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January 13, 2004

Insyte Conference

Brigham Young University’s Rollins eBusiness Center is hosting the insyte Conference on Feb 6th. The agenda includes a keynote address by John Parady, CTO Kelley Blue Book and panels on “IT Strategies: Managing Your IT Investment as Technology Evolves” and “IT Security: What You Donât Know Can Hurt You.” The conference is relatively inexpensive and a great way to meet and talk to other IT executives from around the area.

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State CIO Hurdles

Tom Davies column in Governing magazine discusses the things that new public sector CIOs struggle with when they’ve been used to working in the private sector. Reading the issues was a trip down memory lane. I think they all must be reading my blog. :-) Here’s some of the issues that they mentioned:

• Process is more important than results
• Bottom-line focused individuals hit the wall pretty quickly
• Management tools are different
• Stovepipes and a lack of enterprise vision
• A lack of transparency in the budgeting and rate process
• Politics
• The slow pace of change

Not surprisingly, no one mentioned the legislature, legislative staff, or the the press. There are some things you don’t talk about until after you leave.

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October 29, 2003

Make Sure You're Playing the Right Game

Chess and poker are perfect analogies for the competing interests in deciding how and where to be transparent. In chess, the state of the game is transparent. Each player can see the current state of the game and plan their strategy, and try to deduce their opponents strategy, from that state and the actions taken to get there. In poker, the current state is a secret, or at least mostly secret. You can’t bluff in chess the way you can in poker.

Most geeks play better chess than poker, metaphorically at least. IETF and other organizations work on the basis of compelling ideas and working code. We like to believe that if everyone just has the right facts, good decisions will follow. I hear variations on this theme whenever I talk to techies about public policy issues.

This is one of the biggest problems I had when I was Utah State CIO: I thought we were playing chess when in fact we were playing poker. Its actually worse than poker—-at least in poker, everyone has the same goal. In government everyone has a different goal and their actions often look irrational because you don’t understand their motivation. I’ve spent years studying the actions of some people there and still can’t deduce their motive. And yes, I’ve flat out asked them. They just look all wide eyed and innocent and say “I have no motives of my own—-I just do my job.”

In an environment like that, its difficult to make progress through an appeal to rationality and facts. Its often the bluffing and the behind the scenes maneuvering that makes the most difference. The winners frequently have no facts at all. They’d lose a chess game hands down, but they’re very good poker players.

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August 15, 2003

Westerm CIO Summit

I’ll be attending the Western CIO Summit on August 25 and 26th. I’ve been asked to participate on the eAuthentication panel. I attended last year and blogged all three days. This is a farily small, close gathering and I enjoyed the interactive nature of the presentations last year. I’m looking forward to seeing some old fiends and talking about identity management in the government space.

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July 29, 2003

Federal CIO Certificate Program

The National Defense University offers several interesting certification programs for federal IT managers in IT management. The CIO Certificate Program requires coursework in eleven areas:

1. Policy
2. Information Resources Strategic Planning
3. Leadership/Management
4. Process Improvement
5. Capital Planning and Investment
6. Performance and Results Based Management
7. Technology Assessment
8. Architectures and Infrastructures
9. Security and Assurance
10. Acquisition
11. eGovernment/eBusiness

The eGovernment Certificate Program requires coursework in eight areas:

1. Policy
2. Planning and Organization
3. Change Management
4. Architecture and Enterprise Integration
5. Financial Resources
6. Performance Management
7. Security and Privacy
8. Human Capital or Information and Knowledge Resources

These courses are necessarily focused on the needs of the Federal government, but state and local IT managers can sign up on a space available basis.

Don’t overlook training and education as a means of changing your organization. If you want to change the culture of your organization, focus on creating training courses for your managers that teach them the principals you want in the new organization. I wish I’d concentrated more on this when I was CIO for Utah. We did some of this by establishing the Product Management Council which has done a great job at educating a whole crew of eGovernment product managers inside Utah state government. We could have done much more, especially on the IT management side. The best way to manage change in an organization is through education.

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June 30, 2003

There Ought to be a Club for Former State CIOs

BIl Campbell, the recent former CIO from Wyoming has written an article in the latest CIO Magazine entitled “How to Survive in the Public Sector”. He came to see me last November, just after I’d decided to resign, but before it was public, and spent a day with me. I remember telling him I was resigning and his discouraged reaction. I think even then he probably saw the impossibility of his situation. His comments in the article echo some of my own in my Public Service Tips.

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May 28, 2003

Watches and Computers

The other day as I was driving to an appointment I glanced at the clock in my truck to see how I was doing for time. For some reason it struck me that I can remember when the only clocks in cars were wrong. I don’t wear a watch usually. I’ve found that clocks are ubiquitous. I’m almost never somewhere where I can’t find a clock. No need really to carry one on my wrist. The reason that people carry watches harks back to a time when clocks were not easy to find and yet time was becoming more and more important. They needed portable time to work in the world in which they lived. I think the analogy to computing is interesting.

While I don’t carry a watch, I do almost always have a computer with me of one sort or another. And a personal communications device called a cell phone. This is largely because I can’t find these things conveniently (and certainly not with access to my information) as I move about. Perhaps as computers and connectivity become ubiquitous, we’ll also find ourselves leaving our laptops at home and relying on the computing devices we find where we are. That’s a twist from how I’ve imagined the future.

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January 09, 2003

Four Questions Every Start-up Ought To Answer

As I go around and visit companies, I usually ask them four questions:

1. What’s your product?
2. Who’s your customer?
3. Why do they buy your product?
4. What’s your competitive advantage?

You’d be surprised (maybe you wouldn’t) to find that there are companies who can’t answer these questions. They might think they’re answering them, but usually they’re waving their hands a lot while their talking. I want to know the answers to these questions before I ever hear word one about the technology. Sometimes people think the first question is answered by talking about their technology—its not.

Questions 3 and 4 may seem similar, but their not. Question 3 could alternately read: “what problem are you solving for your customer?” and question 4 could alternately read: “why can’t any other bozo with a wheelbarrow full of money do the same thing?” Contrary to popular belief, access to capital is not a competitive advantage.

I’m also usually pretty blunt about asking about gross revenues, burn rate, and their funding situation, but only after a substantive talk on the first four. I’m having a lot of fun. I need to find a way to get paid for it. :-)

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January 02, 2003

EX-IT?

A recent article on eWeek talk about IT workers who, when faced with a career change, got out of IT and into something else. I can’t see it. I still get excited when I think of building something new or start tinkering with SOAP or whatever. When I taught at BYU, there were 700 undergraduate CS majors (still are). I talked to many of them who hated to program and were in CS because it was a good way to get a job. I used to advise them to go into sales. :-) I guess those types are probably wondering whether to tough it out or not. I think hard core techies will always be looking for the thrill you get from building the next, new thing. I’m proud to count myself among that group.

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December 22, 2002

CIO vs CTO Redux

Earlier, wrote about the differences between a CIO and a CTO. Doug Kaye offered another:

CIOs are primarily concerned with how their company consumes and applies technology. CTOs are primarily concerned with how their company creates and exports technology.

I think the producer/consumer contrast is quite appropriate. Of course, in the process of consuming, CIOs create new things and in the process of creating, CTOs consume technology, but coupled with the other statements in my earlier post, I think this has the right context and serves as a good summary.

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December 18, 2002

CIO vs. CTO

One of the questions I hear with some frequency is “what’s the difference between a CIO and a CTO?”   Having been both, I think I have some insights that might be helpful.

First let me talk about what I think they have in common:

• In both jobs, a key role is helping technologists understand what the business needs and helping the business understand what the technology can do for them.
• Both roles require a strong technologist with a strong grasp of business (kind of a corollary to the last point, but slightly different). 
• Both should be strategic thinkers.
• Both should be excellent leaders.

Now for their differences:

• I see a CTO as primarily focused on the top line while the CIO is primarily focused on the bottom line.  There’s some cross over, but I think this is a valid distinction.
• A CTO is primarily concerned with external products and customers while a CIO is primarily concerned with running the business (internal products and customers).
• In an ideal world, the CTO runs the product development organization while the CIO runs the IT organization.
• If you have to choose, being a strong technologist is more important for the CTO, while being a good manager is more important for the CIO.
• A CIO has to be operational and understand how to build repeatable processes, reliable systems, and the organization to run them.  A CTO doesn’t necessarily have to have these skill if backed up by a strong operational person in the role of CIO. 

A large technology oriented company (more than a few hundred employees) should have both.  There’s too much to do for one person and the thinking can be very different.    One of the big problems at Excite\@Home was they never had someone  at the “C” level who was looking internally.  “IT” was a division (not even a VP slot) inside the larger technology organization.  There were four levesl between this director and the CEO.  The result was real chaos in the internal systems and operations areas.  The CTO was a brilliant technologist, but not very “operational” and consequently, repeatable processes were hard to find. 

Personally I’ve enjoyed both roles, but I found the challenges to be very different. 

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December 17, 2002

Craig Burton's Application Services Automation Layer

Interestingly enough, after writing about Level 5 Routing for Web Services this morning, I happened to have lunch with Craig Burton.  Craig has started a company called JanusLogix this is doing something along those lines.  Craig calls it the application services automation layer.  Lot’s of protocol heavy stuff (which won’t surprise anyone who knows Craig).  I’m hoping Craig will get some additional white papers and other information on the JanusLogix web site soon, because what he’s up to sounds like interesting stuff. 

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December 11, 2002

Tablet PCs: A Frist Look

This afternoon I got to spend about 15 minutes playing with a tablet PC from Acer  (TravelMate 100) and one from Compaq (TC1000C).  I hefted them wrote on them, and played with some of the apps.  My first impressions:

• I think I’d like one of these.  They have a very nice form factor that is more usable than a notebook in a meeting, airplane, etc. 
• I liked that COMPAQ keyboard detached.  It wasn’t a lot lighter, but it was much thinner. 
• The Acer was VERY hot on the bottom.  It would cook your legs if you had to sit with it on your lap.  The COMPAQ was nice and cool (they’d been on for about the same length of time)
• They’re pretty expensive for something which I don’t see replacing my laptop.  I’d like one, but not as my only notebook.  I’d give up my iPAQ for one though. 

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December 10, 2002

One of the Things I'll Miss

One of the great things about being a CIO is that you can get technology questions answered quite quickly most of the time.  Yesterday I was having lunch with a friend of mine at the David Chase Cafe (great place, btw) and he complained that his T68i phone didn’t get very good reception at his house near there.  Sure enough, I pulled out my phone and I had no bars.  Today ATTWS was in the office for another meeting and so I asked about it.  My question was whether they’d built out all their cell sites with GSM/GPRS or were still making capital investments.  The answer is that all current cell sites are GSM/GPRS capable, but that the wavelength used for GSM doesn’t travel as far as the frequency they use for TDMA.  ATTWS still needs to fill in some of the gaps and has a capital plan for 2003 to do so.  So, Bill, there’s your answer. 

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