What a CIO Cockpit must be able to do
"Today, most IT reports do not tell us very much"
Today, most companies' operations depend more than ever on using IT successfully. Most of their core business processes depend on it. Which makes it even more important to be clear about what condition IT is in throughout an organization.
Today, most IT reports do not tell us very much: the IT costs of the various departments are not comparable, the focus is on technical details about server failures or application response times, and decision-makers cannot always recognize immediately what the risks actually are. And the only way of finding out what's happening is to use a great deal of manual work, sifting through the data first, with the lead times that are involved.
Today, most IT reports do not tell us very much: the IT costs of the various departments are not comparable, the focus is on technical details about server failures or application response times, and decision-makers cannot always recognize immediately what the risks actually are. And the only way of finding out what's happening is to use a great deal of manual work, sifting through the data first, with the lead times that are involved.
CIO cockpit has to provide tailored views aggregated for each target group
One way to solve these problems is to introduce a CIO Cockpit. This compresses all the relevant IT data and information and presents it in transparent form. Which key indicators are used depends on who it is aimed at – which includes the CIO and specialist areas - and can be either business- or technology-oriented.
There are five different management levels a CIO Cockpit should be able to provide information with.
Level 1: Supervisory Board
To the Supervisory Board, the CIO Cockpit provides an overview of the main strategic projects and key IT risks involved. This can include such things as a traffic light symbol for meeting budget, time and specification constraints for the company's two or three projects that are most important in financial and operational terms, and those that are most prestigious. It can also include notes on selected IT risks and what they mean to the business, and ways of reducing them.
Level 2: Management Board
The Management Board gets the same information as the Supervisory Board, plus some control-relevant IT data. This includes an extended view of projects (e.g. traffic light symbols for all IT projects from a certain volume and up), a longer extract from the IT risk portfolio and the company's total IT budget, which distinguishes between actual, budget and target costs.
Level 3: Decision-makers at specialist areas
Information for decision-makers is more focused: they get process-related detail indicators that affects IT directly, like how much time it takes to release SIM cards for new mobile phone customers or display a new tariff structure on the insurance side. Specialist areas only get the indicators on IT costs and projects and to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) immediately relevant to them.
IT costs = information roadblock
Level 4: CIO
CIOs need a broader view of all main indicators and must be able to drill down to individual report levels. IT costs are a major information block here: it must be possible to break total costs down to regional or business unit level. Projects need to be able to be presented in detail at individual project level, and system availability and SLA compliance need to be viewed according to individual groups of applications systems or by specific agreements.
The Cockpit must also show long-term goals that are relevant to the CIO, like a target CMMI level's current status or target customer satisfaction index.
Level 5: Operational IT units
And, finally, operational IT units such as applications development or computer center operations are given individual, detailed insights into how available individual application systems or network components are as well as data on applications development productivity.
Useful hints when introducing a CIO Cockpit
As well as tailoring information to suit different target groups, the important things to remember when introducing a CIO Cockpit are that
There are five different management levels a CIO Cockpit should be able to provide information with.
Level 1: Supervisory Board
To the Supervisory Board, the CIO Cockpit provides an overview of the main strategic projects and key IT risks involved. This can include such things as a traffic light symbol for meeting budget, time and specification constraints for the company's two or three projects that are most important in financial and operational terms, and those that are most prestigious. It can also include notes on selected IT risks and what they mean to the business, and ways of reducing them.
Level 2: Management Board
The Management Board gets the same information as the Supervisory Board, plus some control-relevant IT data. This includes an extended view of projects (e.g. traffic light symbols for all IT projects from a certain volume and up), a longer extract from the IT risk portfolio and the company's total IT budget, which distinguishes between actual, budget and target costs.
Level 3: Decision-makers at specialist areas
Information for decision-makers is more focused: they get process-related detail indicators that affects IT directly, like how much time it takes to release SIM cards for new mobile phone customers or display a new tariff structure on the insurance side. Specialist areas only get the indicators on IT costs and projects and to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) immediately relevant to them.
IT costs = information roadblock
Level 4: CIO
CIOs need a broader view of all main indicators and must be able to drill down to individual report levels. IT costs are a major information block here: it must be possible to break total costs down to regional or business unit level. Projects need to be able to be presented in detail at individual project level, and system availability and SLA compliance need to be viewed according to individual groups of applications systems or by specific agreements.
The Cockpit must also show long-term goals that are relevant to the CIO, like a target CMMI level's current status or target customer satisfaction index.
Level 5: Operational IT units
And, finally, operational IT units such as applications development or computer center operations are given individual, detailed insights into how available individual application systems or network components are as well as data on applications development productivity.
Useful hints when introducing a CIO Cockpit
As well as tailoring information to suit different target groups, the important things to remember when introducing a CIO Cockpit are that
- Key indicators need to be tailored to the business concerned: IT indicators, for example, relate to corporate targets, like winning more new clients
- All indicators must be displayed intuitively and in easy to understand form, such as traffic lights, bar charts or cockpit displays
- The first thing to decide on is who is responsible for analyzing the causes systematically if matters go considerably off course
- Raw data from different source systems, like ERP systems or project databases, needs extracting automatically and analyzing in accordance with consistent rules
- All CIO Cockpit indicators must be linked to the appropriate incentivizing mechanism in each case.
For each significant deviation a systematic root-cause analysis with definition of countermeasures is performed
Analyzing causes systematically is really important. One tried and tested way of doing this is to break problems down into their individual components and decide what needs to be done about each of them. To show how causes can be analyzed, let us take an example of excessive actual costs:
A CIO Cockpit can provide valuable services, find how business processes and IT are related and identify risks early on. A CIO Cockpit needs to be introduced very carefully to use these benefits to the full, describing all the indicators involved in detail in a "cook book".
Proof of concept
Before introducing the Cockpit into IT systems, it is advisable to run a proof of concept, that is, check the plans against actual data in a manual table. This is the only way of ensuring that the indicators selected actually provide meaningful control information.
A CIO Cockpit can provide valuable services, find how business processes and IT are related and identify risks early on. A CIO Cockpit needs to be introduced very carefully to use these benefits to the full, describing all the indicators involved in detail in a "cook book".
Proof of concept
Before introducing the Cockpit into IT systems, it is advisable to run a proof of concept, that is, check the plans against actual data in a manual table. This is the only way of ensuring that the indicators selected actually provide meaningful control information.
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