Best Practices

Are we all too busy?

Do your users pay attention to dialog box pop-ups? If you’re thinking, “yes, of course,” read on.

A recent study by members of the psychology department at North Carolina State University shows most people do not pay any attention to these dialog boxes – even when presented with information indicating potential malware.

The authors created four fake dialog boxes – one of them was indistinguishable from standard Windows dialog systems. From subtle (moving the mouse over the “OK” button would cause the cursor to turn to a hand — typical of browser control) to blatant (alternating between black text and a white background to white text on a black background), the dialog boxes should have been a tip-off to users that something wasn’t right.

The study was conducted by loading a series of medical websites to a panel of 42 college students, who were told to watch the sites and expect questions to follow. The fake dialog boxes were loaded randomly and the responses of the users were tracked. The response time showed the users did not spend any time evaluating the fakes. During the follow-up questions, students found “any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs.”

Is there just no time for “dialog box speed bumps?” With the quick-answer Web-search service ChaCha growing in popularity, are we all too busy to even search for answers on the Web? Wasn’t that the point of the Web in the first place – a place to access information from all over the globe?

Are your users too busy to pay attention? Should you rethink the use of dialog boxes and consider another venue for that information?

Forrester: No room for cowboy culture in IT

Just like Toby Keith, I should have been a cowboy.

Alas, I went into journalism and never did get the hang of a lasso. If you’re in IT, a new Forrester report says, you should let those cattle drive dreams go as well.

It turns out the cowboy culture is just about the most destructive way a CIO can run an IT shop. The result, Forrester vice president and principal analyst Marc Cecere says, is complete chaos. On the other end of the culture spectrum is a completely IT-centric shop. An isolationist policy that separates IT from the business can lead to over-control and is just as bad as playing Lonesome Dove.

Forrester is urging CIOs to aim somewhere in the middle. Be autonomous without being isolationist, the analysts say. Pay attention to metrics — but not so much that you take the rational thinking element out of IT.

In short: Stop, think.

Culture is important. There are some things money can’t buy, and a comfortable work environment that emphasizes positive, forward thinking is one of them.

So stop, think. Assess whether your employees are happy, whether IT culture in your company jibes properly with other business units. Is the culture in your IT shop promoting the business or is it keeping things status quo? Worse, is it hindering the business?

Should you need an IT attitude adjustment, here are Cecere’s 10 steps: Continued »

New Firefox browser nearing release

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is scheduled for the end of May. A code freeze was implemented late last week, forcing programmers to scramble to make last-minute changes and stomp out any bugs that still exist.

Release candidates are typically the final stages of development before the new software is pushed out to users.

The latest beta version – Firefox Beta 3.5 – was released in early April and, in my experience, the results of that version weren’t exactly stellar.

Techworld notes that Mark Schroepfer, vice president of engineering, posted to Mozilla’s development blog this weekend, “The release candidates will move a little slower than beta.” The reason, according to Techworld, is because of “the need to account for more public feedback than with earlier builds.”

Or, as one friend posted succinctly to his Twitter stream: “Firefox 3 beta 5 = fail.”

I wonder if Schroepfer saw a lot of that and decided to urge his company into a more cautious route.

Personally, I’m still a Beta or two behind 5. But even the Firefox 3 beta that I use to surf the Interwebs daily is a little buggy. From time to time it freezes or just decides to shut down on its own. That said, I’m a lot happier with my latest version instead of Firefox 2, which routinely froze and forced me to reset my user preferences: Losing my bookmarks and history several times a day got old quickly.

CIO blogs lift us up where we belong…

We often kick around the idea here whether or not CIOs are reading blogs. It’s a friendly argument, but we haven’t been able to come to a conclusive decision yet. So, as I surf through my Google News updates and through my RSS readers, I always keep looking for those elusive CIO blogs that’ll prove the point that, yes, you are reading – and even writing – blogs.

This morning I happened onto a real gem. CTO/CIO perspectives is written by Peter Kretzman. Kretzman describes himself as an information technology and online industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience in the business.

His blog, his about me page notes, covers “broad topics of interest to senior executives, giving the CTO/CIO perspective on such things as working as a member of a company’s executive team, how to focus product and application development, enhance and maintain world-class operations, and the care and feeding of technical staff.”

Yesterday as I was surfing the vast Interwebs for any and everything CIO related, I came across Joel Dehlin’s blog. Dehlin is the CIO for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also maintains, what seems to be, an active and popular blog. While Dehlin doesn’t confine his blog space to just the latest and greatest CIO news – he does tell personal anecdotes, but I haven’t found any pictures of his pets on the site, yet – he does touch on CIO issues from time to time.

What most interests me about Dehlin’s and Kretzman’s writing is that both obviously have technical experience and could easily get mired down by the nuts-and-bolts type of discussions that may be relevant to only a handful of people. Instead, both made the conscious decision to write about common information technology issues and offer real-life antecdotes to make the whole a little easier to swallow and have a more general appeal. Their writing styles are straightforward and charming in their desire to help their fellow readers.

So, at least for today, I win this argument. CIOs are writing blogs. And you’re reading them, too, as the comments on these blogs can attest. Well done, my midmarket CIOs. It’s like an unexpected gift or a lollypop at the end of a doctor’s appointment.

Since you’ve exceeded my expectations today, I give you Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes:

Fencing for recognition: Sword fight your way to the executive table

Normally, I’d take a pass on commenting on a report like the one EDS recently published entitled “CIO at the Table.” But today I feel like this could be a useful read for you, my midmarket CIOs.

As with most of the reports I come across, there isn’t anything entirely earthshaking or world changing about this. The main thrust of the article is about including CIOs at the decision-making table at any given company.

“In either case, technology isn’t something you can ignore in the 21^st century. No matter what your industry, IT is at the center of the action… Yet many organizations continue to misstep, not quite understanding the role of the CIO, the part that IT technicians should play in daily operations, how to make investment decisions, set sequence and priority, or even the best way to capitalize on the latest innovations to expand and change the products and services they are taking to market … What most senior leaders fail to grasp along the way is that making IT work has as much to do with business as it does with technology itself … But you have to do more than invest in good infrastructure and applications. You have to integrate and align IT with the enterprise’s overarching goals.”

I just went ahead and grabbed the most salient points of the article. But, by all means, you should read the whole report, even though it’s aimed more directly at your CEO than it is at you.

It does, however, provide some insight into the way your boss is trying to wrap his or her mind around what you do on a daily basis and why a good CIO is vital to the company.

Maybe I should say the way your CEO isn’t thinking about your job. EDS suggests an expanded role for the CIO with a more strategic vision for the whole company and IT governance in general. It’s a decent argument and could provide a few thrusts and ripostes for your next performance review.

IT staff to CIOs: Pay us more!

A recent phone survey of 1,400 CIOs across the country revealed that offering increased compensation is the greatest incentive for IT staff to stay with a company.

The survey, developed by Robert Half Technology, asked CIOs this question: “Which of the following elements have you found most effective at improving IT staff retention?”

The top three responses were:

1. Increased compensation 27%
2. Professional development or training 21%
3. Flexible schedules 18%

(Check out the press release for the rest of the results.)

For a second, I thought maybe the survey takers were responding to the question: What’s the best way to hire and retain auto mechanics, CEOs, convenience store clerks, killer whale trainers – or reporters.

Wow, imagine that. Money is the key issue at the heart of retaining employees. Well, I never.

What might be even more shocking are the conclusions that Robert Half Technology extrapolated from this survey, which, in my opinion, are worth reprinting here:

• Pay competitively.  Periodically benchmark employee compensationagainst industry-standard ranges to ensure your salaries are keeping pace.  Robert Half Technology produces an annual Salary Guide with salary ranges for more than 60 IT positions.

• Offer and promote training.  Provide IT staff access to the courses and certification programs they need to grow their careers.  Make sure employees are aware of professional development opportunities.

• Support work/life balance.  To prevent teams from burning out, ensure that workloads are realistic. Encourage employees to ask for help when they need it, and consider bringing in project professionals to help during peak periods.

That’s some skilled analysis.

It’s easy for me to sit here and lob grenades at these kinds of surveys — and the accompanying results — but there may be some merit in pointing out that after money, training was the next concern that CIOs feel will help retain IT staff. This is a pretty solid point.

Working as a midmarket CIO offers you a different opportunity than being in an enterprise company. I bet you get to know your employees. You might even hold the door for them on the way into the office in the morning. Use that familiarity and train the people you work with. Not only will your employees appreciate the way you’re helping them enrich their professional lives, it’ll also make the operations that they manage for you run that much more smoothly. (And once they have those skills, they will, no doubt, use them to leverage a new position at a company that pays better. See survey result number one above.)

Think about it. Remember the first day you learned how to fix a transmission or tie a fisherman’s knot or sauté an onion in oil? Didn’t you feel enriched at the end of the day? Maybe you wanted to get back out there the next day and do it all over again. I bet your employees would feel the same way about using that new cooling technique they learned about.

Justifying IT expenditures: Outsourcing isn’t always the answer

Accountability, budget constraints and cost of provisioning services – these are all issues that CIOs hear about when presenting IT budget numbers. “Why does this cost what it costs?” and “Can’t we outsource some of these functions?” are both questions that you’ve likely encountered when justifying expenses to your bosses.

The Naked CIO argues that outsourcing and offshoring IT projects isn’t necessarily the right move to make. In fact, he thinks it may cause more problems than it could potentially solve:

“Cost-based models drive a wedge between business and IT and this type of services-based arrangement makes business alignment more difficult.”

Keeping a project agile through a grass roots-style approach is, in his opinion, the route CIOs should go.

From where I sit, this makes the most sense. When contracting an outside company to do the dirty work that you need done, improvisation and adaptability is necessarily curtailed. In most cases – unless a contract is reworked – the company tapped will produce what you ask for and deliver it, hopefully, in a neat box with a bow on top of it. But project parameters are often subject to change and having the flexibility to address new needs is key for a CIO, not to mention IT on the whole.

I’ll give you a real-life example. A friend of mine works for a large hardware company whose name you would know if I mentioned it. Half his team is stationed abroad in the Middle East, and the other half is located right here in the Bay State. Because of cultural, religious and time zone differences, the half of the team that is abroad works on Sundays, while the Massachusetts-based cohort does not. Changes in his project are often subjected to approval from managers on both side of the Atlantic, and just getting a simple OK can be an ordeal. My friend has occasionally been called into the office or forced to work on a Sunday afternoon to sync up with his team, while the foreign contingent sometimes takes conference calls in the late evening local time.

The company has an internal instant messenger client that, in theory, should allow team members to speak to each other when they are all online over the course of the day. Yet still, my friend’s project has been delayed numerous times. Some of those delays are because of the problems inherent with developing a new product. But to think that the location differences and the limited communication doesn’t play a role into the delays is just naive.

Now translate that to your organization. My friend is working with co-workers who, albeit in a different country, draw their paychecks from the same source, teleconference regularly and communicate daily. When CIOs outsource a project, a direct line of communication is often lost. I doubt that when you have a question about why an application or piece of hardware isn’t working properly that you get to speak directly to the programmer who designed it or the tech who built and maintains it. My friend does. He still experiences delays and setbacks.

It might look well and good on the bottom line when a CIO produces numbers that cut costs because an outside contractor is doing the majority of the work cheaply. But what those numbers often time don’t include are the cost of delay in rolling out the project due to communication snafus and the cost of ironing out wrinkles that always seem to appear.

Have I got a solution for you? No, I haven’t – but if I did, I’m sure I’d be making the big bucks advising CIOs on how to keep projects in house without driving up costs. But ultimately, when you go to the bigwigs with the purse strings, you have the option to tell a couple of different stories. One involves up-front platitudes about the lower cost, while hidden snags lie around the corner. The other involves using the staff whom you’ve likely hired, whom you trust and with whom you can speak directly to develop whatever solution your company needs.

The question is really: Which are you going to tell?

Top five rookie CIO mistakes

In an article published April 13, Todd McGregor, managing director of Forrester Middle East, laid out his “Top five CIO mistakes.”

Here’s an abbreviated list:

1.  Conflicting culture and structure.
2. A management style that conflicts with IT goals.
3. Metrics that don’t support the direction of IT.
4. Weakened strategic functions.
5. Overly fragmented functional groups.

 (To see the full list, check out McGregor’s article with his explanations and examples.)

Far be it from me to pick a bone with a Forrester analyst — especially a managing director — but that list seems a little simplistic. It could be that he’s addressing enterprise CIOs as opposed to CIOs in the midmarket, but it seems like each of those mistakes boils down to simple management flaws.

It could be a function of being too far removed from the IT department itself, but, really? Metrics that don’t support the direction of IT? Someone who is in charge of managing and directing technology for a company doesn’t know which metrics should be pulled and what data needs to be analyzed? I’m sure that is a top mistake for a CIO — assuming they’re making that mistake at all. C-level employees reach that position for a reason, and while employees might think that most CIOs are clueless when it comes to daily operations, being that far out of touch should be grounds for firing.

Look, McGregor does make some salient points about the general strategies that CIOs should use while running their departments. They just strike me as a little obvious. Feel free to disagree.

In the meanwhile, I’d like to humbly submit my top five rookie CIO mistakes.

1. Not wearing pants to work.
2. Parking in the CEO’s spot –this is still IT, after all.
3. Telling the facility manager he “missed a spot.”
4. Ordering the tuna salad with extra pickles in the cafeteria.
5. Contracting Rent-A-Center to redesign the data center.