15 nov 2016

Five consequences of not having a CIO on the board


Some posts ago I wrote about the same topic. However, the more inside I try to navigate within organizations the more reasons I find to talk about this topic. This is why I decide to write again about this, although this time I will turn the way of expose and instead of present:  “The seven reasons to have your CIO on the board” as the title of the previous post, now I will say: “Five consequences of not having a top IT executive in your organizations”. 

If you are close to companies, much as you can know the internal structure, you should agree with the idea that for the most of the organizations the IT necessities cropped up suddenly and as they consider it as something necessary, but not an opportunity to take advantage. They handled IT with the minimum resources, delegating this area to low levels and approving only small projects and having a bunch of advices from external consultants from time to time. But when the business has demanded grow and grow to the IT departments they were unable to cover the demand, then some business areas started to create their own IT small group. This situation still remains very often and even knowing a lot more about the consequences only a few have been able to make the right decisions.

IT continues, in a large number of companies, been a second level decision factor and of course handled by a second level managers or executives (from the point of view of the decision level nothing about personal capacity).

There are a lot of bad consequences of not to have an IT professional on the top level of your organization and the most of them are related to loss of opportunities and capacity but others are creating an over cost and less effective process and ways of working: 
  1.  Not having a strong head to design an IT strategy for the whole company, each other manager of business makes their own decisions to cover their own necessities, additionally IT is an attractive area which everybody likes and feels able to do their own battle. 
  2. With different decisions makers, we have different environments, usually with redundant tools for doing almost the same function with means double cost. 
  3. Islands of technology means a lot of problems to interact between departments, and to solve it, more partial and limited solutions are created. The whole strategy of the company could be affected. 
  4. Several solutions coming from different points of starting, usually means a large number of applications with total different technology, appearance, way of access and credentials, the environment becomes complex and the final users of this are completely lose for reaching what they need. 
  5. The new era of the digitalization will not allow this complexity, all of us should be able to adapt our ways of working to standards faster than we never did.

3 nov 2016

La última milla en las multinacionales

Quienes hayáis trabajado en oficinas de compañías multinacionales habréis podido comprobar como la insatisfacción, las quejas y comentarios negativos sobre los servicios corporativos centrales son abundantes en lo relativo a cualquier área. En mi caso que he estado en ambos lados, y más concretamente en el ámbito de tecnologías de la información, he podido comprobar como en las oficinas remotas se reciben numerosas peticiones de adaptaciones que son inabordables en recursos para todos los casos presentes. Casi todo el que gestiona servicios centrales opina que las oficinas remotas tienen algún tipo de intolerancia alérgica a hacer las cosas del modo en que se han ideado.

Por otro lado en las oficinas remotas se acumulan igualmente los comentarios negativos sobre la falta de capacidad de adaptación de las herramientas centrales, la poca comprensión de las necesidades cuando se está de cara al cliente final o la distancia que separa las soluciones de las exigencias del mercado local.
Es una batalla abierta en gran parte de las organizaciones, que obviamente no queda solo en comentarios que es lo que todos percibimos. La realidad es que hay una gran pérdida de eficiencia operativa, a veces debido a soluciones engendros  en los que es imposible distinguir donde termina el antebrazo y donde comienza la mano.
No existe un método para proveer de las herramientas adecuadas en el nivel adecuado de especificidad desde los servicios corporativos, sin embargo siguiendo unas sencillas recomendaciones el problema se minimiza notablemente.

  • Distingue bien cuál es el core de tu negocio desde el punto de vista corporativo.
  • Analiza que servicios puedes ofrecer con la mejor calidad de manera horizontal.
  • Crea equipos de trabajo donde personas que provengan de las oficinas remotas tomen parte de las decisiones.
  • Pide ofertas para a adopción de tecnologías o despliegue de servicios a proveedores localizados en los países o regiones de tus oficinas remotas.
  • Exige siempre tecnología interconectable siguiendo los estándares de mercado.
     Evita los problemas, son mucho más sencillos de resolver así.