Archive for September, 2010

How IT Leaders Can Get Their Team To Change When They Don’t Want To

Thursday, September 30th, 2010
Image Credit
Change Happens & We Need To Find Ways To Deal With It…

Change Happens & We Need To Find Ways To Deal With It…

As an IT Leader, one of your main jobs is to lead your team though changes. However, here is where you may run into a problem. Considering how many layoffs, cut backs, and canceled projects most IT teams have had to work though, the last thing that your team really wants is more change. What’s an IT Leader to do?

First Things First

If you want to have any hope of being able to convince your team to rally behind a significant change that you are in charge of, then you’re going to have to do some work. The first thing that you are going to have to deal with has to do with what has gone on in the past.

In order to make things happen now, you’re going to have to find ways to help your team let go of the past and find ways to move forward. You want them to be able to move forward as quickly as possible. Note that you need them to do both of these on two different levels: an emotional level as well as a workplace level.

How To Let Go Of The Past

If you want to have any hope of helping your team to let go of the past, then you are going to have to let them get all of those feelings that they have inside out. Sorry technology lover – this is messy, human relations (can you say “management”) sort of stuff.

The key word here is “empathy”. Note that I didn’t say “sympathy”. The difference is a bit subtle, but it’s critical. An IT Leader who is sympathetic feels bad because you are felling bad. An IT Leader who is empathetic feels sad because of the thing that is making you feel sad. This latter emotion is a much, much more powerful way to connect with your team.

What you are going to have to do is to acknowledge the feelings that the people on your team are having. Once you’ve done that, then you can start to use this understanding to go about building a team environment based on cooperation and trust.

Next Things Next

Once you’ve got the IT team to let go of the past, it’s time for the next step. This is where you get them to buy-in and support the new change that you are trying to implement.

In order to get everyone to commit to what needs to be done, you are going to have to be straight with them. This is not the time to be sugar-coating what you are telling your team. If it’s going to be hard to implement the change that you want to do, now is the time to tell everyone that.

Practical Ways To Get Everyone Onboard

One of the key ways to get support from your team is to make sure that as the leader you are providing a clear vision of where you want to go. This vision has to have enough detail associated with it so that your team can fully understand where you want to go and how you plan on getting there.

Additionally, IT Leaders can’t make their team implement a change. Rather you are going to have to allow them to do it themselves. To make this easier for them to do, a good idea is to let the team create their own procedures for rolling out the needed changes.

What All Of This Means For You

Change is never easy. For some reason, in the world of IT change is not only hard to do, but due to past failures most of your team often resists any attempt to implement a change.

IT Leaders need to realize that they need to take an active role in implementing IT changes. They need to work with their team and help them to let go of the past and all of the baggage that goes with it. Next, they need to discover how to get the team to buy-in and support the new change.

Implementing IT changes is something that will happen multiple times during your management. Taking the time to do it correctly will help not only your IT team to become more valuable to the rest of the company, but will also end up making you more valuable at the same time.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How active of a role in implementing a big change in the IT department do you think that you should play as opposed to your team?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How many times do you have to tell your team: it’s time to start innovating again? The global recession is over, if your part of the IT department is going to start to grow and be successful, then your team is going to have to be out in front and leading the charge. Since budgets are still constrained, it’s going to take a great deal of innovation to find ways to do more with what you currently have. Why isn’t anyone doing this?

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Posted in change | 7 Comments »

Why Cloud Computing Won’t Work For Every IT Project

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Image Credit Caption: Not All Clouds Are There To Help Your Project…

Caption: Not All Clouds Are There To Help Your Project…

If IT was a game show and you were a contestant on it, right now it sure seems as though you could correctly any question that you were asked by replying “cloud computing”. That’s because cloud computing, basically outsourcing parts of your next IT project’s IT infrastructure and applications, sure seems like a great idea. However, early reports back from the front lines by other IT Leaders are starting to paint a different picture…

…And Why Are We Talking About Clouds?

The reason that we’re talking about cloud computing is because it’s ushered in an era of “software as a service”, or SaaS if you want to be cool. The reason that IT Leaders like to talk about SaaS based applications that run in the cloud is because they offer an opportunity to save the company a lot of money.

A single user’s subscription to a SaaS application generally costs an IT Leader about $10 – $50 per month. The beauty of this approach is that that cost includes maintenance, support, and even the hardware that the application runs on. Oh, and all of a sudden your users can log into the application from anywhere – they don’t have to be in the office to do work.

Just How Big Of A Deal Is This?

SaaS (and Cloud Computing) is growing like a weed right now. The folks over at Gartner are telling us that in the business software market, SaaS offerings make up about 9% of what’s out there right now and it’s expected to hit 16% by 2013 because it’s growing at about 20% per year.

This is where IT Leaders are starting to see problems pop up. Since the whole SaaS market is growing so fast, even the people who work in it are finding themselves unable to keep up. This means that IT Leaders who are trying to get information on what products are available are starting to run into sales people who really don’t know what their company’s product can and cannot do. This is where problems with SaaS offerings start…

What’s Wrong With SaaS?

Unlike the glowing brochures that you’ll get from SaaS providers and the industry rag articles that are falling over themselves saying that Cloud Computing is the “next big thing”, IT Leaders who are on the front lines are reporting that SaaS is not a silver bullet and has its own set of problems.

In fact, some companies that went down the SaaS route are now pulling back. Gartner reports that the top reasons that IT Leaders have been deciding to discontinue their SaaS deployments are:

  • Difficulty in integration with existing applications
  • High cost of services
  • Lack of agility provided to the business
  • Level of investment required
  • Lack of robustness
  • Poor track record of provider
  • Poor client references
  • Inadequate security, privacy, or confidentiality
  • Didn’t meet technical requirements

Bottom Line Issues

In the end, it all comes down to money. One of the biggest attractions of SaaS is that it offers hard-pressed IT Leaders a way to stretch their IT project budgets farther. However, IT Leaders that have implemented SaaS solutions are reporting that the benefits may not be so clear after all.

In the initial years, yes – your IT project will save on having to make the big CapEx spends that they would normally have to make in order to create the infrastructure to support another enterprise application. However, what seems to be missing is the ultimate reduction in people to support that solution and infrastructure costs over time.

What All Of This Means For You

The world of IT keeps changing all the time and as an IT Leader you’re going to have to move fast in order to keep up. SaaS offers many benefits; however, there the drawbacks are also starting to show up.

IT Leaders on the frontlines of SaaS deployments are reporting that they are running into issues with integrating the SaaS applications with their existing enterprise applications. Additionally, many of the economic benefits appear to be only in the first few years with the long term benefits not being nearly as clear.

Right now Cloud Computing and SaaS are hot topics that every IT Leader should be looking into. However, look before you leap as the saying goes…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that having to hire fewer staff to mange one of these projects should be a benefit of a SaaS deployment?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT Leader, one of your main jobs is to lead your team though changes. However, here is where you may run into a problem. Considering how many layoffs, cut backs, and canceled projects most IT teams have had to work though, the last thing that your team really wants is more change. What’s an IT Leader to do?

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Posted in SaaS | 4 Comments »

Secure Your Data And Boost Your Career

Thursday, September 16th, 2010
Image CreditGood IT Security Starts With Knowing What Needs A Lock

Good IT Security Starts With Knowing What Needs A Lock

I guess I could have used a different title also “Make Your Data Unsecure and Sink Your Career”! Although IT Leaders spend much of their time worrying about making sure that their IT teams are working together to be successful, that pesky issue of data security keeps creeping into everything that we do. Maybe it’s time for you to make a plan…

What You Are Doing Wrong Right Now

One of the keys to having a successful IT Leader career is to not get caught up in some big data breech incident – it’s hard for an IT career to recover from something like that. Even fancy new IT trends like cloud computing won’t save the day – it just means all of your valuable stuff is in one place for the hackers to attack.

Right now too many IT Leaders’ approach to securing their company’s data is to realize that they’ve got a bunch of valuable data sitting on a bunch of servers inside of some data center. Their approach is to install guards (firewalls) and to limit how people can gain access to the data (intrusion detection systems). Although this is a necessary step, it’s not nearly enough.

The Right Way To Do Data Security

So if we know what the wrong (or at least incomplete) way to do data security is, what should IT Leaders be doing? Simply put, you need a new security strategy.

The goal is pretty straightforward. You should be able to protect both your structured and unstructured data no matter where it is: being used by both employees and customers, stored on a network file system, or as it’s in flight over the network.

What we’re really talking about is doing away with the old idea of an IT information security program and instead replacing it with an enterprise risk management program.

What Are The Right Questions To Ask?

Michael Davis is a security consultant who has taken a look at this issue and he believes that there are four questions that need to be asked by the person who owns each piece of corporate data:

  • Where is the data?

  • What exactly is the data?

  • Who has access to the data?

  • Why do they need to have access to it?

Taking the time to ask, answer, and remember what the answer was to these questions is the key to developing a sound corporate data security program.

Who Should Be In Charge?

The final question that you need an answer to is just exactly who should have the ultimate responsibility for the security of your data? Interestingly enough, the answer does not lie in IT.

Instead, the experts recommend that a non-technical business-side owner be selected and vested with the power to make all decisions regarding the data in question. By doing it this way, you can ensure that the business value of the data being secured will be part of any decision regarding how to secure it.

What All Of This Means For You

IT Leaders walk a fine line: they need to complete their IT projects as quickly as possible and yet at the same time they need to take the time to make sure that corporate data remains secure. The old ways of doing this are no longer enough.

IT security programs are morphing to become part of a larger enterprise risk management program. Assigning a non-IT person to be responsible for making decisions about a given type of corporate data is the first step. The next step is to make sure that the right questions are being asked.

You can never completely guard against a hacker breaking in and attacking your data. However, smart IT Leaders know that with the right responsible parties and by asking the right questions, it is possible to do a good job of securing the data that needs to be secured.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What part of the company do you think that the owner of corporate data should come from?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If IT was a game show and you were a contestant on it, right now it sure seems as though you could correctly any question that you were asked by replying “cloud computing”. That’s because cloud computing, basically outsourcing parts of your next IT project’s IT infrastructure and applications, sure seems like a great idea. However, early reports back from the front lines by other IT Leaders are starting to paint a different picture…

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Posted in security | 5 Comments »

What It Takes To Become A High Potential IT Leader

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
Image Credit High Potential IT Leaders Are The Ones Who Become Successful

High Potential IT Leaders Are The Ones Who Become Successful

What is it going to take to make your IT Leader career a success? Sure, you can deliver IT value and get your projects done on time, but will that be enough? The answer is no. For you to be seen as a successful IT Leader you are going to have to be seen as a “high potential” IT Leader – one who is going to go places beyond your current assignment. Clearly you need to know what it’s going to take to get others to consider you to be high potential…

The Intangibles

The reason that many IT Leaders get stuck in their current job with the current responsibilities is because others don’t believe that they have “what it takes” to handle other responsibilities. The things that it will take for you to be viewed as being a high potential are intangible (can’t really be expressed in words) and generally can’t be written down on job descriptions or yearly evaluations.

The good news is that Dr. Douglas Ready and a team of researchers have been looking into what it takes for an IT worker to move from regular to high potential workers. They’ve uncovered four factors that can transform you from everyday to high potential in the eyes of others.

Drive Time

Do you have what it takes to succeed? Can others tell that you have this drive? Just being good isn’t enough for you – you have to want to be great and it needs to show.

The key here is that others need to be able to determine that you are willing to make the extra effort to succeed. This means that they are going to have to be able to see you make sacrifices in order to advance in your career. Everyone has to know that your personal life comes second when it comes to your job.

The Ability To Learn / Do

High potential IT Leaders are always learning new things. However, this isn’t enough. Just because you are willing to constantly be learning new things doesn’t make you a high potential IT worker.

Instead, you need to show others that you have the ability to not only learn new things, but to also take what you’ve learned and apply it to what is happening right now. The use of new ideas to make IT more productive for the company is what is going to set you apart from everyone else.

Become A Risk Taker

Despite all of us understanding that IT is all about change, it can be too easy for IT Leaders to get comfortable in their jobs. When this happens, they lose the desire to take new risks and they are no longer viewed by others as being high potential IT Leaders.

What we need to do is to be willing to take on new ways to make the company more productive. Sometimes this involves starting a risky new project, or developing a new set of IT skills that will require us to leave what we already know behind.

Develop Your “Spidy Sense”

The comic book hero Spiderman has what he calls his “spidy sense” which tingles when there is danger approaching. High potential IT Leaders need to develop their own version of this type of sensing that allows them to detect when a danger to their careers is approaching.

Career dangers can include such things as projects that are doomed to fail from the start, or avoiding providing feedback to senior managers that could help the company do better. High potential IT Leaders have a highly developed sense that allows them to know when to push forward and when to pull back.

What All Of This Means For You

Just being a IT Leader is not enough. In fact, just being a good IT Leader is not enough either. What you want to be is a high-potential IT Leader . This will open doors to new opportunities at the firm that you are working for and at other firms also.

In order to start to be seen as being “high potential”, you are going to have to start doing several things. These include showing a keen sense of drive to succeed, the ability to both learn new things and then apply what you’ve learned, take proper risks, and sense when an opportunity is either a good thing or a bad thing for your career.

The good news is that any IT Leader can become a high potential IT Leader . Simply by adopting these traits you can quickly move from being seen as simply a good IT Leader to being seen as a high potential IT Leader.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Would you be willing to make sacrifices in your personal life in order to be seen as a high potential IT Leader?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, enough of this cloud stuff already! The field of IT is just like every other field out there and we have our own share of trendy topics – cloud computing sure seems to the one that we’re dealing with right now. With all of the magazine articles on clouds and conferences going on, you’d think that every IT Leader and CEO has a good understanding of just exactly what a cloud is. Well, you’d be wrong…

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Posted in career | 3 Comments »