Process Makes Perfect: How to Turn IT Process Automation into Business Growth

From: www.cio.com

Process Makes Perfect: How to Turn IT Process Automation into Business Growth
– Stephen Elliot, CIO

March 11, 2009

Stephen Elliot, VP of strategy for CA's Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business units, is speaking at this week's AFCOM Data Center World conference on data center efficiency. He shared this advice on the topic for CIO.com readers.
2009 will likely go down in history as a tough year for the global economy, and a tougher year for most IT organizations. CIOs are being asked to further reduce budgets and increase staff efficiencies, while maintaining and often increasing the quality and number of IT services. However, as Albert Einstein once said, "in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity"; IT is full of them.

The rise of virtualization, policy-based networking, process standardization, automation, and SOA has positioned IT at a critical inflection point in achieving business efficiency and effectiveness. As IT and business leaders, we must seize these opportunities. To "get more out of less," CIOs are prioritizing investments into technologies that offer business impact and continuous cost containment. One of these areas is IT process automation technologies, whereby solutions ensure the automated workflow of a series of tasks, potentially triggering an action based on a series of inputs. Often, many of these projects start with a change or configuration process while success is measured on basic ROI metrics. What's interesting is that ROI is not enough. Measuring the business impact of IT process automation is where savvy CIOs are investing time and resources, using ROI as a baseline for time to value.

Recent customer conversations show this to be true:


A large financial service firm is working towards delivering business process impact by integrating their virtual and physical management solutions into a service view, while mapping the service and application topology to the key customers' groups and utilizing chargeback for the services.


A large insurance company is linking the number of agents to the number of policies created per day. The availability of this system is paramount, as is the data accuracy and capture.

A retailer is linking their pricing and POS systems to the ability to execute workload automation. This helps to maintain accurate price points and ensure a balance between profitability and inventory management.

A large service provider is managing SOA-based applications to high levels of availability and service levels, based on in-depth root cause analytics of application performance solutions.

A large bank is looking to compress change and configuration costs and fragmented processes by standardizing process workflows across separate IT groups.

The common theme for all of these examples is efficient use of technology, notably IT process automation, to drive the business outcome. As a stand-alone solution, IT process automation has limited value. But when paired with solutions such as service desk or data center automation, they become an integral part of the foundation for business growth and IT's ability to directly measure and generate it.

However, technology alone does not generate these business returns. In about 55% or so of our customer conversations, the IT organization has adopted multiple IT processes, often based on ITIL or CoBit. The most common ones include problem, change, incident, and configuration management. More recently, CIOs have asked us to map solutions to support financial and release management. In a few cases, some aggressive CIOs are evaluating ITILv3. In all cases, the notion of managing a "service," upon which ITILv 3 is espoused, is prevalent.


Getting Started
CIOs should consider the following recommendations to drive success in IT process automation and consider that the trifecta of IT staff, process standardization, and technology are required to create a sustainable competitive advantage and successful business outcomes. To achieve this, CIOs should:

• Purchase an IT process automation solution: Consider the workflow engine the most important purchase criteria; integration across a vendor's portfolio and with third party solutions is a close second.

• Integrate the tool with a data center automation strategy: The ability to automate workflows will be a paramount requirement for on-going cost savings and efficient IT operations.
  

• Utilize virtualization: Effective use of process automation will take place in both physical and virtual infrastructure; integration into a seamless, singular workflow is the goal.

• Adopt ITIL process standardization: Go beyond the foundational processes and adopt financial management and release management; automate the processes.
  

• Get small "wins" first: Automating IT change and configuration management processes are a great way to reduce costs; start within an IT silo and build out across teams.

• Add process automation to data center consolidation projects: Automation must be a key requirement of any data center project to fully realize on-going cost and efficiency benefits.

• CIOs should recognize that IT process automation is more than just deploying a purpose-built tool. It requires IT staff buy-in and CIO leadership to drive automation and standardization of process workflows with specific business objectives. Example of objectives include the reduction in the number of trouble tickets, an improvement in IT service availability, or key business process outcomes such as those outlined in the examples above.

ROI as a Success Factor: Don't Sell Yourself Short
It's easy in this economic environment to rely solely on ROI, and in fact ROI is a great starting point. But, increasingly we are working with clients to establish business cases that are for "continuous cost containment." For example, while IT process automation can drive much efficiency, the real value is getting multiple teams to understand their role in the process as it becomes automated, and to measure the impact of this automation. As process standardization takes hold, the behavior and time allocation to certain tasks for IT changes. CIOs must work with IT staff to identify the key stakeholders, create buy -in for the new processes, and measure their success. Communicating these key factors to the staff is imperative. IT process automation is but one initiative that should be considered in tough times. However, CIOs should use this as a stepping stone to larger efficiency measures that bring teams together, improve efficiencies, and establish a foundation for business growth.

Stephen Elliot is vice president of strategy for CA's Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business unit. In this role, he is focused on key areas such as business unit technology, strategy creation, analyst relations, market positioning, partner development, and customer deals. Prior to CA, Mr. Elliot was a noted software industry analyst at IDC, Hurwitz Group, Gartner, Instat, and Forrester.

Hiring for IT-Business Alignment at Wyeth

From: www.cio.com
Hiring for IT-Business Alignment at Wyeth

– John Mann, CIO

March 17, 2009
Jeffrey Keisling takes great pride in the relationship between his 1,800-person IT organization and the business at Wyeth: "One of the greatest measures of our success is that the employees in IT are indistinguishable from their business colleagues," says the drug-maker's vice president of corporate information systems and chief information officer.

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The IT-business alignment of which Keisling is so proud begins with the company's hiring process. Business executives participate in interviews with candidates for senior leadership positions in Keisling's IT organization. Likewise, Keisling says he interviews candidates for positions outside of IT.

Further promoting IT-business alignment at Wyeth (which Pfizer is acquiring) is the fact that 11 of Keisling's 12 direct reports are members of line executive teams at the $22.8 billion pharmaceutical company. So they report both to Keisling and to the individual line executives they support. Keisling and the line executives participate equally in performance reviews for the 11 direct reports.

Another reason why IT employees are "indistinguishable" from their business counterparts is that many of them come from the business to work in IT. Keisling says he's hired employees from Wyeth's commercial and manufacturing groups to head up business intelligence and operational effectiveness initiatives.

With the emphasis Keisling places on IT-business alignment, it should come as no surprise that Keisling looks for candidates who are businesspeople first when he's hiring. He seeks employees who've had a clear impact on the organization's they've touched and who "lead with a clear sense of purpose."

Here, Keisling explains how he makes hiring decisions and offers his advice for acing a job interview.

John Mann: What are some of the IT challenges you face now and how does hiring figure into them?

Jeffrey Keisling: I think it is fair to say that every chief information officer in every industry today is challenged to improve the operational performance of the company while lowering costs in IT. What's interesting is that everyone has the same tools. Everybody can buy the same technology, whether applications or infrastructure, and the only thing that really makes a difference is the quality of the people. Across Wyeth, not just in IT, it is all about finding and retaining talent and strong leaders. Our leaders can and do move across the company, and in- and outside of IT. We have a long history of developing people, and we have a very comprehensive and mature model for managing talent across the enterprise.

Have you brought people into IT who have been with the company or in the industry, but who may not have had a strong technical background?

Absolutely. It's bi-directional. People who have come out of our commercial organization are now leading up business intelligence initiatives, and people who came in from our manufacturing group are heading up operational excellence efforts in IT. With the high degree of professional scientific and medical talent we have on staff, it is very common for us in IT to bring in people who can apply their knowledge of science and medicine to technology.

What types of positions are you currently recruiting for?

It is all depends on the level, but in general, we are very focused on two areas: One is business analysis, and the second, which is complimentary, is business process skills.

What is the process for interviewing a candidate for a job in your IT department?

With a senior leader in IT, we have a very deliberate approach. It would be a series of one-to-one formal interviews. For example, if we were hiring someone who would line up with Wyeth's public affairs department, the vice president of public affairs and one or two of his direct reports would interview the IT candidate. I would do the same thing with my shop in IT.

For a middle manager or someone in a business analysis role, we have more recently used panel interviews. I think that has served us pretty well. It tends to bring a diverse set of views and is pretty efficient.

Do you ever interview candidates for non-IT positions?

Yes. There is a strong sense of collaboration in our company, which is one of our values, so it is natural for me to interview candidates for positions outside of IT and vice versa.

Who was the first person you ever hired?

The first person I hired was when I was a manager many years ago. I have worked with this woman now in three different companies. I have hired her twice. She is working on our team here today, but I did not hire her here. I would have, but she was here before me.

What did you base your hiring decisions on when you first started hiring, and how does that compare to today?

Fifteen to twenty years ago, as a first-level line manager, I placed much more emphasis on technical competency. Today, I ask three things. One is about the candidate's impact. What is this person's history of driving change, leading change or delivering value to the company? Two is, What kind of leader do we think they are going to be? Three is about the candidate's values.

I think broadly about how a person fits into the overall team. It is much more obvious to me [now] what the non-negotiables are—the things I will never compromise on. Some of my non-negotiables include trustworthiness, forthrightness, and how enjoyable it will be to work with the candidate. There are a lot of talented people who have very strong technical skills who cannot work in a team environment.

Diversity is also a major factor. Our markets and customers are diverse, so we have to have people who can work across the enterprise, cultures and languages.

What do you consider a successful hire?

Someone who is a good businessperson first, who puts the members of their team ahead of themselves, doesn't take credit for others' accomplishments, leads with a clear sense of purpose and has impact.

What is the biggest hiring mistake you've made, and what did you learn from it?

In general I've learned not to compromise on talent. "Good enough" never works out to be very good at all.

Have you ever had a case where you really liked somebody you interviewed, but your team didn't?

Yes. We have always found that discussion and debate among the team members, including the business partners who are working with us during the hiring process, yields a better answer. So we frequently do not have a unanimous decision. Discussion ultimately leads to the best answer.

What should candidates wear to an interview?

What a candidate wears is not a major factor for me, but my advice would be to wear a suit. First impressions are not over-rated. However, if I were interviewing with Google, I probably would not wear a tie for that interview. You have to be sensitive to the culture of the company you are interviewing with.

What advice would you give someone interviewing with a CIO or to be a CIO?

The answer is the same for both: Be yourself and be clear about the impact you've had on the businesses that you have been a part of. A candidate should talk about what they have accomplished vis a vis what is expected in the position. Talk about how you lead and the values you bring that will make the company the best place to work.

Do you have any pet peeves during an interview?

All too often, the person who you are interviewing does not simply say, "I want this job, and I believe I am the best person for it." I find it striking that someone would not express that during the interview.

What advice can you offer candidates about their résumés, thank-you notes and cover letters?

In a résumé, I am looking for information about the person being an "impact player." Again, I see a lot of people who are technically qualified, but I like to see some expression of what the person has managed or accomplished. Thank you notes are fine, but they don't make much of a difference to me.

If someone is a quality candidate, would they have a better shot contacting you directly, or should they go through human resources?

In general, neither. I would advise going through the networking process and then [contacting me] directly. Someone I hear about through one of my colleagues here in the company will get a lot of attention in a very short period of time. We encourage our people to bring that kind of thinking to us, and they do a good job. I think it is more important than ever, particularly in this economy, for people to use that channel.

Do you find that most of the people you hire come from networking or internal referrals?

I would say that 80 percent or more of our hires come through networking.

What three interview questions do you always ask and why?

1. Tell me about one or two of your accomplishments that you are most proud of and that describe who you are?
2. Can you provide an example of a professional risk you took that worked out great and one that did not, and what did you do about it?
3. What do you do for fun? I ask this because we emphasize people having balance in their lives and because it shows how a person "ticks." People open up about themselves in striking ways.

John Mann is associate director of The Alexander Group. He is based in the executive search firm's Houston office.

Making ITIL Work

by Ann All

I recently wrote an article and a follow-up blog post based on discussions I had with several IT analysts and with IT professionals on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). They offered lots of great advice on how to effectively implement ITIL, only some of which made it into the article. I'd like to recap some of the advice in the article and mention some of the suggestions that didn't make it. Hopefully other folks with ITIL experience will join the discussion and share some suggestions of their own.

• Start with realistic expectations. If you start out thinking ITIL will help you cut IT costs in half, you will be disappointed.
  
• Begin with a solid baseline, looking at unit costs, quality and productivity.
• Measure in granular enough detail so improvements can be tied directly to an ITIL process or tool.
• Concentrate on your most critical business processes. Ask users to help you determine which processes are the strongest candidates for improvement.
• Enlist a strong executive-level sponsor.
• Invest time in educating users about ITIL's benefits, preferably with diagrams showing how workflows can be streamlined.
• Reassure staff that their roles won't be automated out of existence. Rather, ITIL will allow them to apply their time and energy to more strategic issues. They shouldn't have to spend as much time firefighting, and firefighting will become less stressful for them, when necessary, if processes are better defined.
• Focus on achieving small, incremental wins, and the momentum will take care of itself.
• ITIL is an organizational effort and thus cannot be confined to IT.
• Training is important. Make sure users understand how to use ITIL tools and processes.
  
• Change management can get costly if and when users try to circumvent ITIL processes. With the CIO's blessing, send a weekly e-mail listing all of the 'emergency' changes made the prior week.
• Pick and choose the ITIL principles that will benefit your organization. You don't have to adopt them all.
• Promote posiitve results to create enthusiasm.