The theme of the conference reflected the fact that over 200 participants had a rare chance to attend presentations by CIO Award winners; as well as by market leading technology vendors HP, Oracle, Mercury Interactive and Veritas, and analysts, IDC Asia Pacific (a sister company to IDG, CIO Asia's publishers).
The event also tied in with the formal unveiling and announcement of the five organisations taking home the coveted CIO Awards. The five winners were chosen from the CIO 100 for 2004, CIO Asia's annual index of companies in the region that are adding the most value to their business through the strategic and creative use of IT.
E-Government: The Way Forward
First up, the audience heard from Wu Choy Peng, Assistant Chief Executive (Government Systems) of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. The body, responsible for the formulation and implementation of IT policy, government e-business initiatives and fostering the growth of the IT sector in Singapore, has been honoured with a CIO Award in 2002 for its cutting-edge work. In her presentation, "The Singapore E-Government Model and our Experience", Wu touched on the achievements of the Singapore government in delivering over 1,600 e-services online, through a single eCitizen URL, as well as the provision of SingPass, a single identification password for citizens to deal with the government e-services.
Over the next few years to 2006, Wu said that the government has set a target to move beyond the electronic provision of services to network, integrate and value-add to these, "as well as to bring citizens closer together". "The aim is to make delighted customers out of our citizens, but more than that, to begin to connect citizens, build communities and inspire greater trust and confidence," said Wu.
To achieve these three aims, the government plans to push more e-services over different platforms (mobile, SMS), offer more access points, and develop more tailored services for different demographic groups. To connect citizens, more consultation activities, and a centralised portal for community services and resources will be set up. Finally, greater cross-agency links, knowledge sharing and importantly, shared services and infrastructure will be made available to government agencies to support the delivery of these services.
On this last point, Wu gave a sneak peek behind what she called "the unglamourous stuff" of the job, which nonetheless has been, and will be, key to the success of e-government initiatives. She sketched a few components:
- Formulating service-wide ICT policies;
- Developing service-wide enterprise business, information, application and technical architectures that enable government agencies to be flexible, but without them needing to "reinvent the wheel" and be able to adapt already-running, proven architectural strategies;
- An ICT Portfolio Management tool, that maps support objectives, and gives managers a helicopter view of value against cost, as well as select the right type and number of projects;
- Strong relationships with the private sector to build e-services, that can then be used to strengthen the expertise of the local infocomm sector.
"CIOs deserve an award for bravery," said Ganesh Ayyar, vice president, HP Services, Southeast Asia. This is because business has become so IT-interdependent, and economic conditions have become so volatile, that the CIO quite literally is constantly working on the edge, trying to help his organisation keep abreast of rapid change, and growing business demands.
This change is a result of, and driven on by, a gradual evolution of the nature of IT itself, he observed. In the recent past, IT was seen as a cost centre, with significant upfront investments, costs out of joint with revenues, where correct capacity was an ever-moving target, and supply constantly struggles with demand. Perhaps the saddest statistic of how inefficient the IT-business relationship has become is one study that finds that only 27 percent of projects were delivered with expected returns. "The traditional business model can no longer hold, in the face of today's business realities," Ayyar said.
With a view to improving this relationship, and making it a more valuable one, Ayyar discussed HP's Adaptive Enterprise framework which is about "synchronising business and IT for competitive advantage". Its goal is to turn IT from a purely reactive, service-oriented model, where costs are managed, risks mitigated and service and support quality increased, to one where the IT organisation can play a pivotal role in enabling the business to respond to changes, or to increase its agility.
He spelled out the benefits of increasing organisational ability, in terms of reducing the latency in making business decisions, executing these changes, and then validating the effects of those changes. In turn, these latency reductions enable benefits such as:
- Inventory tuning to free trapped cash
- Faster setup of new customer services on reusable infrastructure
- Intelligent offers of new services to the most desirable customers
- Balancing cost and agility
- Maximising RoIT, or "Return on IT", which captures the value of IT's contribution to organisational adaptability and agility, beyond a pure cost perspective.
Finding Your T-Zone
CIOs managing large IT organisations and project implementations must keep their finger on the pulse of everything that's going on, and it can be a complex task, with so many key performance indicators, parameters, cost levels and other variables to think about and manage. "Management of complexity is the single most important thing a CIO must handle," said Andrew Ward, consulting director with Oracle Singapore.
In this, they have an unlikely counterpart in airline pilots, who similarly face a complex task of keeping their aircraft flying, and their passengers safe. To do this, they rely on various dials and indicators, which in more modern aircraft now span the whole of the cockpit. Obviously they cannot refer to each and every one of these dials and instruments. Ward: "Pilots have a framework called the 'T-Zone', a specific set of instruments where fundamental, key data affecting the performance of the aircraft is encapsulated. Any information that the pilot refers to is done so, only after reference to the dial in the T-Zone."
Similarly, good, effective project management is about successfully managing that complexity in a similar way, by drawing up a key framework of data and indicators which the CIO can refer to and rely on. Ward suggested following a fundamental framework for management and direction on projects, and illustrated how Oracle tackles each dimension. It consists of:
CLARITY. Clarity involves issues such as information flow, and understanding. "At a basic level, you need to ask 'Have you defined success?'," said Ward. This can include formulating and communicating organisational and project missions and objectives, detailing primary and secondary goals, and creating multi-stakeholder input. At Oracle, all parties are kept in touch with this information through project portals and workspace solutions, and methodical project planning.
COMPETENCE. Covering issues such as behaviour and attitude, as well as knowledge and skill. A key question to ask here is: does your team have the skills to deliver on the project? "If not, do you train, mentor, or outsource the project?" At Oracle, training for experts is a high priority. "We use mentoring to fill in the gaps, and this is very relevant on the project side. Once someone has that experience, you can reuse it," he said. Ward recommended the benefits of going for Project Management Institute (PMI) certification (Oracle project managers are enrolled for this, and it is internally funded), and talked about the use of the STAR review process, which provides holistic feedback to the individual.
CLIMATE. Refers to the infrastructure and culture which are the backdrop for the project. "Is the environment supportive?" Ward cautioned CIOs to ask, and to consider the various processes, management support, systems and resources at hand. At Oracle, this area is taken care of by creating local and global communities of expertise for knowledge sharing on projects; fostering participative management, and using the projects as opportunities for creating inter-departmental links.
In parting, Ward had this final advice for managing projects well: "Know your objective--document it in a charter, and not just an RFP." He also advised insisting on fixed prices from providers, and thinking end-to-end.
Coping with Storage Complexity
Building an integrated storage architecture can reap your company up to fifty times its productivity, and generate savings and better performance, says Alvin Ow, technical consulting manager, Asia South, Veritas Software Corp., who spoke at CIO Asia's "Secret of Champions" conference last month.
Ow says companies face a number of storage issues within their enterprises today. The first is the high costs of storage management. While storage acquisition costs have gone as low as 5 cents (U.S.) per megabyte, total overall costs escalate to as much as US$3 or more per megabyte when storage management costs are factored in. Ow says that companies should be getting at least 0.5 terabytes per administrator. Another issue that companies face today is the need to ensure high availability of their IT infrastructure and to cope with complexity in their IT environment. CIOs can overcome these issues by taking a systemwide approach and embracing the use of storage management software.
Ow also illustrated how storage management software solutions from VERITAS allow for complexity to be tamed and automated into a virtual architecture. VERITAS offers a suite of solutions that can automate, integrate, and simplify enterprises' loads in the following areas: disaster recovery, high availability, database performance, file system and volume management, SAN administration, volume mirrors, replication and backup.
The Tortoise And Hare Tie-Up
NTUC Income Insurance Co-operative won a CIO Award this year for their remarkable rollout of BigTrumpet.com portal, offering useful financial and personal services to customers, and riding on a Web services platform. Continuing the "Champions" theme, CIO James Kang offered insight under the hood of the project, which was completed in a remarkably quick period from its green-lighting--just four and a half months from "Ground Zero" in June 2002.
He brought the house down with his rendition of the "Asian version" of the old tortoise and the hare fable, in a bid to illustrate how one needs to keep abreast of the competition, but with a little strategy under one's belt. In a humour-filled, frank presentation, Kang sketched out why NTUC Income opted for Web services. He said, "Basically Web services build on previous technologies, and you can program the Internet, such that applications are able to talk across various platforms."
"To the business, this opens up a whole new application model. You can federate your systems and information across the organisation, build systems in modules, and orchestrate systems."
He gave an example of how one Web service, supporting the various processes involved in tendering for motor workshops to repair damaged cars, was able to save S$20 million (about US$12 million), and bring more transparency to the tendering system.
Another benefit of using Web services is in beating the paper curse. With documents and information now shared and processed electronically, and with legal regulations now allowing for these digital documents to be admissible in court, organisations can reap the benefits of saving on associated storage, manpower and processing costs.
Kang added that the BigTrumpet project was a direct result of collaboration, not just within the NTUC Income organisation, but with multiple agencies, including the IDA. The latter's .NET MySingapore project, is aimed at promoting development of local expertise and experience in the emerging standard. It was this collaboration, as well strong internal management support that were key to the success of the project.
His biggest lesson from building BigTrumpet? He said: "One of the most useful lessons we learned from this project was that the ability to move fast means that you must sometimes learn to accept less than perfection."
CIOs Calling The Shots
The final word of the afternoon's conference belonged to Puni Rajah, vice president for research with IDC Asia Pacific, who talked about the changing roles, responsibilities and decision-making mechanisms of the CIO.
Echoing the sentiments of other speakers at the conference, she said the biggest change would have to be the CIO becoming a key business influencer and enabler, and driver, by becoming an equal partner to business.
"A CIO needs to empower and enable," she said. In fact, the bulk of a CIO's role should be about managing relationships within an enterprise. "If you look at the figures, nearly two thirds of new IT investments are initiated as a result of changes in business processes." Therefore, much of the work involves selling and communicating to everyone from senior management to IT purchasers, to end users, and of course, the IT teams they head.
Foremost in their minds must be the impetus to balance the need for operational efficiency in IT (through managing projects, consolidating, centralising and streamlining) and the need to IT-enable the business (where the thinking is in terms of efficiency, flexibility and profitability). While the two goals are interdependent, they represent two different sets of thinking, and equilibrium between the two can only be maintained if there is a systemic IT/business relationship, she added.
"Successful CIOs take a programme approach to this issue," she observed. Referring to the experiences of the IDA, and Fedex, she had this advice for building a more dynamic IT-business relationship:
- Start with building strong relationships and partnerships on the inside and then working outward;
- Leadership from senior executives must demonstrate (not merely assert) the importance of IT and business working together;
- Changes in hiring practices, pay-incentive programmes, employee deployment, training and education programmes, etc. may be required;
- Involve all levels of employee consistency in message and commitment to IT/business alignment;
Aligning Business to IT
The enterprise of today faces all kinds of challenges--not just from the external market but also from within. And to better understand the challenges arising from the changing environments outside and within, the enterprise must be prepared to relearn how information should be processed, and distil knowledge from it.
That was the message from Mike New, managing director for Mercury Interactive (South Asia). Speaking at CIO Asia's "Secrets of Champions" conference held last month, he urged attendees to his breakout session to get back to basics and find the link between how information is processed and how it should be used for strategic purposes.
Titled "The Omniscient CIO", his presentation centred on what organisations need to do to attain higher value from its IT investments. "Eighty percent of an organisation's budget typically is meant for daily operations and core business, leaving only 20 percent for innovation and driving the business in new initiatives," he says. The way forward is for the business to understand where its strengths are and optimise the IT processes it has in order to realise higher return on IT investments.
But how should an organisation start? New advised that they should begin with aligning business and IT operations and putting in place methods to effectively monitor performance and availability. Ultimately, the organisation has to ensure quality, performance and availability. Without these, no amount of investments will truly turn the organisation into an agile one and compete effectively.
Quelle: CIO Asia, 08.04.2004
