Advanced Configuration and Asset Management

A colleague of mine at Atos has written a white paper on “Advanced Configuration and Asset Management” as he says his summary -

“Configuration and Asset Management is not a subject to attract immediate enthusiasm from executives. Why is this? Probably because they have other business critical issues on their agenda. Or is it because – plainly stated – Configuration and Asset Management is all about collecting and storing data in a database?”

All too often people focus of the technology behind this IM&T capability and loose sight of the real business value that you can get from Configuration and Asset Management. Configuration and Asset Management underpins so many other best practices and can provide the “IT business intelligence” anybody responsible for delivering IT services (from the CIO down!) needs to make better decisions – from “what needs to be patched” through to planning IM&T strategy and business change.

To get hold of a copy of this white paper, see the link below 

http://www.atosorigin.com/en-us/Business_Insights/Thought_leadership/Thought_leadership_Container/wp_advanced_configuration_asset_mgt.htm

NHS CIO Network Group on Linkedin

I have created a CIO Network group in Linkedin. The purpose of this group is to help connect those people responsible for Health Informatics across the NHS. This group is aimed at CIOs, IT Directors and Associate Directors etc. This group is not intended to replace any of the existing internal communications mechanisms, hopefully members of this group will find it a useful tool for connecting with their peers.

If you work for the NHS in a CIO capacity, please take a look. Thanks.

Here is the link to the group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2074660

IT Infrastructure – Roadmap or Strategy

I am taking a slightly different approach in communicating Infrastructure Strategy to CIOs that I am working with. I am taking the view that most people can work out for themselves what their desired technology/IT “end state” should be (ideally in the same place as the business want to be!). The challenge is identifying sensible routes or roadmaps to this end state from where you currently are, with the “landmarks” to look out for along the way. So, Virtualisation, Unified Communications, Cloud Computing,  Mobile/Fixed Convergence, Innovation Management, ITIL V3 etc are “landmarks” along the way to realising the Infrastructure Strategy and enabling the Business Strategy.

 … I have use this in a number of presentations recently and it seemed to go down well with the audience (CIOs/IT Directors), seems to be more intuitive and resonates with the reality of being a CIO today.

 So for me an Infrastructure Strategy is usefull but may not go far enough, a Strategy Roadmap while still being “strategic” (ie the what and why) can be more pragmatic if it suggests good (and perhaps highlights some bad) routes to take.

NIMM Balanced Scorecard -The working out is more important than the answer!

I recently delivered two workshops, one for an NHS Trust CIO and the other for the Head of IT at an NHS Foundation Trust. These workshops were for the senior management team, providing them with an overview of the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model (NIMM) and the NIMM profiling tool/Balanced Scorecard. At the end of the session I facilitated a self assessment exercise for 1 NIMM capability looking at all 5 perspectives and scoring each on using the NIMM maturity levels (1 – 5). I made some interesting observations which for me really illustrate the value of self assessment using the NIMM balanced scorecard.

1. The working out is more important than the answer During the self assessment, the team worked well together facilitated by myself and the CIO/Head of IT and arrived at a consensus of the current “state of play”. One of the teams I worked with scored themselves quite high while the other team scored themselves as a NIMM Level 1 possibly 2. The NIMM maturity level is a useful metric for measuring progress, but what was really useful was the dialogue used in the room to work out the maturity score. A number of different people from different parts of IT discussed their own point of view and “perception” for each of the balanced scorecard perspectives. At the end of this discussion, the team had collectively arrived at a NIMM maturity score that they all agreed with and felt that they “owned”.
2. Scoring your as-is NIMM maturity helps create a roadmap for your desired to-be During the conversations to work out the current as-is NIMM score, the team also (without realising it at first) started to suggest their own solutions for improving the as-is. For example, when discussing the current process maturity, while being at “standardised” (at level 3), it soon became very clear which parts of the process could be automated using existing technology to speed up the process, achieve NIMM Level 4 (“Optimised”) and avoid delays by having a more robust approval workflow process.
3. Strategy and business alignment is at the heart of the matter! In one example (for the Service Desk capability) a number of NIMM perspectives were scored low by the team, discussions around the reason for this low score all seemed to come back to a lack of clear strategy and poor alignment with the business, including some confusion caused by the language and metrics used by IT in reporting the performance of the Services Desk to senior business (non-IT) stakeholders. The good news here is that relatively small investments in this perspective would create the clarity and alignment needed to quickly drive maturity improvements in ALL the other NIMM balanced scorecard perspectives

We Live in E/Mail… It’s Official

According to research firm IDC, E/Mail , as most knowledge workers will agree,  is the most time-consuming activity, followed closely by creating documents, then comes searching for and interpreting information. Email consumes an average of 14.5 hours per week per knowledge worker. This is not surprising, given that E/Mail it is the major tool used for collaboration and for sharing information.

Email is often used as a transport mechanism for documents as part of a workflow system with document workflow such as sales, operations support and other business processes.

Searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker’s time (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively).

Any improvements that an organization can make which result in reducing the time spent living in E/Mail will have immediate financial payback.

Infrastructure Benefit Types

Much of the work I am doing involves estimating the benefits from infrastructure technology, this is not a straightforward task given that most of infrastructure is invisible to the end user (and it should be!). There are many way of attempting this, some more complicated then others (usually requiring military grade spreadsheets!), but for me keeping this simple is the key.

I have created a set of what I call “Benefit Pillars”. These are the types or classes of benefits that you can expect from an investment in IT infrastructure.

Here they are:

Risk – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way specific risks can be managed or mitigated?
Cost – how can this investment help an organisation to avoid or offset specific costs? useful to include time-frames and monetary values where possible since this is primarily an economic indicator.
Functionality -  how can this investment help an organisation to improve the functionality of an existing capability or initiative? useful to give examples of how this improvement will improve usability of a user application and improve end user experience & effectiveness through improved functionality.
Service Delivery – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way it delivers service both from an IT perspective and from a business perspective?

 

How do CIOs track benefits enabled by IT?

A concern I am hearing a lot today is how a CIO should go about attributing benefits realised by the business back to the IT initiatives that enabled them in the first place.

 

IT costs are usually tracked in the IT organisation’s budget while the benefits from IT enabled change are usually realised (and reported) in the business units of an organisation (P&L).

 

This issue is particularly challenging for the largely “intangible” infrastructure capabilities such as collaboration technology.

 

Mature benefits management disciplines are needed in IT to help create the mapping between IT enabled “potential” benefits to business realised “actual” benefits.

 

The simple example below shows a benefits map for Software Asset Management:

 

 

Infrastructure Maturity Mapped to TCO

One of the things I am really keen to do is show how improving infrastructure maturity impacts Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the ability to generate ROI (return on Investment) from infrastructure investments.

I came across some research from Gartner where they compare Desktop TCO against various levels of “management”. The management levels they use are broadly similar to Levels 1, 2, 3 & 4 of the NIMM.

While direct costs remain fairly constant across the maturity levels, the indirect costs come down quite significantly as your infrastructure maturity improves.

In summary (my interpretation),

Going from NIMM Level 1 to NIMM Level 3will reduce Desktop TCO by approx 21%.

Going from NIMM Level 1 to NIMM Level 4 will reduce Desktop TCO by approx 42%.

Assuming that this trend will follow through to other parts of IT Infrastructure (Network TCO, Mobile TCO…) then there is a compelling TCO case to drive infrastructure maturity as well as the improvements in service and end user satisfaction.

Pilot Version of the NIMM Profiling Tool has been Released

The NIMM Profiling tool and NIMM Balanced Scorecard I have developed for the NHS is now available for testing within the NHS. The tool is intended to help NHS organisations self assess maturity against a set of suggested Infrastructure Capabilities using the NIMM levels and the NIMM balanced scorecard method. The self assessed scores are not nationally benchmarkeable since they rely on subjective self assessment, however, if the NIMM balanced scorecard guidelines are followed, it is possible to arrive at a meaningful score which can be used locally to plan and measure improvements in infrastructure maturity.

This is currently only available internally to the NHS on N3, here is the url.

http://nww.pspg.nhs.uk/iPSPG/iPSPG%20Artefacts/NIMM%20Profiling%20Tool%20Pilot%20Version%200.43.zip

Data – Information – Knowledge

I often work in situations where people struggle with some fairly basic definitions for what knowledge is. You can “Google” the term or look at any number of white papers and articles on knowledge management, but I prefer to use a real-world example which seems to help get the point across (well it works for me anyway!).

Now this is a very simple example and is intended to try an make the point about when data becomes information becomes knowledge. Consider the following example and ask yourself what’s more useful to you as a business traveller, then decide what a computerised travel booking system might be able to use:

Data

• 26Oct08 28Mar09 123456 – LHR 14:20 5 SEA 16:01 BA49 747 0

• 26Oct08 28Mar09 - - - - - -7 LHR 14:20 5 SEA 16:15 BA49 777 0

• 26Oct08 28Mar09 1- - -56 - LHR 17:10 5 SEA 19:05 BA53 777 0

 

Information

• Effective from 26^th October 2008 until 28^thMarch 2009 there is one daily British Airways flight that departs from Heathrow to Seattle, this flight departs in the afternoon at 2:20PM.  On Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays there is an additional flight that leaves at 5:10PM.

 

Knowledge

• The BA49 is usually a Boeing 747. If you are travelling alone and want to get the best premium economy seat on the plane, use the on-line checking system 24 hours before to request row 28, this is usually an aisle which only has one seat in the entire aisle, so there is plenty of leg room to stretch out and room for hand-luggage.
• If you can’t book it on-line, get to the check-in early, the crew refer to this internally as the “Captain Kirk” seat so if you ask for it using this nick-name you stand a much better chance of getting it.

What this does not answer is how you transform data into information into knowledge? how do you enable the capturing and sharing of knowledge? and how do you keep all of this current and in a usable form?