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Following on from my last post about CIO recognition in the board room I was excited to discover that relevant coverage had reached the mainstream press, notably the venerable Financial Times.  An article by Alan Cane titled “It’s much too early to write off the role of the CIO” looked right on the sweet spot…..until I read it.

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I frequently muse on the relationship between IT and the business, so I was interested to read this WSJ article by Amit Basu and Chip Jarnagin, that dares to suggest that IT’s isolation is even greater than I thought.  Namely that a glass wall exists between IT and everything else.

The article is pretty balanced and does point out that it is not exclusively IT’s fault.  Indeed one of the problems IT often faces is getting appropriate representation around the board table.  I don’t buy the argument that CIOs bring this upon themselves.  It’s up to the CEO whether he wants IT on the board.  A secondary decision is who to appoint, and if there is nobody internal, then he can recruit externally.

I also like the fact that Amit and Chip point out that there is a responsibility on the business to embrace IT and try to understand its value.  Conversely there is clearly an onus on IT to focus on and demonstrate the value that it adds.

There is a need to speak each other’s language and IT people are frequently accused of using jargon, but how many IT people (or how many business people…) understand all the jargon used by accountants?  Senior officers are obliged to learn the accountant’s language if they want to get on, so why not IT language too?  Equally, accountants have had to learn a bit about marketing geek lingo too, and we are all at the behest of HR’s guide to political correctness – a language all of its own.

So how come other disciplines are always accepted and IT often isn’t?  Is Information Technology just the newest profession?  Can we look back at accountants and learn from how they gained recognition?  What about marketeers?  Didn’t they all just prove that they added value at some point in the past?  In the absence of recognition from the CEO, maybe the CIO is the only person who can raise the profile of IT in their own organisation.

Will I look back on this post before I retire, and wonder what on earth I was talking about?  By then, surely IT will simply be an accepted profession in every organisation, like Finance, Sales, Marketing and HR are right now.

My daily newsfeeds bought me some mannah from heaven in the form of news that Manchester City Football Club is going to trial contactless payment technology in conjunction with its season tickets.

Access to the ground is already by contactless proximity card so making the leap to contactless payment is just like Oyster and Barclaycard really.  I criticised that one heavily for lack of ambition which just goes to show the power of fans eh?

I am not currently a season ticket holder at Man City but I do go to many of the home games using my contactless Access Card, where I merely ring up, ask for a ticket and access is authorised.  I turn up for the game and hey presto, my card let’s me in.  I won’t go into the number of times two people have been allocated the same seat but I tolerate this as a “fan”.  If that same access card could be used to buy a beer (for which I tolerate queuing for ages), a pie (ugh!), and my programme this would be great.  I then shuffle my way through to my seat amongst the thronging masses and watch City play out a drab 0-0 draw and go home to kick the cat.

A major energy company in the UK, npower, has a corporate strategy of turning customers into fans – no wonder….  At Man City, I am happy to pay for poor service again and again, and I never ever switch “suppliers”.   Btw, I am an npower customer and sadly I must report that I cannot make a valid comparison since I have never had a service problem with them.

I hear there are similar trials in the US too – I wonder if Man City fancy twinning with the Seattle Seahawks?  They had a service problem at Green Bay in last season’s playoffs – it snowed wildly – home advantage hmphhhh!

The age old CIO dilemma.  Buy vs. Build.

On the one hand, you buy in a package from a vendor.  They bring industry “best” practice.  They guarantee that your administration is as good as your competitors.  The trouble is that it is equally as bad as your competitors.  So it puts you in an equal position, not an advantageous one.  The lowest common denominator?  At the very least you are making your business subservient to the vendor’s view of the world.  Sometimes this can be good, sometimes it can be bad.

The traditional alternative is to build your own system.  For the purposes of this argument, I am placing this in the same category as buying a package from a vendor and then trying to tailor it to your environment.  The former can be very rewarding and can differentiate you greatly, but can also be very expensive.  The latter is almost always the worst of both worlds and creates expensive and long term projects, contorted business solutions, and a support headache long into the future.

So is there a third way?  I think so.

Your existing systems can adapt to changing business requirements if there is a process management layer capable of making sense of the existing infrastructure.  This can lead to business agility on a new scale if you implement it properly.

With the right tools and methodologies, new horizons are possible.  New standards in customer interaction, faster service, better compliance, process adherence, first time resolution and other desirable customer outcomes are all possible….in the short term.

Is anyone else getting the feeling that the mood is really changing against off-shoring?

Based on anecdotal evidence from my own range of contacts in enterprise sized companies, I am starting to notice a trend towards bringing business processes back in house.

In fact this is not just about off-shoring.  Even local outsourcing is being affected.  Companies are starting to realise that most business processes can be done more efficiently in house, especially with the aid of technology.

This is leading to a new wave of efficiencies, and just as importantly, local control of business priorities.  It is leading to a new ability to manage the ever changing business landscape.  This is leading towards the nirvana of increased business agility.  Powerful stuff and I am happy to say that Blue Prism is playing its part in delivering the vision.

This weblog is one year old – hip hip – hoorah!

As this is also my 111th post, cricket fans will understand why I am writing it standing on one leg.

Rather than wallow in cringing self congratulation, I want to use this opportunity to congratulate Wordpress, the platform of choice for the grown up blogger.  Wordpress has supported both my blogs for 12 months without the merest hint of a problem, which is more than can be said for my ISP.

I only wish our corporate website was so flexible.

Barclays results out today show that the credit crunch is hitting different banks in different ways.  Profits were a whopping £7.08bn, only 1% down on last year’s record.  That doesn’t sound like an industry in crisis.  You might be thinking “what credit crunch?”

However, the Northern Rock fiasco, coupled with Bradford & Bingley’s grisly profit figures clearly continues to dampen the sector.

When you consider that so called mortgage banks, Northern Rock and B&B, have little exposure to the US housing market (which caused Barclays to write down $1.6Bn), you have to wonder whether it is in fact the British housing market that is in crisis.

I mentioned after the last Barclays trading update, increased confidence in the credit card operation and this seems to have been well placed with profits up by one fifth.  Perhaps the diversified banking model is the only one that can survive these turbulent times.  Is the role of the little guy, focussed on one specific banking niche, dead?  Is it necessary to have a balanced portfolio of businesses within a bank to ride the swings and roundabouts of outrageous misfortune?

Perhaps it is time for Barclays to bid for Bradford & Bingley, before one of the American banks steps in to get it on the cheap.

In a most unsatisfactory end to another Government shambles, it has been announced that stricken mortgage bank, Northern Rock, will be nationalised until market conditions improve, and the value of the bank increases, whereupon Darling dreams that bidders will flock back to repay the British taxpayer a handsome dividend.

In the meantime, I expect this to be the worst decision for bank employees, shareholders, customers, and the banking industry in general, not to mention taxpayers in the long run.

It is widely acknowledged that a new brand is required for Northern Rock if it is to survive, never mind thrive.  Is the government going to rebrand it “Brown and Darling”  – a secure home for your money?

The Government is badly placed and very inexperienced at running a bank.  I expect that value in Northern Rock will actually be eroded and the taxpayer will lose out again.  In the meantime, no doubt Northern Rock’s competitors will be considering their legal positions regarding the special Government assurances and protections that Northern Rock savers enjoy.

What a mess.

However, you have to be somewhat sympathetic to Darling’s dilemma.  The mistakes were made very early in the affair with the Bank of England, the FSA and not least Northern Rock management all carrying some responsibility.  It is easy to blame the Government when there have been many parents of this problem child.

Whilst there is plenty of serious coverage of Jérôme Kerviel and his antics, I was amused to see French commentators renaming the stricken bank “Société Généreuse“.

The serious point to me is about governance.  Whether IT systems, banking processes, or capital management, there must always be governance, assurance, security surrounding human activity.  That is not say a lack of trust, far from it.  But there needs to be parameters within which people are allowed freedom to act, combined with systems that prevent them straying outside these, when to do so has such serious consequences on the organisation and its environment.

The larger the enterprise, the more this is so.

Joe McKendrick at ZDNet picked up on my previous post on short termism and budgets, and suggested that the time may be ripe for “Guerilla SOA”.

That’s exactly the sort of thought I had in mind.  However, if you can implement the guerilla initiatives in such a way as to keep an eye on the long term future even better.  So if you are using mashups for example, the architecture is flexible so new data sources can be plugged in and out down the line.  Guerilla initiatives are great at delivering value in local areas of the organisation but one day it will be desirable to join up the dots.

I guess I am arguing for a bottom up approach to SOA which is hardly a new suggestion, and not one that everyone agrees with, but seems well suited to these times.