman said.

Why not? Friends, CIOs, consultants, lend us your best ideas on how to integrate cloud, social and mobile into the enter-prise for a seamless provisioning of IT ser-vices. We’ll call it ITSM for the consumer age. There’s no time to lose—the wolves are howling.•

dream definition—might well require 10 years, but CIOs don’t have a decade to per-fect IT services for this digital age. By then, it will have passed us by. And please, cau-tions ITSM expert Jeff Brooks of Gartner: “No more IT for IT’s sake.” No more hero cultures, where IT folks are rewarded for saving the day, not when the first question is, “Why did the day need to be saved?” Brooks said. The ITSM mindset still tends to focus on service-level agreements, on reducing IT costs, on 5 freakin’ 9s of near-perfect up-time when it’s the few minutes of downtime that matter to the business: Did it cost the company money and how much?

CIO MATTERS


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CIO Decisions is a SearchCIO.com e-publication.

Rachel Lebeaux Managing Editor

Christina Torode Editorial Director

Linda Tucci Executive Editor

Nicole Laskowski Senior News Writer

Karen Goulart Senior Features Writer

Ben Cole Site Editor

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Linda Koury Director of Online Design

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Amalie Keerl Director of Product Management [email protected]

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LINDA TUCCI is executive editor for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at [email protected].

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