Increase Productivity: Low-Hanging Fruit, Part One

I have yet to encounter an office where the staff are proficient in computer basics on their computer: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, file management, email, or even the use of a browser. It is appalling to me that often management are the least productive in the use of these ubiquitous tools. I don't care whether you have MAC, Windows or Linux and your company uses MS Office, Google Docs or freeware like OpenOffice, you and your staff should have a base level of software and computer literacy.

Bringing all staff to a basic set computer literacy skills is the lowest hanging fruit you can pick for improving productivity, and by low hanging, I mean it is so low you could pick it off the ground.  The king of office products is MS Office and I would be surprised if all staff in any given office uses or could use more than five percent of its capabilities.

So why don't organizations pick this fruit?  Do they assume everyone is knowledgeable on how to use these products?  Do they feel they can't afford to train their staff?  The corollary question is can we afford not to train staff in the basics? 

So, how do you pick this low-hanging productivity fruit? There are many alternatives, please feel to mix and match one or all to your organization:

• The most expensive, but most effective, is to have instructor-led sessions for all staff.  You set the standard and provide on-going training to staff.
• Make sure you have a champion in every department.  This champion will be the go-to person and be able to demonstrate effective use of the computer.
• So often the Help Desk is only involved in break/fix; change that around and have their prime focus on 'How To'.  How do I do this in Word?  Have them be there for all aspects of coaching.  As a by-product, you'll make their job more interesting and satisfying.
• Hold user-led lunch-and-learn sessions.  Have users share their own productivity tips and tricks.  For the price of a few pizzas, unless your organization is ultra-cheap and have staff bring their own lunch, this is very inexpensive training.
• Identify fee-for-service and/or free training sites on the web.  Both Microsoft and Google have free training sites - take advantage of these.

A word of advice:  You can provide all the training you want, but what good is it unless you know what you need to be effective for each staff member's job?  HR listen up: put a computer literacy skills matrix together for each job in your organization.  For example, list the software functions employees should know in order to do his or her job: in word processing identify the 50 things you should know, 50 things in spreadsheets, 30 things for email, 20 things for browsing, etc. . HR could have three levels of knowledge - basic, intermediate and advanced for all topics (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, browsing, computer operating system).  Clearly list the expectations of your staff.

This low-hanging productivity fruit is so easy to take advantage of.  Just do it!

Increase your productivity even further, check out Increase Productivity: Low-Hanging Fruit Part Two in my next blog.

IT Matters

Boards naturally expect management to optimize IT efficiency and deliver projects on time and on budget. But sometimes the CEO and the senior management team don’t have IT knowledge or experience. Their comfort level - and knowledge - is limited, so they will abdicate IT governance to the CIO, CFO or IT Director.

Why? Sometimes the CEO really doesn’t understand the technical aspects of IT, and secondly, many CEOs trust their staff completely in this area.

How IT decisions get made should not be about trust; it is more about teamwork, and executives and board members need to be part of the team.

So why aren’t they?
 

A lot of reasons. Executives and boards haven’t involved themselves in IT governance because they think IT requires more technical insight in order to understand how it can help the company. Or they see IT as too complex. Or IT has been set up within the organization as a department separate from the business itself. Whatever the reasons, organizations really should not let ‘technical literacy’ be a roadblock, good IT oversight requires governance skills, not technical skills.

Many CEOs tend to be in that boat where they’ve delegated the technology oversight to their CIO or CFO mainly because I don’t feel technically up to speed. After all, they’re the experts. The CEO thinks he/she doesn’t have to be, and many CEOs don’t plan to spend the time to get technical.

The reality is you don’t need to be technical to understand IT governance. It is a governance process, and Board members and CEOs certainly understand governance. CIOs still deal with all the technical aspects, but good governance focuses on the business, creating integration of business and IT and creating value. Boards and CEOs need to get involved because IT does matter.

Is it time for flash?

What is flash?  Flash memory is solid-state computer storage. 


USB Flash Drive

Most of us are use to the USB flash disk drives that quickly replaced the floppy disk drive many years ago.  Today, the price is often less than $1 per GB.

RAM memory was originally used in main computer memory, and many of us always compare number of GBs of main memory, number of CPUs and the clock speed, and number of GB (or TB) of hard disk storage when evaluating computer performance.   Solid state memory, by far the better performer, was expensive and therefore was, in the past, relegated to small, high-performance memory on a computer while the low-cost, much slower memory was on spinning magnetized disks.  I remember in the mid 1990s when 4MB of RAM was $400 and disk storage was $.25 per MB.

For the past few years we have seen little progress in increasing the clock speed of CPUs and to improve performance we add CPUs to a machine (dual, quad and 8-core CPUs are the norm today).  The bottleneck or slow point on most computers today is in the Input/Output when accessing data.  So the next leap in computer performance will be in accessing data.  Today, solid state memory is the next leap in overall computer performance.

Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Without the slowness created by moving parts - such as hard disk drives (HDDs) which use a spinning platter to store data - solid-state drives (SSD), using solid-state memory chips deliver much better performance.  SSDs can read and write data much faster than hard drives with most workloads and they access the data much more quickly as well. Furthermore, solid state drives, with no moving parts are much less susceptible to handling damage even when impacted during use thereby making them much more reliable.

Solid State Disk (SSD)

Flash is starting to grow up (and by that, I mean it has become affordable).  It is now a realistic replacement for hard spinning drives.  SSD is still more expensive (ten to twenty times more than HDDs) but compared to the overall cost of a computer and with its higher performance, it is becoming more popular.  All the major players offer low capacity (256GB SSD) for personal computers.  Apple on one laptop model, the Mac Air, only offers SSDs.

Other major vendors (IBM, Dell, HP) are getting into SSD for servers.  IBM is pushing to get into the data centre by offering high performing SSD with 24TB capacity.  Flash drives use much less power than HDDs.  For some applications that use a lot of random data accesses, performance can be from 10 to 60 times better.  IT administrators will need to take the price performance of SSD into consideration in the data centre and to do this they need to compare cost per workload instead of cost per GB.

Has the tipping point arrived for SSD?

Canada misses the top 10 in 2013 Global Innovation Index

It is no surprise to me that Canada didn't make the top 10 in the Global Innovation Index 2013 Report.  Years ago Canada was in sixth position. 

In so many organizations, I have witnessed a dearth of innovation utilizing IT.  Many businesses treat IT as a cost centre, with an attitude of cut, cut, cut. They don't look at IT as an innovator to propel the business forward. 

It all starts at the top.  Boards, more likely than not, pay no attention to IT.  If it does get on the board's agenda, it is likely once a year when the CapEx and OpEx budgets get approved.  But even then there is no discussion on getting value from IT.

Senior management often ignore IT as well.  They feel their CIO or senior IT manager has a handle on things.  Most senior executives cannot explain IT governance or IT strategy in their organizations.  They don't know if their investments in information technology are creating value or not.  Most organizations don't know how to utilize effective processes or governance to take advantage of IT.  To cap it off, many organizations don't even have IT at the Executive Committee table.

Although placing only 11th on the overall Global Innovation Index, Canada only managed 22nd place on Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) use.  The U.S. was no better, coming in at 23rd in ICT - it's a North American weakness.

With the lack of attention to IT at the top, it is no wonder that Canada is out of the the top 10 in innovation.

Eight characteristics of a successful IT project

How often have we seen in the media that 60% to 70% of IT projects fail?  What can we do to make them successful?

You'll have greater success with your IT projects if they exhibit these characteristics:

• a clear committed sponsor - a project sponsor has to be fully engaged in the project, be available throughout, make timely decisions, approve changes to scope, timetable or resources, and mobilize resources when required.
• a clear business case - a presentation on the reasons for a project including the strategic fit, an analysis of alternatives, a cost-benefit analysis, identify risks, and a justification of the proposed solution.
• a well-constructed project charter - this includes such items as the project purpose and description, goals, project scope, deliverables, schedule, milestones, budget estimate, change management process, team roles, success metrics, and more.
• a communications plan  - all successful projects have a clear communications plan.  Identify who needs to be notified of what and when.
• a change control process - all projects experience hiccups and you need to manage these unexpected changes in a clear, expeditious fashion with sign-off by the project sponsor. 
• project summaries - regular communications to all stakeholders on the project status.
• issues log - a detailed, managed list of all issues arising during the project and how they get solved.
• an effective post-implementation follow-up including lessons learned - after the project is completed, follow-up is required to ensure the project's stated objectives were met.  Be sure to document what was learned from this project so you can apply these lessons to future projects.

Furthermore, many organizations have implemented a Project Management Office (PMO) - a centralized office for keeping projects within scope, schedule and budget, that also ensures integration of business goals through the creation and enforcement of project management and IT governance policies and procedures. The PMO should help in achieving successful projects.

Question: in your organization does the Project Management Office just monitor IT-related projects or does it oversee all projects including business-related projects?

The IT Chauffeur drives to CIO Canada

In the June issue of Canadian CIO, editor Shane Schick interviews me about The IT Chauffeur.  I enjoyed having a chance to talk about what inspired me to write the book: the disconnect between CxOs and IT.

Here's the interview in the June issue of Canadian CIO: IT strategy, he wrote

Canadian CIO June 2013

What do you think the CEO should know about IT?

Have you ever wondered why there is a disconnect between IT and business in many organizations? Does it start at the top?  

Regardless of your position in any organization, can you explain how IT decisions get made?

Some business articles allude to a poor relationship between IT and other departments being a function of poor management.  Would this gap disappear if the C-suite had a better understanding of Information Technology?

What do you think the CEO or anyone at the C-suite should know about IT?  Here are my top items: 

• Clear understanding of how IT decisions should get made
• IT Governance
• How to integrate business and IT
• How to use the business case in IT and other divisions
• How project management methodologies for all divisions can make an organization more effective
• How data integrity is critical to the operation of the organization
• How to make the IT department's services efficient
• How to protect the organization from natural and man-made disasters 
• Why it's important to protect data
• Fundamental understanding of the cloud
• Basic understanding of big data and business intelligence
• Know that IT can be socially conscientious with green IT, and finally,
• How to undertake the development of an IT strategy

Recognizing that CxOs often don't understand IT as a starting point, I wanted to explore what the CxO should know about IT using a non-technical, easy-to-understand, conversational story. So have a read of the book The IT Chauffeur (Available at Amazon.com or at CreateSpace).