Published: February 06 2012, 05:26 PM | no comments
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.

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Published: February 01 2012, 10:16 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

After being a technology geek for the last 30 years, the one thing I know for certain is that the only constant is change! I love getting a new piece of technology and learning how it can make my life better.  I am not alone in this; we are breeding a generation where "geek is chic." It's a generation that doesn't think twice about adopting technology whether it's at work or play. They give little thought to Facebook or Twitter posts ranging from where they are - despite privacy concerns - to immediate feedback of a bad meal that they just had. Some describe this generation as "all about me," but I describe it more as "it's all about NOW!"

This generation and their virtual members (I count myself as one) have an amazing impact on the speed of change and if those in traditional IT organizations are not ready, you'll be swept up in this rapid evolution ... or is it a revolution?

I recall when I started in IT, our IT organization would move slowly, carefully and in an extremely methodical manner.  We delivered almost all aspects of the IT environment from the mainframe to the cables that connected those consuming IT. We would carefully manage each complex change with checklists that were checked and double-checked; we would have meetings to discuss actions and would do dry runs of complex change to ensure that we wouldn't impact any aspect of a system's availability. Lead times for change would be weeks and months and if you didn't like our standards, timeframes or imposed requirements - too bad. You could scream all you liked; we simply went back into our data center behind our locked doors to the place you were not allowed access to

At this time technology was a privilege.

But something has changed. I believe we are at the tipping point where technology is no long a privilege it's a right!

Yes, technology changed - we have our PCs, the internet, the Blackberry and of course my beloved (this week) iPad - but I think that fundamentally what has changed is they education system. We now have an emerging workforce of the "empowered" generation who are conscious of technology all the while we have educated the remainder to leverage it for value and good.

As I was filling my rental car this morning at the gas station I witnessed a parent with their school age children and they were playing with an iPad. As I commented to the parent at the pump he told me they were doing their homework assignment. The children, I was told, are ages 6 and 7.

For those of you in IT, it's no longer about the delivery of magic behind closed doors. The focus for you is changing. You are moving truly into the service industry, delivering IT-enabled business value by focusing on the service and its delivery. This all is potentially delivered through a complex value chain of providers. You can no longer hide behind rules that say "no." You must alter your posture to say "yes," while focusing on the risks involved and how to effectively communicate and empower the business to accept risk where appropriate and how to mitigate it where it's not.

Will IT go away?  No. At least not in the short term! Will roles change? They have changed already. The challenge or question for individuals is "to change or not to change?"  If you don't, you may be left behind!

This blog also appears on the CA Service Management blog.

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Published: January 27 2012, 10:36 AM | no comments
by Mary Cauwels

As we prepare to close the first month of the new year, I am looking back on how I spent a lot of the weekends using the "out with the old, in with the new" mantra. And that got me thinking (scary, I know) about the relationship between innovating new products or services and transforming application portfolios or moving services to the cloud.

In order to make room for the new ideas, it is necessary to make space by evaluating the so-called "old" products and services. This rationalization might actually need to occur prior to innovation activities or at the very least in lock-step with it. However, it is not a simple matter of carte blanche removal of all things old. I learned that while sitting on the floor with my son during the "clean out" of his room. Surrounded by Legos^TM, race cars, and plastic army men, my son and I had to discuss what to keep, what to donate to charity,  and what to throw away or recycle. This is the case in organizations as well. The dialogue between IT and business is critical.

Consider the path that Nordea Bank took when embarking on their Total Application Portfolio Assessment project (TAPAS), recently published in a customer success story.

Nordea recognized that years of mergers and acquisitions have resulted in redundant, antiquated, or unused applications. Meanwhile, they needed to gear up to bring new innovations in financial products and services to market quickly which meant freeing up resources. Enter CA Clarity PPM. It brought Nordea the solution they needed to evaluate the 3,300 business applications spanning from banking systems to customer relationship management, human resources, and accounting applications.

According to Michael Steffensen, Head of Group IT Business Support at Nordea, "The CA Technologies PPM solution provides comprehensive visibility of application details to support the TAPAS project and enables greater governance. It also acts as a tool for communication between business and IT to ensure an open dialogue is maintained and that application decisions are supported by all key prospects." This included the selection of the evaluation criteria. Now Nordea can maintain a score for each application that relates to the business criteria such as functional quality, business and strategic value with IT criteria such as application costs and technical quality. This qualitative and quantitative data guides more "informed decisions as to whether to retire, keep as-is, upgrade or replace an application," explains Steffenson.

The result is an expected €3.5 million in cost savings which will not only free up funding resources for new innovation but will also free up IT staff to support new projects. Fortunately for Nordea, they expect continued benefits for years to come.  And with the latest release of CA Clarity PPM, coordinating innovation and transformation and aligning business and IT is even easier. 

As for my son, our transformation project was a success as well - for now at least.

 Lego image provided by Mary Cauwels.

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Published: January 24 2012, 02:13 PM | no comments
by Crystal Miceli

This got me thinking about the power of the crowd, and how passion can be harnessed to improve delivery of products and services.

If passion about a product or service can be generated, whether through awareness or debate, what might that do to brand loyalty?  It seems that, if you feel like you can have an impact on an outcome, you become more invested in that outcome being a positive one.

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Published: January 10 2012, 01:50 PM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

There is so much data being thrown at us each day it's overwhelming! Email, instant messages, Web pages, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, RFID networks, texts, embedded systems in cars and the list goes on and on. All this data is collected and simply waiting to be used. Let me take a step back and define what I mean.

The Wikipedia definition for Big Data is:

"Big data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set."

What is happening is that enterprises are collecting exceptionally large volumes of data, in multiple formats from multiple sources. The volume of data is increasing, as is access to it with the evolving interconnected world of social networks, sensor networks, customer chat sessions, etc. In fact everything is available on the Internet somewhere. For example the United States Library of Congress and Twitter just signed an agreement (Dec. 7) that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever tweeted added to the library's repository (note to self be careful what I tweet).

The value, however, is NOT in the data, it is in the analytics of the data to make effective business decisions from the intelligence that is identified within the information. Prediction 3 for 2012 is that origanizations will commence mining the information for value to make effective decisions. 

Potential value propositions could include early indications of trends that are working to move new products quickly to or from them market. For instance if a new product is working within a certain demographic you can rapidly target like demographics. Now in the past this information may have taken days or weeks. With big data aggregation and analytics, it could be available in minutes or hours.

More than ever before analytics of the information will be critical, but like all processes using data, garbage in will probably lead to garbage out, unless you can identify the garbage!

 This blog also appears at CA Technologies Service Management blog.

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