Quick and dirty, the interview we did with Hans of Hans on Experience. He speaks about Le Web 3, how it is and how it should be. Sorry about the end part; we finally managed to choose our favorite camera.

Just a quick post to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2007! Or in German:

“Fröhliche Weihnachten und ein glückliches Neues Jahr”!

Santas in Hamburg

In addition to Maarten Kardux blog on “Forecasting business value key to investment decisions” I would like to take a look at the other side of the spectrum. In his blog Maarten supports the statement that IT investments should be supported by a sound business value projection. My point of view for this blog is a bit different then his: It depends completely on the project, managers, company and industry:
 

I have been in quite some meetings over the years to support project business cases. What I have seen is that board members do look at the financials but see the CFO as the one who should comment on the financial specifics (mostly on the budget side). Board members do look at what the “project” adds to their business from a quantitative point of view but have more connection with the qualitative point of view and how it would fit in their scope of stakeholders and strategy. Therefore it is important as IT manager or CIO to team with board members on their specific topics for a qualitative perspective and in-line with their strategy before presenting a “projects” business case.
 

As example: Quite some years ago (around 10) a chemical industry client asked us to help them replacing two old BI systems by a new one. Working on developing the business case for this client, it was hard to develop the financial side of the business case. Stating the implementation cost was easy, but defining what the company would save or add value by renewed industry and company insides was very difficult. This since it completely depended on how the new system would be used, if the management would support the output of renewed insides (and act on it) and more. We ended up in calculating the amount of business hours that could be saved and a calculated market share improvement of about 2,5 % (because of first mover advantage).
 

The qualitative side of the business case was much easier. A better user interface would help people giving them much more inside and understanding of what they could do with BI tool. Next to that we could easily link the project to the strategy of the business (consolidating figures from acquired companies) from a qualitative perspective.
 

Presenting the whole business case to the board, the whole discussion was around the qualitative side and not on the quantitative side.  Asking the board members what they thought about the financial gains the company could get when implementing the new BI systems reacted in smiling faces and answers like “we believe that the financial gains are there, but are not sure if this is the way to go. The reason that we have two BI systems is because of political choices and how hard the financials might be, it is not worth the political hassle we will create. The companies which we have taken over are simply not ready and willing to do this. You should have spoken to those companies, creating a team together with them for implementing this”.
 

Of course the above example is just one of many. It does not state that IT investments should not be supported by a sound business value projection but there is more then only the business value projection. In many cases these other sides are seen as much more important.
Therefore I would suggest to present business cases with quantitative and qualitative insides but do also not forget to link them to the various stake holders and internal power maps. As a help in this you can for instance use Porters Five Forces model. Spending too much time on the quantitative elements might even kill the whole financial side of the business case…
 

Next to that I have to admit that our knowledge on BI systems and business cases have grown tremendously over the last 10 years, which makes it much easier as well to develop such business cases nowadays.
 

Hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Do not hesitate to comment or react. Maarten and I are more then happy to see your emails and comments based on our blogs.
 

Have a nice holiday season!
 

On december 9 we had our annual company-wide party, this time again at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. It was a Bal Masqué…awesome!

lees verder…

Traveling has not stopped me from working through my 100-day plan, making sure our business is in good shape and focusing on increasing our industry knowledge and enterprise transformation for our clients. I am also looking at our people and how to make sure we retain the best by looking at their career paths and nurturing our future executives.

I also want to encourage all Resources executives to be actively involved in community meetings, diversity workshops and meeting our clients. I had the pleasure of attending a diversity workshop in Houston, community meetings in London where we had interesting debates about global warming, and a community meeting in Amsterdam where one of or Accenture colleagues shared his experience of working in Uganda on the anti-corruption agenda.

In October I also attended a unique event, “het cultuurbal”, held every year in Amsterdam during which members of the business community get together with leaders of the city’s cultural institutions and share some of their thoughts on how to be successful. It was very stimulating and interesting to learn how we all share common values, no matter where we were born and raised or live today.

As you know, I transferred my country managing director (CMD) position to Anja Groenewoud, who has recently introduced two awards recognizing those who are growing our business and people in the Netherlands.

I am happy to see that the Netherlands technology group, which has grown to over 400 highly skilled employees, was awarded the “Growing our people” award. I am also proud to have received an award for growing our business during my tenure as CMD. This award really belongs to all of us as we continue to find new ways to help our clients become high-performance businesses.

Finally should I dare talk about the hockey team I play with… We’re still zero wins for the season and something tells me that next season we might play in another league. Are we getting too old for these younger players? 

Met een naam als Abdeluheb Choho ben je eraan gewend geraakt dat je je leven lang je naam zult moeten spellen en je voortdurend zult moeten uitleggen waar je naam en dus ook jijzelf vandaan komen. Toen ik tweeëneenhalf jaar geleden voor mijn eerste sollicitatiegesprek bij Accenture kwam was ik dan ook licht verbaasd dat mijn naam en culturele achtergrond totaal niet ter sprake waren gekomen.

Inmiddels ken ik Accenture uiteraard goed en is het mij duidelijk geworden waarom naam en culturele achtergrond er bij sollicitatie én in je carrière bij Accenture niet toe doen. Accenture, met haar 146.000 mensen in 49 landen, heeft een mondiale blik en kijkt voornamelijk naar wat haar medewerkers kunnen en presteren. Wie je bent is een gegeven, dus gaat het erom wat je doet met je achtergrond, talent, kennis en ervaring. Deze meritocratische benadering zorgde ervoor dat ik mij snel thuis voelde bij Accenture. Sterker nog; bij Accenture is er een duidelijke houding dat diversiteit binnen een team juist zorgt voor sterkere teams dan teams die allemaal uit dezelfde soort mensen bestaan. Het is om deze reden dat Accenture een lange geschiedenis heeft met ‘diversity & inclusion’ en dat dit jaar een, uitgebreider dan voorheen, programma is gestart dat nog meer vrouwen, mensen met een andere culturele achtergrond en mensen met een fysieke beperking wil werven.
 

Waar ik bijzonder trots op ben is dat er binnen Accenture geen klassieke sociale overwegingen een rol hebben gespeeld bij het op de agenda zetten van diversiteit. Dus bij ons geen excuus-Achmed om te doen alsof diversiteit op de agenda staat. Met de stormachtige groei die Accenture doormaakt en de groeiende krapte op de arbeidsmarkt, bijvoorbeeld de krapte van mensen met een technische achtergrond op minimaal Hbo-niveau, is het voor Accenture van belang steeds aantrekkelijker te worden bij werknemers met bijvoorbeeld een andere culturele achtergrond.
 

Nu vraag ik mij af of wij als Accenture hier een nieuwe trend neerzetten of dat er meer bedrijven zijn waar diversiteit oprecht vanuit zakelijke motieven wordt ingestoken. Mocht jij als lezer van deze blog bij een dergelijk soort bedrijf werken dan hoor ik daar graag over!
 

Abdeluheb

A couple of weeks ago in the AutomatiseringsGids two Gartner analysts claimed that effort put into a financial validation of project propositions is a waste of time.  For the last 5 years ‘proving the business value of IT’ has been top of the list of CIO concerns. According to the authors IT departments spend too much valuable time in trying to come up with sound financial models to support investment decisions and forecast the business benefits. So far all have failed.  The difficulty is the emphasis on financial return, whereas large IT investments typically involve a whole range of operational changes to an organization. These are hard to quantify and usually out of reach for IT. In addition the authors claim board room decisions to be often irrational or at least disconnected from the revenue projections. The CIO should therefore focus on building trust through accurate project cost estimations and not waste time on financial calculus of perceived business benefits.

I fully agree with the difficulty in quantifying these benefits, however do not agree with the call to let the business ‘fly in the blind’ on expected benefits. Accenture research clearly indicates CIO’s are suffering from a credibility gap with the Board Room, precisely for their inability to sell IT as a business enabler.

A recent Accenture study among business and IT executives of over 100 medium to large sized companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland showed that two of the key IT productivity success factors are business-IT alignment and business-oriented IT strategy. Alignment between business & IT is still a challenging, strategic task, though.

In the past most IT departments I worked with were not very reliable and good at presenting the right business value forecasts for investment decisions. Effective procedures are generally not in place. However by distinguishing between core and commodity capabilities alignment between business and IT can be structured. High performance businesses apply a two-pronged strategy for their IT investments based on a set of commodity and value rules. Interestingly these leading companies not only spend significantly less than the global industry average on IT, but also manage to dedicate a higher percentage to innovation.

For the coming years IT spending is expected to increase and will be more tightly linked to business value, especially in industries where business priorities change from cost reductions to value creation. For IT to take up its responsibility in driving business value, the ability to quantify value creation will be key. Because of historic inability, the CIO first needs to demonstrate a solid business understanding before claiming his seat at the board table. It’s time the IT function becomes an integral and mature part of business operations. A sound business value projection of IT investments is an essential prerequisite!

I welcome your reactions, Maarten

Who is Maarten Kardux?

I am a manager within the Strategic IT Effectiveness consulting practice of Accenture. I joined Accenture early 2006 with 9 years of experience within IT as a project-, program and line manager. I have worked with a variety of organizations in different industries. In this blog I will regularly post my field experiences and personal views on topics of IT Value, IT Strategy and IT Transformation. I look forward to having many meaningful discussions!

I am finally back at home after spending two months on the road meeting with our leadership team and executives from around the world. I attended the senior executive kick-off meetings in Atlanta, Beijing and Paris, listening and participating from my new vantage point as chief executive of the Resources operating group. During these meetings, our leadership team laid out plans on how to take Accenture to the next level. I also had an opportunity to catch up with colleagues and meet new faces. These meetings and the networking that goes on are a powerful tool for our executives to share ideas from all over the world.

What impressed me the most during these meetings is the passion executives share in growing Accenture within the operating groups, geographies and our three growth platforms (business consulting, systems integration and technology and outsourcing). There’s a tremendous push in developing industry experts and building scale in areas of expertise such as customer relationship management, supply chain, finance and accounting outsourcing and systems integration.

As part of the kick-off meetings, each operating group organized break-out sessions to discuss how to grow the business. As I met and talked with the Resources senior executives, I shared my view that running our operating group as a high-performance business requires all of us to be entrepreneurs and risk takers, as well as team players and collaborators. All while having fun doing our job and challenging ourselves to be excellent business operators.

I also just attended the International Utilities and Energy Conference (IUEC) in Miami, which Accenture runs every year.  We hosted fantastic clients from Europe, the Americas and China.  We saw and heard from great speakers such as U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Marc Spitzer, Key Span President and COO Robert Fani and PG&E CFO Chris Johns.  They addressed the key issues utility and energy companies are focusing on, such as global energy policies, prices, and a stronger focus on renewables (in particular wind and solar power) and nuclear energy.

In addition, Dr. David DeLong addressed the issue of energy and utility companies’ ageing workforces. This area is of particular importance as our clients continue to look for ways to capture employee knowledge or, as some call it, “a company’s memory”.

The IUEC again proved to be a great opportunity for our clients to network and for us to step back and understand some of the key challenges they face every day.

We’re almost at the end of 2006, so it’s time to lookback at my ‘Predictionz for 2006′. I’ll have to link you to MSNCache for a backup of this post, as the original one got lost during our move to the new BlogPodium - I forgot to tag it, so I have no clue where it’s gone to…

“I expect a growth for RFID in the fields some fiels outside the supply chain like health, security/identification, but also luggage tracking at airports (which is already growing very fast). Mobile payments currently seem to peak in the US and Asia. I expect the Eurpean market to follow slowly, as within Europe there are many countries with many banks, which makes it complex to initiate this on a large scale respectively in an integrated way.

And just like Internet: RFID was put to the market, started hyping, but now it’s time to consolidate and look for profit-driven implementations rather than ‘for the sake of technology’.”

And, was I right? Well, of course - as long as I focus on finding what I’m looking for:

• Healthcare: Cardinal Health Deems RFID Pilot a Success, VDC: Pharma Item-Level RFID to Set Precedent
• Luggage tracking: Air France-KLM Embarks on RFID Luggage-Tag Trial
• Mobile payments: Rabobank introduces telecom services to enable wireless payments in the future

I skipped Security/Identification because there was, and still is, a lot to do about RFID in Passports: Dutch RFID Passport hacked, New RFID Passport Scare — Does it Matter?, Cracked it!, De eerste elektronische reispassen zonder bescherming. Observations like this make it difficult for the public to accept RFID. Especially because there are a lot of concerns regarding privacy. Therefore, clear but pragmatic legislation has to be put in place, and consumers need to be properly informed.

And where did I go wrong? Well, I underestimated the ‘for the sake of technology’. There’s a lot going on with new technologies like Gen2, Near Field UHF and also with the development of standards, for instance by EPCGlobal.  

So where is this heading for? Stay tuned for my predictions for 2007…

A few days back I discovered on Frankwatching that Ronald van der Aart started a weblog, Amazing PR!.

Ronald is Public Relations Manager at UPC Nederland and we’ve met at the ANP pers support seminar a month ago. He was there to talk about the UPC webcare team - a groundbreaking way in which UPC has entered the online discussions on their products and services. Basically, this team (1) monitors the internet on certain topics and (2) posts reactions when needed. This all with the objective to get the facts straight, not to lecture people on how they should feel about certain products. Which is the only way it will work of course.

His blog looks promissing. He really writes from his own passion, not from a UPC point of view.  Because of the real passion, he’s probably been able to post quite frequently up till know, which is the hardest part. Let’s hope he keeps it up!