Turning ‘Dirty Data’ into Business Insights for your Customersdocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109998/item_694736/CIO_Decisions... · CIO JUNE 2013 VOLUME 23 Turning ‘Dirty

CIOJUNE 2013 VOLUME 23

Turning ‘Dirty Data’ into Business Insights

for your Customers

decisions

GU

IDIN

G T

EC

HN

OLO

GY

DE

CIS

ION

MA

KE

RS

IN T

HE

EN

TE

RP

RIS

E

RECOGNIZING VALUE FROM VENDOR RELATIONSHIPS

IT AS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

GETTING IN GAME SHAPE

PROTECTING PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSETS

Inside: THE VISION THING

PUTTING THE ‘IT’ IN ‘HOSPITALITY’

CIOs are finding new ways to combine information from outside sources with company data, putting actionable

intelligence into the hands of decision makers.

CIO DECISIONS • JUNE 2013 2

THE VISION THING


RECOGNIZING VALUE FROM VENDOR

RELATIONSHIPS

TURNING ‘DIRTY DATA’ INTO BUSINESS

INSIGHTS FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS



PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

THREE YEARS AGO, dairy cooperative Land O’ Lakes Inc. envisioned combining publicly available data—lots of it—with internal data sources to help its seed-and-crop-protection customers figure out what to plant where, and when, in order to produce the best crop yields. The company’s de-sire to harness these disparate data sources for new business insights was at the cusp of what we now routinely refer to as the big data revolution in business—so kudos to Land O’ Lakes for knowing a good idea when it saw one.

But as our cover story in this month’s CIO Decisions by senior news writer Nicole Laskowski makes clear, getting from “the vision thing” to actionable data is not for the faint-hearted, especially when a large

The Vision Thing

EDITOR'S LETTER

Linda TucciExecutive Editor

chunk of data doesn’t play nice with tradi-tional enterprise data warehouses. “That’s sort of the nature of unstructured data: the lack of precision, the fact that there’s likely to be erroneous information stuck in with the good stuff, that there are no restrictions. It can make for a lot of work to massage it or get it into a format you know is reliable and meaningful,” Land O’ Lakes CIO Barry Liben-son told Laskowski.

Not to give too much away, but IT not only found a way to mash that data but also suc-ceeded in putting the right data into the hands of Land O’ Lakes salespeople via iPads and Androids—and from there, before the eyes of customers. Says Libenson: “Time is everything. If you can be ahead of the compe-tition, give your sellers confidence, keep your


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

period, as customers come to expect to see the data. “There’s going to be no place for poor performance or inefficiencies to hide, and I think that’s going to be relevant to ev-ery industry,” he said.

My takeaway from the story? How lucky CIOs are to be in a profession that can de-liver something the world has never seen before.•Please write to me [email protected].

growers happy, everything works out fine.”There’s even more to this happy ending:

The project fundamentally changed the re-lationship between the technology organi-zation and the business, because “we were delivering something to them that was un-like anything they’d ever gotten,” Libenson said. Analyst Kurt Schlegel of Gartner Inc. believes the use of big data in business does not just have the power to change the rela-tionship between IT and the business, but also can transform how business gets done,

EDITOR'S LETTER

mailto:[email protected]


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

CARL WILSON IS not your ordinary CIO. He led the IT team that enabled Marriott In-ternational to revolutionize the hospitality industry for the digital age by being the first to implement online reservations and offer high-speed Internet in its guest rooms.

With an accolade-filled career span-ning four decades, Wilson knows his way around an IT organization, the C-suite and the boardroom. It’s his familiarity with the boardroom, in particular, that helped set him apart as a leader and laid the foundation for his new avocation: CIO coach. Now a hands-on mentor to four Fortune 500 CIOs, a consultant and a board member himself at several companies, he contends that true CIO leadership—the quality that will ensure CIOs endure—paradoxically comes from be-

ing a team player.At Marriott, his philosophy of forging a

collaboration between IT and the business was quickly embraced by his IT team and business peers. He put in place the pro-cesses to ensure that happened. One invio-lable standard: that every major IT project the company took on would have a business owner and an IT owner, each equally ac-countable for achieving business benefits.

“We forged that type of thinking in the organization, along with collaborative MBOs [management by objectives] where everyone was rewarded for the success of participat-ing, whether you were in the business or IT organization,” Wilson said, referring to the managerial practice of aligning objectives with organizational goals. “A lot of common

Putting the ‘IT’ in ‘Hospitality’ON THE JOB

UPFRONTNews, views and reviews for senior technology managers


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

goals and interests developed.”Wilson quickly brushes aside any insinu-

ation that he deserves the credit for revo-lutionizing the hospitality industry with one-stop Internet reservations and in-room high-speed Internet access.

“It was the IT leadership team, plus very engaged C-level executives, especially in marketing and sales area,” Wilson said. “It wasn’t as hard as it may sound, simply be-cause everybody worked together. That’s part of the characteristics and culture of Marriott, which I think comes from the company being in the hospitality sector.”

The combination of knowing its custom-ers and an awareness of the potential of the Internet turned out to be a productive part-nership. The newly minted Marriott.com held the potential to not only greatly reduce the cost of how rooms were sold but also personalize the guest experience. Marriott.com is now a $6 billion-plus, lowest-cost

UPFRONT

34% of respondents mentioned lack of control over the cloud environment

33% of respondents feel they need to focus more on data center virtualization before moving to the cloud

31% of respondents cited security as their reason for skipping the cloud

2% other

ON THE AGENDA

Clouded JudgmentIf you’re listening to the hype, then you’d think every enterprise is abandoning its entire data center infrastructure in the name of cloud compu-ting—but that’s just not the case. So what factors are stalling cloud adoption in the enterprise?

Source: TechTarget’s Cloud Pulse survey, conducted in March 2013, polled 1,297 cloud storage users representing a broad variety of industries.

MAIN REASON FOR NON-ADOPTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING

34+33+31+2+z


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

distribution channel for Marriott.The Marriott team also recognized another

business reality before it became apparent to the rest of the world: how important Internet connectivity was becoming to its clientele of business travelers. They were starting to arrive with PCs in tow, looking to work or stay connected during their visits.

“The No. 1 thing they needed was high-speed Internet access so they could work in their rooms, and we provided that to meet their needs,” Wilson said. “We just happened to be the first company who really endorsed it and aggressively went after it because we saw that need—we kept our eye on guest expectations.”

One of the greatest compliments of Wil-son’s tenure came from the chief operating officer who remarked that, in meetings, if he didn’t know them, he wouldn’t be able to distinguish the IT people from their busi-ness partners.

Big Data and Analytics: Ideals vs. RealityA recent McKinsey & Company survey asked C-level executives about the functional areas where they do—and where they feel they should—focus on using big data and analytics to improve their organization’s focus. Among their priorities:

Source: McKinsey & Company 2012 global C-level survey, “Minding Your Digital Business,” including responses from 1,469 executives

UPFRONT

BY THE NUMBERS

CUSTOMER INSIGHTS, SEGMENTATION OR TARGETING

CUSTOMER SERVICE/SUPPORT

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND TRANSPARENCY IN INTERNAL OPERATIONS

NEW PRODUCT STRATEGIES

PRICING

49%

33%

30%

28%

21%

60%

40%

40%

39%

29%

Currently

Ideally


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

“IT people knew the business processes and understood the business area they were accountable for, and their partners were learning the technology because we worked so closely. That’s why we were successful,” Wilson said.

And yet this cultural structure and approach, with all its proven benefits, still eludes many companies. To those CIOs, Wilson suggests

they start by following the money.“The language of business is finance, so

we made it a point to ensure all our senior IT leaders had a good grasp of the finances of the company, how the company made money,” Wilson said. “Without that, you could never engage at the level they needed to with their business counterparts.” —Karen Goulart

UPFRONT

WHAT’S THIS?

TarpittingTarpitting is the practice of slowing the transmission of e-mail messages sent in bulk as a means of thwarting spammers. The intent is to maintain a high quality of service for legitimate users while making the sending process impractical for spammers, who—because of low response rates—must be able to send vast volumes of messages quickly and inexpensively. The delay is insignificant for typical recipient lists, and administrators can grant exemptions to people with valid reasons to send messages to a large number of recipients. Source: WhatIs.com


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

As organizations grow, storage and capacity considerations become increasingly important. One pharmaceutical company on the rise has turned to Infrastructure as a Service provid-ers to house and protect confidential its patient data. Here, Nathan McBride, vice president of IT at AMAG Pharmaceuticals Inc., discusses the importance of organizations performing due diligence and taking certain precautions before engaging with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. He also advises companies to work with a cloud services broker to develop a solid infrastructure.

ONE ON ONE

What types of precautions must small and medium-sized business must take into

Recognizing Value from Vendor Relationships

account when they’re looking to engage in Infrastructure as a Service?Certainly, No. 1 would be authentication. When you start taking some of your core apps and putting them out to the cloud, so to speak, in the IaaS space, you need to take into consideration how your employees are now going to remotely authenticate to the services that are existing out there. Then you need to consider storage and capacity. A lot of companies aren’t doing any particu-lar capacity planning in the cloud because it’s so cheap. But if you’re not watching

Nathan McBrideTITLE: VICE PRESIDENT OF IT

ORGANIZATION: AMAG

PHARMACEUTICALS INC.

YEARS IN ROLE: FIVE YEARS

UPFRONT

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/video/Engaging-with-Infrastructure-as-a-Service-providers-Advice-for-SMBs

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/video/Beyond-the-hype-CIOs-can-generate-business-value-from-big-data-tools

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/video/Engaging-with-Infrastructure-as-a-Service-providers-Advice-for-SMBs


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

your growth, it can get out of control pretty rapidly. Your cost can go from being credit-card-worthy per month, up to [purchase order]-worthy in a very short time.

You partnered with a few vendors who achieved that correctly. Do you develop that in-house?We didn’t do any development in-house. We started our initiatives in the cloud back in 2008 [by] looking at a very, very small market. There were vendors ... four or five guys developing in very small closets and cubicles around the world, developing prod-ucts that would become these very, very important key parts to the cloud. In order for us to achieve this, we had to partner with a lot of them and take a lot of risks. But through those partnerships, [we] were able to engineer a cloud structure that we didn’t have to develop that’s extremely strong, that’s plug-and-play, and allows us at any point in time to inject a new vendor

into any link to provide any additional layer of security, authentication, auditing, etc.

Many companies with fewer than 500 employees are turning to vendor partnerships to develop valuable cloud infrastructures today, rather than doing this in-house.Right now, the big paradigm shift is toward cloud service brokers (CSBs), which is a concern of mine only because a lot of these so-called cloud service brokers, or cloud service migrators, are partnering with spe-cific vendors. They’re bundling those ser-vices into one unit, which they sell you at an expense-per-month rate. The only problem is, that decreases the company’s ability to investigate the entire field. In a lot of these verticals, where three years ago there might have been one or two vendors, you’re now looking at 30, 40, sometimes 50 vendors in one little space in the cloud.

As a company, it’s worthwhile to investi-

UPFRONT


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

gate all of the vendors in that space, rather than focusing on just buying a bundle. We found that by looking at the entire market and constantly investigating it—because it’s constantly maturing—you can pick out those really excellent vendors that will do just that one niche characteristic for you. And the CSB market is growing. A lot of these bigger vendors are snatching up the small ones. It’s something that companies are going to have to decide what to do, I think, as we go forward. You either stick with Google—we use Google—but then, just stay with Google. Don’t buy the whole Google bundle from a VAR. Buy just the Google part and then pick all the other piec-es yourself. Or if you don’t have the time or inclination, buy the Google bundle. And get all the things that come with it.

Regarding Google, can you speak to the solu-tions that you’ve chosen though that system?

With the Google Apps environment, the APIs are easily accessible for developers [and allow] for vendors to develop any one of a number of different types of plug-ins and structures to go on top of the enter-prise itself. These are your basics: your mail, contacts, calendar, your YouTubes, etc. But when you begin to look at the plug-and-play architecture, that’s your OAuth [open authorization] injection of apps. You have things now [such as] Prezi, you have Gliffy, you have DocuSign. They are going to go after a certain niche corner of the market. We looked at document auditing in the cloud. We used CloudLock for that. And CloudLock allows us to do a specific func-tion with all of our Google Docs. We have almost a million documents in Google. For us, knowing where they are at any given time, being able to see which ones are im-portant, which ones aren’t—that’s a very, very critical thing. —Wendy Schuchart

UPFRONT


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

BY 2050 , the Food and Agricultural Organi-zation of the United Nations (FAO) predicts the world’s population will hit 9 billion, a 34% jump over current totals. The increase will have serious implications for water and energy resources and almost certainly for the agricultural industry. To keep up with population growth, the FAO believes farmers will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than they have in the last 10,000.

“This is all a productivity game,” explained Karen Oerter, director of marketing and cus-tomer insights at WinField Solutions LLC,

a wholly-owned subsidiary of Arden Hills, Minn.-based Land O’ Lakes. “If we’re going to feed those people, it’s all about under-standing what you’re going to need to do to get the right products on the right acre.”

For Land O’ Lakes CIO Barry Libenson, this is also an innovation game. In order to help the crop protection and seed distri-bution subsidiary target customers more effectively, Libenson and his IT team are wrangling “dirty data,” or data that can con-tain errors. By combining internal customer data with reams of external data, his team is

Turning ‘Dirty Data’ into Business Insights for your CustomersLand O’ Lakes is finding a way to combine ‘dirty data’ with company information and—Eureka!—put new customer insights into the hands of the business. BY NICOLE LASKOWSKI

COVER STORY


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

helping the business predict what crops will yield the highest value where—down to the acre.

The new initiative not only involves inte-grating diverse data from disparate sources but also putting sophisticated and easy-to-consume analytics right into the hands of the company’s internal sales and marketing team, as well as into the hands of the coop-eratives and farmers it distributes to—Land O’ Lakes’ external customers.

“Big data has given us the opportunity—and the need—to start thinking in new ways,” Libenson said.

DIGGING THROUGH THE DIRTThat’s saying something for an industry known to be rich in data but sometimes short on data-based action. While new farming equipment is outfitted with sen-sors, the data it generates has done little to

change the day-to-day operations for the family farms that are Land O’ Lakes’ chief customers, according to Oerter.

“Do you know how framers transact? They don’t carry their credit card, they usu-ally don’t have their wallet,” she said. “They transact by walking into the co-op and say-ing, ‘Hey, I need a load of fertilizer delivered over there in the corner of Grandma’s 40 acres.’ That’s a transaction. You try to figure out how to put that in your database.”

Other data sources suffer from a similar lack of standards, Libenson adds. Take the crop-yield data U.S. farmers report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in order to

TURNING ‘DIRTY DATA’ INTO BUSINESS INSIGHTS

“ Big data has given us the opportunity—and the need—to start thinking in new ways.”

—Barry Libenson, CIO, Land O’ Lakes


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

receive subsidies. By piecing together yield data, a non-relational data source made publicly available by the government, Win-field Solutions can uncover what’s growing where. Figuring out who is doing the grow-ing, however, isn’t simple, as the same re-ports do not require farmers to enter their names.

“One of the running jokes is that Bruce Springsteen apparently plants more corn than anyone else in the world, which tells you a little bit about the average age of the growing community,” said Libenson, but not much else about those growers.

“That’s sort of the nature of unstructured data: The lack of precision, the fact that there’s likely to be erroneous information stuck in with the good stuff, that there are no strict restrictions,” he continued. “It can make for a lot of work to massage it or get it into a format you know is reliable and meaningful.”

In the past, this kind of “messy, ugly” data, as business counterpart Oerter calls it, pro-vided limited insight for the business. To-day, Libenson and his team are making bet-ter use of it by triangulating crop yield data with GPS coordinates—another external data source—to tease out information on who the grower is.

“We were not extracting information off of the Internet previous to this, other than simply looking it up and loading it into an Excel spreadsheet,” Libenson said.

Tactics such as using geospatial data or even satellite imagery are known as preci-sion agriculture, and while this practice ben-efits the farmer, it also gives the WinField Solutions’ sales and marketing team a more detailed picture to help target product sales.

“Time is everything,” said Oerter. “If you can be ahead of the competition, give your sellers confidence, keep your growers happy, everything works out fine.”



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

REAPING WHAT YOU SOWLeveraging external data sources—such as social, census and meteorological informa-tion—to drive deeper insight has been a Land O’ Lakes vision for more than three years, conceived initially by the chief op-erating officer, said Oerter and Libenson. Because so much of external data doesn’t fit easily into a relational database, the big question was how the IT department could deliver.

Libenson and his team eventually found Endeca Latitude. Acquired by Oracle in 2011, the data discovery platform can pull togeth-er non-relational and relational data sources on the back end and provide an easy-to-use data visualization tool on the front end. The investment was a game changer for Land O' Lakes, according to Libenson, and not just because the technology enabled deeper data insights.

“Like a lot of technology organizations, I

think historically, the business didn’t neces-sarily see us as delivering things that were going to empower them” he said. “This really changed the relationship between the tech-nology organization and the business be-cause we were delivering something to them that was unlike anything they’d ever gotten.”

Today, WinField Solutions’ sales and marketing teams are armed with company-issued mobile tablets and can pull up these visualizations and build a window into buy-ing behavior right in the field.

“We buy a lot of iPads in the WinField division and a lot of Android tablets,” Liben-son said. “As a matter of fact, we had a sig-


Because so much of external data doesn’t fit easily into a relational database, the big question was how the IT department could deliver.


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

nificant planned increase in mobile technol-ogy spend from 2012 to 2013 partially driven by tablet absorption and the need for addi-tional bandwidth for the sales organization.”

PLANTING NEW SEEDSThe on-the-spot analysis can get quite so-phisticated, Oerter said in a recent video interview she did with Oracle. “[The sales team] might be able to go in and identify customers that purchased a certain seed, and then maybe based on the current weath-er patterns, might want to consider a certain fungicide or insecticide that’s associated with that crop.”

And, for a group of customers who have long relied on their farming smarts to sur-vive, the data is proving compelling—at least once they see it.

“When I took the product out to one of our really big co-ops, [the manager] said,

‘We don’t need it,’” Oerter said. He doubted the data, and so Oerter took him through a demo, quickly identifying that one of his best customers hadn’t ordered the half-mil-lion dollars in seed he did the previous year.

“Everyone was waiting for the customer to come in,” she said. “What this analytical tool helped us to do was to go out and, with confidence, make the call.”

According to a 2012 Gartner Business In-telligence platform customer reference sur-vey, Land O’ Lakes’ WinField Solutions is far from alone when it comes to bringing data to the customer: Thirty-six percent of the 1,364 respondents indicated they already had externally facing business intelligence appli-cations.

Kurt Schlegel, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. and lead author on the survey report, believes the trend will grow stronger. “This percentage will increase substantially as delivering analytics exter-



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

“With big data applications, the goal is to empower the user to solve a fairly complex problem based on a lot of different data and without having to rely entirely on the IT or-ganization all of the time,” Libenson said. “I think we’ve been successful … in doing that.

“At the end of the day, I’d rather my people spend time doing other things than having to build reports and dashboards all day long,” he said. “They have a lot to do, and tools like this really, really go a long way toward freeing up our resources to work on other stuff.”•

nally becomes an expected component of every business relationship. Needless to say, this also represents a major career opportu-nity for CIOs and IT leaders,” he wrote.

Putting analytics into the hands of cus-tomers provides a layer of transparency that Schlegel called the future of analyt-ics. “There’s going to be no place for poor performance or inefficiencies to hide, and I think that’s going to relevant to every in-dustry,” he said. Schlegel believes Land O’ Lakes is headed in the right direction, and Libenson couldn’t agree more.



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

TDS TELECOMMUNICATIONS CEO Dave Wittwer knows a thing or two about how to get ahead. In his 30 years at the Madison, Wis.-based telecom, he has climbed the ranks, from internal auditor to CFO to COO to head of a $1 billion business with cus-tomers in 32 states.

Over the course of his long career, Wittwer has come to appreciate the com-petitive advantage that various functions can bring to the business, including IT, and he has some advice for CIOs who want IT to be a strategic partner to the business.

GIVE THE BUSINESS OPTIONS FOR ACCOMPLISHING GOALS

CIOs who want to play a strategic role at their companies must first recognize that decision making is not about specific de-partments or projects but about how best to keep “moving the ball forward,” Wittwer said. “We’re in the business of accomplish-ing our goals.” The business is constantly evolving, and if IT wants to function as a competitive advantage, it must do the same.

That is easier said than done, he concedes. In his experience, people often prefer a role

BUSINESS POV

IT as Competitive AdvantageCEO Dave Wittwer has seen the value of IT in his 30 years with TDS Communications. Here, he advises CIOs on staying relevant. BY KAREN GOULART


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

COMMUNICATE RISK IN PLAIN LANGUAGEWhen it comes to managing IT risk, com-munication is key. Being able to convey the real value of an IT project in plain language is a required skill for CIOs who want to make IT a competitive advantage, Wittwer said. That doesn’t mean sugarcoating the benefit or glossing over the technical details. For example, replacing a mainframe platform because it will no longer be supported by the vendor might well be reason enough to move forward. This is managing technologi-cal risk—and it’s a concept everyone can understand, he said.

“If you tell me it’s an infrastructure that’s not going to be supported anymore and there’s an opportunity to reduce cost by replacing it, I’ll get behind that,” he said. “Don’t try to build in things like, ‘Now we’ll be more agile with how we do pro-gramming,’ because the more you put those soft, fluffy benefits around it, the harder it

in which they’re told exactly what to do and when. Success is defined as becoming profi-cient in that role. Effective businesses don’t work that way, especially when it comes to their IT function, he said.

For example, a key part of TDS’s strategy involves acquisitions. In the past 30 years, it has acquired 200 companies—three to four per year on average. IT has a direct relation-ship to how those acquisitions are sustained and integrated, Wittwer said, but every situ-ation is different. IT adds value by creating options and creative solutions that optimize the integration of each acquisition. In some cases, optimization might mean migrating the acquired company onto legacy systems as quickly as possible. With other acquisi-tions, a more hands-off strategy might be better. “All too often, companies look for that perfect path,” he said. “What’s impor-tant for us is staying flexible, and IT fits into that by giving us options and alternatives.”



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

you’re doing it, there’s a pretty good chance the business is not going to get to the goals we’d hoped for.”

Wittwer realizes not every CEO—or CIO—has the stomach for this flexible bud-geting approach and that the funding struc-tures in some industries might prohibit it. But for a capital-intensive business like TDS, tradeoffs can be made.

For their part, strategic CIOs need to be able to be nimble and occasionally fly by the seat of their pants. However carefully one plans, it’s never as simple as getting the money and taking projects to completion, Wittwer said. A project runs over, a big cus-tomer makes a demand, a competitor makes

is for the organization to understand and reprioritize.”

BE FLEXIBLE WITH YOUR BUDGETIn a space like technology, where things are always in flux, the IT budget must follow suit for IT to be a value-add to the company. “The worst thing you can do is simply say, ‘Our budget is this amount and we’ll do the top 10 things that fit into that,’“ Wittwer said. “That doesn’t help the business move forward; that’s just resource allocation.”

That doesn’t mean CIOs have carte blanche, he said. An IT leader, for instance, must be able to articulate why last year’s IT budget was $25 million and this year’s plan calls for $40 million—again, in language the business can appreciate. Strategic IT is never about buying servers and applications, but about explaining why and how they’ll help the business. “If you can’t explain why

Strategic CIOs need to be able to be nimble and occasionally fly by the seat of their pants.



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

makes sure they are coached on the parts of the business they’re less familiar with.

At some point, however, there has to be a cultural fit between the CIO's and the CEO’s business philosophy in order for IT to become a competitive advantage. If the CIO’s style and values don’t match up with the CEO’s, the relationship between IT and the business is bound to be troubled. “For me it’s very simple: I want someone who is transparent, somebody who creates a lot of options in terms of alternative strategies, someone who is flexible and who is commit-ted and accountable,” he said.•

a move that requires a response—CIOs need to be ready to react. “Even if you have every-thing perfectly lined up, the environment that you’re operating in isn’t going to let it be that easy,” he said. “Things keep coming over the wall.”

KNOW YOUR STUFF—AND EVERYONE ELSE’S, TOO

Having a deep understanding of the busi-ness across the management team is what creates competitive advantage, Wittwer said. CIOs are no exception. “In order for us to be successful, you need to know every part of this business; you need to know how we make money, how we provide customer ser-vice, how we do everything,” he said.

That understanding takes time—and not just for CIOs. As a means to that end, he praises leaders for what they excel at, and

“ For me it’s very simple: I want someone who is transparent”

—Dave Wittwer, CEO, TDS Telecommunications



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

A YEAR AFTER the iPhone hit the market, Boston city government officials launched their first mobile application, Citizens Con-nect 1.0. The app’s purpose was to tap into a pool of residents who might not otherwise call to complain about a problem to provide the Boston citizenry with better city ser-vices. Citizens Connect turned smartphones into a reporting tool for things like potholes, broken street lights or missed trash pickups, and it turned citizens into data gatherers.

“This was the beginning of developing new products that really engage our citizens,”

said Bill Oates, CIO for the city of Bos-ton. “We were looking at all of the benefits of consumerization of technology that were now in the hands of our constituents, and how we were going to be able to deal with that.”

When Oates rolls out version 4.0 of Citi-zens Connect later this year, the city will push the mobile app envelope even further by introducing a gamification component to the mix. In the upcoming release, a pilot program called “Street Cred” will give resi-dents the chance to electronically high-five

Getting in Game ShapeWith an updated mobile application due out later this year, the city of Boston’s CIO is set on introducing gamification to the public sector. BY NICOLE LASKOWSKI

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

city employees for a job well done.More often than not, gamification (which

uses the same game theory concepts that are alive and well in Foursquare or Angry Birds) conjures up the image of custom-ers or employees earning points, collecting badges or climbing a leaderboard for pati-cipating in or completing specific tasks.

Boston’s Street Cred doesn’t go quite that far. Rather than badges or points, the employee collects something closer to Facebook “likes” for a job well done from a satisfied citizen—the customer, said Oates, who unveiled details of the new version of the app at a recent Boston Smarter Cities Forum.

“For our workers, it gives them a chance to really want to do a good job and be re-cognized,” Oates said. With Street Cred, he said, “we can start creating that real con-nection between the constituent and the employees.”

GAMIFICATION IN THE ENTERPRISE TURNS INWARD

According to Brian Burke, a research vice president at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., gamification in the enterprise is not exactly new. Marketing and loyalty programs use game theory for motivating certain kinds of customer behavior. Its enterprise uses, however, are quickly expanding. “While companies initially focused gamification on externally facing solutions, the area of real growth today is internally facing solutions, with organizations creating applications to engage employees in training, performance and innovation management, among many other areas,” he said.

CIOs should start thinking about how their organizations can help develop apps to motivate business—and IT—employees, Burke said, if only because this latest mani-festation of consumer technology shows signs of having legs. “Technology providers



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

are beginning to integrate game mechanics within their solutions, so gamification is coming to the enterprise whether CIOs are on board or not,” he said.

For Boston’s Oates, using technology to influence behavior comes naturally, born out of his 20-plus years of experience as a CIO in the hotel and travel industry. “I come from a hotel company where loyalty programs are really important; my Sheraton Club Inter-national and my Starwood Preferred Guests were critical in terms of our connection to our customer,” he said.

CLOSING THE LOOP BETWEEN WORKER AND CUSTOMER

The Street Cred gamification feature is one aspect of a larger upgrade for Citizens Con-nect, which closes the loop between Citizens Connect and a companion mobile app built

in 2012 for employees called City Worker.“We really want to complete that circle,

make that real connection—not into City Hall, but the connection from the constituent who has a pothole to the employee who fixes it,” said Oates, who also leads the city’s Depart-ment of Innovation and Technology and par-ticipates in the mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, which is tasked with generating ideas on how to transform city services.

Closing the loop means employees and constituents can communicate directly: The constituent can apply for a work request, and the city worker can update the request when the work is completed, even supplying a photograph. And the constituent can, in turn, thank that worker directly.

Gamification programs such as Street Cred are generating a lot of buzz right now, Oates said. “We’re going to try it and see if it works.”•



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

WHICH COMES FIRST, privacy or the golden egg of big data? The riddle is far from being solved, at least when it comes to personal information. And it isn’t even being pon-dered in a serious way at many companies, if the enterprise risk managers I rubbed shoul-ders with recently are any indicator.

Sitting at lunch with risk managers em-ployed by a swath of industries from real estate to financial services to hospitality, I learned in no uncertain terms that the po-tential risks to the enterprise posed by pos-sible abuses in the handling of big data paled

in comparison to the risks burning up their heat maps.

Perhaps they are right to put personal data privacy on the back burner. Yes, priva-cy is in the news, but what are the enter-prise risks of dealing in big data compared with liquidity risk, talent risk, competi-tive pressure, fraud, big weather? Besides, thanks to the communication technologies that make it easier than ever to disseminate information, privacy is on its deathbed— or it will be by the time we boomers meet Joe Black.

Protecting Personal Digital AssetsIn a big data era, one of the sacrificial lambs is personal data privacy. This is a risk for each of us and the companies we work for. BY LINDA TUCCI

DATA PRIVACY


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

About the same time I was hearing about heat maps and risk frameworks, the CIA’s chief technology officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, dropped his bombshell about the value of dots at GigaOm’s Structure: Data event in New York: To wit: “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode [where] we fundamentally try to collect ev-erything and hang on to it forever.”

“Forever,” according to some reports, was in air quotes, but make no mistake: Hunt is not just in the hunt for big personal data. In his view, “it is really very nearly within our grasp to compute on all human-gen-erated information.” The aim is to analyze big data sets and take covert action based on the analysis. We even have some idea of how that will go down. Just two days be-fore Hunt’s remarks in New York, Federal Computer Week, citing unnamed sources, reported that the CIA has signed a contract with Amazon Web Services, valued at up to

$600 million over 10 years, to build a pri-vate cloud behind its firewall.

PERSONAL VS. PRIVATEAfter lunch, I attended the one-and-only session on data security and privacy risks at this two-day enterprise risk management conference, and left understanding a little better why my tablemates might be inclined to shrug off questions about the personal data privacy guidelines at their companies. The session featured the chief security of-ficer at a regional insurance company in upstate New York, schooled by Health In-surance Portability and Accountability Act regulations on the need to manage privacy risks and—as a board member of a Boston firm using big data to track terrorists—privy to the lucrative uses of big data. He admira-bly laid out the hazards of the privacy ter-rain, from the difficulty of rationalizing the



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

muddle of multiple privacy laws (since 1998 there have been more than 200 privacy laws passed in more than 150 countries) to sort-ing out the now-muddied distinction be-tween what is personal and private.

“A picture, your face, name and address may be personal but it is not private, and it is not going to become any more pri-vate than it is today. In fact it is going to get worse,” the security executive said. He warned the audience that using information for other than the stated purpose for which it was collected can get companies into hot water (for example, insurance companies that use personal data to ascertain how much people cost the plan, then find a way to kick them out).

The main point is this: Big data, which ag-gregates many types of public information, exposes personal information and, from a company perspective, exposes the enter-prise to great risk. While a company can’t be

Big data exposes personal information and, from a company perspective, exposes the enter prise to great risk.

held responsible for personal data out in the public, using that data in its models could run afoul of legal and regulatory issues, the security exec said. Making matters worse, people are becoming desensitized to what is private, which only makes it harder to instill a “culture of privacy into how your company handles data,” he said. “People are looking at what lies ahead for privacy. There’s really not much to say. We’re kind of on our heels with respect to the topic.”

From the back of the room, someone called out, “Let’s talk solutions. We have all these experts in the room. I’m tired of hear-ing how difficult it is. Let’s talk about solv-



THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

ing the problem.” Good luck with that.As the CIA’s Hunt was quoted as saying, anyone who carries a smartphone is “already a walking sensor platform,” visible even when the device is turned off. “The inani-mate is becoming sentient,” he said.

All us, not just risk managers, are in jeop-ardy of being left in the digital dust by Jeopardy-busters such as Watson, which (who?) can compute on all that human-

generated information much faster, of course, than our other human systems—governmental, legal, ethical—can figure out what’s appropriate.•


“ The inani mate is becoming sentient.”

—Ira “Gus” Hunt, chief technology officer, CIA


THE VISION THING



RELATIONSHIPS





PROTECTING PERSONAL

DIGITAL ASSETS

CIO Decisions is a SearchCIO.com e-publication.

Rachel Lebeaux Managing Editor

Christina Torode Editorial Director

Linda Tucci Executive Editor

Wendy Schuchart Senior Site Editor

Nicole Laskowski Senior News Writer

Karen Goulart Features Writer

Ben Cole Associate Editor

Emily McLaughlin Assistant Editor

Linda Koury Director of Online Design

Neva Maniscalco Graphic Designer

Amalie Keerl Director of Product Management [email protected]

TechTarget USA 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466

www.techtarget.com

© 2013 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by an means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.

LINDA TUCCI is executive director for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at [email protected].

NICOLE LASKOWSKI is senior news writer for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at [email protected].

KAREN GOULART is features writer for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at [email protected]. @

WEBSITE Visit us

@E-MAIL

Contact us

@TWITTER Follow us

@FACEBOOK

Connect with us

@GOOGLE PLUS

Add us

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Cover image: WIN-Initiative/Getty Images

http://searchcio.techtarget.com


www.techtarget.com

http://reprints.ygsgroup.com/m/techtarget


mailto:kgoulart%40techtarget.com?subject=

http://www.SearchCIO.com

mailto:editor%40searchcio.com?subject=

http://twitter.com/searchcio

https://www.facebook.com/pages/SearchCIOcom/186854283970

https://plus.google.com/106403995602132443589/posts

Documents

Turning ‘Dirty Data’ into Business Insights for your Customersdocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_109998/item_694736/CIO_Decisions... · CIO JUNE 2013 VOLUME 23 Turning ‘Dirty