IT – Are you getting ‘noticed’?

Posted July 17th, 2008 by Dennis Powell

I wanted to share some concepts from an interesting keynote address from the America’s SAP User Group (ASUG) meeting being held in Toronto this week, which StackSafe helped sponsor (thank-you-very-much).

The ‘theme’ of this UG was all about upgrading SAP, primarily from several earlier versions to ECC 6.0 and EP7. If you’re a SAP upgrade manager, you’re familiarized with the planning, preparation, communication, negotiation, and scheduling to prepare your organization to perform an upgrade of something as mission-critical and integral to the business as an ERP. And that’s before you even begin to actually upgrade.

Mr. Don Whittington, CIO of Florida Crystals, provided both an entertaining and thought-provoking keynote regarding his company’s experience with upgrading to SAP v6.0. Florida Crystals is a ‘field-to-shelf’ sugar producer, a 24/7 operation that works with a number of well-known companies. I’m not going to discuss the details of his upgrade, other than to say “Wow!” that Florida Crystals experienced zero downtime and zero missed shipments after completing the upgrade. Don was obviously proud of the IT group for delivering this accomplishment, and for an operation of this size and scope, this result is truly impressive.

Throughout Don’s presentation, he liberally mixed advice about the overall IT business approach within the discussion of the practical upgrade process. Consider a few points from his talk:

IT is at its best when it goes unnoticed – Like any technology, service, process, or activity taken for granted, IT is doing the best possible job when the rest of the organization doesn’t notice them – because everything is working as expected. Don used the analogy of a phone service: users press the keys and expect the call to go through.
Set your customer’s expectations – IT gets noticed when others set its priorities. If allowed to set the business priorities associated with an ERP (or any key application) upgrade, a business owner will expect no disruption, including no downtime, no loss of performance, no change to the way of doing business, etc. These objectives are important and need to be taken seriously; but as the provider, IT needs to have the final say. In reality, there will be disruptions. IT should host the ‘ERP upgrade party’ and set the expectations up front, both in terms of the risks, the potential disruptions, as well as the value gained by the upgrade. Noting ‘value’ brings up an amusing aside – Don ran through a tongue-in-cheek “Typical Technical Upgrade” checklist (I paraphrased):
- Postpone the value-add IT services for a significant period of time
- Assign significant human capital for upgrading
- Procure significant capital for contract services
- Procure additional capital for addition infrastructure
- Aggressively mange the process
- Communicate progress to all
- Work through the conflicting priorities…

And the successful end-result after all of this expense and effort, is that everything works exactly as it did before. As Don said, “Try selling THAT expectation”.

IT must speak the language of business –“Revenue”, “margins”, “and related business value terms should be a regular part of the IT management lingo – not just to make IT sound more like the well-rounded employee, but because the business managers and users don’t understand and won’t relate to Java upgrades, 32b to 64b conversions, or other eye-glazing technology verbiage. When your user doesn’t understand how you deliver value to the business, they will set the expectations for how you should deliver value to the business – likely in ways that you can’t deliver.

Don also presented some statistics showing:

70% of CIOs on average see IT as critical for business innovation. (Only 70%? What do the other 3 out of 10 CIOs think of their IT group?)
Less than 50% of CIOs see IT as a driver of business innovation.
The kicker: less than 25% of CIOs see IT as the main initiator of business innovation.

One final thought: Leading business innovation is the one place where IT always wants to be noticed and the person who should always notice is the CIO.