Execution Strategy

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Application portfolio management drives technology road map definition and hence the first step is to perform application portfolio management. In the application portfolio management, the applications in the landscape are assigned in to four different categories. Members of each categories depends on IT and business strategies and the categories are:

1.Replace, 2.Retain, 3.Sundown and 4.Introduce

Follow the enterprise sundown procedure for applications under sundown. Now, group the applications which are in the categories under replace, retain and introduce. Create an enterprise business process map and align the applications under the business process map. Align all the technologies used for each application. At this point, a holistic high level chart which maps business processes to set of applications and set of applications to technologies will be established. To attain ultimate end results, this chart or map should be kept high level and focus on the major items in both application and technology layer.

A successful, practical and value added enterprise architect will strike a good balance on capturing key information in this step and avoid details. For instance, there is no focus on items like 2 Mac work stations being used by Marketing to create corporate font or no focus on items like a Lotus Notes system being used by five users in a field location.

A general approach to map the application landscape categories to technology landscape categories is given below.
Retain: Evaluate the technology used of the retained applications and ensure it meets the technology roadmap principle
Replace: Perform – Build Vs Buy analysis. For build or buy solution – ensure it adhere to technology road map principle. Follow the sun down procedure for the current application
Introduce: Perform – Build Vs buy analysis. For build or buy solution – ensure the solution adhere to technology road map principle.

Basic principle in defining the technology road map is distinguishing differentiating and commodity technologies in the landscape. The simple idea of categorizing the technology stack into these categories is as follows.

Investment in differentiating technologies
Optimize the cost in commodity technologies

Differentiator and commodity depends on type of industry. For instance, for banking and finance industry, the key differentiators are security, compliance, investor confidence and investment management. Whereas, for energy and utility sector, the key differentiators are safety, security, green technologies and energy efficiency. For any profit organization, the corporate strategy, IT strategy, finance strategy and etc are reflection of competitive strategy. Conceptually the differentiator factors for each industry can be analyzed but competitive strategy of the organization defines the attributes of differentiators within the market sector.

Ideally, the differentiators from competitive strategy transform into corporate strategy and infused into each organization strategy. The strategy alignment ensures unidirectional execution across the entire corporation.

In a recent project scenario I worked on, the following are top seven differentiating and commodity technologies for a company in banking and finance market sector.

The top 7 differentiating technology areas are: 1.Security, 2.Compliance, 3.IT Service Mgmt, 4.Integration, 5.Dataware house, 6.Back office and 7.Private Cloud.

The top 7 commodity technology areas are: 1.Operating System, 2.Application Server, 3.Web Server, 4.Database Server, 5.Desktop, 6.Storage and 7.Collaboration

The outcome of the technology roadmap is to have a positive net value in terms of cost, flexibility, security, adaptability, agility and sustainability. A solid technology implementation plan is created with strong foundation of principles, alignment with corporate direction, executive sponsorship, and senior leadership endorsement. These are key required qualities to execute a plan successfully.

Secrets for technology roadmap execution

Integrate the architecture team part of the technology delivery team.

Bring the industry best product experts to implement technology road map. Take time to on broad the best expert with great positive attitude and learning aptitude to the architecture team.

The attitude of the experts plays a major role to implement technology roadmap successfully.Since commodity technologies will be replaced, the current support team of the current commodity technologies will demonstrate strong resistance to introduce and implement the replacement technologies. Industry experts with deep knowledge and great positive attitude will defeat the resistance of current support teams and infuse confidence in them.

Conduct technology forum discussions and participate in all enterprise or departmental town hall meetings and explain the reason and rationale for technology changes to the developers, application managers and illustrate the measurable value of new technology road map.

Bring the market research analyst and research documents to the organization and provide evidence and case studies on the selected technology roadmap’s success stories in the industry.

Identify low hanging fruits, implement it quickly and celebrate success.

Ensure the implementation teams understand that failure is not an option.

Ensure the implementation teams understand that there is no fall back plans available in case of failure to implement the new technology.

Ensure the implementation teams does not look back and second guess all the technology decisions made. At the same time, assign in-house industry experts to the implementation teams to overcome any technical challenges they face. For complex technical problems, engage the premier support team immediately to augment in-house industry experts to uncover and solve complex technical problems.

Engage the experts and define detail architecture to cover scalability and high availability.

Finally, engrain “MAKE IT HAPPEN” mindset to the technology implementation teams.

All the above steps are not just a theory. Above framework was followed and technology roadmap was defined and it was successfully implemented in less than 8 months for a large company in banking and finance sector. we “MADE IT HAPPEN”

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Blessings from Cheetahs for a long journey

A new revolutionary or evolutionary ideas are not agreed in one step nor in first step. It is a process to build consensus even to explore a new idea. An IT strategy may be an evolutionary or revolutionary idea based on the current state of an organization. In the IT strategy definition process, the idea of change must be agreed by senior and executive management of an organization before even a new IT strategy definition process is kicked off. A need and purpose for a change in an IT organization becomes imperative when there is a business strategy clearly defined. How do you define IT strategy when there is no clearly defined business strategy. In the previous post, I recommended that, in those scenario, create an IT strategy to improve the value of IT organization. Since the IT valuation process and methods are so vague, I suggest, it is not wise to start the discussion with senior executives as to increase the value of an IT organization as IT strategy. The moment an IT strategy person starts the discussion of improving value of the company, the speculation starts with wild imagination which are destructive.

First step in introducing a change is to have courage to talk to executives of the organization and get their blessings for your ideas. The philosophy is, people will listen to your idea when you tell them nicely and you will have their blessings if it is a good one. The rank you hold in the organization does not matter and you will be able to connect with them, make them listen and get their blessings. Result of the attempt to make the connection with your idea with your ideas may be career threatening but, as a strategy person, you need that courage to take the risk to make that change in the organization.

Reduction in operating cost of an IT organization is an easy sell. If someone has an idea to reduce the operating cost by 20-25% with out the reduction of services nor resources, then you will get everyone’s attention in the board room. Open source platform would be a good starting point if it is not fully maximized in the organization. Receive conceptually concurrence on embracing and encouraging open source platform in the organization. If that is accomplished, that is a great starting point for a long road to reach the end goal – increase the value of an IT organization.

It goes back to the abstract strategy approach “think big, start small and run fast”.

Once open source platform adoption is agreed than the next step is to show results. Look for a commercial software product that has significant on-going maintenance cost. It could be due to license, complexity, resource availability, hardware or others. Identify an area carefully and diligently analyze the cause for higher cost. Study the availability of open source equivalent and its capabilities, capacity, supportability and maturity. Compare and contrast it with commercial product. If it is feasible to show cost saving with the open source replacement, identify technical resources and perform end-to-end proof of concept and show the results to the senior management.

When people run fast, it is assumed that you reach the destination sooner. Generally, the audience does not have the curiosity to inquire the distance you run. When you do a first proof of concept to prove your first idea of a long road, the time taken to accomplish it is very important. Don’t take more than 5 weeks to complete the proof of concept to show the results. Draft an implementation plan with risk.

Details on how to receive concurrence on open source adoption from senior and executive management will be in my next post..

IT Strategy: In the absence of a Business strategy

Business strategy drives IT strategy. But, what drives IT strategy in the absence of clearly defined business strategy?

Identification of successful business strategy in a dynamically evolving consumer and financial markets is extremely challenging and sometimes, it is impossible. Look back in few years, take business strategies of top companies and their result today, and hence the evidence of extreme complexity and challenge exist in defining successful business strategy for an organization in a dynamic market.

IT strategy supports business strategy in spite of the out come of the business strategy. True. However, the point is, some times business strategy can not be defined clearly or it does not exist and in that case, how the IT strategy should be defined.

In the absence of business strategy, IT strategy is to increase the value of IT organization. Now the questions are, what is IT valuation and how to measure it, and finally how to increase it?

I had the opportunity to work with a purchase accounting project for a well known demerger in the auto industry. I noticed, there is a significant market opportunity for a IT valuation model in spite of 3 of big 4 consulting and accounting companies were heavily involved in that project. So I developed a simple IT valuation model to determine the fair market value of an IT organization to readjust the book value of IT assets.

To simplify it, let me put a different spin to IT valuation. Purchase accounting occurs after a merger or demerger occurs. But, before a merger or acquisitions occurs, an organization is evaluated for its market value. That includes tangible and intangible assets. The tangible assets are mostly fixed assets and over the years, valuation process for the tangible assets is more matured. Most of the IT valuation comes from intangible assets. For a pure technology companies like Microsoft, Intel, the intangible assets of the organization can be quantified by patents, copy rights, trade mark and etc. For an IT organization supports a business function in banking and finance, oil and gas and etc, the intangible asset valuation is challenging.

In those scenarios, the intangible assets are:

An organization ability to adapt to market change in terms of capacity & capabilities. ie scale up or down infrastructure based on future requirements
An organization ability to develop a rapid applications for future requirement – skill set, processes, knowledge
An organization’s efficient operating cost mode – in terms of license, hardware depreciation
An organization’s IT general controls and management – IT risk management, Security Management, compliance management

The above intangible assets of an organization improves the value of IT organization. It will be reflected in case of merger or an acquisition. In the absence of clearly defined business strategy, take the above strategic objectives of IT strategy and plan.

The above IT strategy will reduce the cost, improve the over all reliability, flexibility, security and adaptability of an IT organization. It requires investment and the question is how a CIO can justify the ROI for the above initiative.Biggest advantage of the above approach is, the initiative does not require any additional incremental cost. Since it has very high ROI, it will sponsor the project from its saving and improves the value of IT organization. When there is no clearly defined business strategy then the IT strategy is to improve the value of IT organization.

If any one interested to understand the granular details of the above IT strategy, practical difficulties of framing the strategy, actual results and etc. More blog postings will follow to provide the details of the above steps. Mean time, if you’re impatience and you need immediate information, please do not hesitate to contact me.