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During a recent Gartner meeting with several members, the turnaround-style CIO members discussed that they are not afraid to take some risk, and doing so has paid off with improved service and a modernized IT environment. In 12 months, one CIO was able to “rip and replace” all infrastructure systems, and, in the process, over 90% of all enterprise services were upgraded, replaced or retired.
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One of the executives we engaged is the CIO of a $1 billion federal R&D organization specializing in energy research, supporting 4,000 staff, 10,500 systems and 6,000 scientific users per year. He recently executed a three-year turnaround (i.e., IT modernization program) and shared with us the nature of the initial challenge, approach, success factors and business impact.
The CIO noted that his business colleagues were extremely supportive: “As a team, we had an opportunity to make a major impact on how they conduct business and how they work with other organizations. The leadership wanted to embark on transforming their organization in numerous areas within a very short period of time.”
The CIO further stated that “there were many challenges to overcome, both from a culture standpoint and a technology perspective. One of the most difficult decisions was moving forward on a ‘single-stack’ IT solution versus implementing a ‘best-in-breed’ IT solution for each process or IT challenge, and in doing so, there was no shortage of challenges.”
Nature of the initial challenge:
• Unknown number of computers and unknown IT costs
• Hundreds of applications written in a variety of languages and technologies
• Disjointed end-user application experience and communication
• Unknown number of IT staff spread over approximately 20 IT departments
• Concerns around the growing challenge of attracting and retaining the brightest staff and scientists
• Weak performance monitoring
• Inconsistent communication and collaboration among staff
How did the organization do IT?
The CIO told us that he “directed the IT staff and vendor partners to develop small project teams of skilled experts that were isolated to modernize a discrete, manageable handful of highly visible enterprise applications one at a time and often in parallel. These small teams of experts depended on each other, and trust was established very quickly as a result. The decision to standardize to a single-stack proved to make a considerable difference in the ability to deploy rapidly, and the technologies worked much more seamlessly.”
There were multiple critical success factor (CSF) outcomes:
• Consolidated all IT staff into a single IT organization
• Consolidated hundreds of applications based on a standard methodology
• Standardized computers and enterprisewide technical, business and data architecture
• Created a standard and documented approach for application development
• Modernized the IT environment to improve knowledge sharing, and automated processes for efficiency through:
o Collaboration tools: instant messaging, unified communication, desktop VTCs
o Knowledge management tools: portals, blogs, visual enterprise search engines, expertise location
o Email services: improved IT services by providing 3GB email inboxes with integrated voicemail
BOTTOM LINE:
CIOs must make significant IT changes to transform the way data is stored, how knowledge is captured, and how it is shared and communicated internally (to staff and LOB clients) and externally to business partners and customers.
Business Impact:
By modernizing and transforming IT, cross-disciplinary collaboration is at an all-time high and people are able to rapidly identify who has specific domain knowledge and how to partner to address mutual interests and improve efficiency and effectiveness (productivity, profits, revenue, customer retention/up-sell, market share and EBITA).
Additional Insights:
• “How the CIO Intersects With Other C Suite Roles” (Research)
• “Case Study: CIO Phil Pavitt’s Development as a Change Leader” (Research)
• “The Enterprise CIO’s Role in Business Process Improvement” (Research)
