As counter-intuitive as it seems, it’s methodical planning and relentless communication that works to breed agility, according to Dianah Neff, former CIO of the city of Philadelphia and now a senior partner at Civitium LLC. She and several other 2006 Premier 100 IT Leaders also promote the adoption of standard processes and procedures as the basis of deployment flexibility. In other words, agility is very much a matter of design.
When Neff was appointed CIO of Philadelphia in 2001, the country’s fifth-largest city had virtually no IT governance in place. Decisions were made but not always executed. Goals were set, but projects were never initiated.
Neff was the driving force behind Wireless Philadelphia, an ultra-high-profile, fast-moving, multimillion-dollar project to build the biggest municipal wireless Internet system in the country.
“The easy part is the technology,” Neff says. “The truly
“there’s some
misconception
about agility.
it’s not just about
changing rapidly.”
EArL MOnsOur,
DirEctOr Of strAtEgic
infOrMAtiOn tEcHnOLOgiEs,
MAricOPA cOunty cOMMunity
cOLLEgE District
hard effort is defining needs, creating a vision that others can understand and embrace, and then developing a road map to achieve that vision.”
“There’s some misconception about agility. It’s not just about changing rapidly,” says Earl Monsour, director of strategic information technologies for the Maricopa County Community College District in Tempe, Ariz. “It’s about responding quickly and appropriately, which requires having a long-range plan in place at all times. With a plan, you can make adjustments as technology changes and business opportunities arise, rather than reinventing the wheel each time change occurs.”
Maricopa’s long-range plan to overhaul its core WAN, which supports the district’s 10 colleges, is a prime example.
For over two years, Monsour continually talked about the need for a major network upgrade and the plan for making that happen. During that time, the college district’s
IT organization successfully implemented several network enhancements, including a network load-balancing system and two storage-area networks. These projects worked to boost executive confidence in the larger network overhaul proposal, and when it came time to formally request the budget to perform the overhaul, “we had approval for that major investment within a month,” Monsour says. “The reason is because we had planned and communicated our plan so much beforehand. The plan constantly has to be communicated. It just can’t sit on the shelf.”
Premier 100 honoree and Lafayette Consolidated Government CIO Keith Thibodeaux firmly believes that by identifying and standardizing certain technology and business process frameworks, Lafayette is better able to collaborate with other governmental and nongovernmental entities, which is critical to its own organizational agility. Frameworks take into consideration systems and organizational interdependen-
cies, required IT and business skills, and the long-term costs and ROI of IT.
Using the framework approach, Lafayette Consolidated Government is working with five universities in the state and the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative to create its own research network that will support the $20 million Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise Center.
The center’s 3-D technology is used by the oil and gas industry to model seismic data and reservoirs. But for most of the region’s small and medium-size independent oil and gas companies, the technology was out of financial reach. So Lafayette’s Economic Development Authority stepped in, along with Silicon Graphics Inc., to create an immersive visualization facility.
“We think of this as a co-op model. We can give the oil and gas companies the same competitive technology [as the large oil companies, most of which have moved to Hous-ton], but no individual company has to spend the money for it,” Thibodeaux explains.
Under a proposed utility computing model, Lafayette Consolidated Government, which already owns and operates its own electric utility
agility enablers
awareness
Knowing what’s
going on
The Right
Information
productivity
Executing well
day to day
The Right Processes
and Operations
agility
flexibility
Confronting expected change The Right Options
adaptability
Confronting unexpected change The Right Reactions
SourCE: GarTnEr InC., 2006
References:
Archives