You can check the video out from Channel 9 here

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I’ve talked in the past on this blog about the challenges the current generation faces from not having sound fundamentals when it comes to technology projects, but another equally important issue is the concept of technology for technology’s sake.  What I mean by this phrase is that we can’t just look at technology as the means to solve all of our problems, and simply throwing technology at a business problem is not going to make it go away.  When I’m mentoring new technologists and even talking to customers about implementing a technology project one of my favorite phrases is “projects are 80% people and 20% technology and the technology part is easy”.  Most of the time the technology part of a project is the easy part, remember at the end of the day it is just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s that tell the computer what to do.  The challenge comes in aligning the people and business to the technology.  I believe all successful technology/ICT projects focus on three core aspects regardless of the technology you are implementing:

1. Information Architecture
2. Technical Architecture
3. Training and Education

Wikipedia defines Information Architecture as the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems.  The English version of this is the flow of information through the technology, business processes, relationship between information, and it’s relevance to the business process.  If we are trying to automate the process of approving a document for public consumption on the public website we might need to go through a formal review and approval process.  This process has people that must be a part of this approval (called actors in UML language), and changes to the document happen throughout the process (revisions).  Information architecture is the process of mapping who is involved in the process and what that process looks like from beginning to end, and any information that needs to be captured throughout the process (who approved the document, who made edits and changes to the document, what edits and changes they made, what kind of information does this document contain, etc.).  This is a critical step in ensuring that the technology solution is delivering business value and provides a roadmap for implementing the technology part of the project.

Business value is the key here, we are not just implementing this technology because it is “cool”.  The question(s) to always ask yourself are:

1. Is this technology project going to increase our revenue?
2. Is this technology project going to reduce costs?
3. Is this technology project going to give us a competitive advantage?

I’m open to hearing more suggestions around questions to ask, but in my experience all well intentioned technology projects can be grouped into one or more of those three questions.  Making sure the project is answering at least one of those questions is the key to ensuring it is delivering business value.

Technical architecture is the 20% technology part of the project, this is selecting the right technology to meet the business needs and implementing it correctly within the business.  Plenty of models and processes exist to ensuring success, but I’d recommend folks take a look into ITIL and the MSF framework as a starting point.  The reason I believe that this stage of the project is the easy part is that if you successfully built a sound information architecture this phase of the project is simply mapping those requirements to the features of the technology, understanding any gaps, and addressing them.

Training and education is in my opinion the most important part of a project and the one overlooked the most.  Even with a sound information architecture and a sound technical architecture and implementation the system will not deliver the value to the business if nobody uses it.  How many times have we been a part of a technology project thinking we delivered the best thing since sliced bread and then nobody used the system?  The primary reason is that we skipped this step of the project or didn’t do it well enough.  Call it end user adoption, end user training, lunch and learns, or whatever, but making sure the users of the system adopt the technology is the only way to make sure you realize the ROI and business value of the project.  This is one of the reasons I’ve embraced and adopted an agile approach with projects, agile doesn’t have to just be focused on projects that have a software development component.  The entire purpose of Agile is to iterate a solution over time, delivering value and more important gaining user feedback EARLY in the process.  This concept can be applied to any project and especially shines doing technology projects.  Constantly gaining and interacting with users during the development process ensures you have correctly understood what they need from the solution, gets them engaged and involved in the project early, and provides the project team with continual feedback.  Gaining that early buy in and including the end users as a part of the project team is key to success.

The key thing to understand in this blog post is about the core ideals of doing successful projects, there are many other components described in depth in many different methodologies and project approaches, but if you look across all of them you will see these three concepts as a recurring theme.  The rest of the project and concepts in these project methodologies revolve around execution and process.  Technologists need to take the above to heart because it is what separates geeks from business savvy geeks!

I’m interested to hear about others peoples experience in delivering successful and unsuccessful technology/ICT projects, can you map the successful ones to containing all of the above components?  Which step was excluded in the unsuccessful ones?

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Mind Mapping is a tool I added to my arsenal a few years ago and I can’t live without it now. For organizing concepts and ideas quickly in a visual way goes a long way at being able to organize and dissect a complex idea or to spur creative thought. I’ve used it to organize the hierarchy of SharePoint installations by breaking down farm configurations, site collection architecture, and demonstrate content publishing paths, and for figuring out the site hierarchy of a web site for a client. I started years ago using a product from MindJet called Mind Manager, but have recently messed around with MindMeister and Xmind because of the on-line collaborative component. The next best thing to mind mapping is collaborating with someone else on the mind map! MindJet also has an on-line offering, but they didn’t offer one at the time. I have settled on Xmind because of the functionality of being able to incorporate multiple ideas in one map, the ability to have a desktop version, and the collaboration aspect.

Have you given mind mapping a try? What was your experience? If you’ve tried it what tool do you recommend?

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The half-life of knowledge in technology is 6 months. Half of what I know sitting here right now will be obsolete in 6 months, that is the speed at which technology moves and why you can never stop learning.

I’m sure there are some people that are tired of hearing me say that over and over again, especially to new technology professionals. This article got me thinking about it again. The author talks about how we age as human beings and discusses the book “Aging Well” and the process we all experience through life. The thing that caught my attention was towards the end of the post when he stated the following:

So what has all this got to do with Learning and Change? I think it gets to the heart of the matter. Firstly, you need to be adaptable, to change as your context does – as Valliant puts it, ” to make Lemonade from Lemons”. To embrace the changes you are experiencing and to explore the new situation – to learn, to go to the Mountain, don’t wait for it to come to you.

That is so true in today’s uncertain economic times and is preaching to the choir when it comes to technology professionals who deal with constant change throughout our career. We need to embrace this change and exercise some of our leadership skills to help innovate and grow both personally and professionally.

I’m a regular reader of Zen Habits and think Leo’s post for today ties into this topic perfectly, you can read it here. Everyone who has been involved in a technology project knows that nothing ever goes according to plan, and being aware and accepting of that is the key to dealing with the project issues with a positive attitude. As much as we might like you can’t control everything and everyone around you, but you can display leadership and guidance. I loved Harvard Business Review’s management tip of the day as well “Don’t let the Recession Halt Development” in which they encourage leaders to continue to challenge your team and provide them meaningful work.

Sometimes life and circumstances do get us down, but especially for technology professionals we can not let our foot off the gas when it comes to learning and development. As leaders we must strive to constantly provide challenging work for our teams and find ways to help them find some meaningful work, especially today. So what are you going to do right now to better yourself and/or your team? I’d love to hear about it.

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The birth of Everyday CIO is that theme.  Here we are going to explore the hands on practical use of technology in the “real” world that has and continues to shape my life and the world around me.  I want to explore how I got to this point in my life and what influenced me on my journey (the past), what my daily challenges that I face in my life today (the present), and where are we headed in the wonderful land of Information and Communications Technology (the future).  I hope to reconnect with some old friends in this pursuit and build some new relationships along the way, but I somehow I think I’m just going to enjoy the journey!

Ian

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I am a father, a partner in a business, a husband, a son, a friend, a mentor.  The purpose of this blog is to explain how I have become the Chief Information Officer of organizations, my family, my friends, and myself.  How do you take this ever changing world of technology and apply it practically to your everyday life to truly improve it and empower yourself and others?

This blog is designed to try and answer that question through my personal and professional experiences.  Everyday CIO is also a look into the key approaches and concepts to get beyond technology for technology’s sake, to get beyond it as just a tool, and to understand how it can empower you and others to accomplish great things.

Ian

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