Our Blogs – For CIOs by CIOs

By Ken Norland, Associate and Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Are you eager to sabotage your organization's Master Data Management (MDM) initiative, drive inefficiency and compromise data quality? While we hope this isn't your intention, there are certainly pitfalls that can lead to MDM failure, derailing the success of an otherwise well-conceived project. In this discussion, we'll explore five proven ways to ensure your MDM endeavor falls flat, providing valuable lessons on what not to do. Instead, you can avoid these common traps and chart a course to MDM success.

By Sean Hickey, Senior Consultant

Many corporate leaders are always looking to improve costs while improving organizational effectiveness. Many times they attempt to achieve this by reactively cutting headcount across the board by X%, with top-down mandated layoffs. In the process they usually harm organizational effectiveness, decrease service levels and increase finance process risk.

The good news is there are better ways to reduce corporate costs. Here are some ideas that, as a CFO partnering with your CIO, you should consider spearheading…

By Jon Bergman and Lonnie Sanders III, CIOPS Associates

You may not have realized it, but we are just weeks away from the annual celebration known as the “Festival of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute”! While you are contemplating how you plan to mark this exhilarating occasion, we’d like to point out something that should be obvious. When it comes to the Change Management aspect of IT Service Management (ITSM), your end users are never going to see “enormous changes at the last minute” as a cause for celebration. 

Although change is never easy, if you want to make IT changes easier for your end users, the best approach is to establish a regular cadence for change. Here are some of the things that we have seen are most helpful in this area…

By Jon Bergman and Lonnie Sanders III, CIOPS Associates

The store manager arrived at work at 9:30 am, just as she did every workday, and she immediately started readying the store to open at 10:00. She turned on the lights, straightened out the merchandise, powered up the computers, turned on the registers and addressed some paperwork. 

Everything seemed fine…until 45 minutes later when she went to ring up the day’s first customer and discovered that something was screwy with the register. While she vaguely remembered getting an email the week before saying that corporate was going to be downloading some new software, she was certain that email had appeared pretty routine. After all, if they had announced that on a specific day and time they were going to be downloading software to change how the registers worked, she certainly would have taken notice! 

By Walter Curd, Associate

About twelve years ago I was brought on as the CIO of a large semi-conductor company with an incredibly complex operation. The company manufactured and sold over $2.5 billion worth of units each year, had tens of thousands of quotes and orders each month, and—perhaps most importantly to me as the CIO—was using over 600 software applications to run their business! It seemed like everywhere I looked there were more software programs, and my IT group had to support all of them.

Needless to say, it was obvious to me that our IT organization, as well as the business as a whole, could benefit from some strategic planning. Others agreed, and the company brought in an outside expert to help with the strategic planning process. 

This expert took us through a very straightforward process that gave me the information I needed to completely transform my IT organization…and it was all built upon the concept of “winning.”

By Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Quick! If you had an urgent need to know the details of the routers at your Cleveland facility, or exactly what sensitive company information can be accessed from a company laptop that was just stolen from a hotel room in Shenzhen, how long would it take you to access this information?

If you have IT Asset Management in place, you can pull up the necessary data in a matter of seconds. Otherwise…well, whether or not you’d be able to find this information at all is anyone’s guess. 

By Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Many organizations think the process of getting a robust IT-related Knowledge Management system in place is too costly and time-consuming to make it worthwhile. Which is quite ironic, given that cost and time savings are the main benefits these systems provide!

What is ITSM Knowledge Management?
In the context of IT Service Management (ITSM), Knowledge Management is a formal process for gathering and analyzing knowledge related to your IT systems, and then making this knowledge readily available to help desk personnel and, often, end users, in the form of written articles and/or video tutorials.

Once you have Incident Management,Change Management and Problem Management in place, implementing Knowledge Management is usually the next logical step in getting the ITSM basics in place and continuing to add value.

By Ed Caufield, Distinguished Alumni and
Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Andy Warhol once said, “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” But as any IT manager will tell you, sometimes when you do change things, things don’t go as planned or envisioned. Trying to avoid having changes go wrong and then analyzing the situation when they do is what Change Management and Problem Management are all about.

In the first article of this multi-part series on getting the ITSM (IT Service Management) basics in place, we focused on Incident Management. Incident Management is about prioritizing and addressing “incidents,” which is what happens when something in your environment breaks. In this article we will discuss Change Management and Problem Management, which are the next two logical steps in the IT Service Management process.

By Ed Caufield, Distinguished Alumni and
Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Pop quiz: What’s the most important reason to put IT Service Management (ITSM) in place? Because you want to…

A. Transform your organization from a reactive operational team to a proactive customer-focused team
B. Start using repeatable processes to deliver services more efficiently to your end users
C. Create visibility and transparency for both end users and IT services leadership
D. Uncover hidden problems
E. Increase customer satisfaction

Answer: Any of the above! These are all key benefits of ITSM. Which one is “most important” depends entirely on your organization’s needs and goals.

By Ed Caufield, Distinguished Alumni
and Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

There’s a great quote from the cult movie Matrix: “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” As our experience working with a recent client, a $1B service company shows, this truism certainly applies to the realm of IT Service Management (ITSM). Here’s what happened…

The company’s IT management had called us in because they were growing increasingly frustrated with what they assumed was a broken help desk. The problems they were seeing included late tickets, incomplete tickets and aging tickets not being worked on. Major issues were not being properly escalated and their “VIP” customers were not receiving any special treatment. In sum, the entire help desk function was wildly inefficient, extremely unproductive and lacking transparency to the issues or trends at hand. Not surprisingly, customer satisfaction was low and going lower.