The question of outsourcing all IT functions within a small business was asked of me by an acquaintance after she read two of my Small Business CIO articles: Small Business CIO – Manager of Constraints and Outsourcing, Value & Capabilities – Priorities for Small Business CIO’s.

This person, who I’ll call Heather,  is the owner & CEO of a ~ 100 person firm\. She’s thinking long and hard about dropping her entire IT team and starting from scratch.  As part of her thought process, she had been looking at outsourcing a good portion of her IT infrastructure and only keeping the core assets that she needs in-house.

Heather had already determined that she’d offload her email platform.   To her, that was an easy decision…they’ve had nothing but trouble with their in-house exchange server.  She’s also determined that her website hosting will go off-site to a managed services firm.  Both are pretty straightforward decisions and are easily supported by an cost/benefit analysis.

But…she’s now rethinking her entire plan. When she contacted me, she’d come to the conclusion that she should do away with 75% of her IT staff, outsource all IT platforms and save hundreds of thousands per year.

Outsourcing Small Business IT

While I’ve been a big proponent of outsourcing some information technology functions, especially within Small Business IT shops, I’m alarmed at the level of cuts Heather’s proposing.

Heather’s core business revolves around services.  Her company provides marketing services to real estate firms.  In talking through the issues with Heather, she doesn’t see her information technology team and assets as a core piece of her company’s competitive advantage.

During a few phone calls and email exchanges on the subject with Heather, I was able to convince her to take a step back and rethink her approach.

While she is still convinced that she can outsource most of her IT platforms, she’s realized that there are a few that would be nice to have some ownership on.

For one, her financial IT system(accounting, billing, etc).  She had thought she could easily outsource the entire technology platform but has come to realize that her livelihood is based around how her financial platform.

Another outcome of Heather’s rethinking her IT outsourcing initiative – the majority of her IT staff will keep their jobs.    Like many IT teams in the small business world, their focus will be changing from platform maintenance to technology initiatives that help the organization position themselves as a leader in their field.

Cutting Small Business IT to the bone

Heather is the second small business owner that I’ve talked to in the last month who’s been thinking about outsourcing their entire IT team.  In addition, many CIO’s and IT leader’s that I’ve talked with have said the same thing (you can read more on the subject in my post titled Outsourcing, Value & Capabilities – Priorities for Small Business CIO’s.

I’d caution everyone out there who’s looking at outsourcing part (or all) of their information technology function to be careful. Sure you can get away with going to the cloud for some IT platforms and you can easily outsource things like web and email hosting, but outsourcing to much IT can be deadly.  More on that in another post.

PS - While I wasn’t paid for my time by Heather and didn’t ask for payment…I offered my suggestions on her plans and, thankfully, she listened. That said, I may start up a consulting practice solely focus on Small Business IT…seems to be a lot of folks in the SMB space needing assistance.

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Small Business IT Outsourcing – don’t go too far is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Small Business Technology Outsourcing
2. Outsourcing, Value & Capabilities – Priorities for Small Business CIO’s
3. Small Business CIO – Manager of Constraints
4. Outsourcing Bill of Rights
5. Innovation and Outsourcing – Do they go together?

Long answer?  Read on

Vince Kellen does a great job arguing the point in a post titled “Echolalia: The CIO is Dead! Long Live the CIO!” on The Cutter Blog. Jump over and read it.

Shameless Plug – Kellen was the Editor of the January 2010 Edition of the Cutter IT Journal and was helpful in getting “The Future Proof CIO” article that Gene De Libero and I co-authored.

In Kellen’s post, he writes about the ever present argument that the CIO’s role will go away.   The best argument for the role to always be around?  This line from Kellen’s post:

The CIO role has been and will continue to be focused on the information integration of the firm, especially as newer and more difficult forms of information grow.

I was struck by how straightforward and simple that statement was.

Many of the CIO’s that I’ve worked with have seen their focus being ‘delivering technology to meet strategic objectives’.  Not a bad focus actually…but Kellen’s definition of the CIO role is actually much stronger and much more important.

As CIO, if you focus on ‘delivering technology’, you’ll always be the ‘IT group’.  You’ll always be focused on the technology rather than the problem. And…you may

Why not step back and start focusing on the problem in business today?  That problem is a simple one:

How can an organization deliver their service or product in a way that is smarter, more effective and more useful to clients?

Answering that question should be the focus of every member of senior leadership.  The CIO’s role should be to deliver the necessary information to address this most important problem.  By focusing on the problem, the CIO can move out of the ‘CIO as Tech Guru’ to ‘CIO as Strategist’.

What will happen if we continue to focus on the technology? I think we’ll continue to see people discussing whether the role of the CIO is important enough for organizations.  Start focusing on the business problems and focus on the Real Business of IT and that discussion will end rather quickly.

The role of CIO going away? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

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5. Mark McDonald on IT Planning for 2011

Image courtesty of CIO.com

I’m a bit slow on my reading lately….so bear with me as I catch up. Just read through the 2010 State of the CIO Survey published by CIO.com.

A few highlights:

• This year, nearly one third—30 percent—of the 594 IT leaders we polled say meeting or beating business goals is a personal leadership competency critically needed by their organizations, up significantly from the 18 percent who said so last year.
• 22 percent cited “identifying and seizing on commercial opportunities”—more than triple last year’s 6 percent
• Aligning IT initiatives with business has dropped significantly over the last 2 years – 64 percent, down from 71 percent last year and 82 percent two years ago
• Still, most CIOs have no P&L duties. According to our survey, just 9 percent head up a line of business
• There are impressive jumps in the numbers of IT leaders concentrating on customer although the majority of respondents still don’t spend their time with any

Interesting results.

A few more stats:

Projects that CIO’s canceled last year:

• 39% were were infrastructure upgrades
• 31% enterprise software rollouts
• 21% were unified communications projects
• 20% were network upgrades

Projects that got funded were:

• 63% – projects that improved end-user productivity
• 53% – projects improved the quality of products
• 39% – projects that helped create new offerings

From those stats, it looks like CIO’s have been focusing on driving growth and improvements in the business…which is an excellent thing to see.

Take a second to review those that got canceled. Those are the projects that aren’t sexy. They are the ‘plumbing’ of the organizations….nobody outside of IT really cares or understands what a ‘network upgrade’ means to the company.

But…what happens next year when the recessions is over and the IT infrastructure can’t keep up? Will the CIO & IT organization have moved off to the cloud entirely as Gartner predicts will happen with 20% of businesses by 2012?

CIO reports on another Gartner study that says 2010 is the year of transformation of IT using social technologies. According to Gartner, this approach “raises productivity and increases value from current IT assets”. Perhaps CIO’s have been looking to the future and realized that they can get more value from their current assets.  This realization has allowed them to shift their focus from operational to transformational as reported in the survey results above.

The next few years in the IT space will be interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2010 & beyond brings for CIO’s.

What do you think about these results?  Are you seeing the same things in your organization that are reported in the CIO.com survey?

Focus of the CIO for 2010 and Beyond is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

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2. Outsourcing, Value & Capabilities – Priorities for Small Business CIO’s
3. Links for March 21 2010
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5. Links for March 14 2010

While Gene’s question is a fair one, I have to ask a much simpler question….do you have a technology strategic plan? Or at the very least, do you discuss technology and/or IT in your organization’s strategic plan?

I know its a simple question….but its an important one.

Last year I spent some time working with a medium sized organization’s CIO and IT group.  They had just finalized the organization’s strategic plan for the following year and wanted someone to come in and review for completeness and see if there were any holes.

When I met with the team, they were extremely pleased with their work and they were excited to have been included in the strategic planning process.  They were ready and raring to get to work on the new strategic plan.

I received the plan and reviewed it.  It wasn’t bad…it fit the organization well.  The culture fit the strategic plan.

There was only one problem.  At no point was there any discussion of using technology to reach the objectives listed in the plan.

A good portion of the strategic plan revolved around technology but there was little discussion of any strategy to actually acquire, implement and utilize technology

So…back to Gene’s question – is Cloud Computing part of your strategic plan.  Based on my experiences, organizations forget about technology as part of their strategic plans.

Have you included technology in your strategic plan?

Do you have a technology strategy? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

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Progress Software’s CTO Dr John Bates predicts that 2010 will see the following “revolutionary” changes in the IT space:

1. Real-time insight and business control will become a must-have, as organizations can ill-afford to lose money and customer through being slow to notice problems in delivery.

2. Event-driven computing will accelerate, driven by business needs, and impacting both the way applications are built and how they are deployed in the enterprise.

3. Cloud computing will become mainstream, with storage-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and compute-as-a-service, becoming widely sold and used.

4. Mobile computing will continue to be the biggest driver of innovation, extending the move from the desktop to the PDA to internet-enabled in-car systems, and even the fabled ‘internet fridges.’

5. CIOs will be forced to justify IT investments, because the recession has killed off the notion of ‘IT for IT’s sake,’ CIOs must demonstrate rapid return on investment, business relevance and the strategic importance of IT to innovate to release funding for projects.

Some interesting predictions.  Let’s take a brief look at each prediction and see if it makes sense.

Prediction #1 – Real-time insight and business control will be a must have.

I can see this. This type of data is a must-have regardless of whether the year is 2000, 2010 or 2050.  Why is real-time data so important though?

Is it needed to create more efficient processes?  Is it needed to create better plans?   Perhaps.  But I’d argue that real-time data is only important if you use it to get closer to your customers.

According to Progress Software:

In 2009, our research found that 67% of businesses only become aware of problems when customers report them. 80% of companies already have critical business events they need to monitor in real time

Why do you think Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are such a hit today with organizations?  It isn’t necessarily because organizations are social…it’s because it gets the brand closer to the customer and in near-real-time.

Is real-time data a revolution or an evolution? I say revolution when it comes to IT but its an evolutionary for other parts of the business due to the avaolability of near-real-time data over the last year.

Prediction #2 – Event-driven computing will accelerate and impact the way applications are built and deployed.

Event-driven computing.  Huh.  That sounds like something that’s been around a while.  While it has been around a while, I’m not sure it’s been used to its fullest extent.

What is event-driven computing? Well..in a few words: event-driven computing is a way of building applications and architectures to be able to respond quickly to any event. If you’d like to read more on the subject, go take a look at Event-Driven Computing: An Introduction for more details.

So what can event-driven computing provide to IT?  Real-time behavior of users and systems. Observation for alerts. Predictive Processing.  Some really interesting stuff here.

Is event-driven computing a revolution or an evolution? I say revolution because, if it were to happen in 2010, it would require a completely new way of building applications.

Prediction #3 – Cloud computing will become more mainstream.

There are a lot of people that would argue for and against this point.  To get one side of the argument, go read the latest BusinessWeek article titled “Forecast for 2010: The coming Cloud Catastrophe“. See another side to the argument in David Linthicum’s article on InfoWorld titled “Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010“.

Will Cloud computing become more mainstream: Yes.  Is it revolutionary?  Not yet.

Prediction #4 – Mobile computing will continue to drive innovation

Yep.  I agree.  The mobile space is hot and will continue to be hot.  This will mean a new approach to data and security for IT groups around the globe.

Mobile computing has been around a while.  The Blackberry (granted – not really a mobile computing platform) was the first real game-changer for IT and the iPhone has changed things forever in the mobile computing space.  Add to that the netbooks and forthcoming generation of tablet computers, some rumored to run the iPhone OS and Google Android OS, and you’ve got a fully-connected, fully functional mobile platform.

But is it mobile computing going to be revolutionary? I’m not sure I’d call it that. Evolutionary is the word here. IT groups have been dealing with mobile computing for a long while and the processes and procedures are in place (for the most part).

Prediction #5 – CIO’s will have to justify IT investments with strategic plans and show rapid ROI for each project

Agreed but I’m not sure this is revolutionary. This is something that most CIO’s and organizations have been looking at for a few years now.   In years past, the CIO had to justify spending and with the economy in shambles, the Chief Information Officer‘s of today have had to provide even more justification for IT projects.  This justification is even more reason for The New CIO to be able to move into the strategic discussion with other leadership team members to help further align IT and the Business.

So…is this Revolutionary? Not at all.  We’ve been seeing this evolve for years.

Will 2010 be Revolutionary or Evolutionary for IT?

So…out of the 5 ‘revolutions’ for 2010 for the IT space listed by Dr Bates, I see only 2 that might be revolutionary while the rest are really more of an evolution for the majority of organizations and consumers.

Will 2010 be revolutionary for IT? I think it can be.  I think if more CIO’s take the approach that I’ve been arguing for in my New CIO series’, we’d see an awesome revolution in IT across many organizations. Think about how much more efficient your team could be if they spent less time on ensuring your employees weren’t surfing Facebook and more time on driving innovation through technology.

Focus on building revenue and driving innovation with technology and you’ll see a revolution. Focus on the same things you’ve always focused on, and you’ll be luck to see anything at all.

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Will 2010 be revolutionary or evolutionary for CIO’s and IT? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

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Diamond’s Digital IQ research, in which we surveyed 451 senior business and IT executives of large companies, found that firms spend roughly 240 man weeks per year on planning and budgeting—almost five man years! Think about what could be accomplished with 80% of that time back in the hands of your senior-most leaders. Roughly 25% of this effort is geared toward collecting the project ideas, another 25% toward preparing business cases, and only about 15% on linking the initiatives to the strategic roadmap. Our study also found that the presence of a multi-year strategic roadmap is a strong indicator of company performance, but that only 37% claim to have a clear roadmap. So, to get leaner in planning a company needs to get a clear roadmap and spend more time aligning to it and less time on (tactical) data collection.

Emphasis mine.

Interesting results.  That’s an awful lot of planning for some awful poor performance that we see in most IT groups today.  What can we do differently?

That last sentence in Chris’ points the way. Instead of spending so much time with IT planning and budgeting, why not start looking at building a strategic IT roadmap that aligns to business objectives and much less time on gathering operational and planning data that may not have any real value in the planning process.

Improving IT Planning in 2010 is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

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2. Do you have a technology strategy?
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4. Focus of the CIO for 2010 and Beyond
5. Connecting IT with Business – The Go Betweens

My review in two words: Excellent book!

Whether you are an expert in the Enterprise 2.0 world or just a beginner, this book has something for you. Whether you believe in Enterprise 2.0 or not, this book has some excellent concepts that can be used to help bring social tools into the enterprise.

The book is split into two parts with the Part 1 covering the tools of Enterprise 2.0 and Part 2 discussing how to successfully utilize social tools within the enterprise.

Part 1 provides a very good overview of the tools and techniques of Enterprise 2.0 as well as some real-world case studies of companies that have implemented Web 2.0 platforms.  These companies are extremely diverse running the gamut from government agencies to start-ups and the information provided by McAfee shows real-world usage of Web 2.0 within enterprises.

Part 2 is where the really good stuff happens.  This is where McAfee shines.  This is the stuff that every CEO, COO, CIO and CMO should read and digest.   This is the place where you get to see some strategies for using social tools within the enterprise.    When you read this book make, sure you pay attention to the Six Organizational Strategies starting on page 179.  Good stuff.

Will this book give you the recipe for successful use of Enterprise 2.0?  No.  Will this book make your Enterprise 2.0 project(s) successful?  Maybe. Maybe not. What this book will do is give you some ideas on how to introduce Enterprise 2.0 into your organization and give you some tips on make it successful.

So…let’s take a step away from the book for a minute and look at the topic itself.  Enterprise 2.0.  Great name but one that has been much maligned.  The topic has caused a lot of debate since being introduced.  For some examples, go read Dennis Howlett‘s article titled “Enterprise 2.0 – the non-debate” and then read Mark Fidelman’s response on CloudAve titled “Enterprise 2.0 Caffeine: Let’s debunk the non-debate” to get some flavor of the various debate’s happening out there on the topic. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 in the comments.

With all of this debate, or non-debates as some would say,  let’s look at McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.

McAfee continues with his definition when he writes:

Enterprise 2.0, then, is about how organizations use the newly available ESSP’s [emergent social software platforms] to do their work better

With those definitions in mind, let’s revisit one of the main arguments against Enterprise 2.0 –> The value of Social Media / Enterprise 2.0 cannot be determined.  In fact, there are many (Howlett included) that say social media tools are worthless to the organization.

My response to this argument is a simple one:

How valuable is the knowledge of an employee?  How valuable is the knowledge of 10, 100 or 1000 employees? Can you place value on that knowledge?  Maybe.  Maybe not. That doesn’t mean that trying to harness that knowledge is worthless.  So why would using tools to harness that knowledge be worthless?

I can understand some of the arguments of folks out there against Enterprise 2.0.  There are a lot of buzzwords floating about and a lot of hype around the subject, but if you take the lessons from this book to heart, you’ll do more than buy into the hype…you’ll give your organization an opportunity to succeed by really harnessing the expertise, experiences and value of your organizational knowledge.

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Book Review: Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

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CIO and the Art of Decision Making by Arun Manansingh on A CIO’s Voice

Before you can truly talk about Change Management, you have to focus on achieving clear vision by Olivier Blanchard on The BrandBuilder Blog

The 5 Secret Characteristics Of A Truly Great CIO by Dr. Jim Anderson on The Accidental Successful CIO

Where Measurement Falls Short by Amber Naslund on Altitude Branding

IT Strategies for Rising Markets by Vince Kellen on The Cutter Blog

Why Stories are an Effective Communication Tool for Your Blog by Darren Rowse on ProBlogger Blog Tips

Use Humility to Improve Performance by John Baldoni on HarvardBusiness.org

The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something from Zen Habits by Leo Babauta

Is “social product management” for real? by Tom Grant on The Forrester Blog For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

The value of IT exists over time not at a point in time by Mark McDonald on the Gartner Blog Network

Enterprise 2.0 Caffeine: Let’s Debunk the Non-Debate by Mark Fidelman on CloudAve

When Should You Let an Employee Make a Mistake? by Peter Bregman on HarvardBusiness.org

Balancing Anticipation and Adaptation by Mike Cohn on Mike Cohn’s Blog – Succeeding With Agile®

Two Powerful Words: I NOTICE by Angela Maiers on Angela Maiers Educational Services

The Intersection Of Quality And Expectations by Jono Bacon on jonobacon@home

Links for November 8 2009 is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

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The New CIO is a weekly article about the challenges facing today’s CIO as well as what can be done to prepare for future challenges.

I just completed reading The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World. Great book.  Go buy it…the link above is an affiliate link or just go grab one from your favorite bookseller.

The book does an excellent job of discussing the world of business and the role that turbulence has played in shaping it.  Donald Sull does a great job describing how to embrace turbulence and seize the opportunities that turbulence can bring.

How do you embrace turbulence?   By being agile.

Before we continue, don’t confuse ‘being agile’ with the agile development methodology….while they may be similar, for the purposes of this article, I’ll be talking about a different ‘agile’.

That said, let me clear up what I mean when I saw agile (and what Donald Sull means when he uses it): Agile isn’t about speed. Agile has to do with the ability to change course when needed. Being agile means taking a look at your organizational landscape (strategy, operations, etc) and breaking up the long-term view into smaller samples of time to make it easier to see and respond to opportunities.

Dr Sull defines agility as:

“the capacity to identify and capture opportunities more quickly than rivals” (p. 138).

In addition, he uses the concept of air warfare to help tell the story of how agility can provide tremendous benefits.  Out of these stories of air warfare, Dr Sull introduces John Boyd, a military strategist who helped with a lot of the science behind the F-16 and F-18 fighter jets, and Boyd’s OODA Loop.

John Boyd's OODA Loop (Courtesy of Jeff McNeill's Flickr stream)

What is the OODA loop?  It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

What does it have to do with IT? Everything.

In order to be an effective IT group and CIO in the world today, you’ve got to have some flexibility (i.e., be agile) so you can move quickly when opportunities arise.

As we all know, we are being asked to do more with less.  The only way to do that, is to remain flexible (as well as have a good team and not overwork them).  In addition to being agile, you’ve got to have a strategic plan and know how to execute that plan.

By using the OODA model, you might be able to be agile, plan and react as necessary.  Let’s look at how you might incorporate the OODA model into your business life.

Observe

To use the OODA model, the first (and perhaps most important) step is to continuously observe.

Observe your situation.  Look at your organization, team and the competitive landscape.  What can you and your IT team do to help move the company forward?

In addition, observe how your team operates. Do you have enough people?  Do you have the right people?

Is your strategic plan still valid based on these observations? What are the politics of your organization?

Orient

While observing, you’ll need to orient yourself to your landscape.  Orientation (in the OODA model) is all about positioning yourself.

Is your organization changing direction?  Are your competitors doing something differently that previously?  Is your team becoming overloaded?  Do you have the right people on board to make your plans successful?

Decide

You are observing your situation and have oriented yourself to the climate….now all you have to do is decide to do something.  Can you make a decision?  You better be able to.

In a turbulent world, you don’t have time to wait or over-analyze…you’ve got to decide quickly and move on.  In the world of air warfare, if you wait you die and in today’s world your fate and your organization’s fate might just hang on your ability to decide.

Act

You’ve decided on a plan of action.  Now you need to execute it.  If you’ve observed, oriented and made the right decision, you can act with ease…but do you have the right people in place?

Many organizations plan well but very few ACT well.  The ability to act and react after observing & orienting is a major reason that some organizations succeed and others don’t.

The New CIO & The Loop

The OODA model is built with feedback loops.  Each action is fed back to the observation stage to review for tweaks.  I’ve found that most organizations are missing this feedback mechanism…strategic plans are made and ‘rolled out’ without any feedback nor any way to change course quickly.

Dr Sull introduces his own version of the OODA loop…he calls it the ‘agility loop’.  The agility loop has four stages:

• Make sense of situation
• Make choices
• Make it happen
• Make revisions

I like what Dr Sull has to say about the agility loop…whether you use the OODA loop or Sull’s Agility loop, you’ll be in a position to improve your agility.

To succeed in the future, The New CIO has to remain agile.  Using the OODA loop (or Dr Sull’s agility loop) helps you keep your mindset right.  Remember to observe, orient, decide & act. Then repeat.

Turbulence, IT and The New CIO is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

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1. Decision Speed, Performance and the CIO
2. Values and The New CIO
3. Agility and The New CIO
4. Linear Thinking and the CIO
5. Goals, Priorities and The New CIO

The New CIO is a weekly article about the challenges facing today’s CIO as well as what can be done to prepare for future challenges.

I just read a ‘call for papers’ from Cutter IT Journal with the title “The Great Recession Fallout: Will CIOs Be Elevated or Exterminated?”  It doesn’t look like they’ve posted this latest call for papers on their website, but you should be able to find it there sometime soon.

While I’ve already been thinking about this topic for some time (an example can be seen in last week’s post titled “The Future of IT & The CIO“) it’s good to see  there are other folks thinking about the same thing.

A passage in the email really made me stop and think about what we (industry, IT & CIO’s) are doing.  Here’s what caught my eye:

No longer singularly pursuing either an innovation or an efficiency agenda, CIOs may now need to pursue both as their firms are driven by both the need for efficiency and the fear of having an obsolete business model. While CIOs have for some time been asked to contribute in strategic and tactical ways, has this recession pushed them too hard down both paths?

Take a look at that last sentence and think about it. We’ve been pushing (and been pushed) to do ‘more with less’ for quite a while now.  We are being asked to be strategic and tactical.  Our IT Staff are being asked to be both technical and business savvy at the same time.  This is a fact of life…but is it a reality?  Are we really able to do everything asked of us?

Can you really focus on the strategic and tactical at the same time?  Can you really expect your technical staff to interface with the business?  Have we cut our staffs and budgets so far that we’ve cut out ability to deliver real value? Are we running on empty these days?

Great questions (I think anyway).

Can you (or your team) really do it all?

There is a point at which you and your team become overloaded.  In a normal economy, this overload could be offset by hiring new staff, but in this recession there’s no new staff and many organizations aren’t bringing in new contractors either.  At some point, the overload becomes too much and you and/or your team need to pull back the effort or you’ll overload your circuits and burn yourself or your team out.  Just like the fuel gauge shown above, you and your team will be running on empty.

The New CIO needs to know when they can take on the extra work and responsibilities and when they need to push back at the organization to ensure proper staffing levels.

In addition, the New CIO must ensure that they have the right mix of IT staff.  If we’re being asked to be both strategic and tactical, you better have some folks who can do both.  If you have to interface with the organization, you better make sure you have IT staff who can interface with the business.

Lastly, as I’ve said before, in this age of doing more with less, the New CIO has to lead by saying no as much as they can.  The organization has to understand what the IT group is capable of and what will take additional staff and/or budget.

Keep your eye on your team and make sure they’ve got a bit of fuel left at all times.  Keep working hard and moving closer to your goals…but make sure you aren’t killing your staff.

Take a few minutes and ask yourself and your team: Can you really do it all?  If the answer is no, start building a business case for what needs to change, how it needs to change and why. That business case needs to land on every leader’s desk within the organization and you’d better drive hard to make the changes necessary.  If you don’t you might just find yourself looking at a staff who’s running on empty and an economy that has just moved out of the recession…and you’ve got no way to do what needs to be done to take advantage of the changes.

That said, if your organization was working right, the recession would be the time to invest in additional staff and projects…not cut staff and projects.  But that’s a topic for another post

Can you do it all? – The New CIO Series is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
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Related posts:

1. Keeping your IT staff Engaged and Happy – The New CIO Series
2. Minding the gap between Strategy and Tactics – The New CIO Series
3. Leading by saying No – The New CIO Series
4. The Dangers of Hidden Talent – New CIO Series
5. Defining "Right" – The New CIO Series