Posts Tagged ‘IBM’

What A Rental Car Company Can Teach IT Leaders

Thursday, May 20th, 2010
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Maybe We Should All Be Trying Harder…

Maybe We Should All Be Trying Harder…

As IT Leaders, we should all be trying harder to find ways to use the talents of our teams to make our companies run smoother. Hmm, I wonder if there are any companies out there that could serve as an example for us? Good news – there is one: >Avis rental cars.

How Hard Can It Be To Rent A Car?

It turns out that Avis Rent A Car is really both Avis and Budget – both companies are owned by the same company (who knew?) The first lesson that IT Leaders can learn from Avis is how they roll out new technologies: they don’t bet the farm on any one technology. Instead they do proof-of-concept trials and gauge customer feedback in order to decide if they should go ahead an rollout a solution company-wide.

Avis is not afraid to use wireless technology if it solves a problem. If you’ve returned a rental car to Avis lately, you’ve probably been greeted by an employee standing in the return line with a wireless device. I know that I haven’t had to go into the office to return a car in a long time – thank you wireless (great because I always seem to be running late for my plane).

As an example of IT Leaders thinking outside of the box, Avis has taken this remote check in one step further and now they will email you a copy of your receipt so that you don’t have to worry about stuffing a piece of paper into your luggage as you jump on the shuttle bus.

How To Innovate When You Work In A Parking Lot

One of the reasons that Avis’ IT Leaders are so innovative is because they can see their competition on the other side of the parking lot. That causes them to try harder.

The Avis data center is currently outsourced to IBM so Avis doesn’t have to spend any time worrying about typical data center activities. Instead they spend their time working on things like trying to make sure that a customer’s experience at the rental counter will be the same experience that they’ll have when they visit the company’s web sites.

The Internet plays a big part in every IT shop these days and Avis is no different. Avis uses XML to interface to other travel related businesses via the Internet. By doing this they are able to avoid booking fees and this saves everyone a lot of money.

Finally, Avis IT Leaders have also spent a lot of time and effort to create a direct connection between themselves and their insurance companies, car dealerships, and collision repair shops. This allows them to quickly react whenever one of their customers has a car crash.

What All Of This Means For You

Normally rental car companies and their cars don’t get even a second glance from IT Leaders as we race though the airport. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking a well run IT shop in our haste.

Avis is locked in a constant struggle with other rental car companies and so their IT Leaders have to be constantly innovating. They use whatever IT technology best suits the issue that they are tying to solve and this includes wireless and XML.

In the end, it’s the close working relationship that the Avis IT Leaders have been able to create between themselves and the business side of the house that has allowed them to achieve so much. Maybe that’s why they try harder…

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

Question For You: What do you think that Avis should do next in order to make renting and returning their cars even quicker and easier?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The world of IT is experiencing a form of “cloud fever” in which every company seems to be talking about how they are going to use cloud computing to become more successful. Well, talk is cheap and in the end it’s starting to look like nobody really has a clue as to how to go about actually doing this…

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Posted in information technology | 2 Comments »

Why “I Don’t Care How You Feel” Is Bad IT Management

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Life is hard for IT Leaders and it’s not going to be getting any easier anytime soon. With everything that you need to be doing, it sure seems like having to put up with team members who have personal issues that take away from their ability to do their jobs can only hurt performance. For that matter, those “touchy-feely” workplaces that places like Google and Apple have sure seem to be missing the mark — work is for work or have these companies forgotten that?

The Good Old Days Where People Shut Up And Worked

Those of us who come from a technical background know how the world should be run. There should be a set of rules and everybody should know what the rules are and everybody should work according to the rules. If a business was run this way, an IT Leader’s job would be so much easier — you would only have to deal with the deviations from the rules.

However, we’ve tried doing this — it was called the 1950′s through the 1980′s. Remember the classic “IBM Man”? It turns out that the rigid workplace did work and you could get a great deal of productivity out of people; however, then the world changed.

What happened is that everything started moving much faster. Global competition showed up with a vengeance. Then the Internet arrived and things started moving even faster. All of those rigidly structured companies with their rigidly structured IT departments hit a brick wall. IBM felt it especially hard and there for awhile in the early 1990′s was teetering on the edge of failure.

What Works In Today’s IT Departments

If you miss the old days, you’re not going to like this part. After a lot of trial and error, we now know what it takes to make a modern company successful. The first step is to take the time to realize that the people working for the company are not “assets“, they really are people. These people have a life and potentially a family outside of work and the boundaries between the two have never been fixed.

This means that as an IT Leader you need to take the time to get to know the people who are working on your team. If you are able to really engage with them, to make a connection, then the boost to the productivity of your team can be almost magical.

The operative word here is “flexibility“. If you place people in a rigid IT environment, then they will at best do exactly what you tell them to do when you tell them to do it. If instead you are flexible and focus more on what you want them to do and no so much on how you want them to do it, then this causes your team members to become much more satisfied with their jobs and they will end up doing much more. This job satisfaction shows up as your team members treat customers and other employees better which then results in more loyal customers and more productive business interactions with other departments.

What All Of This Means For You

Creating a rigid IT team that has lots of rules to follow is a great way to keep things under control. New IT Leaders often gravitate to this type of solution because it’s familiar territory — almost like programming an IT system. However, this has been shown to be the wrong way to go about doing things.

The right way to have the most productive IT team is for you as an IT Leader to take the time to connect on a personal level with your team members. This means getting to know them and sharing your personal side with them also.

Creating an IT workplace in which the focus is on getting the work done and being flexible in just how it gets done is critical. This is the type of environment that will bring out the best in your team. The results that your team will produce from this type of situation will be the rocket fuel that powers your career to the next level.

Do you think that IT managers need to worry about getting to know all of their team members on a personal level?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. All you need to do is to learn a about a new management tool called social-network analysis…

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Posted in IT manager | No Comments »

Are IT Managers Afraid Of Commitment? Employees Speak Up.

Friday, February 6th, 2009
If IT Leaders Want To Retain Staff, Then They Need To Make A Commitment

If IT Leaders Want To Retain Staff, Then They Need To Make A Commitment

An IT department does not consist of just a bunch of servers and some cabling. It’s really made up of bright, talented people who know a lot about how servers, networks, and applications can be used to propel a business forward. However, not every company and not every IT manager treats their staff the same way – do you think that that matters?

The real question here is how committed to their staff are companies and IT Leaders. Are the members of your team actual people or are they just resources that can be downsized or replaced at any time. In fact, does it really matter which way you choose to look at them?

The good folks over at CIO Insite did a survey of IT Executives awhile back and they uncovered some interesting discoveries.

Quite obviously, not all IT departments are created equal. It turns out that in the foreseeable future most of the hiring is going to be done by small and midsized companies. Given the current economic climate, that’s good news. The other side of the coin is reflected by the larger IT shops which indicated that they will be reducing their IT staff (this includes IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo).

Where things get interesting is when you take a closer look at who the firms that will be hiring are looking for. They want business analysts, systems integrators, networking staff, and web designers. These appear to be the place to be in IT!

But back to our original topic – what does it take for an IT Leader to get the people that he/she hires to stick around? The CIO Insight survey revealed that just paying more is not enough. It turns out that what you have to do is to place organizational development up at the center of your IT recruiting and retention strategy.

In simple words, what this means is that in order to get your IT workers to stay, you’ve got to offer them things that they want like job security or  work/life balance. Now an important point here is that when I say “job security”, I don’t mean offering a job for life (unless you are at Toyota). Instead, what I’m talking about is having the company invest in the employee and having them develop skills that will serve them well in this job or in their next one.

In order to find out how to keep IT employees, you first have to understand why they leave. The IT Executives surveyed said that staff left for the following reasons:

  • better pay / benefits
  • opportunity to learn new skills
  • reduced commute time
  • to work at home or set own work hours

Knowing this, then what can an IT Leader do to get employees to stay? Focusing on improving every employee’s work / life balance is a good place for a company and a leader to start. Keep in mind that the benefits that do the most to boost employee retention are the ones that provide long-term financial and career security.

What have you found keeps you and your staff working at the same company? Why do people seem to leave your company? Why do new employees join your company? What changes do you think should be made to get more people to stay? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in retention | No Comments »