Am Cham 110616 Final

The Top 10 Challenges
Facing CIO's
John Dickson
Strategic Forty2 International Ltd

#1: Exploiting The Power Of
Business Analytics
Business speed is not just a competitive advantage but a
competitive requirement. End-to-end business
intelligence is an indispensable corporate capability
being driven by increasingly intimate online relationships
and engagements with customers dictating more-
effective allocation of IT investments.
The challenge for CIO’s is to harness the power of
analytics for the business to understand what's coming
versus (merely) rehashing what happened.
Challenge….Business data sources; spreadsheets, silos,
unstructured data
CIO’s must become visionaries within their sphere of
influence moving out of the "support organization"
mindset and earning their seat at the ‘C-table’.

#1: Exploiting The Power Of
Business Analytics
Business Intelligence
doesn’t

#2: Budget Allocation –
Maintenance versus Innovation
The IT budget of 75% or 80%+ allocated to keeping the
‘current systems’ running (“Maintenance”) is dead.
Given the speed of IT innovation of uncompromising
competitors, companies that don't invest aggressively on
IT innovation will get left by the wayside.
The CIO’s challenge is to move away from the ‘80/20
maintenance /innovation’ IT budget model.
Move to a model where innovation is at least
equal to maintenance in percentage.
How? Eliminate re-work & fire-fighting; do business
analysis; UAT is NOT bureaucracy gone mad! reclaim
“Skunkwork$$”; control change.
 Enforce SDLC/Change Management etc – see Challenge #10

Maintenance versus Innovation #2

Level 1: Reactive
IT Groups in the first level
typically spend most of their
time fire-fighting & have
problems with poor service
levels & long outage times.
There are usually few formal
processes established, almost
no systematic communication
about changes happening in
the environment & an
abundance of finger-pointing
about the causes of service
interruptions.
<<50% of resource is spent on
‘planned’ work.
Level 2: Using the
Honour System
As their users and
management become
increasingly dissatisfied with
downtime, poor quality
service & lack of strategic
development IT
organizations begin
implementing defined SDLC
& change management
processes.
They begin to document
policies & processes relying
on the ‘honour system’ for
ensuring that individuals
adhere to the new policies &
procedures.
Organizations often become
frustrated as they cannot
systematically determine
when people circumvent
these policies and
procedures.
Level 3: Using
Closed-Loop
Management
When organizations deploy
closed-loop management
processes they begin to realize
significant performance gains.
Closed-loop management
exists when detective controls
are deployed for detecting
changes to production
infrastructure and applications
& all changes are reconciled
with authorizations to ensure
that no undocumented or
unauthorised changes escape
notice. At this stage there is
typically a formal project &/or
strong exec sponsorship to
resolve issues & to bring
service levels & IT costs under
control. With executive support
& appropriate controls, service
levels improve and unplanned
work dramatically declines.
Level 4:
Continuously
Improving
Once they have experienced
the benefits of closed-loop
management, companies
begin to use their acquired
control to pinpoint problems
and inefficiencies.
They are then able to
systematically attack &
improve weak areas which
enables continuous &
ongoing improvement.
Companies (IT) at this level
are able to provide
predictable, high quality
services in a cost effective
manner.
>95%+ of resource is spent
on ‘planned’ work.

#3: Creating A Robust Mobile
Strategy – iPAD’s, Tablets, et al.
Clearly these are not going away (or are they?**)
Mobile Applications? Some just aren’t.
& there are some obvious mobile applications –
Inventory, say removalist/relocations; Courier; Inspectors
etc…e.g. a fully integrated Restaurant/bar wine list app
interfacing all the way back to the vineyards/grapes in
near time!
The challenge for CIO’s is to weave these tools into the
corporate IT framework securely, consistently, and
rapidly.
** There is a school of thought (& market evidence) that says perhaps there isn’t really a tablet
market after all. Maybe all Apple has done is to create an iPad market, not a tablet market.
InformationWeek, April 18th
, 2011

#4: Digitizing The Enterprise
There is a lot of buzz about Intelligence Chains,
Opportunity Chains, and Engagement Chains.
The driver behind these notions is the concept of having
the right data in the right place at the right time in the
right fashion.
The CIO must be out in front driving the effort to Digitize
The Enterprise and thereby accelerate and enhance
business decision-making, reduce cost, eliminate latency
in the business, facilitating the whole organization in
getting closer to customers and prospects.

#5: Social Media
The issue for CIO’s is how aggressively and assertively
they and their IT teams are charging to the forefront of
business opportunity and organizational change to make
social tools not just permissible, but indispensable.
Beyond the tools themselves, are there clear and
compelling ways to measure the effectiveness of various
types of social applications?
The question of the relevance of these tools to business has
long since been answered.
The challenge for the CIO now is to understand how to
exploit this new dynamic for the business.

#6: Customer Engagement
There is an exponential acceleration in customers and
partner organizations demanding to be more intimately
involved in product design, supply-chain synchronization,
technical support, roadmap planning, joint opportunities,
and scheduling optimization.
The CIO is absolutely indispensable in moving this from
a daunting and unfamiliar prospect to a source of unique
and potentially enduring competitive advantage.
The first challenge here is for the CIO to change his
own persona and work in such a fashion; his next
challenge is to bring the “C-table” along with him and
have them believe that he can be an innovator in a
business sense.
Lock the customer in.

#6: Customer Engagement
Make your customers &
partners need
‘your’ data
to run
‘their’ world
Use the ‘Data-Handcuffs’

#7: Data Center
Infrastructure/Clouds et al
CIO’s, on top of their traditional data centres are juggling
private clouds with hybrid clouds and public clouds (and
closed public clouds).
In parallel they have the big vendors, all of them,
bombarding them with negative arguments around the
outcomes of choosing the wrong side in the Stack Wars.
& at the same time CIO’s have to oversee & be crafting
plans around the emerging massively mobile world.
& in his ‘day job’, the CIO has to maintain operational
systems availability, even in somewhat relaxed
industries, exceeding 99.982%.

#8: Globalization
“The world is getting smaller every day”. The integration
demands of client, customer and partner companies are
accelerating at an enormous rate.
Add a pinch of SAS, SSAE, ISO to the mix and simmer.
Only a few years ago CIO’s could plead distance and
geographical diversity as reasons systems did not play
together well. This is no longer the case.

#9: Optimized Systems
Optimized systems can offer stunning levels of
performance – not ideal for every situation or application.
CIO’s need to scrutinize where these highly engineered
and integrated systems can deliver breakthrough
capabilities matched by breakthrough levels of business
value.
 Then move quickly to exploit those opportunities.
The CIO will need to separate the killer apps from the
lemons.
 Believe what IBM, SAP, HP and Larry Ellison would have you
believe & optimized hardware-software combinations will be the
only option for high-achieving businesses.
The challenge for the CIO is pretty clear here.

#10: The PMO
With so much happening on a local &/or global scale the
prospect of keeping track of everything across the CIO’s
purview is a very daunting prospect.
The deployment of an effective PMO office is
essential to success.
Explaining to the business why the PMO is essential is
almost as big a challenge as building, empowering and
deploying the office itself.
A hard part of this sell is delivering the message that the
PMO stands outside the IT Supply or IT Demand areas.
 It is the core of IT Governance and IT finance and sits discretely
under the CIO.
The PMO function has become indispensible.
If it is not on the PMO-Radar, it doesn’t exist!

The Top 10 Challenges
Facing CIO's

IT Strategy, IT Organization, CIO
Leadership, IT/Corporate Governance
Many uninformed tech-strategy charlatans are still
pushing the mantra that CIO’s need to "request a seat at
the C-table”
“The CIO should work under (the 1960’s structure of
answering to) the CFO”.
Those CIO’s who haven't earned their ‘C-table’
credibility and autonomy by virtue of their visions and
their achievements need to be pruned out.
Businesses without aggressive tech capabilities won't be
able to compete in the short to mid-term & will likely fade
away in the longer term.
CIO’s can no longer fall back on "we're a
support organization" or "the business just
doesn't understand IT" or "we can run what we
have, or we can innovate, but we can't do
both."

The business must acknowledge that the IT Strategy is a
factor of the Business Strategy and to be effective &
linked to the business must be driven by and built on a
foundation of business imperatives.
Too often the business neither accepts nor wishes to
understand this position – (as they cannot lay down a
concise business strategy looking out say three years??)
 “Increase the bottom-line” is not a business strategy.
If the business can’t describe the future of the
business and the business imperatives driving
the business, how can they expect the IT
function to support and lead the business and
be a core facilitator of business strategy?
The CIO can be an initiator.

 To this end, there are packages and
methodologies that I use regularly with
businesses to extract their ‘business
imperatives’ such that they/I can then develop
(or show their CIO how to develop) an aligned
and relevant IT Strategy.
The ‘IT Strategy’ is not necessarily the urban myth that
many people deem it to be. But it does take time and
effort.

Strategic Planning
Tactical solutions
•Document IT strategy
•Recommend target
enterprise architecture
•Recommend application
collaboration solutions
•Short term technical
solutions (Quick Wins)
Solutions &
Options analysis
•Formulation of
guiding principles
•Evaluation of
options to
fulfil discovered
gaps
Portfolio
Assessment
•Total application
inventory analysis
•IT – business
functionality
mapping
•Understand
functional and
technical gaps
Business & IT needs
assessment
•Understand
business needs
•Understand IT
environment
•IT vision and
mission
•Evaluate
technical drivers
IT Strategy Methodology

The optimal IT Structure - ??
The IT Organization is a clearly demarcated Demand and
Supply model.
I have deployed it locally & globally in several situations to
great effect.
Like all good things, getting there comes with a little pain.

WhenbusinessunitsworkdirectlywithIT,
theyoftensetuptheirownenterprisesystems.
Creatingaunifieddemandorganizationcan
simplifytheinterfacewiththeITSupplygroup.
“SplittingdemandfromSupplyinIT”McKinsey

When business units work directly with IT,
they often set up their own enterprise system
Creating a unified demand organization can
simplify the interface with the IT Supply grou

CIO Leadership, Corporate Governance – see previous.
CIO’s have to earn their (“C”) leadership position.
It does not just come with time or being the last man
standing in IT. The longest serving application
developer or techo propeller-head in an organization is
unlikely to be a natural CIO.

Challenges / Opportunities CIO's
face in Mainland China
 The biggest challenge facing CIO’s in China is that China lacks
tech-savvy depth or maturity in IT people and company executives.
The IT knowledge in China is predominantly current generation and
book (learning institution) learned and lacks the benefit of
generations of IT knowledge – experiential insight.
 Upside…..no legacy or heritage applications.
 The realm of IT corporate governance and structured or planned IT
development (and deployment) is to many people (and in fact many
organizations in China) very alien, almost an anathema.
 SDLC, IT Strategy and the PMO Office are seen as largely
unnecessary and bureaucratic.
Given this mindset, “quick-fixes”, “skunkworks”
(unapproved developments), silos of information or
function (dysfunction), ignoring of standards and
completely unstructured development of ‘applications’
are justified on the basis that the business is far more
important and cannot wait for ‘I.T. bureaucracy’.

Challenges / Opportunities CIO's
face in Mainland China
 The biggest single challenge is educating the IT
practitioners and their executives of the disciplines that
lead to successful and sustainable IT.
 ‘Fire-fighting’ is often accepted as the norm and part and
parcel of IT and is preferable to the perceived
bureaucracy of a properly structured and functional IT
organization. – See Challenge #2
 Legislation and regulation used as excuses for the failure of IT
are simply (further) parameters that define the boundaries of IT
on an organization by organization basis.

The Strategic Forty2 Virtual Chief Information Officer (VCIO)
Strategic Forty2 International Limited (S42), is a dynamic information technology services organization
headquartered in Hong Kong, PRC. Virtual CIO’s for S42 act in the capacity of part-time, ‘senior’ or interim
CIO’s for client organizations. This offering directly determines the technology innovation required to meet the
strategic long-term goals and manage all functions of S42’s select customers’ information technology estate. As
adjunct, existing CIO’s or IT Department Heads are afforded mentoring and advisory services. As adjunct,
retained IT Steering Committee positions are undertaken upon request.
The activities undertaken include ensuring the total cost of providing the business with the IT function (Global IT
TCO) is clearly understood and appropriately accounted for with a view to ensuring business alignment and
management of the IT Budget/Spend and parallel IT expenditure(s); the proper functioning of information
processing systems to support the business; recommending and managing upgrades of both real and virtual
assets; the implementation &/or refinement of the business analysis function; ensuring documentation of policies
and procedures to achieve compliance; the implementation of tailored, proven, comprehensive Systems
Development Life Cycle Programs (SDLC); the establishment of effective Program Management Offices (PMO)
resulting in solid, timely and appropriately delivered applications solutions that reflect business priorities; and
underpinning it all, IT organizational and capability assessment and improvement strategies.
The VCIO identifies, recommends, develops, implements, and supports total solutions in agreement with the
client that match and support the strategic business goals and imperatives of the client. To this end, a complete
international standard IT Strategic Planning process is provided.
For more information or a confidential discussion regarding how we can assist your
company, please call John Dickson in Hong Kong on +852 9048 7121 or e-mail
johndickson@netvigator.com.
Strategic Forty2 International Limited

Strategic
Forty2
IT
Strategic
Planning
process

Why is Strategic Planning important?
 Business strategies and objectives are increasingly dependent on IT
to be successful. An IT Strategy must lay out a roadmap and plan for
investment to establish the systems, infrastructure and services
necessary for the business to achieve long-term objectives.
 Assessing how well current IT assets and capabilities are positioned
to support business goals will reveal application, infrastructure and
organizational strengths, weaknesses and gaps.
 A well formulated strategy will directly link IT projects and initiatives
to sources of future business value.
 Business leaders will understand IT’s priorities and how those
priorities are aligned with business direction.
 The IT organization will have a clear picture of what systems and
services are needed, when and how they will contribute to the
success of the company.

What’s offered in the Strategic Forty2
process?
 We use a complete set of industry leading IT Strategy tools.
 Structured to be able to pick and choose individual tools as required
to meet current needs, or partially completed projects/undertakings.
 A proven methodology for tackling strategic planning.
 The process can be broken into parallel streams – utilizing in-house
resources where applicable – to expedite the conclusion.
 The deliverable is an assessment of current applications, technical
infrastructure and organizational capabilities providing the necessary
insights and foundations to design aligned strategic programs and
initiatives to address strategic business imperatives, strengthen
existing assets, fill gaps and ensure IT investment alignment to meet
the long-term business needs of the business.

The Strategic Forty2 process will:
Understand
 Clearly articulate business objectives and strategies and the role IT
must play in achieving them
 Scan the marketplace for information technologies that can offer new
value or competitive advantage to the company
 Communicate how IT will contribute strategic value for the
foreseeable future
Assess
 Evaluate how well current applications are positioned to meet
strategic business needs
 Identify gaps in application functionality that are critical to future
plans
 Forecast how the technical infrastructure will need to change to meet
future demands
 Appraise the IT organization – its ability to deliver the systems and
services needed to meet company priorities

Plan
 Define the projects and initiatives needed to strengthen and
improve existing technologies and fill in strategic gaps
 Link these projects to sources of business value to build the case
for investment
 Lay out the roadmap that determines the key commitments that
IT will meet in supporting business strategies
The Strategic Forty2 process will:

The 5 key aspects of the process…
with supporting IT Strategy development tools at every step
1) Business – IT Strategic Alignment
 Stakeholder Guideline and Analysis
 IT Strategy and Roadmap Scope Statement
 Kickoff Meeting Template
 Technology Monitor
 Business Executive Interview Guide
 Assessing Enterprise Strategy
 Enterprise Strategy and Goals
 Key Success Factors Analysis Tool
 IT Imperatives
 IT Vision Meeting Agenda
 IT Vision and Mission Statement Template

2) Application Direction
 Application Topology
 Business Function and Application Assessment Tool
 Application Direction Migration Strategy Guide
 Application Improvement Opportunity
3) Technical Infrastructure Development
 Infrastructure Components
 Network Diagram Primer
 Network Diagram Template
 Infrastructure Assessment
 Technical Infrastructure Direction
 Infrastructure Improvement Opportunity
 Infrastructure Prioritization

4) IT Organization Direction
 IT Staffing Worksheet
 IT Skills Inventory
 Irregular IT Staff Inventory
 Staff Level Allocation
 IT Skills Inventory Tool: Light Version
 IT-Business Interaction Model
 IT Service Model Alignment
 IT Organization Gaps
 Statement of Organization and Capability Direction
 Organization and Capability Improvement Opportunity Template

5) IT Strategic Investment and Value
Roadmap
 Analysis of Available Options
 Option Evaluation Tool
 Current IT Projects
 IT Strategy and Roadmap Scope Statement
 Initiative Description Template
 Initiative Prioritization Tool
 Guide to Documenting Your Strategic Roadmap
 IT Strategy Budget Impact
 Business Case Template
 Communications Plan Template
 Strategic Plan Presentation
 Strategic Plan Template
 Executive Meeting Agenda

Business & I.T. rushing along as fast as
possible with no common roadmap
BUSINESS
I.T.

Am Cham 110616 Final

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