Chuck's Blog

Want To Learn To Lead An IT Transformation?

An interesting opportunity has just bubbled up around the whole topic of IT transformation -- especially for IT leadership.  Maybe you'd be interested?

Our own Wayne Pauley has tackled a very ambitious task indeed.  He's attempted to take everything EMC has learned around IT transformation over the last few years, and boil it down to a practical 7 hour class.

The coursework is aimed primarily at key IT leadership who will be playing a direct role in orchestrating an IT transformation. 

The material is also relevant to business leaders who are closely involved in an IT transformation.  The goal is to arm these people with practical frameworks for driving the right workstreams in the right sequence.

The material looks pretty good to me.  However, we won't know that for sure until we try it out.  So we're looking for people who would like to participate in the beta version of the class.

If this might sound like you, please read on ...

The CIO Survey: Big Data Is Hotter Than You Might Think

We here at EMC tend to care greatly about what IT leaders around the globe are thinking about -- no surprise. 

We spend a great deal of time in face-to-face settings.  We subscribe to a wide range of analyst publications and surveys to broaden our perspectives.

But, sometimes, we feel the need to invest in our own surveys around important questions we believe deserve more detailed answers.

Working with CIO Magazine, we were able to uncover some useful insights around how IT leaders in larger enterprises around the globe are thinking about big data, security and cloud. 

We also found some surprising differences between US perspectives and more global ones.

The Business Wants Big Data: Are You Ready?

It was gratifying to see the widespread attention from yesterday's announcement of the Human Face Of Big Data Project: articles, blog posts, tweets at #HFOBD, etc.  It's good to see that there are lot of people who understand that big data will play a big role in their personal lives, and they want to get engaged.

And now, back to the more pragmatic world of corporations, businesses and that all-important task of making money ...

I came across a fascinating blog post on the Harvard Business Review site, basically confirming what I had long suspected: business people are starting to understand the amazing power of this stuff; the IT folks aren't quite sure what to do about it.

The article is polite and gently makes statements around "better alignment".  

From my perspective, IT isn't a monopoly, and hasn't been for a while.  If business people want something important -- and they can't find it internally -- they'll find a way to get it externally.

And, ultimately, that's not going to be good for the business, and certainly not good for the IT team.

The CIO Dinner

I'm starting to really like visiting the outlying IT geographies.  Places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin to name one.   If you haven't been, it's an excellent example of an industrious and progressive midwestern US city.

Compared to the grind of larger cities, travel was almost a pleasure.  And I could see a real sense of community  -- it seems there are no strangers in Milwaukee, just really nice people you haven't met yet.

I also like the broad mix of industry sectors, and IT shops of wildly varying sizes -- from quite large to, well, "very leveraged".  I found the IT leadership style here very progressive, collaborative yet ultimately self-sufficient.

EMC recently hosted a wonderful intimate dinner here for about 8 of our customers and partners.  Great food, great wine -- and an insightful range of topics worth sharing.

Thriving In A Post-ITaaS World: Clouds As Platforms For Innovation

For me personally, it's been crazier-than-normal-crazy over the last few months.  Most years, summer slows things down a bit, but not this year. 

Why?  As I might have predicted, the brunt of the ITaaS (IT as a service) transformational wave has started to hit.  We are now starting to be collectively besieged by growing cadres of  IT leaders who want to start driving meaningful change in their own organizations. 

I couldn't be more pleased.

The hard part is that since I've been so personally identified with this subject, I seem to be the first call people make, so I've been completely swamped.  But help is on the way, as many parts of the EMC organization are now investing their time and cycles to learn more about ITaaS, and specifically how to best help our customers who want to make that journey. 

Most of our customer and partner engagements start with the lessons we've learned from EMC IT's own transformation, roughly from 2009-2011. 

Not every situation is identical, but there's a lot to be absorbed from someone who's already made that big investment in transformation. 

Thanks to the EMC IT team, there's no shortage of that material here in my blog.

But, in some sense, EMC IT has now moved to a post-ITaaS world. 

Yes, they've done the heavy lifting to transform to a service provider model.  They've re-architected and re-skilled.  They've changed the way IT services are produced and consumed.  They've established price transparency and started to shift the very way IT is funded at EMC. 

Always more to do, but -- now that they've achieved a great measure of success -- there's now an important question: where do we go from here?

And the answer is turning out to be "all sorts of great places".

Digital Literacy For Business Leaders

It's happened more times than I care to count. 

I'm meeting with relatively senior business leader, not an IT person.  We're talking about what's going on in their world. 

I ask an open-ended question around, say, social or mobile or cloud, or maybe big data analytics, and I don't get the response I was expecting.

It's obvious I've committed some sort of faux pas.  There's a stiffening, a deer-in-the-headlights sort of look, followed by a quick referral to "someone in IT who's working on it". 

An awkward pause usually follows.

I bet if I asked a more familiar question around competition, or business strategy, or budgets or people or globalization -- I'd probably get a knowledgeable and engaged response.

I used to think it was my fault for bringing up the topic.  Not anymore.

Ten Steps To IT Transformation

A few years back, EMC's own IT organization embarked on a journey of fundamental transformation. 

No longer content with incremental improvements, the decision was made to refashion themselves into an internal IT service provider, and leave behind the traditional enterprise IT construct.

The story of their transformation -- motivations, challenges, successes and lessons learned -- has provided extremely useful insight for many hundreds of EMC's customers and partners.  Yes, every IT situation is different, but time and time again we've seen that there's plenty that can be learned from their efforts.

Recently, they published a very insightful whitepaper: "An IT-As-A-Service Handbook: Ten Key Steps On The Journey To ITaaS".  I think it does a superlative job of outlining the crucial steps needed to get organized and start to make progress. 

While no recipe is perfect, once again there's plenty to take away from their experience and perspectives.  Once again, my thanks to the EMC IT team for investing the time in creating these documents.

IT Transformation: Does Your IT Group Fit The Profile?

I started writing in earnest about clouds and IT transformation back in January 2009 -- a little more than three years ago.

At the time, most IT groups would politely listen to me talk about the coming world of service catalogs, hybrid clouds, et. al., nod a bit -- and that would be that. 

Interesting, but not practical for them at that point.   Thank you for your time.

But, every so often, I'd meet an IT group that was intensely interested in the subject.   Their passion and enthusiasm stood in stark contrast to a vastly larger and vastly more passive crowd.

What made them different?  Why were they so interested, and everyone else wasn't?

I became very curious about these particular customers, and started to take the time to look deeper.  I began to construct profiles of the IT groups I was talking to, and looking for a correlation between their expressed enthusiasm (or lack thereof), and what I could discern externally. 

Over time, patterns repeated themselves, and an "ITaaS profile" (IT as a service) began to emerge.

During early 2011, I began to test my model.  I'd research a customer I was scheduled to talk to, score them using my profile, and attempt to predict the likelihood they'd be interested in the topic of IT transformation when I got in front of them.  I quickly discovered I had a very good predictor. 

It's sort of nice to know what's going to happen before you show up with a bunch of powerpoint :)

So, today, I thought I'd share with you what I've learned.

And, perhaps, figure out if your IT group fits the profile.

More On Mobilizing Your Enterprise

Just about every aspect of enterprise IT is in play these days, if you think about it.
 
One of the more challenging aspects is fully embracing the new endpoint for IT service consumption -- the ubiquitous mobile device.
 
To be clear, we're not simply talking about a BYOD (bring your own device) program, or re-hosting legacy apps on mobile devices via VDI -- although those are pieces of the bigger picture.
 
No, what we're really talking a fundamental re-thinking about how application experiences are built, distributed and consumed.  Mobile first, if you prefer.
 
And whether that new capability is pointed at your employees, your partners or your customers -- the changes are turning out to be very far reaching indeed.
 
EMC's own IT group is no stranger to these forces.  For the last few quarters, a small team has been working towards enabling mobility across our entire organization and business model.  I first introduced this story back in January of this year.
 
Now, five months later, I thought it would be good to circle back with the EMC IT team and get a status report: what have we done, and what have we learned?
 
Quite a bit, it turns out.

Healthcare CIOs: At The Crossroads

In the course of my role here at EMC, I meet plenty of IT leadership teams that are in the throes of transformation.
 
But the CIOs of healthcare providers are clearly a breed apart: the transformational forces grinding upon them are truly exceptional to behold.
 
In geology, the only difference between a benign fault line and a massively destructive earthquake is simply about how fast things move.
 
And, for healthcare providers, things are starting to move very fast indeed.