Dr Phillip J Windley is a recognized expert in using IT to add value to the business. In an earlier role, he served as the CIO for the State of Utah,serving on Governor Mike Leavitt’s cabinet and as a member of his senior staff. In this capacity, he was responsible for the effective use of all IT resources in the state and advised the Governor on technology issues. During his tenure, the Utah State was repeatedly recognized by many national groups for its excellence in the areas of IT and eGovernment.

Prior to his appointment as CIO, Dr Windley served as vice-president for product development and operations at Excite@Home, managing a large, interdisciplinary team of product managers, engineers and technicians, developing and operating large-scale Internet and e-commerce products. Prior to joining Excite@Home, Dr Windley served for two years as
CTO of iMALL, an early leader in electronic commerce. He has been a professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the University of Idaho. At BYU, he founded and directed the Laboratory for Applied Logic.
Dr Windley received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis in 1990.

Business leaders want business intelligence and business process automation, what we give them are desktops and networks. That's the gap where CIOs fall short Dr Phillip J Windley, former CIO, State of Utah, USA

Dr Windley now famously runs a blog on enterprise computing (www.windley.com). In an interview with Dataquest, he shares some thought-provoking ideas on managing technology within the enterprise and governments:

If you were to divide the deployment of IT in government/ administration into phases, at what point is the Govt of Utah currently in?
I see four essential phases: Simple web-site; Online government; Integrated government; Transformed government

Most government IT is operating at level two right now.  We’ve moved well past simple Web sites in most instances, but are stuck on the integration part.  There’s no surprise there—integration in government is hard because of the fragmented nature of the bureau–cracy. Integrated government requires end-to-end electronic transactions, automated RFP and procurement processes, cross-department sharing of information, automated problem-resolution, and employee and citizen self-service. The fourth step is what we really ought to be shooting for. In step four, services are personalized and targeted.  They cut across department and program boundaries. Why is it that I have to go to different offices to get different services?  

What are the current challenge areas in IT deployment?
There are several.  Everyone is worried about security and many of them are clueful enough to see that in the 21st century, to have security you’ve got to have identity management.  In the past, we’ve managed security by building big moats around our organizations and tried to keep the bad guys out by installing firewalls and hardening servers and routers. There has always been a friction between these actions and the needs of the business. In the past, the friction has been small enough that we were able to get away with telling the business guys to live with it. Now we find that business increasingly requires that our partners, suppliers, and even our customers have access to data and services deep within the network.  Another area that gets a lot of attention is integration and interoperability.  CIO’s solved one set of problems in the 90s by installing CRM and ERP systems only to find that these are the very systems that need to be integrated to support business process automation.  Now, everyone’s back at the drawing board buying EAI tools or exploring Web services.  Personally, I think Web services are the best hope here, but many organizations are put off by the continually evolving standards. There are some strategies to overcome this.  First and foremost, jump in and start some pilot projects.  There’s also relatively inexpensive software called Web services intermediaries, that provides a degree of "standards-proofing." 

What best practices do you recommend in the area of technology management?
Wow, I could write a book on that question. I saw part of my job as a CIO in terms of being a technology filter and injector.  At times, I had to cut off a technology or trend because it wasn’t right for what we were doing, but more often, I found myself injecting new technologies into the consciousness of the organization. That’s one reason I started a blog: To let the IT organization know what new technologies were around that could influence their jobs.  No one has the time to understand every piece of technology that floats by and so we all rely on human filters to some degree or another to tell us what’s important and what to pay attention to. The CIO ought to play an important part in that process. 

Windley’s Technology Decision Priority Matrix

On structuring the IT organization, I have written a white paper on the Modular IT organization. The paper argues for flexibility in organizing IT, but says it ought to be done using a pretty simple guiding principle. There are basically only three core activities that any IT organization performs: Value innovation, solutions delivery and service provisioning. Value innovation occurs when an organization uses IT to  change and improve how it conducts its day-to-day business operations.  It requires an ongoing analysis of how IT can be used to strengthen an agency’s  central roles and mission, enhance customer relationships, and connect with  partners. The overall goal of value innovation is to improve organizational performance by ensuring  that IT goals and activities of the organization are fully aligned with its business goals.

Services are IT utilities or commodities such as network connectivity, desktop computers, email and other servers, data centers, and  other aspects of IT that support solutions delivery. Services are the infrastructure that other IT activities are built on.  Service provisioning is the process of  deploying and operating needed services at the lowest possible cost.  Since  services must be reliable, cost-effective, and secure, the service provisioning  organization must spend a great deal of time and effort developing and  implementing processes and metrics. The guiding principle: Organize your IT shop to pay attention to things that couldn’t be outsourced. In most cases this means paying attention to value innovation first, solutions delivery second and service provisioning third. 

What are the overall trends you see in IT that could have a bearing on how and which technologies get taken up for deployment within enterprises?
The primary trends I see in IT today all have to do with what I call connected computing: The use of decentralized resources to achieve IT goals. This shows itself in mobile computing, in instant messaging, and in Web services etc.

What is your observation on the amount of strategic say that a CIO has in running the organization? Or is it that the CIO is relegated to be the operational head of just another management function?
I have always believed that the CIO’s job is to support that business and that’s a strategic function.  Unless you’ve got a seat at the table, and are meeting business leaders of the organization, you can’t hope to understand what the business needs.  Business leaders want business intelligence and business process automation, what we give them is desktops and networks.  That's where CIO’s fall short. 

What is your response/reaction to Nicholas Carr’s "IT Doesn’t Matter"?
Carr makes some good points in the article, but ultimately misses the point. For example, Carr makes the point that thinking strategically may be more fun than the hard work of operational excellence, but the latter is much more likely to be the cause of problems for a company. He also says that vendor needs, more than company needs, frequently drive IT purchases.

So, where exactly is the problem?
The problem is that he’s only thinking about the problem in one dimension. There are two dimensions: Expense of the IT project on the vertical axis and the resulting increase in competitive advantage along the horizontal axis. Take your projects, get a group of your best managers together and go through an exercise where you rank each project on these two dimensions and then plot them on the chart.

The first step of the analysis is easy. Do everything in the green. You probably don’t want to do anything in the white until you’ve finished everything in the green. Now, you may be thinking: Never do anything in the red. These are not likely to improve competitive advantage significantly and they’re expensive. The second step in the analysis is to classify the projects in the red quadrant into two types. To understand the distinction, let me give you an example. If you’re in the hotel business and you classified your expenses, "clean sheets" would fall into the red zone. Its expensive to provide your guests with "clean sheets" and all your competitors do it too, so there’s no competitive advantage. Still you'd be a fool to decide that you ought to slash the laundry budget and let you guests sleep in dirty beds.

So ‘clean-sheets’ are ‘must-do but expensive-to-do’ areas. What does it mean in the context of IT?
There are a number of "clean sheets" projects in IT: Reliability, scalability, availability, security, desktops, LANs. You can see why these things fall in the red zone: They’re expensive and, in theory, anyone can do them. In practice many don’t. Finding out best practices in these areas isn’t difficult and skilled people who know how to run these kinds of operations are available. I think the problem is that these issues are "red-zone" issues and it is easy to get distracted by fun "strategic" projects and let "red zone" projects languish because they don’t provide significant competitive advantage.

That’s short sighted because even though red zone projects can be done by anyone in theory, they are rarely executed well and many companies fail for lack of execution even with a strong competitive advantage in other areas.

So how much do you agree with Carr?
I don’t agree with every thing Carr has written in this article, in fact I think its tone is likely to cause many to miss the entire point. Even so, CIOs would do well to look at projects and vigorously pursue any that fall in the green zone, while never losing sight of "clean sheets."

The tough thing about living in the red zone is that it is not sexy. It is hard to do and no one’s going to come up to you and say ‘Hey, I noticed the computers didn’t go down again!’ It’s thankless work and it’s difficult to convince people to spend much on it. The goal is achieve operational excellence and do it as efficiently (read cheaply) as possible. It requires different priorities, a different culture and organizational changes. But "red zone" work is the basis on which everything else is built and success in other areas is unlikely if this is ignored.

Easwardas Satyan in Mumbai

Page(s)   1