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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Well this was painful, and it’s relevant to how CIOs can thrive in the PC-plus era.

Office 2013 stopped working on my Windows 8 tablet – every Office application crashed immediately after being launched.

Neither of Office’s two repair processes helped. Un- and re-installing Office didn’t help. Reverting to the last breakpoint didn’t help either. The Windows 8 refresh process did, but required that I reinstall Office. Which then refused to activate.

According to the first Microsoft tech I worked with, Microsoft limits how many times Office can be reinstalled on the computer for which it is licensed — a restriction not mentioned in the EULA. Anyway, for a mere hundred fifty bucks he was willing to sell me an extended warranty, after which he would fix my problem. I asked to speak to his manager and he refused. Not a good showing.

The next day a different tech grasped that this was a licensing server problem, not an Office problem, and quickly fixed it.

Let’s imagine a CEO accepts the now-popular suggestion that cloud computing and BYOD mean it’s time to move IT into the business departments, which will all happily replace the company’s expensive and complicated enterprise applications with cloud-based SaaS alternatives.

So they do, cheerfully buying their PCs from Costco and their copies of Office through Amazon, while using Dropbox or Google Drive for shared storage. (Contrary to popular wisdom, by the way, they won’t move off of Office, because they can’t. The alternatives just can’t handle what the company’s more sophisticated employees need; also, many of them exchange documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with vendors and customers who need to see them in unscrambled form.)

This arrangement works just fine. Until, that is, something breaks, like for example, Office starts to crash for no apparent reason. Only now there’s no help desk to call, because IT has been divvied up among the business departments, and, by the way, the company no longer has an enterprise license because who’s going to take care of buying one?

Answer: While decommissioning IT, most likely everyone would have figured out the need for some IT, to handle things like the company’s networks, PC provisioning and end-user support.

Which is how CIOs can survive the current round of why-IT-doesn’t-matter-anymore thinking: Embrace it.

Start with the IT service catalog. While some of its proponents took the catalog metaphor off a cliff (yes, that was intentional), suggesting it include such niceties as pricing, the core idea … that what IT does should be public knowledge … is a pretty good idea, and, by the way, the more political the management culture, the better this idea is.

So here’s what you do. As part of the next IT strategic planning cycle, gather the company’s executives together and make the following speechlet:

We all know about the cloud. You all probably know that “bring your own device” is a reality, and that we in IT are now asked to support a lot of employee-owned technology. You might have read some of the forecasts that say IT spending outside of IT will and should be growing a lot faster than IT spending inside of IT.

The cloud and BYOD are real, they’re important, and they mean we need to re-think how we make IT happen in this company. We all know spending is a bad place to start. It’s an output variable, not an input variable. So here’s what I propose.

As an executive team, our job is to establish the principles we should use for deciding what should happen where. With these principles to work with, my team will wade through the IT service catalog and figure out how our new principles change how we as a company make each service happen. We’ll bring the items that change the most back to this committee for review.

Once we’ve figured out who’s going to do what, we can figure out what this means to the budget … and whether we should be moving staff, too.

Yes, this will be uncomfortable. It isn’t the first time new technologies have re-drawn the business/IT boundary, though. The electronic spreadsheet, for example, moved most small-scale development out of IT, just as VOIP moved the telephone system into it. All in all you’re better off leading this parade than you are trying to stop it from happening.

And as a fringe benefit, it gives you an opportunity to remind the company’s top executives of all those things IT does that nobody seems to appreciate.

It’s all good. Or at least, it’s better than any of your other alternatives.

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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

Nuance is dead. May it rest in peace.

The headline: “PC shipments crater and tablets are the bogeymen,” (Woody Leonhard, InfoWorld, 10/10/2013).

First, let me assure you, Woody is a bright guy and I have a lot of respect for him. And second, writers don’t always write their own headlines. In any event, here’s what “crater” means: Worldwide, PC shipments are down around 8 percent, depending whose numbers you believe. In the U.S. PC shipments are up … up … a couple of percent.

Hardly the stuff of cratering.

The more interesting factoids in the story (and as I work for Dell I’m not an entirely disinterested party, although I have no connection to the product side of the company): The major manufacturers (HP, Lenovo, Dell) saw slight growth in their sales worldwide. Lenovo and Toshiba saw double-digit growth in the U.S. Yes, that’s right, growth … also not the stuff of cratering.

An interesting sidelight is that Apple’s U.S. sales took a sizable hit (more than 10%).

The truly fascinating bit was that Acer and Asus saw their sales plummet — down around 25% from last year. That really is cratering.

How to interpret these numbers? It’s probably much as pointed out here a few weeks back (“The post-PC era isn’t post-PC. It’s PC plus,” 9/16/2013). What cratered was consumer demand for PCs. Acer, Asus, and even Apple have a strong consumer orientation. Enterprise demand is, most likely, stable — enough from new ventures and replacement units to continue to support the major manufacturers.

It isn’t as attention-getting as “crater,” though.

As long as I’m quibbling with my friends at InfoWorld I might as well take issue with another recent piece they ran: “The end of the CIO as we know it — and IT feels fine,” (Galen Gruman, 10/11/2013). I’m afraid it got a lot wrong, starting with when the CIO title first appeared and what drove it. It wasn’t, as the article claimed, 15 years ago, driven by Y2K combined with the rise of ERP and eCommerce.

As evidence … why would any of those change “Director of Electronic Data Processing” to “Chief Information Officer”?

No, the CIO title came into existence twice that long ago, in the early 1980s. The driver: A newly introduced technology for mainframe computers called the database management system.

DBMS licenses were expensive. Very expensive in the context of what companies were already spending on their mainframe systems. The real, tangible cost-justification for spending the additional money was that it increased programmer productivity. Which it did. (Disagree? Imagine having to program without one.)

Except that, as anyone who’s tried it knows, programmer productivity is excruciatingly hard to measure, which means proving the tangible benefits of the new technology would have been excruciatingly hard.

So IBM’s marketing department came up with a new concept: The primary value EDP provided wasn’t increased employee productivity, as we’d been claiming until then. That was secondary. The big value was the information itself and what companies could do with it to improve decision-making. What, you thought this was new with data warehouses, data mining, and big data?

Whether you agree or disagree with the concept, the title “Chief Information Officer” flowed directly out of this idea — that information is where the big value is.

The concept’s legitimacy is questionable, by the way. Among its drawbacks: It elevates the importance of management decision-making above the value of actual work. But that’s a different, and very long diatribe.

Anyway, Galen’s piece is one of many that are appearing these days that predict we’ve entered the end-times for the CIO, and probably for corporate IT as well. Read any of these pieces. Squint at them sideways and you can predict the outcome of following this advice: A proliferation of “islands of automation,” because when companies push IT into business departments, nobody will be willing to pay for integration, let alone have the skills to handle it, let alone the authority.

And, the advice-followers will see significant fortification of political siloes. The reason? A big chunk of spending that used to be strategic (or at least enterprise in scope) will now be tactical, or, more accurately, departmental.

Siloed.

For a very long time … since, in fact, the advent of the DBMS … IT’s most important role has been integration. Maybe if CIO had stood for “Chief Integration Officer” we wouldn’t need to have this little chat.

* * *

Speaking of the 9/16 column, which talked about how IT’s role is expanding while its budget isn’t, I’m embarrassed. At the end I promised a follow-up that talked about what CIOs can do to survive the experience. But my vacation distracted me. Sorry. Next week for sure.

– Bob

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