Thank you 2011 and Nice to Meet You 2012

12/29/2011 Contributor: Jim Brown, PDS, Office of the CTO, Technologist

Here it is, last week of the year.  It’s time to sum it up and look to next year.  From my point of view, 2011 has been a very successful year.  Both personally and in the work PDS is doing.  The measure of success that I am using is the definition proposed by Earl Nightingale more than 50 years ago in his “The Strangest Secret“:  “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.”

Most of my time at home is aimed towards helping my children grow up to be happy, healthy, and productive people in their community.  This is a task I share equally with my wife and is heavily influenced by their school, church and activities we all pursue together.  I feel we’ve made great progress towards that goal this year.

From a PDS standpoint – this year has been a full step forward in the launch of our multi-year strategy to bring greater value to our client partners and their communities.  In September, we announced the launching of our network of Cloud Extension Centers, making real our intent to bring the Cloud to our partners (rather than our partners having to go to the cloud).  As we go through the development phase of the project and face the day-to-day challenges square on, I do get a feeling of great satisfaction coming from the joy of being something, knowing we are advancing – progressively realizing our worthy ideal.

The confirmation from our clients and vendor partners that we are on the correct path is fueling tremendous momentum.

So, here we are – the end of the year.  And so, on to 2012.  What will we bring to 2012?  PDS has had the same core values throughout our company history.  As we go out about our business, we consistently redirect our focus by asking the right questions of ourselves and our partners:

- How can we help IT become more strategic?  To communicate better with the business, deliver quicker on what the business is going to need, sometimes just as the business understands what their needs are.

- How can we help you compete in your industry?   Being able to help answer that requires us to understand business drivers, industry trends, and other factors so we can make sure that our solutions are really fitting what you really need.

- How will this improve end user satisfaction?  We like to tie things directly back to the clinic, the floor, the classroom, the cube where applications are being used, which is what we see as being the heart of what IT does – enable businesses and users through applications and data.

- And, doing the above three things right, how can we do them in a way that we reduce the overall cost of providing services for the business – reducing the overall TCO for IT?

What are the problems our clients are facing now?  It varies by industry, but I think at the core there several trends to be listed:

1. Agility & Demand – How to change to meet the unrelenting demand for quick solutions to business problems?  How to satisfy demand for greater choice?

2. Value - How to be transparent and measure value?  The question or perspective varies – but it really comes down to how well is IT meeting the needs of its customers and how well do their customers understand what IT does, how it does it and why it costs what it costs.

3. Innovation & Solutions – How to reduce costs of supporting IT so investments can be directed to solving business problems?

4. Efficiency - How and where to increase operational efficiency?

2012 Year of Integration

Keeping these in mind, when I think about 2012, I believe that we will make more progress towards our goal, make more progress this year through integration.  I believe 2012 is going to be a year where the lines between IT and the business rapidly dissolve, where cross-functional teams led by either business or IT work together to solve problems.

Integration = Performance

When a system needs greater performance, when performance is not good enough, greater integration is needed.   Most of our clients have a strong desire for developing effective teams and improving project results, but most have serious barriers to working together.  I think that some of it can be traced back to a fundamental conflict between efficiency and effectiveness that goes like this:  Both IT and business have cultures of making the most efficient use of each other’s time, with an emphasis on saving costs.  This makes sense from an operations stand point – we have to be efficient with resources as we go about our daily business. (Side note:  Much of this type of efficiency can be accomplished with automation - and in IT, as funny as this might sound – we have a long way to go with automation of these types of tasks.)  However, with project work, if you try to be efficient up front and your emphasis is on not wasting resources you will not be successful.

Instead, an emphasis on communicating, innovating and co-creating should be your primary focus.  Especially for transformational type of projects – the ultimate view of efficiency should be adjusted to take in a much longer horizon.  Over the long haul, it is very inefficient to save time up front by running through requirements quickly, being efficient on resources while you are trying to explore new territory.  There are better ways to be efficient or good stewards of resources such as having a more gated, elaborative process for project work.

…Sorry… got lost on the soapbox there.

So for 2012, I believe an emphasis on integration and automation will be worthwhile:

- Integration of your project teams and business operational groups so that they can communicate, collaborate and enable their community to progressively realize their worthy ideal.

- Automation for efficiency on those tasks where IT is only getting in the way or not adding value to their own team or their customers.

So, thank you 2011 and here’s to 2012!  Please take time early on and build relationships, decide or reaffirm what your worthy ideal is, pursue that with a whole heart and commit to automating the rest.

Happy Holidays and see you Next Year!

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To view more of Jim Brown’s blog posts, visit the IT Leadership archive.