CA Community






This Blog
Syndication
Tags

February 2012 - Posts

Roll or Die: Success Strategies for Managing Transformation

Published: February 24 2012, 01:29 PM | no comments
by Lisa Sass

When I started sea kayaking a few years ago, I joined a group called "Roll or Die" that was taught by a former rescue swimmer on a mission to train kayakers how to do the former to avoid the latter. As much as I try to avoid metaphors, those rescue methods struck me as being very similar to the unpredictable business conditions we navigate every day.

Weather patterns change, tides shift, waves rise - any or all can turn a dry start into a soggy finish, at work or on the water. Assisted rescues are common for kayakers who capsize, and can be dangerous because they require assistance from others to get out of trouble. The person in the water has to stay calm and hang on, while those coming to assist put themselves at risk with an urgency driven by the knowledge that someone's well-being may depend on their skills.  Projects face similar challenges that can result in putting investments, resources and other initiatives at risk, and often there isn't much time for staying calm and hanging on - much less waiting around for someone else to figure out the next move.

It took just one dunking and a rescue of the first type to convince me that I better learn a second method: the bullet-proof roll, which is a far better defense against unpredictable conditions. Hanging upside down to practice while strapped into an 18-foot kayak is disconcerting under the best conditions, but mastering different rolls meant being able to get upright in seconds without assistance and with less risk.  The confidence gained from developing skills and mastering tools made a dramatic difference in how our group faced challenges on the water.

Projects are also more likely to succeed when contributors have a "bullet-proof roll" comprised of the skills, data and tools needed to navigate through sometimes-turbulent, often-unpredictable initiatives. Taking the time to deploy the right solutions and processes during periods of relative calm sets teams up for success, especially when challenged to deliver the transformational changes required to keep an organization competitive. And, it prepares them to take on bigger challenges with more confidence.  

Listen to this webcast to learn how CA Clarity PPM can help transform your business by aligning emerging technologies across your portfolio with the powerful capabilities in a single solution.

Share this post:  
Tags: , ,
Leave a comment

 

By: Lisa Sass
Lisa Sass is a Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager for CA Technologies, focused on Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions. She has spent much of her IT career in marketing, project management and professional services after getting hooked on the power of emerging technologies as a senior...
Read More..

IT will transform or be transformed

Published: February 22 2012, 09:52 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

Imagine for a moment that you get on the plane after using a valuable upgrade to get into a nice seat with allegedly better service, free movies (that you have probably already seen), a choice of meals and folks that call you by name. Unfortunately, you quickly realize that your expectations may need to be lowered. The staff keep skipping past you to take every body else's order for the meal, skip you during the drink service and forget your name constantly, and the worst outcome of all -- they forget to turn on the entertainment system.

The good news is that you reach your destination safely and on time - very important - but only by sitting through 10 hours of shocking (in a bad way) customer service. After you have traveled for a while on a single airline or airline group you become a captive audience to that airline. So what do you do? You suffer through a few bad experiences calling the airline, writing some emails, posting some tweets and the response is simply promises of better service or some points to your frequent flyer account.

Parallel this to the way that many businesses feel about their IT service delivery. Imagine that the business doesn't get the level of agility it needs with change taking too long. There is too much perceived "process" which is exacerbated with poor or non existent communication with the business. The business perceives little or no value from IT, and simply views it as a necessary evil. Many organizations simply refer to IT as the office of "NO."

IT doesn't have to be this way and in short if we don't transform we will be transformed.

When I spoke recently in Europe at a series of Application Portfolio Management events, a large part of the time was spent on the transformation that is taking place in many organizations. The transformation is sometimes by choice and sometimes imposed. I spoke to the head of IT with a large multi-country company who shared with me a story about the demise of the large central IT organization. The experience with the IT department was so bad that the business started investing directly in its own IT, creating a "Shadow IT" department. This was done initially for development; then they added delivery; and after 18 months there was no requirement for central IT.

The organization didn't own a datacenter, all infrastructure was delivered by third parties and the business was managing the relationship with the suppliers closely and established contracts that allowed them to rapidly transition to an alternative supplier should the service not meet expectation.

Value propositions of IT were agility, end-user satisfaction, adoption of capability through growing market share all whilst the business was profitable. The response from IT to this delivery was defensive of course, asking internal audit to be involved to ensure that the correct checks and balances were in place, privacy laws were being complied with, data was secure, continuity requirements were in place and so on. After a few months of reviews and a few debates with the CIO, head of the business division, the CEO and the CFO, the outcome was an excellent for all involved. IT established an Office of the CIO in Group IT that set base guidance for security, data privacy, and retention and agreed to negotiate and monitor contracts with third party providers. The business was responsible for all development, meeting capability requirements and so on. The result? Capability was close to the business, the business was driving IT-enabled business value, the responsibilities for IT were clarified and a charge-back agreement for the services consumed was met.

Back to my airline experience, yes the experience is true and the outcome is that I am transforming myself to leverage significantly more virtual meetings. I have changed airlines and I have no issue using social media to communicate both my excellent and poor experiences.

So what do you think, are you transforming or will you find yourself transformed? Just call me Robert "Transformed" Stroud.

Share this post:  
Tags: , , ,
Leave a comment

 

By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
Read More..

Ten-Step Program for Application Portfolio Management

Published: February 13 2012, 08:11 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Spain, France, the U.K., Finland and Denmark to meet with senior management though a series of round table sessions on the topic of Application Portfolio Management (APM). The outcome of the round tables were agreement that most businesses have accumulated a wide assortment of applications, some redundant, many underused and some obsolete. Many of these applications were out of sync with the business direction and complicating business processes. The lack of governance of these applications is slowing down the speed of business and definitely increasing cost.

APM provides a comprehensive understanding of the applications operating within your environment. The objectives of APM are to move the organization from a state of unknown to a defined inventory with comprehensive data on the business value and technical condition of each application.

There are multiple programs for APM in the industry. Here is the CA Clarity10-Step APM program:

Step 1: Appoint an APM program manager

Appoint a dedicated APM program manager with appropriate authority level to drive the process. The role will require the person to be objective and judicial during the assessment and portfolio analysis.

Step 2: Define the scope of an application within your business

Definitions may vary per business needs, your application landscape, or simple opinion, but you need one definition to work with in order to assemble your inventory. The following is an example of an application definition:

Application - An executable that directly supports a business process either through its own interface or as a business service through another UI.

Step 3: Conduct an inventory

Collect relevant information on all applications meeting the definition and capture the data. Data will include: status, business process, acquisition source, who is responsible, maintenance status, business needs serviced, etc.

Step 4: Define your evaluation metrics

To make the necessary decisions to transform your application portfolio, you must have agreed-upon metrics for how your decisions will be made. Sample metrics should include: Business value, costs, benefits, strategic fit, technical conditioner, vendor rating, etc.

Step 5: Assess the business value

Survey business representatives on the business value of each application.

Step 6: Assess the technical condition

The technical condition of the application is its quality, performance, availability, and strategic fit in your architecture amongst other metrics including: number of incidents related to the application, costs associated with resolving incidents, availability, compliance with IT policies and strategy, maintenance stream, etc.

Step 7: Assess risk

A risk profile for each application should be developed which includes: security, disaster recovery, vendor viability, regulatory compliance, privacy, and other relevant issues.

Step 8: Analyze portfolio

Analyze each application in the portfolio per your evaluation metrics and score the applications against each other to understand organizational value.

Step 9: Determine actions

Develop scenarios for potential actions based on the analyses of the applications. This should incorporate a summary of the expected results if the scenario is acted upon - including impact to budget, staff, policies, and strategy.

Step 10: Implement decisions

The actions decided will generate a new program of work that will need prioritization within your current investment cycle, which will require a schedule, resource allocation, cost, delivery plan, and other project components.

For more information on APM visit the CA Clarity website and download the APM Whitepaper from the Application Portfolio Management site.

Share this post:  
Tags: , ,
Leave a comment

 

By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
Read More..

Innovation: Is it how you manage, or what you manage?

Published: February 08 2012, 02:39 PM | no comments
by Lisa Sass

Rolling over to a new year brings changes to benefit plans affecting millions of healthcare consumers. Managing how those changes go into effect is the year-round challenge for my friend, a senior IT executive for a large benefits provider. Over a recent dinner, he brought up how his company is investing many millions in projects designed to improve patient safety and system security, along with process improvements to protect margins. I asked how the lengthy list of projects was going to be managed, and he gave an exasperated sigh: "Spreadsheets."

I was shocked. This is a company noted for its progressive approach for adopting technology to deliver products and services. Cutting edge facilities and processes have been highly-refined to deliver a higher level of safety and accuracy than its more traditional counterparts while being held to stricter compliance requirements, and they lead their nearest competitor by a wide margin. Yet, all that innovation was being managed by spreadsheets? As much as I would like to believe that companies readily adopt solutions that can help drive innovation faster and with better business intelligence, in reality many organizations cling to outmoded project management tools that cannot keep pace with the demands of an increasingly-complex marketplace and regulatory environment.

My friend's challenges are the same as many others: methods cobbled together over many years by managers-long-gone whose major contributions ended with mastering conditional formatting. As we discussed how far project management as a discipline has come over the years, we also discussed how far project management tools have advanced. These days, a company that invests so much in projects can't afford to ignore the importance of having a complete portfolio view, especially when those projects depend on making confident, informed decisions that impact the safety of healthcare consumers, compliance, and business value.

By next New Year, I'm hoping the answer to how his organization is managing projects is met with a smile and, "CA Clarity PPM."

Read more about how one healthcare benefits provider saved millions while facing healthcare reform and a growing demand for new services.

Share this post:  
Tags: , , , ,
Leave a comment

 

By: Lisa Sass
Lisa Sass is a Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager for CA Technologies, focused on Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions. She has spent much of her IT career in marketing, project management and professional services after getting hooked on the power of emerging technologies as a senior...
Read More..

Application Portfolio Management: The first step in transforming the business of IT

Published: February 06 2012, 05:26 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Robert Stroud

Every CIO I speak to faces similar pressures - business demand is increasing, especially with the millennials and the consumerization of IT, and at the same time budget increases cannot keep up with inflation. Being a glass half-full person I see this as a wonderful opportunity for the IT organization to focus on its primary charter: driving business value by transforming the business.

Last week while returning from the ISACA Strategic Advisory Council meeting I had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time with a senior representative of a large healthcare organization who was returning from an organizational leadership meeting. The discussion - which started on a discussion of mobility and the manner that it had changed our lives - led into the action from his meeting which is to drive business transformation, which is going to be centered primarily on technology. Challenges faced in the healthcare organization are similar those faced by many organizations. Organizations face existing application operating and maintenance costs that consume a significant percentage of the budget, they see widespread duplication across the portfolio and massive complexity due to years of acquisitions and siloes of development. The silos of development and lack of visibility across the complete estate makes day-to-day delivery a struggle let alone the offer  the flexibility to transform the business.

The healthcare CIO is not alone.  Most large organizations are in the same position and with the mandate to transform, many organizations are starting the transformation process and funding it with the savings realized with the implementation of an Application Portfolio Management (APM) program.

Application Portfolio Management provides a comprehensive understanding of your applications and their value to the organization including relevancy, costs (all costs), duplication, use, compliance with organizational objectives, and then creates a scoring framework. APM moves you from an unclear inventory of applications with limited understanding of each,
to a defined inventory with comprehensive data on the business value and technical condition of
each application. Once you have implemented an APM process you will have a strategic process for effective decision making that can be leveraged not only with existing investments but also with your future investments and can be used for sourcing determinations.

One company that benefited as part of such a transformation is Nordea Bank, who saved €3.5 million in one year by rationalizing its business application portfolio in the first phase of their initiative.  

Getting back to my healthcare colleague the concept of APM resonated with him as they are moving to a cloud based sourcing program. Knowing what they have and its criticality as they determine if the application is a cloud candidate or not based on confidentiality and data requirements is important.

The hardest piece of APM is the inventory and evaluating and I will cover this in my next blog.

Share this post:  
Tags: , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

 

By: Robert Stroud
Robert Stroud serves as VP and as Service Management, Cloud Computing and Governance Evangelist at CA Technologies. Robert also serves as an International vice president of ISACA, is part of the Framework committee and was the former chair of the COBIT Steering Committee. Robert also serves on the itSMF...
Read More..

More Posts Next page »