Fred Mapp, former AMD CIO

Initiative 1: Align IT strategies with business strategies.

Get a seat at the table. The CIO must have a seat at the corporate strategic planning table. If you don't participate in direction-setting meetings for the company, you won't have a complete picture of what the objectives are and you won't be able to plan the strategies required to achieve those objectives. In the past, IT reported to other executives like the CFO and received the news second hand. It's a little like the childhood game of "telephone," where children sit in a circle, whisper in each other's ears, and marvel at how much the message changes at the end.

I'm fortunate to be a senior member of the AMD corporate operating committee. In this forum I work directly with the other executives to build AMD's business strategies from the ground up.

Dismantle the fiefdoms. Your next challenge will be to secure ownership and accountability of all hardware and software applications. In this step it is vital to meet with your business partners like finance, sales, and product lines to gain their confidence. This may mean challenging and dismantling the various IT fiefdoms that can develop independent of corporate IT. Perhaps organizations outside of IT purchased software and a few servers on their own and then plugged them in to your infrastructure. You'll never have complete control of IT if you don't bring them into the fold.

Formalize the investment prioritization process. There are many requirements from your business partners, usually more than you are funded to implement. To decide which ones are the most important to the corporation you must have a prioritization process. The process includes establishing a Business Technology Board that includes bringing in someone from finance and other organizations within your business. Their objective is to establish a mission and a charter and get buy-in from all the players on what needs to be done. They should reconvene quarterly to review any changes in business strategies.

Check your popularity rating. A key to success in providing business value is to work on your popularity rating - and not just with your executive staff. Talk to managers, end users and everyone in between. Show them what you do for them. Poll them. Ask them what they like, what they don't like, and what they need.

Working as a consultant a few years ago, I was called in to find out why a company's customer care personnel weren't using an expensive new software package the company had installed. I sat down with the end users and asked them why they weren't using it. They said: "This new software stinks - and nobody asked me if I wanted it or what my requirements were." Their point was that decision makers at the high level left them completely out of the loop. No one should have been surprised when they didn't support the changes.

Get back to basics. Some of you may think that this is all common-sense advice, nothing out of the ordinary. But in my travels I have found that neglecting the basics is often a major problem in IT organizations. You can't just throw technology at people without understanding their basic wants and needs. There must be a balance between customer needs and the implementation of technology to make it all work. You have to methodically transform the entire system. My Seven Initiatives tackle all the issues in order and create a structure that helps prevent the reoccurrence of these issues in the future.


Initiative 2

Stay tuned for our next column where we'll discuss Initiative 2: Instilling the principles of business process management in the IT organization and overcoming the associated challenges.

In the meantime, download the PDF guide mentioned in our rules earlier. It illustrates the principle of "Conversion Effectiveness" in IT and reviews a list of specific considerations for getting Initiative 1 off the ground in your organization.