3 value propositions to address the Top 10 CIO Concerns

Lean IT is the extension of lean manufacturing and lean services principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a conceptual blueprint that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The intent of enterprise architecture is to determine how an organization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives. SMACT stack is a new enterprise IT model that blends social, mobile, data analytics, cloud technologies and Internet of Things to improve business competitiveness.

A survey from Forbes pointed out the Top 10 CIO concerns as follows:

• -       Technology Alignment with the Business
• -       Security & Privacy
• -       Speed of IT Delivery and Time-to-Market
• -       Innovation
• -       Business Productivity & Efficiency
• -       IT Value Proposition to the Business
• -       IT Agility & Flexibility
• -       IT Cost Reduction & Controls
• -       Business Agility & Flexibility
• -       Business Cost Reduction & Controls

With close to 15+ years in my consulting tenure practicing Lean Six Sigma with Enterprise Architecture now embracing next generation digital wave of SMAC IoT here are top 3 things an enterprise should switch to or start thinking to address the above concerns:

1.    Think First … Think Fast… Think Future

-       The ever changing landscape of business and technology poses a challenge for any big or small enterprise to catch up with the speed and scale, its very crucial for the technologist to play a vital consulting role in alignment with business and management in clearly defining the roadmap of the future. Here is where the role of an enterprise architect becomes important to align the Big 7 areas (MDM, BPM, ECM, IDM, UXM, BI and Middleware) clearly mapping the big 5 architecture components : Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Integration Architecture, Data Architecture and Application architecture leveraging the latest digital technology stack Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Internet of Things

2.    Lean Before Digitize

-       Lean Leader becomes an integral part of the core team who will define the areas to go Lean and help Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family, clearly eliminate non value add and perhaps automate and orchestrate value enabling activities. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity and aim at creating perfection in all the areas. An enterprise architect wearing a lean cap will play a very crucial role at all levels of architecture ensuring agility, flexibility, scalability and reusability with least efforts and almost zero rework keeping in mind the pace of technology change. Lean and Six Sigma are proven frameworks of excellence and cost optimization as a result of improved operations / decisions impacting business productivity and efficiency 

3.    Empower… Engage… Energize

-       The people factor will play an equally crucial role in the millennial era, the employees need to see value in what they are doing if not what will be left over in the organization will be those who will end up dreaming the future unable to execute, many a organizations have not matured to the modern day thinking, the HR policies and the complacency mind-set equating presence with performance and no moonlighting will kill innovation. What is required is to enable the talent in the organization to stand on their own feet and think like entrepreneurs, empower with strong HR policies which energies the employees to engage in the next gen digital wave and contribute towards the organization growth. Get away from reporting employee utilization  by measuring 9 to 6 stay and work in office / timesheet entries and feel proud that your utilization is increased and for haven sake stop force fitting your talent into the bell curve … this will force employees not to take risk fearing missing the goals and objective.

For every organization to be successful remember all three areas People, Process and Technology are extremely important, the next generation digital wave marked with the SMACT stack will need skills that are not coming out from the education factory (Engineering and Tech. institutes) hold your best talent… groom them to see the future and get ready for the future…

Lean Six Sigma philosophy applied with Enterprise Architecture Frameworks in the SMACT area and harnessing the talent to its fullest potential with right policy governance is a mantra of the millennial organization that foresees itself to stay competitive in this market …

Bringing business and IT together

Feb 16^th 2004, a day I will always cherish, this was the day when I joined Hewlett Packard a now it’s been a decade long journey of bringing business and IT together.

My life in consulting started with HP and I believe this was the major breakthrough in my career, in the very early days I got an opportunity to work with the best of the leaders and mentors where I learned to excel in the consulting assignments being inclusive with all other management frameworks. This was the time when I was introduced into the world of Enterprise Architecture.

While there are hundreds of definitions of enterprise architecture, and each company adds its own flavour in this blog let me stick with the definition provided by Gartner.

“Enterprise architecture (EA) is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating, and improving the key principles and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution”

This was the time when HP and Compaq merged into one and my initial days in this role were spent on engaging with leaders and draw communications to Initiate change from the top and remove barriers. Building out the foundation for execution requires investments in IT infrastructure, and as HP – Compaq came together I was working with the leaders who planned to build their foundations one project at a time, funding mechanisms often limit important investments in infrastructure and so was in this case too. When I look back today I believe I could have contributed a lot more… alas..! this is what experience is all about; it was the very beginning for me to understand how processes become complex when status quo gets challenged and the mergers often take its own time to stabilize before it starts performing.

I got an opportunity to work with a very polished leader, who stepped in and made it happen. Experimentation was the way, there is nothing right and wrong, you simply follow the PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act) cycles before coming up with the final process that will be digitized and take baby steps across the business before building the blueprint and gather buy in from all the stakeholders involved post which the architecture gets drawn, the IT collaborates with the business and decides on the technology suite which becomes the integral part supporting the day to day business operations the organization carries out.

Risk, Disaster recovery, IT Security, Web etc… were very new terms in those days, Cloud computing was in its infancy, the talk of the town revolved round the servers, this was the era when use architecture as a compass and communication tool to draw right investments and build the funding structure emerged.

I was a part of the team whose agenda was to identify the small set of key IT-related capabilities (IT-enabled processes, shared databases, standardized platforms) that are most critical to the company's operations. We all learn from mistakes, and our team too committed few, the kind of enthusiasm in us created a rush to move on to the next project without ensuring that the organization is deriving the benefits from the last project, here is when I learnt Enterprise architecture maps a path in which a company incrementally builds and then leverages capabilities.

I was then introduced to the world of Six Sigma, the strengthening rupee and the weakening dollar in India added a lot of pressure to the IT organization and there was quite a huge cost optimization drive, Consolidating servers, renegotiating contracts, introducing offshore outsourcing, and installing financial discipline, driving series of Six Sigma projects on the floor at all levels and the entire focus shifted from the top line to the operations and this showed up on the bottom line. While the EBITDA for our P&L was +ve the margins were very poor compared to the previous years, it was a time when the salary hikes to employees were –ve and it was required to rethink how to maneuver further.

We had a leader who built a team called Excelartors which stood for Excellence + Acceleration, this team was handpicked from each of the business unit with a focus on enabling core activities and providing useful data that can improve efficiency and creativity of the company's people coupled with rewards for enterprise wide thinking. Each leader drew a business plan and how it can collaborate with IT, data and metrics played a very interesting role, new dimension of the business shaped up which was supported by the IT. Various TCE&Q (Total Customer Experience and Quality) initiatives were led which I was a part of and the energy resonated in each of the top leader I did interact with. Smaller groups functioned and the execution was carried out seamlessly. A lot of work was also outsourced with Wipro who helped enable the business with digitizing the balance scorecard and analytics.

What I learnt at HP about EA can be summarized looking at this simple video on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1MPEmMBqc0