I love my IT department - Reshaping the IT organisation

Reshaping the IT organisation

Reshaping the IT organisation

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// Reshaping the IT organisation

05 // Foreword 06 // Preface

08 // Reinventing the IT organisation

18 // “It is only when users are engaged that IT can become a co-creator for the business”

Interview with Maarten de Vries, CIO Royal Philips Electronics

30 // Creating a love vibe with smarter KPIs

40 // Power, Passion and Pride, the transformation of Group IT within Ericsson

Interview with Eva Listi, CIO Ericsson

52 // Find and imitate other people’s successes

62 // The big switch is on, Zurich Financial Services Group is in great shape for the future

Interview with Mark Sheridan, CIO Global Life and

Theo Bouts, COO Global Life Zurich Financial Services

74 // Quote Wall 78 // Wrap-up

80 // Book Tips

82 // About ‘I love my IT department’, Giarte and HP Software & Solutions 84 // Colofon

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FOREWORD As consumers we indulge ourselves with Information Technology. Mobile internet and social media change life styles dramatically. Some of us even love their devices. Yet when looking at enterprises, loving their IT departments is – sadly – a rare phenomenon. IT is still more a villain than a hero in the eyes of its customers, despite the fact that without IT, nearly every business comes to a halt.

There are enterprises that already deploy IT to change the rules of the business game. In these companies the IT departments not only reinvented themselves, but also the way business treats technology. When interviewing CIOs for this book, we did not just talk about success. Many CIOs are still working hard to reinvent their organisation. Yet their stories are catalysts for a positive change in the business-IT relationship. We simply aim to exemplify how to walk the walk and talk the talk.

This book strives to create awareness for the urge to reshape the IT organisation into a sparring partner for the business. The traditional idea of aligning business and IT – accepting the fact that both have different strategies – is outdated. There is no longer ‘them versus us’, but there is just us. We have to win the hearts and minds of our customers. Together.

We hope to inspire you. Share your experiences with your peers!

Marco Gianotten Eva Meester Giarte

Jan Gladziejewski Remco van Dijk HP Software & Solutions 05

PREFACE Within the relationship between IT and business, love is complicated. We serve the business, but our surroundings change continuously. Competition from new players without legacy is increasing, new technologies pop up, and forecasts for the business for which IT is working are also changing. We have to innovate, implement and save costs – all at the same time! As a CIO, just try and maintain a good relationship with the business in this chaos, let alone improve it. For many people, ‘I love my IT department’ is more of a dream than a reality.

This book outlines the contours of the new IT organisation. The first chapter holds up a mirror to IT. Circumstances and developments all point in the same direction: IT itself must change and start working differently. Our new image must be the result of a new type of behaviour that is understood and accepted by our customers. There are many opportunities for us to reinvent ourselves.

More and more of Philips’ new services and products are IT-enabled. Yet for a long time there was a huge distance separating R&D and IT. CIO Maarten de Vries is transforming his IT organisation so that it can play a serious role as a co-creator. By combining transparency, simplification and economy of scale, Philips now has greater economy of speed. All of this results in ambassadors, recognition and appreciation, the starting point for a partnership with the business.

In the second chapter, we show that IT must clearly justify its own added value and show what it is doing for the business. This step is very important: make sure you know the business. New KPIs are simple and focus on customers or on change, the only two constants within the IT domain. They provide a strong foundation to support the new relationship between business and IT. 06

Ericsson’s IT organisation, lead by CIO Eva Listi, finds itself in a comprehensive transformation process aimed at constant cost reduction, continuous investments in innovation and with a permanent focus on end users and customers. An impressive roadmap, to which Listi adds: “There will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020. IT is not just a business enabler, it is the business.” And, since January 2010, Ericsson’s Group IT is responsible for ‘driving and improving the Ericsson processes’.

Love potion does not (yet) exist, but in the third chapter we show that a certain degree of courage and nerve is required when it comes to love. We illustrate this using success stories rather than dating tips. More and more CIOs are taking the plunge and rigorously opting for IT transformation.

This results not only in a huge amount of innovation and growth but also a flourishing love between business and IT. Zurich Financial Services is working on products and services that must also be serviceable in forty years’ time. The focus is on shedding legacy, implementing industrialisation and always adapting to changing circumstances.

Business and IT are serving the same aims, expressed by ‘the handshake concept’. The focus is on working together rather than on delivering services.

According to Mark Sheridan, CIO and Theo Bouts, COO, that requires soft skills generally found in a mature relationship.

With this book, we hope to make clear that the time is ripe for IT transformation. The business makes it necessary, technology makes it possible and the new generation of employees longs for it. Three opinions in three articles outline the main challenges and show how organisations have been successful in this area. In the interviews, CIOs give us an insight into their roadmaps and ideas. We hope you enjoy reading the articles and they will inspire you.

Yet be warned: success can be contagious!

Marco Gianotten 07

Projections of how IT organisations of large companies will look in five or ten years’ time often include certain threats. How do you cope with an ageing staff, a legacy system or increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks?

Yet the future holds as many opportunities as it does questions. What are the main challenges for IT organisations given that information technology is woven into the very fabric of business processes, products and services? This chapter discusses the new contours of IT and how to shed obsolete working methods.

More than ever, technology is influencing corporate structures and business models. A major part of a company’s competitive edge is currently determined

by IT. Innovation through IT is no longer the exclusive domain of giants such as Amazon or Google. For ‘ordinary’ companies too – with a mainly offline business model – the innovation value of IT is critical for the continuous optimisation of the business model. The proverbial thousand-and-one small innovations are often more useful than one single major breakthrough.

But this increasing importance of technology is in stark contrast to the often difficult relationship between the central IT organisation and the units 08

responsible for results – that is, the business. Many executives are still not pro-IT. Indeed, the question being asked in many boardrooms is ‘why now, we’ve always managed up to this?’.

Tick, tock But the clock is ticking, and we are on the verge of alarming problems.

IT must act. At a large European bank, more than 1300 IT employees will retire in the next three years – starting in late 2010. That is almost a fifth of the entire IT workforce. Of those 1300 employees, 500 are working on business-critical platforms of first generation Cobol. This brain drain can neither be resolved with new employees – not even from India – nor with offshoring.

At the same time, the business often perceives the classic IT organisation as a multi-headed monster in which all specialisations work together as little as possible. This preconception can be seen by the traditional way many applications are (still being) developed. A new group of experts is deployed in each phase, from functional design to operations. At the end of the day, 09

the process is very time-consuming and the outcome is still often uncertain.

Users of the system are only involved at the start and at the end of the process – that is, while specifications are being drawn up and during the acceptance test. This model is no longer tenable in situations where the business is constantly on the lookout for functionality to increase its competitive edge.

In this new decade, the IT organisation is faced with the task of reinventing itself so that IT can fulfil a partner role when creating innovation and business value – using different working methods, using the existing capacity differently, and utilising new competencies.

IT coming out of isolation IT specialists like to talk about functional requirements: what exactly must the application be able to do? These days, however, the wishes of users and business managers are constantly changing as a consequence of progressive insights and discussions with others. For this reason, they usually know exactly what they do not want, but are still looking for exactly what they do want.

As an IT employee, you can no longer wait for ready-to-use registered specs and then build systems on your own initiative that are only subjected to a user test at the end of the process. Many of today’s IT organisations work hard on process optimisation, but all too often in isolation. The alignment between business and IT as an elaborate coordinated effort, where different blood groups only meet in conference rooms, is no longer possible. That is certainly not an appropriate way to achieve innovation and growth of the business. It must become second nature to them to get to know each other’s biotopes and work together. And that requires social attributes such as empathy, curiosity, creativity and openness.

Become a part-owner with economic impact The example of JetBlue, an American aviation company, shows what happens when the IT organisation comes out of isolation and becomes a co-innovator 10

of open innovation in R&D, improved customer perception and cooperation in the supply chain. At JetBlue, the IT organisation is co-responsible for the impact of new information systems on efficiency and on passenger loyalty.

JetBlue’s IT organisation does not just deliver projects on-time-on-budget (OTOB), it is also part-owner of their economic impact. That is why JetBlue’s new home terminal at New York’s JFK is full of smart IT to help customers faster and provide them with more accurate flight information. After the new terminal opened in early 2009, the loyalty of customers – who therefore continued to fly with JetBlue – rose by 7.5 percent over the following quarter.

Becoming owner of economic impact also requires cooperation of other ITrelated KPIs. Real KPIs must be key for the business and must refer to the daily reality in which the business operates. Only then will it be possible to achieve customer-orientation and innovation. The example of JetBlue clearly shows that when IT wants to make a concrete contribution to innovation it must use new working methods and competencies. However, any discussions about the transformation of IT all too often focus on the size of the IT organisation and therefore the numbers of people. However, that number system is the least interesting part of the discussion. It is essential for the IT organisation to break loose from its old role, when the business was able to offload its responsibilities onto the IT organisation. By formally bestowing ownership of the main processes on the business and focusing on operational excellence across the company, IT can free itself in order to fulfil a more strategic role.

Visit the customer Over the past decade, many large IT projects were cancelled because they became too complex without benefiting customers. It is therefore essential for CIOs to be more efficient in the way they manage the strategic portfolio of projects. Since business cases change along the way and technological 11

developments are constantly advancing, it is important to be able to adapt projects or even to cancel them.

Particularly IT employees who are out in the field, who are meeting real customers and who are experiencing processes can contribute meaningful ideas. The greatest value an IT employee can give to the business is to be able to say ‘no’ because you know what is really important. The IT organisation of the future will no longer be a project factory that produces as much as possible, but rather an organisation that specifically defends the strategic interests of the business and has a good knowledge of how to deal with the continuously changing landscape. This requires the use of new working methods. Observe customers – from internal users to online customers – in their ‘natural habitat’, talk to the people on the work floor to find out what they believe is important to make the company more successful. It will become necessary to work in short cycles with concrete results – for example, an application prototype. This need not apply to all components (such as in-depth described processes), but it should apply to anything that is changing fast and for which the wishes of users must be taken into account.

Agile reduces the distance to the business Business managers themselves are generally not in a great rush to get involved in an IT project. They find it much too technical and time-consuming, and if the project is unsuccessful you immediately have a blot on your reputation.

Say goodbye to your career! That situation must and can be changed.

New agile development methods focus on this area. Scrum is a method that involves all experts in the project at the same time which stimulates dynamic communication and cooperation. In this way, energy is released and this in turn generates a good team spirit. And even more importantly, the relevant parties in the business appreciate this working method. It is time we put 12

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the pleasure back into IT. Using Scrum, ABN Amro has found a completely new way of managing innovative IT projects – and with staggering results: not only are the projects more successful, they are also cheaper because they avoid costly project bureaucracy. In addition, when systems are developed internal IT organisations could act as innovation catalysts by offering new developing methods so that new applications can be completed iteratively, quickly and cheaply. That means local initiatives are not nipped in the bud but are actually stimulated, unlike the innovation of core systems where no risk whatsoever can be taken because it might endanger business continuity.

Technology also speeds up IT transformation IT’s new role will not only be driven by new working methods. For example, cloud computing will remove barriers such as high investments or limited internal capacity, making local experimentation more and more feasible. The cloud is therefore more than an infrastructure: it allows central IT organisations to become an important enabler of innovation by giving flexibility to the business and by being active in those areas in which the business is bogged down, such as integration. If software-as-a-service (SaaS) is used to gain rapid access to functionality or extra capacity, there will usually be an exchange of data between the external applications and internal systems.

The use of the cloud and the decentralisation of innovation will result in a new role for centralised IT. IT will take on the director role, as it were. It will act as a coordinating unit that keeps track of integration, compliance and in that way creates transparency. This will have a huge impact on end user satisfaction. With web applications located in the cloud, performance will become more dependent on factors such as server locations and networks controlled by third parties. The cloud is in fact an extreme form of distributed computing, so it can still cause problems for the business. SaaS must work just as fast as it would locally, which means that network configuration 14

and integration are crucial for reducing latency. The step to the cloud will be made sooner or later and as a central IT organisation it is therefore important to facilitate and not to adopt the policing role of naysayer.

Data driven With the growing influence of technology on business processes, the amount of data is also increasing exponentially. Besides existing data – from ERP systems, for example – real-time data such as click streams, social media mining and scan data are also creating new knowledge sources. A package transported by TNT or UPS is scanned more than ten times to optimise the logistical process. Everybody in the world of express knows that reliable delivery, cost control and customer satisfaction depend more and more on IT. A growing amount of data is becoming increasingly important both for the optimisation of processes by people and for decision-making by computers.

However, the requisite customer data is now stored in countless back-office systems or databases, hampering interactive sessions between people (customer) and machines (IT at the company). Because of this, it can take weeks to submit a mortgage application or arrange a loan, even though they could be finalised in a matter of minutes if you had all the relevant decision data in the right place at the same time.

From infrastructure to infostructure By 2015, companies will no longer stand out by what they have in their back-offices, but by their interaction and intimacy with customers. The question therefore is how IT can help maximise the added value of all available data. A new form of R&D involves working with data throughout the company.

A competency such as data analysis must be democratised and left to experts.

Fast causality is becoming increasingly important for improving processes in short cycles. You can use ‘A/B experiments’ to test which user interface or web page produces better results – such as a higher response level, turnover 15

or customer satisfaction. This working method can be used for more and more IT applications when defining an outside-in release strategy. By gaining this action-based insight into all kinds of business processes, the IT organisation moves closer to the business, but it also means that IT must facilitate in organising information management. IT must take the step from infrastructure to infostructure.

First things first: clean up!

In the coming years, the sense of urgency to reinvent IT will need to be greater than ever. The upcoming generation will want access to information whenever and wherever they need it – to an increasing extent using their preferred devices and easily accessible software. There is no point in outsourcing IT if there is no plan to migrate to new platforms. Without such a plan, you are only postponing the problem until the inevitable crisis occurs. But what should now be done with the existing landscape? It is important to remember that the greater part of the current IT expenditure is due to the complexity of the generations of technology that have been built up over the years. Application reduction as a ‘strategy’ is not enough to achieve this, since performances and politics determine which applications will be discarded.

However, a major cleanup is definitely a precondition for operating higher in the value chain.

Eighty percent of the functional requirements can be covered with twenty percent of the time and technology. The rest of the time, IT could focus on promoting innovation and quality. That would also create more space for the IT organisation to focus on delivering a cheap, reliable back-office and realise an innovation engine for processes that make the company more competitive.

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Increase the IT organisation’s self-respect Corporate IT involves more than just monitoring standards and recording the technical architecture. The value of a central IT organisation in the future particularly relates to organising expertise to help the business to cope with the ever-growing influence of digitalisation. The added value, turnover, growth, flexibility and future profit – all of this still depends more and more on whether you have the best, smartest and most business-oriented IT organisation. The greatest challenge is therefore to manage IT as a place where talent wants to work; where interesting but also useful work is done. Creativity, didactics and subject matter knowledge will be vital in helping the business.

Such help does not consist of fulfilling as many wishes as possible, but of presenting people with choices and drawing up scenarios. Facilitating innovation or guaranteeing business continuity are ‘non-functional requirements’.

These are our new specs.

In employee satisfaction surveys, IT often scores the lowest. This lack of selfrespect in many IT organisations is blocking the step towards the model in which IT is actually close to the business. If you want the business to think differently about the IT organisation, as IT you have to first learn to look at and begin to think about yourself in another way. Before you can play a new role and before the business accepts it is securing an innovative sparring partner, you must make sure that as IT organisation you have found a better way of dealing with the bulk of the work you are now doing. People who do not clean up will never have the time, money or self-esteem to make that step towards a reinvented IT organisation. There is a real chance that the central IT organisation will then become smaller than it is now. But smaller can also mean that there is more attention for the really important issues.

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// IT’s responsibility of raising value together with the business

At Philips, the focus is on the end users. And this is not a hollow slogan, since Chief Information Officer Maarten de Vries and his team really judge their own performance by the level of satisfaction among Philips IT’s customers. It is even one of their most important key performance indicators. The Net Promoter Score has an important role to play. We discuss this with Maarten de Vries, who explains the need for ‘ambassadors’. He also explains the difference between satisfied and engaged users and describes in detail the role of IT as a co-creator in the Philips of the future. Philips is a diversified health and well-being company focused on improving people’s lives through timely innovations. “The company integrates technologies and design into people-centric solutions,” says De Vries. “Our focus on solutions and services in the healthcare and well-being space is making the role of IT at Philips increasingly interesting.”

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// Maarten de Vries, year of birth 1962 Works at Royal Philips Electronics since 1986 CIO at Royal Philips Electronics since 2007// // Philips IT counts 2700 employees //

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used throughout Philips. Marketing sets great store by it, as it allows you to view the market as an organic whole made up of people with expectations, wishes and needs. Philips also uses the NPS in IT. This IT NPS is an important instrument for increasing employee satisfaction.

Ambassadors Philips IT conducted many different satisfaction surveys in and around 2007, explains De Vries. “Based on the One IT idea, we wanted to develop one consistent satisfaction measurement for end users. At the same time, as Philips we wanted to put the Net Promoter Score on the map. Not just for our customers, but internally too. That’s a tough measurement, because only people who award a score of 9 or a 10 are ‘promoters’. Scores of 7 and 8 19

are awarded by the neutral evaluators (the ‘passives’) and any scores under that are ‘detractors’. What you really want is ambassadors, because they are always the most engaged users. We actually make a distinction between satisfied users and engaged users. These terms are linked to the three layers we use in IT: 1) Foundation, 2) Enabler and 3) Co-creator.

IT as Co-Creator of Business Value

IT as Enabler of Business Value

IT as Foundation of Business Systems

“The foundation or base layer of IT consists of the invisible infrastructure and ‘info-structure’. As long as this layer is working properly, nobody complains. But as soon as any problems arise, satisfaction starts to diminish.

That is why you need satisfied users on this layer. On the enabling layer, you need more engaged users, people who really see IT as a partner. These are the ambassadors I just spoke about, or the promoters. When you have very engaged users, the IT organisation becomes not only a service provider but also a business partner. And this covers not just the implementation and management of the large CRM or ERP systems, but also the connectivity and productivity tools for end users, such as video conferencing. Tools that fully support workplace innovation: the new way of working.”

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The Net Promotor Score The NPS plays a very important role at Philips. But it is not just about the scores. Philips attaches most importance to promoters, passives and detractors. The distribution of promoters and detractors can be measured by asking customers and/or end users the following simple question: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” You get the Net Promoter Score by subtracting the number of detractors from the number of promoters.

The people in between the ambassadors and critics, the passives, are not counted in the score.

The NPS impetus During every change, there are always people who are less flexible, people who are wary of change; this is actually a very human trait. To get those people involved and therefore have more engaged users, people on Board or Management level must first be committed to the NPS. “That now is a greater point of focus than ever before,” says De Vries. “Because as soon as it reaches a critical turning point, it automatically gains impetus and develops ever faster. NPS is really here to stay. And we’ve set the bar very high for Philips IT. When we started, we were awarded an NPS of -33; in 2009 we increased it to -22 and in 2010 we want to raise it to a -10. So for the time being we’re focusing on the relative performance improvement. Of course, an NPS of 0 in the outside world is absolutely unacceptable for a company like Philips. Internally, we’re measuring the integral Philips community, which means all users from the bottom up. The interesting thing is that 21

we’ve created enormous transparency in this way. Firstly, by communicating to the end user the measurement results on how good or bad our performance is. We also share information about the detractors and the promoters, and the actions we take with the objective to bring the detractors into the promoters’ camp. That can sometimes involve relatively trivial issues, such as the start-up time for a laptop. For many people, this detracted from their feeling of satisfaction. We therefore took the appropriate measures. The start-up time for laptops has really speeded up, but it’s still not as fast as we want it to be.

We will keep trying to improve it. Another example is the performance of the service desk. That’s still a detractor high on our list of priorities and we’re examining it very seriously. We want our users to be satisfied and, even more important, we want them to stay satisfied. Because it’s only then that they will turn into engaged users. By communicating about these subjects openly and transparently and showing that they are important for you and you’re serious about making real improvements, you build up credibility.

Then the ultimate result is not just satisfaction but also involvement.”

Personas and service profiles For many CIOs, the satisfaction felt by the higher executives outweighs that of the employees in the lower echelons. On the other hand, there is also the principle of ‘one man, one vote’, better known as democracy. To resolve this question of whether every vote carries the same weight, or whether there is indeed a slight class difference in the way people are treated by IT, Philips classifies all end users as ‘personas’. De Vries: “That allows us to differentiate our services even more. For example, the R&D Engineer persona has a different service profile to the Factory worker persona. You want to know which services a persona is receiving and how you can address that from the service desk and the available services. This procedure is running parallel with the launch of our worldwide service desk. With this differentiation we’re aiming for equal service levels for everybody at Philips. We are aware 22

that this doesn’t always turn out positively for a number of people. For example, based on their profile some people may no longer be eligible for a smart phone. Services compatible with a secretary or a Board member must be geared to those personas in the appropriate and correct manner. When differentiated in this way, the system is honest. But as far as the IT NPS is concerned, we measure the full Philips community, regardless of class or status. Ultimately, it’s all about satisfaction and it is essential for us to know the degree of that satisfaction. In whatever job in the company and wherever in the world a person may be.”

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IT as a co-creator The term ‘overlapping’ on the Philips website shows that there is synergy and cooperation between the various Philips sectors. There is also the classic R&D, but it is not always clear where IT stands in that process as a cocreator. De Vries explains that, contrary to what many people think, there is equal innovation on all three levels (foundation, enabling, co-creating).

“On foundation level, we call it cost innovation, on enabling level we call it process innovation and on co-creating level we call it product, service, or business model innovation. In that way, for example, innovation in the field of workplace innovation is partly on the foundation layer and partly on the

“In order for IT to move up to that role as a co-creator, the IT environment must be in good order and space must be made inside the IT organisation so that those initiatives can be developed” enabling layer. Traditionally, IT has never played a role in the creation processes of the business. Creation took place in R&D or in the business unit, and any IT contribution was more or less independent of that. But the Philips of today is focusing on solutions and services in the field of healthcare and well-being, and more and more of those solutions and services are IT enabled. The lights in our homes will be an IP address in the future and their operation will be regulated using software. DirectLife is another good example of this. This fantastically small device, which you can carry in your pocket, on your belt or around your neck, registers a person’s every movement 24

throughout the day. The activity monitor measures all activities and along the way also shows whether the day’s (movement) targets have been achieved. By connecting the monitor to the PC, users can display all their activity patterns in detail on a personal web page. The DirectLife solution brings the healthcare and consumer lifestyle components very closely together, but IT is also directly involved. The same applies to developments such as Internet radio or Philips NetTV, for example, which can be used to view Internet content directly on television. Although this really is new territory for IT, we want to gradually move upward and deploy our expertise for these types of new solutions and services. For the present, these are relatively modest achievements, but IT will gradually play a more important role in the journey towards solutions and services. It might be going too far to say that IT is innovating products, but the first proof points have been achieved.

I won’t claim that IT is the new inventor of solutions or services, but with our expertise we’re becoming more and more integrated in the creation process. However, in order for IT to move up to that role as a co-creator, the IT environment must be in good order and space must be made inside the IT organisation so that those initiatives can be developed. That is a dynamic process and a journey that will be taken by more and more engaged users.”

Economies of scale and speed One disadvantage of economies of scale with the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) is that they reduce speed. But you actually want to keep the economies of speed. According to De Vries, the two can be perfectly combined in this new decennium. “With economies of scale, you want to gain a clear insight into what you’re actually doing. What does it cost and what value will it produce? Based on those insights, you create various standard platforms and components that can give you the desired flexibility.

With these economies of scale, you can integrate an acquisition into your organisation relatively easily. But that won’t work if you still have twenty 25

different ERP systems linked to each other, for example. As long as your IT landscape is too diverse, you’ll always be too busy organising the integration process. But if you have just one ERP system running in your commercial environment, for example, you can easily integrate a newly acquired company into that environment. Then it’s practically plug-and-play. In this situation, economies of scale also make economies of speed possible. You also have to very clearly determine which processes, platforms and components are standard. As long as you stick to these, you can develop your differentiated processes and your flexibility on top of them. Philips wants to be a trendsetter in this field and we’re already well on the way. In the past, we may not have made the best decisions about the architecture for business intelligence. But we’ve changed that, and now we have a multidimensional understanding of products, customers and regions, amongst other things.

As a result, we notice that in terms of growth in top line and margin we are suddenly facing all kinds of opportunities. And because we’re working with integral projects across business units to an increasing extent, we are now focusing on the full profitability of a project.”

The business partner A few years ago, Maarten de Vries switched from his job as Chief Financial Officer for what used to be Philips Consumer Electronics to become Group CIO. His experience as a CFO has given him several advantages as a CIO: “One advantage is that in my financial role I was involved in different units and business models at Philips. So it was easy for me to switch to the IT job, and that has a positive effect on our credibility. I know how it feels to be an IT customer. But the main advantage is that I’m used to making whatever I’m doing transparent and easy to understand. Ultimately, as IT you are managing a portfolio and you want a return on investment (ROI). You have to manage the insights into the ongoing costs from the foundation layer as the best competitive costs for the best required service level. You also have 26

to create transparency in the IT investments, divided into enabling and cocreation. For me, this top component represents an investment portfolio, and you have to manage it as such. Among other things, that means you have to be clear about which value you’re creating from those investments. I believe it’s important to keep the debate on this value creation of IT on a high level.

Ultimately, it’s the same as managing the investments in marketing or R&D. In fact, it’s your ROI on your investments in your company. As part of that, I make a distinction between the value assessment of IT and the expertise in integrating acquired companies that I referred to earlier, which we call M&A excellence.

When a possible acquisition is discussed, IT is involved in the due diligence.

We’re also the first in, because the faster you integrate, the faster you get the synergy. The value of our activities is therefore also partly determined by the synergies we can make available. To calculate the ROI, we use six KPIs: sales growth, EBITA, cash, productivity, engagement and of course the NPS. But IT isn’t the owner of this entire process. It rolls itself out in partnership with the business. An IT project is a business project, and IT isn’t a service provider but rather a business partner. That means that our activities, besides having to be ‘on time’ and ‘on budget’, also have to be ‘on quality’ and ‘on value’. And that latter element, value, is the most important in my opinion.

IT has a responsibility to realise value together with the business.”

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In IT, traditional KPIs are often based on technical processes. That tends to turn the focus inward, and so too little attention is paid to the business impact of KPIs. New and smart KPIs can help create the right love vibe between business and IT. KPIs often show how well (or how badly) a company is being managed.

The same applies to the KPIs in IT. KPIs are ďŹ gures, but they actually say a lot about behaviour. And not only do KPIs provide information, people also have the tendency to (unconsciously) behave according to the ratios calculated for them within KPIs. That can be risky, since inappropriate KPIs can lead to inappropriate behaviour.

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This is never deliberate, of course, but people often have no idea of the impact of their own behaviour on the greater whole – and the impact of their own KPIs on processes. For example, the availability of a server may meet the requirement of 99.5 percent, but what happens if that 0.5 failure percentage includes a crashed printer server, making it impossible for the distribution centre to print any more waybills? This chapter discusses the use of KPIs that can improve the business’s appreciation of the IT organisation.

Proliferation of KPIs In IT, many KPIs are expressed in percentages. The KPI in the above example is simply set to ‘green’, and the responsible delivery manager thinks he is 31

doing a good job, but the consequences are incalculable. Percentage KPIs can be too abstract, and therefore provide no insight into the actual impact on the business: the number of missed orders, the number of lost production hours or the number of dissatisfied users.

Furthermore, it is easy to add KPIs but almost impossible to remove them.

As a result, we are sometimes saddled with hundreds of often useless indicators.

And it is more difficult to simplify the indicator store than to build it. Whoever dares to work with five to a maximum of ten KPIs must understand the context exactly and must be able to describe what is really important to ensure that the business will function properly.

In practice, many service level agreements (SLAs) are regarded as dubious by the business because the content sounds like mumbo-jumbo to them. An SLA such as 24x7 gold means nothing to the average employee. On further consideration, gold turns out to be silver – because of 168 hours in a week, 100 hours outside office hours are immaterial. If the SLAs in IT are still full of terms such as reboot ratios and storage uptime, the business still doesn’t know whether a digital service such as order processing or logistical planning will be available when needed. SLAs are rarely concerned about providing real service and are much more focused on achieving technical ratios.

KPIs contribute too little to alignment Whichever SLAs we use, the main thing seems to be that we comply with them. That approach is disastrous for the relationship with our customers.

From the perspective of the user, availability is measured as a binary value: yes or no. You either provide a service or you don’t. Every figure that is not linked to reality is worthless – a KPI is only key when it is also important for your customers. KPIs therefore play a prominent role when you want to realise better alignment between the IT organisation and the business. You 32

need two types of smart control variables for better alignment: on the one hand KPIs that focus on keeping the daily business up and running; and on the other hand KPIs for changes that affect the future of the business. The first type relates to customer-orientation and the second type to innovation, the strategic portfolio and projects.

Towards customer-oriented KPIs Appreciation for an IT organisation is not based on that one mega-project.

Claims that you especially want to be a strategic partner for the business usually meet with derision. To win people’s trust, you must deliver an excellent service. You cannot do that in isolation. Measuring the impact of the work of the IT organisation on the success and failure of the business is the best place to start looking for the right KPIs. IT therefore must become familiar with the biotope of the business. Up to now, service desk employees have spent too little time on the work floor or in the call centre, the open plan office, the production lines or the distribution centre. And developers, too, are often not aware of the consequences on the work floor of a delayed delivery or the failure of important new applications to function properly.

Besides its own technical KPIs for internal use, every IT organisation should define customer-oriented KPIs and in that way institutionalise a service culture. ‘One team, one mission for our customer’ is the spirit you need if you want to act in a service-oriented way; from the service desk to the project groups, from the information manager to the technical expert on the third line. Observe the business in its own habitat, invite users to say what irritates them, and then produce ingeniously simple KPIs that are in everybody’s interest and that improve cooperation on all levels. A good example of this is the number of office hours that can be worked uninterrupted, or rather the percentage of uninterrupted business hours. That is a meaningful ratio which ordinary mortals can understand. Moreover, it puts the emphasis 33

on the uptime of the entire IT chain that is supporting a concrete business process and not just on one part of it. But in order to succeed with this seemingly simple KPI, you must have the right people (competencies), the right processes (such as ITIL) and the right tools (such as a good conďŹ guration management database).

KPIs must measure the business impact Based on the true downtime cost per hour for important business processes, you can deďŹ ne what real service should be. You can also clearly show the business what it can achieve with an investment in shorter resolution times and good problem management. In addition, the operational costs of IT must be 34

allocated as much as possible to a business transaction or a complete business process, such as order-to-cash. Or rather, what does it cost IT to handle a complete order? Allocating the costs of a concrete reducible service to the business makes costs understandable, whereas dividing them into technical quantities such as an ‘amount of storage’ or ‘used network capacity’ actually makes things less clear. The litmus test for customer-orientation towards the business is a comprehensible invoice.

Another useful success indicator is the percentage of cost savings realised

by IT for a concrete business transaction. The pressure on the costs of each business transaction or complete process is constantly increasing. IT can help reduce these costs by replacing old technology with cheaper technology, or by lowering the total business costs by adding more technology. When every Euro spent on IT elsewhere in the organisation results in savings of many Euros, you end up with improved operational efficiency. Cost savings relevant to the business must therefore be reflected in a KPI. Making innovation concrete in KPIs Companies use benchmarks to compare their total IT expenditure – as a percentage of turnover – with other organisations in their sector. Technology is not only important for keeping a company up and running, it also plays an important role when changing processes or even complete business models.

However, when no distinction is made between run and change, you cannot say whether you are spending too much or too little on IT. Besides using customer-oriented KPIs – which is where the operational costs belong – it is also important to work with KPIs that you can use to manage the investments in change. The ratio between IT costs for run versus change is a simple and effective indicator for checking whether enough is being invested to support the growth of the business. What percentage of time is senior IT management spending on business growth? When the time spent by management becomes 35

transparent, priorities can be defined, even on the level of innovation.

What is the average time-to-profitability of the changes that were implemented? Earnings before interest, tax and amorisation (EBITA), or the return-on-investment (ROI) for IT investments?

Decibel management Without IT, it is almost impossible to launch a new service or product on the market. Large companies and government departments often have hundreds of IT projects and dozens of programs running at the same time.

And the business wants to access functionality as soon as possible – for example, a working system or prototype. The growing number of projects is increasing the need to harmonise the supply and demand of IT as a good market mechanism. That is difficult, because instead of a free market the total budget for IT indicates the hard maximum of the supply, regardless of the demand. Whoever shouts loudest – decibel management – or has the best-looking ROI analyses on paper, usually gets the money. However, this does not serve the shared business objective. It is therefore becoming increasingly important to define priorities from the top and regularly reassess them: which (strategic) projects and programs are really important for the company? That also gives a good insight into useful KPIs that focus on change. If the time-to-market (TTM) is really so crucial for the business, faster delivery represents extra value. With TTM, therefore, the ratio on-timeon-budget must definitely not be the main KPI. Development starts in the business Speed is vitally important for innovation; IT simply cannot be accepted as a delaying factor. IT investments aimed at change should therefore not be managed purely as IT projects. The turnaround time from the first draft to a working application is a usual KPI for IT. If it involves innovation, the business does not always come up with ready-made requirements. Disciplines 36

that are traditionally located earlier in the chain should realise that they cannot make up for their lost time by controlling IT on the basis of ever shorter development times. The turnaround time therefore starts at an earlier stage: not as soon as the requirements have been accepted, but much earlier. IT itself can start managing on the basis of the turnaround time as a KPI from the moment that IT becomes involved in the first strategic choices. That way, you can avoid a situation in which so much pressure is put on IT that irresponsible risks are taken.

Besides speed in terms of time, the speed of economic value creation is also becoming increasingly important. For instance, how long is the average time-to-profitability for completed systems? This post-project KPI not only applies to IT – it can also apply to the business. At Zurich Financial Services, a monthly priority panel makes decisions on projects that represent the most important business value. Those decisions are taken in a setting in which all relevant disciplines are present. This approach prevents budgets from being claimed in advance and determines who is first to use the budget on the basis of the requirements.

Succeeding with business-oriented KPIs We will therefore have to switch from old IT KPIs to business variables.

For many IT employees, that will feel like a loss of control, because until now people have always used technical jargon to take measurements and communicate. A figure such as the average resolution time is an indication of whether you are moving in the right direction, but it is still no realistic performance measurement, unlike the economic effect of disruptions. If possible, therefore, calculate in hard currency and define solid targets.

More and more companies are using this new approach successfully. Van Gansewinkel Group, a leading European company in waste management 37

and environmental solutions, is using a remarkably down-to-earth KPI for the availability of its weighbridge application: the traffic jam. If the core system has an outage for one hour in the Netherlands – the Group’s home country – over 350 dustcarts cannot dump their garbage, causing a virtual traffic jam of 2.3 kilometres. Solving and preventing traffic jams is the name of the game when you want to deliver excellent services to the customers of the IT organisation. Schiphol Airport wants to be Europe’s most preferred airport. But that will never happen if travellers keep losing their suitcases there. The IT organisation is working with a ‘suitcase-KPI’ to specify how many suitcases (per ten thousand) are missing their transfer flight connections due to an IT error (applications or the infrastructure as a whole). That score is now almost zero.

A large construction company is applying the rule that in the event of workplace disruptions, twenty percent of the labour costs per user are used as a benchmark for the impact ratio. A telecom giant has calculated a price per hour of downtime for all business applications that are commercially important for finalising orders or changing contracts. This is multiplied by the figures from measurements with automated tools for application performance management. Thanks to this insight and the fear caused by the effect of bad scores, better decisions are now being made – read: priorities are being defined – to improve availability and response times.

By using smart and simple KPIs, you can finally put an end to any derision and dispel any confusion about internal IT services. Greater involvement, insight and understanding can result in better and faster communication and adjustments. These are vital success factors in the marriage between business and IT, with growth and innovation as their offspring!

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// The transformation of Group IT within Ericsson

Dealing with change could almost be called an art, because of its intangibility. It certainly commands admiration in the sector of telecommunication, where changes take place at multiple speed than in other areas. Eva Listi, CIO of Ericsson, tells us about the importance of speed – strategy to execution – about the transformation of the IT-function within this turbulent environment and about her passion for her work. “I truly can’t think of a place I would rather be than in Ericsson. The opportunities and new business models that can be supported by our business right now are limitless.”

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// Eva Listi, year of birth 1962 Works at Ericsson since 2006 CIO at Ericsson since 2009 // // Ericsson IT counts 350 employees worldwide – and also many line and project consultants due to outsourcing //

Eva Listi worked for 21 years as an IT professional within pharmaceutical companies. Four years ago she joined Ericsson and in June 2009 she took over the role of CIO. She illustrates how fast things are happening is this very business-focused world of telecommunication. “Telecommunication develops very much like electricity did in the past. In the beginning electricity was mainly used for lighting, by now it is being used for virtually everything.

Telecommunications started out as a way to transport voice, and now it is being used for any kind of data transportation. The pace of development 41

within our industry is amazing. The company of today is completely different from when I joined Ericsson in 2006. Back then very few anticipated that today there would be 4.6 billion mobile subscriptions, half a billion broadband subscribers and 1.7 billion people on the internet, of which 500 million are using Facebook. This will continue to grow substantially. Apart from that, our competitors of yesterday are part of our organisation today and players that were invisible have become our main competitors. Just try to imagine what this explosive growth of mobile traffic and the rapidly changing environment of competitors and partners means for this industry overall and for Ericsson in particular.”

Huge transformation This rapidly changing business environment unmistakably makes its demands on the IT organisation. The urgency to transform IT from the reactive firefighter it was into a proactive business enabler is high. Listi explains that they are in the middle of a huge IT transformation, which consists of many aspects. “At the basis of it all is the Process & IT Strategy. We develop this together with our business and from it we jointly distil roadmaps. These are five year plans that are furthermore consolidated into a ‘next year’ Portfolio Plan. This plan will be prioritised depending on business value and categorisation. If a project will not deliver any measurable business value, it simply does not fit into the plan.”

The CIO mentions one of the key focus areas for 2011: “Customer first and end user focus. That is important because end users provide services to our external customers. When we are able to provide them with really good working IT solutions, so that they can do their business in the best possible way, then we are doing a good job. Providing this stable and robust IT service of high quality is the baseline. Closely linked to this is the consolidation of our applications, reducing the amount of applications and cutting down 42

complexity. And then we are maturing in providing differentiated services, tailor-made IT services for the various user groups and business units. A constant focus for us is our work on reducing costs. But at the same time we need to invest in innovation at points where we can enable our business colleagues in doing really good business with our external customers. We also are leveraging already made investments, and we are looking into innovative ways of leveraging IT. We are constantly busy finding a good balance between reducing costs and investing. At the same time we are implementing our new and greatly improved outsourcing contracts. We are monitoring, managing and improving our daily operations, based on SLAs. So, the list that comprises the transformation we’re going through right now is very long and includes many challenges and sometimes at first sight conflictive goals.

But to summarise the key issues: robust and stable IT services; driving down costs; providing differentiated IT services; working closer to the business; leveraging the already made investments; driving innovation.”

The strategy The work of the CIO is based on a good strategy that is created together with the business and approved by the executive leaders. “The aforementioned portfolio plans are continuously updated,” Listi explains. “Now we have roadmaps up until 2014 and when we update them again they will cover time until 2015. For this we make use of governance forums. Here we meet with business representatives on a regular basis, to look into portfolios, architecture and the services we’re providing. The support of executive management and their buy-in is of the utmost importance in this whole process. Together we establish KPIs so that we can follow and track this process on a long-term basis. These have developed over the years 43

mostly through learning by doing. And we learn much from the measured satisfaction of end users and key stakeholders. Our new contracts with our main suppliers, HP being one of them, have much improved over time, with better SLAs, and better defined services. Our IT is moving from a service delivery organisation to a service integrator. Even though the delivery of IT services had already been outsourced, we kept doing that for some time.

We were hunting down our suppliers and telling them exactly what to do.

By now we focus much more on managing the contracts and on customer intimacy, working together with the business. One year ago only five of my people were managing the relation with Ericsson business. Today there are almost forty of them – ten are working out in the Ericsson regions and part of the Ericsson regional leadership teams. So you can imagine we have a much better insight now in IT-needs than we did before. And we’re not talking about THE service anymore, but about the specific service for this or that category group.”

Differentiation With Ericsson being a truly global company, services for IT need to be up 24 hours, 7 days a week. To make this true and in addition play a real part in adding value to the business, IT cannot afford to be in the reactive mode any longer. According to Listi it is not that long ago that Ericsson’s IT department only provided services after a ticket was placed. “Today we’re not just ensuring that the solutions are up and running, but we are also finding ways to work together with Ericsson business. For example, we are very much aware that systems should not go down during work on the financial closure of the month. When Ericsson plants are working on large orders, we know about it and are doing our utmost to keep their systems in optimal condition during their days or hours of stress. Likewise we plan maintenance during the weeks that a factory is working on a lower capacity because of holidays.

Having a good relationship with the business and working close with our 44

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business colleagues makes it easier for us to differentiate our services. We want to know exactly what Sales & Marketing need, what’s on the agenda for Finance, etcetera. This also means that parts within Ericsson that require less IT services are paying less than departments that place a high demand on IT. Over the last year our financial model and how we allocate costs has been greatly improved. Some of the costs are still fixed, but it’s becoming more and more based upon usage. The customer needs to experience that he gets what he pays for and that there’s real value in our delivery. The biggest part of our charging system will become usage-based. This is the kind of differentiation I mean.”

“When we are able to provide our end users with really good working IT solutions, so that they can do their business in the best possible way, then we are doing a good job” IT as a driver of change On the whole the IT of Ericsson has made effective steps in becoming a mature IT delivery organisation. “But,” Listi reminds us and herself, “that doesn’t mean that dealing with negative perceptions within the business about IT belongs to the past. Whether business managers look upon Ericsson Group Process & IT as a worthy partner to their business or not, depends greatly on who you’re talking to. We’re in the midst of this transformation.

It has been underway now for two years. That means we are moving from old to new infrastructure, implementing new contracts, at three sites around 46

the world state-of-the-art datacenters are being built as we speak, we’re modernising our entire serverpark, we’re consolidating applications and taking complexity away. Even though all of this is part of our strategy and the roadmaps, it is no wonder that at this point not everyone is fully convinced yet that we can deliver stable and robust services. The business doesn’t necessarily have to love our IT department, but I would like them to see IT as a driver of change. The IT of the past was about keeping the workstations or the large administrative applications running. Today practically everything within Ericsson is IT-related, which brings up endless opportunities. IT is there to help enable these opportunities coming from many billions of connected devices around our globe, businesswise. We foresee that there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020. IT is not just a business enabler, it is in fact the business. I would like the business to feel that we are the best ambassadors of our own products. Come to think of it, perhaps it is not the customers or the business that needs to be proud of IT in the first place. I want ourselves to be extremely proud of what we’re doing together with Ericsson. We’re not there yet, but I know the number of proud people within our organisation is rising. Our goal is to ensure they love to work for the IT department.”

Powered and passionate leaders Rather than talking about a cost/revenue ratio that would capture the IT spend, Listi prefers to look into more meaningful measurements. “Obviously we, like any other company nowadays, are constantly looking into reducing our TCO. Our total spend is divided into operations (running the business) and innovation (changing the business). The value of IT is something the business should ultimately decide upon. It is up to us to deliver the operational excellence for the group functions, which is: providing the right service, at the right time, to the right person or group of persons, at the right cost. This last year a lot of effort has been put into cleaning up the house and fixing 47

things. And now that we’re nearing the end of this transformation program we can work towards renewing or expanding the house. To illustrate this, a majority of the line managers in my organisation have started fulfilling their new roles recently and I can spend more time on looking at getting more proactive. During this fixing period, we have been building a group of powered and passionate leaders. You cannot seize the many opportunities when the people you’re working with don’t understand, don’t believe, don’t know that they will be affected, see no reliable plan or believe that changes will have no effect. Instead of people who are waiting for the next ticket, this requires people with a healthy sense of urgency, who think about the customer first. People for whom driving quality up and costs down comes natural. Leadership that is not only about doing things right but doing the right things. So next to the pride I spoke of earlier, I would want us to be powered and passionate as well. These three Ps – Power, Passion and Pride – are my main goals, really.”

New accountability One of the major changes in the transformation process of Ericsson’s Group Process & IT is that since January 2010, they are responsible for driving and improving the Ericsson business processes. Listi emphasizes that this concerns the framework of end-to-end processes. “Departments like HR or Finance will remain accountable for their own processes of course. This means however that with a good strategy as a basis we can work on aligning and improving the Ericsson business processes. And since processes and IT are today extremely interrelated we are uniquely positioned to work with optimizing the information flow. The involvement of IT in the early stages of creating and optimizing business processes, such as idea-to-product or order-to-cash, helps us tremendously in joining in creating business value.

Not just in the systems but also in the way we work. We can make a contribution in shortening lead times of any given process.”

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The future Ericsson’s 2020 vision predicts enormous growth in interconnectivity around the globe. According to Eva Listi IT by then will not be just a delivery mechanism anymore. “IT will be much more involved with the business.

Ericsson’s vision statement says that we want to be ‘the prime driver in an all communicating world’. For my part I would say that the IT department must be the prime driver in all of the communication within and to and from the Ericsson organisation. You’re always going to need strategy, architecture, contract management and such for IT. IT will no longer be just the fixing factory, but a driver of change.”

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We all know that it is high time for IT transformation, but it takes the huge effort to initiate it. Many CIOs have nevertheless succeeded in doing just that. Success is an extremely contagious emotion that generates a chain reaction. Find out how others succeeded and follow their example!

Fire-fighters are heroes. Rescuing people is something to be admired. We are all attracted to action and excitement, and the IT sector is no exception.

High priority incidents, escalations and disaster recovery are what make the job exciting. For the fire service, the time it takes to control a fire is the same as IT’s average resolution time for incident management. That figure is the adrenaline that drives people to do what they do.

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But how useful is that drive? After all, the least expensive incident is the incident that never happened. IT still prefers to go for the quick rush, for the short payback time and for projects that succeed. Because why on earth would you risk your career initiating a strategic project when there is a good chance it will never succeed? Nobody is that crazy. We prefer to go for instant reward. We know we should eat well, but that doesn’t make pizza and ice cream any less tempting.

Even when you tell the heads of a company – based on hard facts – that in five years’ time they will no longer be able to compete because of their obsolete IT, there is still a good chance that nothing will change. We may panic for a short while (in our minds), but we soon switch to emotional acceptance and 53

again opt for safe ways of achieving instant success. Even though we know all too well that putting out fires no longer fulfils the long-term forecasts of the business.

On the other hand, rapid innovation and growth require IT to show a very different type of nerve and courage. These days, more and more visionary IT managers are taking the plunge and deciding to radically change IT. They are enjoying great success, but not in the traditional way with mega-plans and departments for expensive advisers. Their success stories will hopefully act as a stepping stone for the doubters, because they can help link a rational awareness of the necessity of IT transformation to the emotion of success.

This chapter describes some of those inspirational success stories. Use them!

Show it, prove it IT transformation is particularly a challenge in older companies that have a long tradition, a strong culture and a lot of legacy. When, during the first official meeting with the Board of Management, a new CIO has to listen to the CFO saying that “this is the person who’ll keep the administration afloat”, you know for sure that nobody believes IT is (or should be) important for the company.

It is IT’s task to recognise processes that will make a difference to the business and create a competitive advantage. On that level, there is only one way to break through the traditional patterns – let people know how IT stimulates a company’s competitive edge. That opens the door to IT transformation. And the successes enjoyed by other CIOs show that it can be done.

Vopak is the world’s largest storage company for liquid bulk goods, including chemicals, oil products and liquid gasses. The company chose a ‘new’ process to 54

improve EBITA. The costs of maintaining the eighty terminals worldwide were greatly reduced thanks to the smart use of new technologies such as predictive analytics and sensor monitoring. Besides maintenance at standard intervals, the work is now also risk-based. For this change, this maintain-to-operate process was recorded, optimised, conďŹ gured and automated worldwide. At Vopak, it was CIO Ton van Dijk who launched this transformation in 2006. At the time, the business perceived the IT organisation as the ‘owner’ of systems such as ERP and therefore also of the associated processes. IT had been working very hard, but in isolation. By formally bestowing ownership of the main processes on the business and stimulating a company-wide focus on operational excellence, the IT organisation was able to free itself to play a more strategic role in the organisation.

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IT makes a difference At Rolls-Royce too, IT succeeded in focusing on a process aimed at helping the company win the battle with its competitors – that is, product development and management. Rolls-Royce builds engines for aircraft, power stations and ships. ‘Invent once and use many times’ is an adage that has applied for years in the car industry, where base plates and other components are used in a range of models and brands. Those lessons now also apply to Rolls-Royce’s business. The development processes are being standardised globally and all data on product designs and production processes is being shared. Furthermore, product life cycle management (PLM) is being introduced worldwide, resulting not only in a shorter development time for new engines, but also in the re-usability of designs. Components for the new jet engine for Boeing’s Dreamliner are also serving as the basis for a new generation of ships’ engines for battleships. Rolls-Royce’s PLM project was a cooperative venture between ‘just’ 100 IT employees and more than 400 engineers.

Open the borders!

The approach used by Vopak and Rolls-Royce clearly shows that when IT focuses on the processes that make a difference, it can ultimately result in projects in which IT employees are in the minority. In such a situation, the classical way of working is no longer sufficient. This new type of cooperation also marks the end of the strict division between IT and non-IT and you can no longer ‘wait’, for example, for ready-to-use specifications from the business.

At DHL, too, that strict division between business and IT has become a thing of the past. There, not only the business but also large customers are now closely involved in designing digital business processes. Whereas DHL’s competitors are standardising all their processes and no deviations seem possible, DHL itself is consciously opting for flexibility because that 56

helps customers to be successful. One example of this is reverse logistics, which is very important for product recalls of consumer electronics brands.

At DHL, entrepreneurship is being stimulated, and this includes cloning best practices.

The impossible made possible The financial world is known for the extreme complexity of its IT. As a rule, banking IT is rigid and expensive and greatly restricts manoeuvrability. It is a kind of stranglehold from which more companies must escape, especially multinationals that have grown on the basis of multiple takeovers and are now saddled with a landscape of thousands of different systems.

That the seemingly impossible is nevertheless possible is shown by the example of Japanese bank Shinsei. In a quarter of the usual time and for a tenth of the usual costs, the bank installed a new platform for retail banking and loans. The basic principle was to create a bank that works quickly, cheaply, innovatively and in a customer-oriented way. Instead of looking at the current environment and at existing processes, the focus was turned towards customers’ needs and towards making the core processes as simple as possible. The bank’s success is based on the radical simplification of its new IT infrastructure.

To achieve that, CIO Dhananjaya Dvivedi had to take the bull by the horns.

He made radical and strict choices that often clashed with internal interests and politics. Relevant players in the company were indeed asked for their input, but the bank did not always wait for a consensus before taking action.

In a world where almost nobody dares to take leave of the reliable but expensive workhorse – the mainframe platform – Shinsei is now running completely on Intel servers. Ingenious choices down to the lowest level in IT are often found to work best, such as dealing with memory leaks. For example, if memory is not released after a program has stopped running, a subsequent

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program cannot access that memory, resulting in performance problems.

Instead of costly solutions, the bank opted for phased reboots at fixed intervals.

Dare to leave your comfort zone It is important to step off the beaten track when thinking about IT transformation. Remove yourself from the daily hassle and allow yourself to be inspired by examples from outside your own sector! Particularly in conservative sectors (banking, construction, oil), it is good to look for stars that may lead you to a quantum leap.

Bechtel is the world’s largest construction company. From factories to oil pipelines, the company is constantly busy with around 22,000 projects.

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Some years ago, CIO Geir Ramleth decided to stop benchmarking with companies in his own sector – usually companies less strong than his own – and to use Internet giants such as Google, Salesforce.com and YouTube as his points of reference. Their organisational principles and very low costs inspired Bechtel to configure its own cloud for web applications. Now Bechtel’s IT can support the business for minimal costs and with maximum flexibility.

When a new project comes up anywhere in the world, IT arranges everything within 48 hours.

Imitate the new entrants Large-scale automation was first introduced in the aviation, insurance and banking sectors in the 1960s. It is therefore more difficult to transform IT for these businesses than for companies that automated later, usually using standard packages. Recent start-ups in the aviation sector have proven how important IT is for commerce and the lowest costs in the operation. Also in the financial sector, there is now competition from parties that have no legacy or that are reinventing themselves.

Particularly companies in which the dialectics of progress applies are not getting away with just data centre consolidation or application rationalisation.

This fact was understood all too well by Carl Tilkin-Franssens, CIO of bank insurer KBC, with its home markets in Belgium and Central and Eastern Europe. KBC’s solution was to use a different system development method for greenfield activities and for systems with low-level SLAs. By opting for a standard development platform, KBC realised cost savings of eighty to ninety percent for each project. And the time-to-value – from idea to working system – was reduced by two-thirds. At banks, up to ninety percent of IT budgets are sometimes spent on running the bank. That means there is very little left over to finance change, to make strategic choices. KBC’s ‘run versus change’ ratio is 60/40, which gives the bank all the space it needs to reduce 59

spending on IT during a crisis and quickly switch back when the markets recover. That low run rate at KBC was partly possible because the bank was never aiming for absolute consolidation. Consolidation can help achieve lower costs, but it does not result a priori in faster IT transformation. For many of the systems at KBC, therefore, the bank compares the speed and effectiveness to the scale advantage for IT. This applies to many IT projects in different sectors. Of course, you need to be careful with the core systems that require stability and continuity, but you can be fast and flexible when working with systems you can use to can launch new services, utilise new channels or take control of markets. KBC has been very successful in this.

To conclude Over the past decade, the IT organisation has profited in budget terms from fear-driven trends such as Y2K and cyber-terror. Nobody is immune to issues involving continuity and security, but activities in that area score no points for IT as far as the business is concerned.

Transformation is inspiration. When you reach that point, no mountain is too high. Belief in your own ability is sparked by inspirational successes. Success is a very contagious emotion that generates a chain reaction: it releases energy and strengthens the feeling that ‘we can do that too’ – despite all the ifs and buts. Talk to successful CIOs, imitate their enthusiasm and their courage to take the initiative. Open the gates to complete IT transformation!

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// Zurich Financial Services Group is in great shape for the future

Insurance companies feel the urgency of preparing for the times to come.

For the near future when the customer will confirm even more the position as the main stakeholder, and where agility, transparency and customer experience will distinguish the winners from the losers. However, they struggle with an IT inheritance that is drastically slowing down their development, if not bringing it to a halt altogether. For many of those companies, the main topic for the next five years is: ‘cleaning up the mess’.

Yet Zurich Financial Services Group and its leaders appear to be on top of things. Mark Sheridan, CIO, Global Life and Theo Bouts, COO, Global Life, share their insights.

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// Mark Sheridan, year of birth 1959 Works at Zurich Financial Services since 1984 CIO of Zurich Financial Services Global Life since 2008 Theo Bouts, year of birth 1959 Works at Zurich Financial Services since 2006 COO of Zurich Financial Services Global Life since 2008 // // Zurich Financial Services IT counts 9,000 employees //

In his book The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr elaborates on his metaphor that IT is or will become much like electricity. The two senior managers, specialised in the Global Life Insurance unit within the Zurich Financial Services Group, subscribe to this point of view. Sheridan: “In most places IT is like heating and lighting nowadays. It’s part of the infrastructure.” Bouts agrees: “When IT is like electricity, why should you want to have your own power company?” It comes as no surprise then to know that most of IT within Zurich is outsourced. Sheridan explains that 75 percent of their IT effort goes through a supply chain. “We keep 25 percent of our resources retained to govern, manage, control and understand the IT operation. We don’t make 63

our own sandwiches, we consume them. IT is now a consumption and it’s not something we manufacture anymore ourselves.”

The handshake concept By no means do the above imply that IT is unimportant. On the contrary, it is omnipresent and of vital importance for any modern operation, especially one as large and as global as Zurich. Good IT is essential for the benefit of Zurich Life Insurance and the whole point of that is to deliver world class life insurance to all of their customers. “In order to make sure IT can substantially support this,” Bouts clarifies, “it needs to become an inseparable and integral part of the business. There is no such thing as a stand-alone IT department anymore. Within Zurich Financial Services, Operations and IT are very much intermingled with, aligned with and dependent on one another.”

“From strategy up to the deepest implementation between IT and operations within the company strategy, proper alignment is a prerequisite. If you do not have that, forget about it” “Within Zurich,” Sheridan adds, “we have to work in conjunction with our other business segments of the cooperation. We all work around aligned goals, common purpose, commercials, influencing instead of telling and ordering. This requires soft skills. If you truly believe in the handshake concept, you do not talk about love or hate. When you hate your IT 64

department, something is wrong with your operations. IT and business need handshakes, not handovers. Of course, we will keep handovers if the responsibility for delivery is very clear. Most of the time handshake moments are followed by handovers.” There is something the CIO hates, he admits.

“That is that IT and business are still only being talked about as different things. IT is as much part of the business as are marketing, sales, finance and claims.”

Synergise similarities Life Insurance offers long term products, Sheridan reminds us. “We have to make sure that we are still here in forty years time servicing something we’ve sold today. That is a unique commercial proposition. To be able do deliver a top tier performance forty years from now, I continually have to improve my IT.” Bouts interjects: “One of the biggest prerequisites for this is to look at it at a global level. No doubt there are differences at country level with regard to taxes, pension systems and compliancy regulations. But instead of highlighting all these differences, you should chart the similarities for virtual products all over the globe and see how they can be synergised.” Mark Sheridan predicts that in the next fifteen to twenty years, life insurance will develop in much the same way as the car industry and the petrochemical industry developed. “Meaning industrialisation and sharing processing standards on a global level. We have to predict that and spend all our time and energy on being in great shape for the future.”

Safeguard the data Preparing for the future is a bold thing to say, knowing that a lot of insurance companies will not even be able to deliver their services in five to ten years from now because of legacy. Theo Bouts states that he will not comment on competitors and their problems. “Our focus on ‘Life’ is growing new business and carefully watch over it for forty years. To be honest I do not care too 65

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much in what system we do that, as long as it is the most efficient solution that will provide us with the effectiveness we have promised to the customers. One of our guidelines for life insurance, is to split manufacturing and distribution. So the real big administrative systems do not need to be innovative, but robust so that we can still rely on them in forty years time from now. The way you fill those systems largely depends on customer interaction systems, and those will vary over the years. So both operation and IT will have to decide how to split to accommodate their production and their sales organisation.”

Mark Sheridan emphasises that the most important asset they have is customer data. “That is what drives the contract. Whether you work with an old or a new application, the important thing is to safeguard the integrity of your data in the back office. That is what you’ll be using those forty years.

Your reference around the customer is your data, not your application. So we treat our data, our distribution, our manufacturing and our applications differently, and we have different philosophies about what we would source and what we protect in all of those domains. They require different mindsets, skills, protocols, sourcing and protection strategies. That’s our architecture which we then industrialise to top tier in all of those domains.” Both top managers agree that the delivery of operations and IT needs to be seamless here. “It doesn’t matter,” they say, “whether you would speak to one of us individually or joint, you would hear the same story. We can communicate to each other’s suppliers and it would not make a difference.”

Change agent Separating data from applications is something new to most insurance companies. In this respect Zurich is well ahead and therefore has no problems with their application landscape. According to Bouts it comes down to a proper alignment all the way through. “From strategy up to the deepest 67

implementation between IT and operations within the company strategy, is a prerequisite. If you do not have that alignment, forget about it.” “Another thing,” adds Sheridan, “is this very deep understanding we now have of the value of IT. You cannot do without the commodity, but interestingly in other domains IT is used as a change agent. When we talk about distribution versus manufacturing and how the IT systems landscape is going to look, in the back of our minds we always know we are actually talking about processes instead of platforms. In that respect IT is a change agent.”

Bouts believes that IT and operations within Zurich would not be as aligned the way it is now if they had positioned IT as a separate entity and as a change agent. “That is a recipe for disaster.” Sheridan: “We are in sync with the change that the business wants to bring about. If you don’t have that you get what old IT would be like: an IT project as a solution looking for a problem. In isolation and without sponsorship it will die. If IT doesn’t change as the business changes, it gets out of sync as well and you’ll get other problems. You have to all take that step together and you have to know that if you do so, all your colleagues are coming with you.”

The new kid on the block At times we tend to forget that IT has only really been around for about 25 years now. Sheridan describes IT as “that new kid on the block, with its own attitude and jargon, that is trying to become mainstream. It is surrounded by a generation of leaders who grew up in the time before IT became this integral part of doing business. We’re not quite fully integrated yet, because we still are these new kids on the block. Truly full alignment will probably be a 2nd or even 3rd generation privilege. To make this happen IT needs to work on evolving from a teenager into an adult, become professional and industrialised to the same level that any other engineering concern is. In return the adults should stop treating IT as a child.”

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Four essential points on leadership in enterprises 1. As an essential part of a management team of a global production line, leaders, especially the IT-ones, will have a big network leading role. Finding the part in the global network that really can deliver on their part of the production line.

2. The IT leader in a global production team will drive two parts of innovation: A) Innovation in technology. Not on administrative systems, but on the infrastructure and the hard architecture.

B) Innovation with the business in production line in business and delivery models.

3. The mindset for leaders will have to change – as it is already starting to do – into a ‘glocal mindset’: think global, act local when needed.

4. Leaders should stop treating IT as a teenager and IT in return should grow up and act and deliver more professionally. You cannot have an industrialised approach as long as you keep acting like a craftsman.

One of the drivers for industrialisation, according to Bouts, is self-service of customers and distributors. “Nowadays you can assemble your own car online out of a limited number of components. It’s a shame that we are not yet able to do that for insurance products. But as customers will want more ‘made to measure’ products in the near future, we’ll have to be ready for that.”

Logistics It is more than obvious within the financial services industry that the times that you could make a mess of things and still make a lot of money are over.

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Customers are becoming companies’ biggest stakeholders. Within Zurich there is a strong belief that if you do not continue to deliver more value to your customers you’ll have a major problem. “Customers are looking for service experience,” Sheridan knows. “Their buying experience should be something that they feel in control of and that they feel is controlled, and valued. The same thing goes for acquiring information. The way customers are now interacting with other industries, is something we have to be very mindful of. No doubt they will expect us to evolve in the same way as well.”

“We are in sync with the change that the business wants to bring about. If you don’t have that you get what old IT would be like: an IT project as a solution looking for a problem” The fact that life insurance is a long term product is to Bouts the exact point why they strongly believe in industrialisation. “Logistics is an essential part there. In some ways you could compare us with DHL, where customers can track their delivery with their Blackberry’s. We will move in a direction where our forty-year-product will have a delivery scheme for that period of time, with information needs and customer requests. In order to be able to pay for this, it needs to be industrialised. So that our customer can say ‘I’m comfortable with how my life insurance is being taken care of ’. That’s when they start to value the service.”

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On value One of the main keys of Zurich’s success is their serious consistency in bringing IT and the rest of their activities together. “And,” Bouts adds, “we are robust in execution, which is very important. In the same way as we architect the system, we also architect the delivery. We have to have sizeable deliveries that are big enough to make a difference, but not that big they can’t be delivered. Keeping things within reach will reinforce the fact that we’re improving, that we’re getting better in delivering. This works when the people see that it works. Too often projects don’t deliver what they promised.

The way you architect your delivery program and execute it is essential.”

Sheridan: “Most projects within IT still use ‘on time, on budget’ as the main KPI. That remains important, but ‘on value’ is our new reality. This is about delivering the value you said you would. Why should we invest in this project instead of others within Zurich? We prioritise on benefits, not on time and cost. And I repeat once more that IT aligned with operations is essential. Projects are rejected or approved based upon business drivers, not because of anything else.”

Prioritisation panel Two years ago a panel started to gather on a monthly basis within Zurich Financial Services (Life) to prioritise projects for the whole globe. This socalled ‘Prioritisation Panel’ was formalised a year ago. Sheridan: “Anyone who wants money or investment is being reviewed monthly. Delegates from IT, operations, sales and finance review whether a contribution adds enough to the value generation for customers and shareholders compared to other opportunities. We monitor the new cases against the cases that are already underway and the pipeline of cases. The panel already comes in view in the idea-stage, and once it has transformed to a business case, we then control the projects again. So we have a controlled delivery program. This prioritisation panel is run by the CEO of the company, who ultimately decides.

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On some occasions people have said: ‘your bid is better than my bid, I vote for you’. Once you get to that level of constructiveness, then you know you’re starting to win.” The prioritisation panel has become a key part of Zurich’s governance. Its main driver is value for customers, shareholders or distributors. The main KPI for the CIO is this: “I do not want IT to be on the critical path. I do not want IT to be holding up a project.”

Bouts clarifies that the prioritisation panel only deals with overarching and important projects on a global level. “What people do on a local level, where there is also some investment money available, is fine with me, as long as it remains within the given framework.”

Stuff that always works Looking into the near future, Sheridan is convinced there will be continual changes in sourcing. “We are working towards a different level of componentisation. At the moment we’re still talking about big systems, but that will change into smaller parts. In other areas of engineering instead of assembling great big monolith planes in one building, they ship components which can be assembled all around the world. And should there be a need for big platforms then those will be commoditised and sourced. We as Zurich need to innovate our products, be quick to market and respond quickly to market conditions.

The IT part that will be fully integrated into the business will look for agility and flexibility in the next ten years time. By then IT will have industrialised their operations to a position of heating and lighting, stuff that always works.”

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// Views on the future role of the CIO

Adam Gade, Vice President & CIO, Maersk Line “Within Maersk Line, the implementation of standard processes, and related result and process measures (KPIs), forms the basis for improvement of our documentation and invoices. In many ways this constitutes a cultural change in Maersk Line, placing the customer at the centre of our improvement efforts. Looking to the future, our main challenge within Maersk Line IT will be to work much closer with the business. This calls for a higher level of agility in servicing business needs, which we did not previously promote in our organisation. Similarly it requires that we better anchor solid knowledge of our business within the IT organisation. Our role increasingly becomes focused on business improvement, rather than only managing hardcore coding. All Maersk Line’s main IT services are outsourced, so our role as vendor/contract/project/change managers takes centre stage.”

Freddy Van den Wyngaert, CIO Agfa: “As IT organisation it is important to think along with the business and follow up on market trends. For example, the business model for our Agfa HealthCare Business Group changes: from sales and installation of radiology hardware/ software and clinical information systems up to client demands to offer Agfa solutions in a ‘Managed Services’ model! The project of ZNA (Hospital Network Antwerp) offers these kinds of opportunities for the Agfa IT organisation to deliver the infrastructure and competencies, such as data center operations, hosting, storage and network support.

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As Agfa, we experience that the activities we take over from the hospitals are so special, that for each client we manage a unique environment. However, the future is one-to-many and therefore a standard environment for various clients in order to offer economies of scale. With their operational experience IT can contribute to this, and together with the business look at opportunities to offer more effective platforms for new propositions. The IT share in the turnover of the business of ‘Managed and Professional Services’ leads to a different opinion about IT.” Luc Chauvin, CIO Flemish Government, Manager e-IB: e-government and ICT Operations “In my opinion we are at the beginning of a major change in our businessIT relationship.The coming years, I’m convinced we will face at least 3 major challenges: 1) business-IT alignment:

The way to improve the business-usage of IT is paradoxically to ‘hide’ the technology and put instead maximum emphasis on its functionality to the business. In order to drive IT as an integral part of the business, we need managers that are able to break down the barrier between business and IT: talk the language of the business and focus on business objectives.

2) everything as a Service:

For most of its components, IT evolves towards commodity offerings.

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In addition to a technological model – delivery through ‘the cloud’ – ‘IT as-a-service’ also becomes a financial model: essentially transforming traditional CAPEX activities into OPEX. This can open tremendous opportunities for flexibility and agility and multiplies the number of possible projects within a constant budget.

3) everything open:

Open standards and open source are but the tip of the iceberg. The use of the internet as a social medium is unstoppable and should be encouraged.

Opposition will only discourage the new generation that will view the workplace as a “limit in using old technology”. A maximum openness to experiment and promotion of new technology should be the leading principles.”

Ulfried Paier, Managing Director Raffeisen Information Center Styria (RICS) “In 2009, the RICS data center processed approximately 400 million banking transactions (online and mobile). Such transactions are critical to the success of a local bank and its clients. However, our company is forced to optimize data center uptime and performance without overburdening its staff or driving up IT costs. Besides being leader in internet banking in our region, we developed the largest mobile community within the banking milieu with approximately 150,000 members.

RICS implemented HP Universal CMDB to support the ITIL framework.

Together, the solutions provide full transparency across IT services and their supporting infrastructure. These are achievements that improve the way the business perceives IT. Today, a much larger community can access configuration information, quickly and easily, making RICS more agile in responding to new market demands.”

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WRAP-UP New York, Paris, Barcelona, Rome. Whoever has visited any of these cities will undoubtedly have fallen in love with (one of ) them. Love leads to positive stories and recommendation. Yet there is no love without a journey.

Making the business love their IT is a journey too. The CIOs who tell their stories in this book demonstrate a healthy and mature urge to travel places: from boardroom to shop floor, from factories to the business’ customers.

They dare to take risks and they enjoy the challenge of visiting new places.

It is also important for them to work hard on their marriage with the business, because these CIOs know that nobody wants to be married to a boring, grumpy and untidy partner, always complaining about budget cuts.

Long-term enthusiasm is just as important as a healthy dose of sustainable energy. Soft skills such as communication and empathy are extremely important to be able to read customer needs through formal requirements and requests. This new way of working increases the success of new methods to design, built and run IT. The future is a changed IT organisation – never finished and never ready, but always with the adaptability required by the business. That IT transformation is an enormous challenge, but today’s fast-changing labour market, technology, end users and business environment mean there is no real alternative. There are fortunately more than enough opportunities, as shown by the success stories in this book. With new technology, IT can provide scalable and flexible services that make the business happy (run). The pace 78

can be speeded up, performance indicators can be made understandable and transparent, and costs can be reduced. This is how IT creates the basic conditions for its role as a valued partner in R&D, growth and innovation (change).

However, technology alone will never do the job. It will always be a people’s business. Creating the right conditions, like being a service-champ and finding the right metrics, creates a language of unity. IT will either become a true business partner, or run the risk of being marginalised. Those are basically the two options. The journey in this book describes the end of ‘them’ versus ‘us’. Or as Eva Listi says in her interview: IT is not just a business enabler, it is in fact the business. A bright business future is every CIO’s destination.

So, what’s your Estimated Time of Arrival?

On behalf of the ‘I love my IT department’ community, Marco Gianotten

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BOOK TIPS // Books that can be useful when looking for inspiration on reshaping the IT organisation

8 Things We Hate About IT: How to move beyond the frustrations to form a new partnership with IT Susan Cramm (HBS Publishing, 2010)

How to build a relationship that puts you firmly in control and produces the business results you need? In 8 Things We Hate About IT, Susan Cramm provides the answers for both business as well as IT. Start by understanding differences between operational and IT managers – in backgrounds, personality, pressures, and incentives. Cramm explains how differences prevent operational managers and IT from communicating what, why, and how they do what they do.

Blind Spot: A leader’s guide to IT-enabled business transformation Charlie Feld (Olive Press, 2010)

Feld describes a framework developed and enriched over the last 30 years, which demystifies technology, serves as a foundation and confidence builder, is durable through the eras, across industries, and is simple in nature. The framework focused on business leadership defines and describes the principles and mechanisms for an IT-enabled business transformation: why do anything, what to do, how to do it, and who will lead the change? As is illustrated, this way of doing has been proven to work for many enterprises.

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Switch: How to change things when change is hard Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Broadway Books, 2010)

For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. The authors argue that successful changes share a common pattern. They require the leader of this change to do three things at once: address the rationale, address the emotions, and clear the path for success. Business cases are used to exemplify how this can be brought into action in the business world.

Business/IT Fusion: How to move beyond alignment and transform IT in your organization Peter Hinssen (Mach Media, 2009)

Whereas the old CIO was the king of the technical hill, the new fusion leader is a business master who will lead IT into the 21st century. He or she will blend IT with the business, and turn the old IT department into a new element focusing on technology-enabled innovation. Gone is the old IT. Long live Fusion. This book provides a roadmap for the journey to completely rethink IT, and transform IT into something radically new.

IT Savvy: what top executives must know to go from pain to gain Peter Weil and Jeanne W. Ross (Harvard Business Press, 2009)

In many organisations, returns from IT investments are flatlining, although technology spending went sky-high. This calls for new levels of IT savvy: the ability of all managers – IT or non-IT – to transform their company’s technology assets into operational efficiencies that boost margins. Companies with IT-savvy managers are 20 percent more profitable than their competitors. This book is reading for non-IT managers that seek to push their company’s performance to new heights.

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// About ‘I love my IT department’

Without IT nearly every business comes to a halt. Yet how many business managers would recommend their own IT department? And how many users would evaluate the service provision as excellent? Too few, you would probably agree. IT’s internal branding thus needs improvement. In this light, we founded the community ‘I love my IT department’.

The aim of this community is to improve the reputation of the corporate IT department. Cases from highly rewarded IT organisations, alignment breakthroughs, interviews and best practices are shared within this peer group. With this new book I love my IT department, reshaping the IT organisation we are on a mission for making the corporate IT department an actual rewarded and innovative partner for the business.

More information on our community can be found on www.ilovemyitdepartment.com Feel free to joing our Group ‘I love my IT department’ on LinkedIn or follow us on twitter through ‘IT_DrLove’.

The community is an initiative of Giarte and HP Software.

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// About Giarte

Giarte is a research company for the strategic aspects of information technology.

As an independent party Giarte develops and provides services that at client organisations continually measure employees’ satisfaction with supplied IT services within outsourcing contracts.

Through our community DigitalBoardroom we highlight themes and trends from a management perspective. Programs based on online research, publications and summits on actual themes create close relations where practical knowledge, insights and successful cases are shared amongst top managers.

The building of executive relations networks is supported with campaigns such as ‘I love my IT department’. www.giarte.com

// About HP Software & Solutions

HP Software & Solutions, the software division of HP, offers software products and services in the areas of Business Technology Optimization (BTO), Information Management (IM) and Business Intelligence (BI).

HP Software BTO solutions ensure that every dollar invested in technology, every resource allocated, and every application or service in development or production delivers against defined business objectives. HP Software Information Management Solutions help you manage both structured and unstructured information to improve data governance and e-discovery; business continuity and availability. HP Software Business Intelligence Solutions capitalise on enterprise information to make better, more informed decisions. And HP Software Services help CIOs to improve the predictability of business outcomes from IT investments at every stage of a project life cycle. www.hp.com/software 83

COLOFON I Love My IT Department // Reshaping the IT organisation ISBN: 978-90-74712-90-3 Author Marco Gianotten (Giarte) Editors Jan Gladziejewski (HP Software & Solutions) Remco van Dijk (HP Software & Solutions) Editor-in-Chief Eva Meester (Giarte) Project Management Eva Meester Remco van Dijk Design and lay-out Bureau Blanco, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Print Royal Broese & Peereboom, Breda, the Netherlands Š Copyright Giarte, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October 2010 Š Copyright HP Software & Solutions, Amstelveen, the Netherlands, October 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the copyright holders.