The CIO Assistant's Blog

This summer, Coca-Cola launches a new product. No, it’s not another new Coke to compete or cannibalize the Coke “Classic”. It’s a Coke vending machine. It’s called the Freestyle.

So what’s exciting about that? According to Coca-Cola press release it’s the “next generation fountain beverage dispenser“. What is remarkable is that it represents a rare breakthrough in market research and product development (for more details, see Mary Hayes Weier’s article in InformationWeek). What is even more remarkable, to me, was the successful collaboration between the IT department and other business functions to produce a complete and comprehensive business product/tool, not just a supporting application as usual. This collaboration perfectly illustrates the 3 practical Alignment actions that I have suggested in my previous post Business-IT, Aligned? Let’s take a look at them:

Apparently, Coca-Cola’s IT did it this time in collaboration with R&D. The remarkable fact, according to Bob Evans at InformationWeek, is that this is the first time ever that these 2 teams worked closely on a project, “a shocking revelation when you consider that Coca-Cola company has been around for about a century.” Undoubtedly, Coca-Cola’s CIO must spent considerable time with the head of R&D to come to a meeting of the minds about who’s responsible for what to ensure that neither gap nor duplication occurred in the work of both parties.

2. The “Wow” Factor – “IT people, at least those who worked for me in the past, are proud of their work but they are even prouder if that work is recognized, either explicitly by a Thank You note or implicitly by sharing the spotlight with another team. Find your “WOW” examples. Carefully select those that scream Alignment. Make they hugely visible.”

There is no finer example of the “Wow” factor than this Freestyle dispenser. It’s a multi-function machine that can serve the customers on demand, while acting as a data collection device to feed inventory management, product development and customer preference analysis. Mary Hayes Weier called it “Coke’s front-line robotic army for business intelligence”. It deploys multiple technologies, ranging from Microsoft’s Windows CE and System Center Configuration Manager for Mobile Devices, to SAP’s Point-of-Sales Management and Business Warehouse, to RFID readers and sensors, to Verizon’s virtual private wireless network. It took four years to make it works.

I suspect that many hours or weeks of these 4 years were spent at the intersection between technologies, not just information ones. There is nothing uncertain about its “Wow” factor and its visibility. And Coca-Cola’s IT is sharing the spotlight with R&D for this innovative product.

3. Make Alignment your Guiding Principle – “Sprinkle your talks, your plans, your reports, your blogs and tweets (if you are the social media-savvy type) with Alignment terminology.”

Less known to the public is the collaborative process that Coca-Cola used in this product development. It’s called the Common Innovation Framework. Let’s hear from InformationWeek who profiled Coca-Cola’s CIO, Jean-Michel Arès in its Global CIO 50 list:

“Arès has led a push to let employees collaborating among themselves as well as with bottlers and customers. And this effort has become central to Coke’s broader effort to remake its business.
For internal collaboration, the company has implemented what it calls the Common Innovation Framework, a system that combines project management and business intelligence capabilities. The framework lets operating units in 50 countries search for and borrow approaches used in developing and marketing any of 2,800 beverages that Coke produces. When a product like Coke Zero launches in the United States, the next countries doing rollouts can then borrow what worked.”

Collaboration. Common. These are Alignment terms that were sprinkled in all Coca-Cola IT talks, across 50 countries. Successfully creating an innovative product out of that is called “walking the talk”.

Do you have another example of successful Business-IT Alignment? How about your own? Please share with us.

Photo by Timo Elliott - Freestyle is a trademark of Coca-Cola

          alignment, business, CIO, Coca-Cola, IT, product development, R&D

I was recently attracted to a discussion on LinkedIn’s CIO Network Forum started by Mark Chillingworth, Editor at IDG Communications. He referred to a CIO-UK article entitled “IT-business alignment is still on the CIO agenda“, with the sub-title “Align with the IT, not the other way around” and the following teaser:

The debate is switching, the business should be aligning with the IT systems available to reduce costs.
Increasingly CIOs are telling CIO UK that they can get their organisation to modify its practices to fit the applications in order to keep costs down. Is this your experience?
Read what Rorie Devine and Ian Dobb, 2 leading CIOs say here: http://www.cio.co.uk/debate/118575/it-business-alignment-is-still-on-the-cio-agenda

Eager to find an example of unconventional thought on Business-IT Alignment, I read through the article and was fairly disappointed with the way the story was reported. Why? Because none of the 2 CIOs in question were saying that “business should be aligning with the IT systems”. In fact, here is what they have said [word for word, with all the typo intact] in reply to the analyst’s question:

CIO-UK: “If you were approached by a fresh-faced, newly-appointed CIO and she asked you for your advice in how to pursue IT-business alignment, what would you say?” 

Dobb: “First, you need to understand the board’s expectations. Are you expected to be a commidity order-taker, a service provider, a business partner or more of an entrprenuerial innovator? Second, make sure you have the right team around you – you need to be able to delegate on detail issues with confidence, so that you don’t have to constantly check that the email is working OK. Third, you need to be proactive and learn how to influence. If you have some good ideas, make sure you are tabling them with business leaders. Be aware of the business and board and their learning styles; some people like numbers, some like pictures. Don’t talk techie, talk business.”

Devine: “First, you have to understand your opportunity and the environment. You have to really take time to understand the context and challenges that the business is facing – what you’re there for. Second, make sure you realise the potential of your team. Communicate well; your people want to see a clear vision and a plan. Third, don’t let one issue (for example your SAP system’s performance) become synonymous with what you do – don’t become a single-issue team. At the same time though it’s important to avoid focusing purely on the big picture – you have to deliver too! Lastly, measure your performance as a team and try to keep getting better and better. If you don’t measure, how do you know you are getting better? It’s vital to choose the right things to measure – things that matter to the business and the strategies and priorities that are in place. We’ve found that it’s really productive to form specific teams to take those key metrics and take responsibility for improving performance in those areas.”

So how did CIO-UK come to the conclusion (that Business should now align to IT)? I have no idea. Throughout the entire article, there is only one place, one single statement made by Devine that remotely related to this idea:

“… The chance of success is far better if you don’t customise. If you take an off-the-shelf package you are buying standards. Focusing on the customer expectation is where you will find competitive advantage – not in the customisation of a packaged application.”

But he was talking about commodity process:

Dobb and Devine were in clear agreement on this: when it comes to application software that encodes business processes, you purchase a package if you want a commodity process; if you want to differentiate the business based on a process, you shouldn’t buy a package.

As discussed in my previous post What Business Would IT Align To?, I deplored the attitude of some IT press to take pleasure in doing IT-bashing by portraying IT Leadership as out of touch with “business”. This time, it reversed the position and I don’t know which one is worse. By blatantly twisting the statements of two good, honest CIOs into some kind of empty victory for IT, they just stoke the fire of indignant protests from both sides. Once again, the CIO’s were made into shortsighted leaders who forced Business into making changes to save a few bucks while potentially curtail or damage its ability to compete in the future.

What do you think? Am I reading it correctly or does my anti-sensajournalism get the better of me? But before answering the questions, please read the entire article. Aside from the title/subtitle/teaser aberration, the advices from Dobb and Devine are solid. And the absence of their “clarification” once again proves my point that IT is a Quiet Bunch.

Postscripts.- Not all press articles are that bad. I found one much to my liking here: The Changing Roles of the CFOs and CIOs. In this Enterprise Management Quarterly article by Andrew Jesse, VP of Professional Services at Basware Corp., he pointed out a number of opportunities “for CFOs and CIOs to become more closely aligned to provide greater business value for their organizations enterprise-wide.” Happy reading again.

          alignment, business, CIO, IT, quiet force

This is the third post in the recent series on Business-IT Alignment where the issue is examined from both sides of the coin so to speak. The objective is to demonstrate that Business-IT Alignment is possible if there is a level playing field where both Business and IT are accountable for their action, not just one (IT) performing for the other (Business) to judge. This post will show how the CIO can use a simple approach to keep tab of the progress of the Alignment effort. But before getting there, let’s review quickly the first 2 posts.

In Part 1, entitled “What Business Would IT Align To?”, the readers were shown that “Business” is an elusive term, used by different groups in different contexts and possibly for different agendas. Rarely that Business is meant the overarching entity which encompasses an organization, its people, products, processes, facilities, customer base, etc. In practice, Business sometimes means the executives or heads of business units who deal with IT on a variety of subjects, ranging from specific initiatives to ongoing support operations. In other times, Business also means the more abstract notions of Culture, Strategy, or Money. To say IT should align to Business means that IT organization should spend wisely (no upgrades this year), that IT processes should be in sync with corporate culture, that IT plans should be supportive of corporate strategies, that IT leaders should be true partners with other corporate executives, that IT people should speak the same language as other business functions … a tall order for any human being or group. A misstep happens, Bang … IT is not aligned. Is it fair?

In Part 2, entitled “Which IT Needs Business Alignment”, it was further explained that IT is also evolving itself as a group, similar to the way that species evolve in a darwinian fashion. It means that there are parts of acknowledged and entrenched IT functions that are no longer valuable because they bring no significant perceived values, either because Business can get them elsewhere at competitive costs or because they are taken for granted similar to the air that we breathe. It also means that some parts of IT have managed to acquire new skills and capabilities that could serve Business well. By focusing the spotlight on the low-value areas and ignoring the potentially high-value contribution of others, Business (or whoever says to represent it – including the IT trade press) tends to look at IT in a partial and somewhat unfair way.

How do we redress the situation and view Business-IT Alignment in a more balanced way? How can we weight in the positive versus negative contributions of IT? Should we measure the Alignment over an extended time frame or take a snap shot at a certain time? This post will attempt to answer these questions.

Alignment is in the eyes of the beholders

Despite all the focus, trade press coverage and surveys about Business-IT Alignment, there is so far no evidence of scientific measurements of such alignment. Not even a semi-scientific one. This subject of Alignment is not unlike any other complex and abstract notions such as Success or Happiness. We will know Alignment when we meet one, but we cannot define it in terms that are unequivocal and measurable. For example: Does a successful implementation of a (fill-in-the-blank)-backed initiative counts as an instance of Alignment? How many such instances need to happen during a year to gain the accolade of “truly aligned” IT? Three? Ten? It’s all relative.

So the first step in making Alignment happen is to engage the Business side and jointly define the Terms of Alignment. Since there are multiple representatives of Business, the CIO needs to seek all of them out, not just the obvious or visible ones. Find the opportunity to engage them and start the dialogue. Ask your business partners what do they feel about the business of IT Alignment. You need to show the Business side that you are serious about getting aligned. You need to overcome the fear of confirmation (Fred, you’re damn right. Where was IT when I need them last month?) or the risk of denial (What alignment? Sorry Fred, I have nothing to discuss and no time for philosophizing now!) That’s would be a big first step.

But what can you do next?

Alignment in Action

Here are a few pointers that you may consider, going forward:

1. No Dashboard - By all means, have all kinds of appropriate dashboards ready: the CEO Dashboard, the CIO Dashboard, the Enterprise Dashboard …, but please, NO Alignment Dashboard. Alignment is NOT a Performance. You just cannot effectively measure Alignment as you do with Quality, Productivity, Resource Utilization, etc. Attempting to build a formal one opens the door for critique on dashboard in general, and by extension, all the other legitimate ones. It doesn’t mean that you, as the CIO, cannot have one (or many). Just make it (them) informal, a one-to-one covenant with each representative of the business side (e.g. one with the CEO, one with the CFO, one with each Division Head, so on and so forth).

2. The “WOW” factor - Many years ago, I put up outside of my office a “WOW” board. On it, I had my people posting all kinds of thing, from ISO-9001 Certificate to News Release about the latest Win. The only condition for posting was that the piece must elicit a “Wow” by others. Any piece which received a “So What?” reaction was unceremoniously removed. It was a very competitive, dog-eats-dog type of action by groups vying for a piece of estate on that board. One funny thing happened after a while: all self-served pieces disappeared, to be replaced by Thank You notes from satisfied clients, cover pages of awarded contracts signed by both Sales and IT teams, … Well, you get the idea. IT people, at least those who worked for me in the past, are proud of their work but they are even prouder if that work is recognized, either explicitly by a Thank You note or implicitly by sharing the spotlight with another team. Find your “WOW” examples. Carefully select those that scream Alignment. Make they hugely visible.

3. Make Alignment your Guiding Principle - Or at least consider it your Critical Success Factor (CSF). Find the way to weave Alignment into your IT shop. Sprinkle your talks, your plans, your reports, your blogs and tweets (if you are the social media-savvy type) with Alignment terminology. Meeting of the mind. Have all ducks in a row. Stay in sync. March in lockstep. Sooner rather than later, you will see your staff picking them up (provided that what you say is authentic) in their behavior, then their partners on the business side, then … the IT press, I hope.

One last thing. Business keeps changing. So does IT. In order to stay aligned, you need to adapt and adjust constantly, from both sides. The glorious outcomes recorded last month or last week are now things of the past. Are you still aligned today? This is the only thing that counts.

          alignment, business, CIO, IT, leadership