IT: It's Time to Become a Culture of Yes!

Here's the presentation I gave to Thornton May's Value Studio in Amelia Island, Florida on November 6, 2014.

I have never met a more neurotic group of people than CIOs. They are like teenagers around the lunchroom table, wondering if others like them and wondering why they aren’t fitting in with the cool kids.

There are these frequent topics that pop up in CIO magazine or conferences or discussion boards. How can we become more relevant? How can we add value? How do we align with the business.

Look at that tweet. Can you imagine any other customer service industry that would have a magazine article about why to listen to the customer?

So another frequent topic starter is – How Can IT Evolve?

I’m not crazy about evolution as metaphor

• It is mistake based
• It involves an incredible amount of time and iterations
• We don't have time
• If you look at a rapid environment change, you can see a lot of species extinction. Our IT environments are (or should be) rapidly changing 

But it's a good metaphor in that it is all about competition

And if we're not careful, our competition will be Shadow IT, consumer IT and IT department-circumventing SaaS

And from what I can see, we aren’t evolving. We’re making the same mistakes over and over again.

• We are Culture of No. Our default answer is no, we can't do that.
• Because we are arrogant, with a “we know best” attitude which implies the requester is stupid
• We spread FUD
• We think more about resume impact than organizational impact
• We think as technologists and missi out on the activities of true value to the businesses we’re in

CFO’s by contrast aren’t nearly so neurotic. They aren’t worried about aligning their activities with the business because their activities are the business.

When I recently googled the phrase CFO transition, I got 82,300 results and the top results are actually about individual CFO transitions.

Googling instead for CIO transition, you get 360 results. And the top 2 results aren’t about individuals but are about trends.

The message – businesses don’t seem to care about CIO transition. We are fungible putzes.

Maybe we’re viewed this way because what we seem to value and deliver is being increasingly viewed as a commodity.

Nicholas Carr's book, "Does IT Matter?" You've probably all read this book, so I won't belabor it. In summary, Carr pointed out that companies used to have VP's of electricity, back when those companies actually produced their own electricity. Today, they get their power from a utility and there are no more VP's of electricity. He extended this to say that sooner or later (and he thought sooner), IT would just become a utility, and IT departments would go the way of Departments of Electricity.

But wow, do we seem to be resisting this change with every fiber of our CIO beings.

The single most obvious utility I can think of in IT is email. Email was invented in 1965. We've been through all of the stages of product differentiation (remember PROFS and Higgins mail and cc:Mail) and now it is just SMTP standard mail. You can get a free gmail account that has a mailbox limit of 10 GB.

And yet so very many organizations have internal email servers, email administrators on staff, and 1 GB limits on mailbox size. Even zoos for heaven's sake! As a non-profit, we get Microsoft Office 365 for free. 50 GB mailboxes. 1 TB per user OneDrive, free SharePoint hosting. And yet at a recent conference of 40 zoos and aquaria I attended, only a handful took advantage of this. Zoo have tiny IT staffs - I have 3. And yet many of them are using part of that small staff to administer email.

 So my advice is, whatever you’re doing – start doing the opposite

Instead of your default answer of No, make your default answer yes.

Certainly we have to perform our due diligence and steer our users into wise decisions. But if our initial answer is an obstinate "no, and prove to me why it shouldn't be no", then the utility model will kill us. People will get their own mail accounts, their own dropbox accounts and so on. If we block these with our policies and firewalls, there will be a revolution. At a minimum, "Shadow IT" will pop up all over, and sooner or later people will figure out that they don't really need the real IT department, those Soup Nazis who always talk about problems and not solutions.

Nicholas Carr was largely correct. As technologies develop, they become utility. This is good. Complexity should disappear. People want services, they don’t care how you do it, and they want them cheaply.

So my advice is to LET GO. Embrace the utility model as much as possible. Outsource anything that is not unique and critical to your mission. At the zoo, we run, in-house, our gate admissions, retail, membership, fundraising and animal husbandry software. But we also outsource email, Lync, SharePoint, OneDrive storage, our backups are to the cloud and we co-source our network management. I am constantly re-evaluating. At some point, maybe I can finally have my dream of having zero on-prem servers.

And while you’re at it, don’t be so dismissive of consumer IT. Your employees are bringing their own devices anyway, so embrace that. Allow them to use Dropbox and Evernote. Maybe you can make use of something like dropcam. Don’t block employee use of social media – it’s how the younger workforce operates. If you have concerns over their productivity, then maybe your managers don’t know what work looks like, and so are relying on the appearance of work. Because people can look at Facebook on their phones now anyway.

Again, to point to CFO's. They clearly have to be concerned about risk. Yet they have setup internal and external audit, policies and procedures, tests and measures in such a way that the risk management machine is efficient. They are then able to use the bulk of their functions resources and pour that into value creation activities.

In many ways, I have it easier at a non-profit than at a publicly traded company. I don't have to concern myself with SOX, for one. But I do have a million visitors a year and several million credit card transactions, so I can't escape PCI. I'm just trying to keep as much of that off my plate as possible. Part of me longs for the day when IT can be about system and process value creation, and the "preventing of bad things happening" can be under a risk management group, and perhaps largely farmed out like external auditing is. For now, I am just trying to find the right balance. That means doing what's necessary - the minimum that's necessary - from a risk and compliance perspective, and not going overboard. I want the bulk of my time to be on creating demonstrable and tangible things of value.

Take action on the endless conversation about "aligning IT with the business". Make sure you and everyone on your staff knows each business function as deeply as possible. By being able to sit above all of the functions, you'll see value creation opportunities that those in their silos will miss.

Talk in business terms like ROI, productivity, opening up adjacent opportunities. Develop business cases for projects and form a governance group to beat up on those.  Use the results to present a project portfolio to your board that speaks to them about business transformation and productivity.

And stop the endless pursuit of “best practice”. Get things “good enough” and then work on new things. If you keep on tweaking accomplishments of the past, you will get increasingly less and less payback on that investment of time and resources.

One thing to start off with is the challenge of working at a small non-profit. My whole budget is a rounding error on a line item of your budget.

I had an English teacher in the 7th grade ask this interesting question. I think she meant it as a zen koan – she wasn’t really expecting an answer. But the question stick with me all these years.

Do the rules of constructing a sonnet (14 lines, iambic pentameter, certain rhyming scheme) – do those rules enhance or inhibit the poet’s creativity?

And so now, I like to think that my non-profit, resource constrained world is just making me be more creative and way less wasteful

A lot of people when they first talk to me are a little perplexed on how IT can be aligned with the business of a zoo. But I can quickly dispel that.

One example is how we used to process memberships and how we now do it.

When I arrived at the Zoo in February of 2013, one of my benefits was a membership. And I soon discovered that membership fulfillment took 6 weeks to get a cheap looking paper membership card. The card had a barcode on it, but evidently just for decoration. When a member visited, they checked their ID and then scanned in a generic member visit. No record of the individual membership usage was being kept.

I think one of the enduring benefits of an IT background is it teaches you about process design. This is a real benefit you can bring to every area of your organization. So, now at the zoo:

• You get a PVC card, complete with adorable picture of our twin pandas, at the point of sale
• When we scan you in, we record your visit
• The zoo is able to have 2 fewer FTE's in fulfillment
• We're saving on postage

Another thing we’ve been able to pull off this year is zoo wide Wi-Fi.

I started that project through a donation from Aruba networks. Then we worked on and won a grant that funded the rest of the project.

It was challenging. It’s a hilly zoo, with winding paths and lots of trees. Bamboo, it turns out, is murder on RF signal. And being, by necessity, frugal, I did a lot of the installation myself. You haven’t lived until you’ve mounted an access point on the roof of the gorilla yard.

But now – it’s a demonstrable thing of value to thousands of people. Our guests get free WiFi. Our staff gets a secure network to do things like enter veterinarian reports from within the zoo, using a tablet.

And it has laid the foundation for lots of fun stuff in the future. Apps and iBeacons and interactive educational programs.

One of the fun and quick things the Wi Fi did for us is to allow us to put in some dropcams in animal enclosures. This is embracing consumer tech and the cloud - $200 cameras that stream to a cloud DVR, where for $50/year you can store a week’s worth of recording.

The team has been using them on some of our nocturnal creatures, to see what the heck goes on at night.

With the Wi Fi in place, getting the dropcams operating was literally a 3 minute job.

Read More