Helping your team understand the power of data
When it comes to leadership, there are several definitions; however, the one I like best is from Susan Ward:
“Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act toward achieving a common goal.”
Being a leader has been the most demanding and most rewarding role I’ve held during my IBM career. A good leader recognizes that leadership isn’t telling or providing orders to your teams, but rather listening and coaching them to understand what success looks like. It’s providing the necessary guardrails that allow your team to go off course, course correct, and learn from the experience. A good leader also provides support so individuals can build confidence and become leaders themselves.
The Hybrid Business Management (HBM) team was assembled in November 2020, with the primary mission of delivering the end-to-end operational intelligence needed to manage the various offerings in our CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms organization. Basically, we were asked to bring all the moving parts together and provide real-time data to enable informed business decisions across the organization. Simple, right?
For years, our team operated in a reactive and manually intensive mode. But, application teams need to make decisions rapidly when it comes to development, operations, and migration activity cycles in a hybrid cloud environment. They need to know how to address outages; they want to understand their migration and operational costs; they require accurate and real-time data to make important decisions.
Collecting necessary data for teams presented three primary challenges for the HBM team:
1. What data is needed?
2. Where is the data?
3. How to get to the data with speed?
What data is needed?
To determine what data was needed, I asked the HBM team the following questions:
· What critical questions are being asked that we cannot easily answer?
· What questions aren’t being asked that should be? Do we have the data to answer?
· How much of the data is actionable or informative? Is it being used to drive any activities?
· What business decisions are being made with the current data?
As the HBM team began to answer these questions, they started seeing a common theme — data that was provided to the application teams wasn’t being used or it arrived so late that it was no longer useful. They also realized that the more appropriate questions were not always being asked. For example, we have a monthly report that tracks all open risks and target closure dates, categorized by severity and functional area. I asked the team: “Does this information provide a clear picture of our current risk management status?” They answered that it was incomplete. They realized we needed a better understanding of how the risk impacted the business, which critical applications were at risk, how long the risks were open, and how many risks required extended time to close. Because of this discovery, the team is now pursuing how to implement a new set of metrics that focuses on more insightful KPIs.
The HBM team took a similar approach in uncovering the true cost of one of our legacy cloud platforms and was able to change its support structure to reduce cost by 25% in one year. Providing the organization with this tangible cost reduction opportunity was extremely rewarding to the team and triggered the momentum to search for other opportunities.
In addition to our risk management process, the HBM team is also focusing on using data to improve the following areas:
· Vendor management
· Financial management — budgeting and forecasting
· Platform and services cost optimization — capacity planning
Because the team identified what additional data was needed and what to eliminate, they felt a greater sense of ownership and empowerment. The team feels 100% accountable for the data they’re providing and the quality and process to obtain the data.
Where is the data?
To determine where the data resides, the HBM team was asked to perform a process flow for the operational area of focus. This served two purposes:
1) It would surface any gaps that may exist in the process.
2) It would re-educate the team on the process itself.
After the team performed the process flow, they created a tools and data flow that aligned with the process flow. As a result, they found that due to a lack of system integration in some areas, data was not flowing freely to provide an automated view of the data without manual manipulation. In addition, the HBM team was able to recommend some tool and process changes, such as doing more complete service mapping and tagging across all platforms.
This discovery was critical to our technology based management (TBM) implementation, which started earlier this year to address better cost transparency and operational insights into our hybrid cloud platform. (The TBM framework helps companies integrate IT into the organization, with the goal of running the IT department like a business.) Allowing the team to navigate through these challenges in a penalty-free environment initiated a transformation from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset for the team.
How to get to the data with speed?
When our TBM model implementation is complete later this year, it will bring all the data together and provide a clear and transparent business and operational view of our hybrid cloud platform and services. This will be imperative to help us continue to drive necessary and major business decisions as we move ahead and mature on our hybrid cloud journey.
Al Willis is the Hybrid Business Management 2nd Line Leader within CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM based in Poughkeepsie, NY. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
