There are two aspects to suviving and thriving as a technology operations executive. The first is a focus on the core of actually doing a good job. All is lost if you lose focus on “dial tone” or have an embarrassing / critical security breach or failure. You can’t win any credibility if something serious happens on your watch and you will find no audience for your advice – no one listens if your own ship is full of holes, and sinking. In IT,  perception is reality, and reputations, trust and jobs are lost if a critical failure occurs at the wrong moment. If you want to survive your job as a technology CxO executive, you’ve got to reorient yourself to be proactive in both preventing (or rapidly recovering from) failure

The second aspect is contributing to value, and ensuring that everyone else understands that you are contributing to value. In this, nothing speaks louder than measurable economic results that are aligned to the corporation’s goals. CEOs are primarily concerned with three things: economic value; brand value and sufficient agility (or nimbleness) to remain relevant in existing and new market battlegrounds. Any technology CxO who does not acknowledge or understand this, is already in trouble. (In fact, BinGoogle the “Three Envelopes” joke, and apply it to CxOs).

3 Envelopes

To add value as a technology executive, you have to look for opportunity. Usually, the first kind of opportunity is in improving obvious signs of dysfunction, such as:

A. Brand. On the one hand, a brand can be destroyed by a security breach or loss of data. On the other, a brand can be tarnished by old or bad process enabled by dusty old PCs in your stores or aged servers in your data center. Your brand’s destiny might be in surprising hands. Do you really want your marketing team to be collecting and storing credit card information, for example?

B. Economic. The economics of technology is fixed at too high a level, and not enough value received. This makes your SG&A (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sga.asp)  noncompetitive.

C. Nimbleness. If your people and/or infrastructure crumble on the weight of Black Friday, Mother’s Day, Product launches, the next big IT release, or viral news events, a CEO / CIO starts to question the wherewithal of his Technology Operations team. It is easy for an unmanaged technology infrastructure to go “stale” and let capabilities wither as your competition gets stronger.

This blog will discuss in detail the signs of dysfunction in a series of posts over the next few weeks, and discuss some of the methods used to address these problems. Here is a preview of the topics (in no particular order):

1. No company likes a bad news headline: DO NO HARM and enhance the brand where you can.

2. You are only as good as your last outage or service request! Eradicate chronic service issues, ticket piles and employee unscheduled 90 minute coffee breaks taken while the applications are down.

3. Dealing with external economic disruption – don’t be blindsided by AWS (Amazon Web Services).

4. No one talks to me! Use partnerships and innovation to get your customers working with you, and not against or around  you.

5. All my costs are fixed! How to deal with toxic economics.

6. Where is all my stuff? Get to know your inventory, utilize it, and optimize it.

7. I don’t have the data to refute you! The importance of timely, relevant measurement to manage quality, cost, timeliness and corporate alignment.

8. What do you mean the backup is missing / useless / non-existent? ! The importance of disaster recovery and business continuity scenario planning and practice.

9. You’re still running Windows XP! Having a plan to replace or retire old layers of technology, so that business processes remain supportable.

10. The IT laptop costs twice as much my tablet! The challenge of IT consumerization.

These are the challenges of those running technology operations. It pays to be on top of these issues or you can prepare three envelopes. The choice is yours.

I look forward to writing on these topics and welcome your dialogue.

Mike Ross <TechOpsExec@gmail.com>.

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