Today, I wish to feature CIO.com.  CIO.com is an enterprise Information Technology focused site that is targeted at well… Chief Information Officers (CIOs).  It is presented in a magazine blog style and features daily, weekly, and monthly columns, along with news and special features.  It tends to stay aimed at items that would interest mid to large size organizations and has a very nice mix of human resources type stories – hiring, certifications, management, etc. – and technology implementation and utilization articles.  I especially like it because they do an excellent job of linking to unfamiliar terms and writing at an appropriately mature, but not academic level.  They also feature continuing series on topics of interest such as smart phones, Blackberries, virtualization, and management practices.

CIO.com is free.  It has a very clean interface that while featuring ads, does so in a standard vice flashy manner.  It looks good in all the major browsers, including ones featured by large enterprises, but outmoded in general use, such as IE 6.  I find it very usable and direct.

What is CIO.com?  I cannot describe it better than they do… From their own about page:

“Serving chief information officers and other IT leaders, CIO.com, CIO magazine, CIO Executive Programs, CIO Custom Solutions Group and the CIO Executive Council are produced by CXO Media, an award-winning business unit of International Data Group. CXO Media also produces sister publications CSO magazine and CSOonline.com, for chief security officers and other security executives.”

This site is one that all Information Technology  Professionals should be following.  If not on the web, then at least on Twitter where they have a very good news casting service.  Please check this great site out.

What do you think about this topic?  Do you agree or disagree with me? Do you have a recommended website for next week? Please share your ideas below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for February 9, 2010 by Scott Coughlin.

Image Credit: fastcompany.com

Special thanks to the team at CIO.com I really appreciate your work at putting out such a terrific resource for the Information Technology Professional community.

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There is never enough money to do everything that we want to do.  Since information technology (IT) is often one of the last areas that resources get assigned, it makes the prioritization of those small resources even more important.  I would like you to share your thoughts on the question of where to spend the next $1 that you are allotted.

I will be sure to share the results.

Do you like polls as a daily topic? Do you have a recommended one for another week? Please let me know.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for January 19,2010 ©Scott Coughlin .

Image Credit: Reemergent

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This week’s story is from PC World and concerns one of the most pressing challenges of our Information Age.  As more and more people expect more and more bandwidth from more and more mobile, wireless devices, those smart devices will need more and more spectrum allocation to function.  Since there is a finite amount of usable spectrum and it is nearly all already spoken for, there will be winners and there will have to be losers in the coming spectrum wars.  My money is on the flush with cash mobile phone telcos to “steal” spectrum from all those others who cannot afford to legally defend their stakes in cyberspace.

The only possible compromise that is currently technologically feasible is the creation of spectrum bands with short range, but smartly allocated frequency use.  This is similar to the idea of digital cell phones, but with far greater spread spectrums and thus higher throughput and bandwidth.  The growing idea is to have large swaths of so called multiple use, unlicensed spectrum that gets carved out of the currently under or non-used areas of “white space”.  The challenge is that someone will need to map that space and serve to deconflict legitimate uses and arbitrate harmful interference situations.  And this is where our news story picks up:

PC World – Google Offers to Help Run a ‘white Spaces’ Database

Google is soliciting the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the company to be an administrator of a database that would allow devices to access broadband Internet on unlicensed TV signal spectrum, known as "white spaces."

 

The position is a reversal for Google, whichsaid in February 2009 that it did not plan to be an administrator.

 

The database, which could have several providers, is needed to ensure devices do not cause interference with nearby signals used for TV broadcasts. In November 2008, the FCC approved the use of devices at powers of up to 100 milliwatts on the white space spectrum or up to 40 milliwatts on spectrum adjacent to operating TV stations.

At the core of this issue is an inherently governmental function – management of natural resources for the benefit of its citizens.  In this case, the resource is spectrum.  As such, as attractive as Google’s offer may be, I believe that the federal government needs to find a way to do this internally even if that means growing resources.  There would simply be too much temptation and potential conflict of interest involved in putting the company that profits most from Internet usage in charge of managing spectrum to assist other companies in delivering ever more bandwidth,  No one, including Google needs that temptation.

What do you think about this topic?  Do you agree or disagree with me? Do you have a recommended news story for next week? Please share your ideas below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for January 10, 2010  by Scott Coughlin.

Image Credit: hongkiat.com

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This post is the story of two of my customers.  The first is constantly complaining that their information technology (IT) Department is too large and that they need to trim people to cut costs.  The other continuously bemoans the fact that they cannot fill their IT vacancies, needs more people than the market will bear, and wishes that they could find bodies to permit their expansion.  The strange factor is that they are both in the same industry, market, and approximately the same total organization size.  How can this be?

This weird dichotomy is very prevalent in my experience in the field.  There is simply no agreed upon rules of thumb or metrics for how many staff it takes to meet the needs of an information based group.  If you look online you find similar companies with one tech per hundred total size, ratios of 1:400, and even 1:25.  We, as a profession, are simply all over the map on this one,

Part of the problem is that people define their IT Departments size in different ways. This is a critical difference in the ratios.  Almost all companies include their help desk, seat hands-on service, and technical troubleshooters.  I like to include with these teams management, IT financial services, information assurance / security, back office / server farm administration, and seat service technical plus non-technical administration.  The challenge question is whether you count telephone operators and technicians, video teleconferencing support, cellular phone management, etc. in your numbers.  My compromise is to include everyone who reports to the CIO / IT Department Head for simplicity. 

The other issue is how to you ground your metric.  If you use seats, you need to define it.  Does a seat mean one computer, one user account, or one server to computer link? Also, do your seats include cellular phones, Blackberries, and VOIP?  If you base it on staff size, how many machines do they touch per day?  A little thinking can go a long way here.

Since I frequently get called on to make recommendations and justifications for staff size changes, both up and down, I try to keep on top of the issue on line.  Here are some fantastic links to discussions and white papers on the topic of rules of thumb for IT Staff Sizes:

• TechRepublic.com – IT Staff Ratio
• TechRepublic.com – Deciding the proper user/IT Support ratio
• TechRepublic.com – What is a reasonable end user/tech support ratio?
• Mark Verber – How Many Administrators are Enough?
• ArticleBase.com – Solutions for Staffing the it Department
• Tek-Tips.com – Ideal Users to IT staff
• SpiceWorks.com – What is your ratio? How many users per Tech support personnel?
• Petri IT Knowledgebase – How many IT people are in your org? or What’s your IT person to user ratio?
• Slashdot.org – Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Employees?

If you are curious, this is the rule of thumb that I use for staff sizing.  It is completely based upon my experiences and has no scientific backing.  It does seem to be validated to some extent by the reports and stories in links above.  Remember, I count the entire IT / Information Services Department when I do this.  I recommend one person for every seventy-five seats that are serviced. I define a seat as one computer with less than four user accounts on it adding one for each server that needs to be actively administered.  I find that if you are within plus or minus 10% of this ratio, you are best positioned to take advantage of the benefits of information technology as a competitive enhancement.

Be careful though…One counter-intuitive fact in this matter is that it is just as bad to be over manned as under manned in my experience.  When you get under manned you obviously feel like your company has information friction – computers are down, networks are slow, and security is suspect. However, if you allow your IT Department to get too big, then your information bureaucracy  starts to get in the way of your agility just as badly.  This is the land of blocked ports, overly locked down setups, and endless waits for approval to do anything new or different with your systems. Your IT Department can become its own worst nightmare for your company if you let it expand too far.

I think that, as a profession, we need to focus on this area from an academic standpoint more.  There is real work to be done here to set standards for us all.  While every organization is different, they are not that different.  We should have agreed upon rules of thumb and guidelines to reference. 

What ratio does your organization perform best at?  What is your current ratio?  Do you know of any other links, rules of thumb, or discussions on this topic.  Please share your resources for us all.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for December 30, 2009.

Happy New Year to you and your loved ones.  Don’t forget that our Amazon Holiday Store is still open and a great way to support the site!

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As I said earleir in the week here and here, though I stray far and wide in my management consultant product usage, I do find myself frequently coming back to one that I learned from FranklinCovey.  Monday, I wrote about their concept for goal making that they call Wildly Important Goals or WIGs.  It is part of their The 4 Disciplines of Execution™ organizational consulting program.  On Tuesday,  I wrote about their second discipline in this series which is to make compelling scoreboards to inform the workforce on how you are doing

Their third discipline is that lofty goals made at the corporate level must get broken down into smaller and smaller, executable portions through a process called alignment.  Here I break with their methods and choose instead to use those of an alternate program called The Balanced Scorecard approach.

One of my all time favorite IT Management Tools is Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC).  I find that it provides a very effective means for integrating the goals and objectives of the Chief Information Officer and IT Services Departments into the overall construct of their business.

Wikipedia has a great article on BSC.  This is how they summarize it:

“The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance management tool for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy.

 

By focusing not only on financial outcomes but also on the operational, marketing and developmental inputs to these, the Balanced Scorecard helps provide a more comprehensive view of a business, which in turn helps organizations act in their best long-term interests. This tool is also being used to address business response to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Organizations were encouraged to measure, in addition to financial outputs, those factors which influenced the financial outputs. For example, process performance, market share / penetration, long term learning and skills development, and so on.”

The Balanced Scorecard Institute is another great references with pages of information available to read online.

Kaplan and Norton were professors at the Harvard Business School when they wrote the initial book on the subject.  Following its success they founded the Palladium Group to specialize in consulting associated with executing the BSC methodology in real organizations.  The Palladium Group offers consulting, training, and education services to enable full implementation.  You can certainly learn a lot about the techniques by reading the growing library of books that the team has written on the subject.

It is a little difficult to explain the effectiveness of the BSC method in a small blog post, but it can have transformational benefits for your group.  Essentially, it is a process by which you translate your organization’s highest goals into executable, measurable, and correctable action steps.  Best of all, since it facilitates goal accomplishment in the financial, people, customers, and learning it prevents business thought that ignores the typical competitive advantages and value inputs from information technology.  It also applies equally well to public, private, non-profit, and governmental organizations and I find it to be one of the few business performance management tools that functions equally well when profit is not the driving factor. 

The Deposit Insurance Corporation of Ontario has a wonderful website demonstrating their Balanced Scorecard implementation. You can click here to see an example of one of their scorecards at full browser resolution.

If you are looking for an effective, business proven, academically sound method for aligning your IT and CIO shops with the overall objectives of your organization, I recommend you give the Balanced Scorecard method a serious look.  I have seen it used effectively for a number of IT organizations.

Tell me what you think of this series.  Please suggest IT Management Tools that you have found effective. Have you used or seen used this one before?

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for December 3, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin

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