IT’s secret sauce

Successful IT often requires as much insight into business as into technology.

For instance, a technology consultancy came to Niteo Partners, an NEC subsidiary, seeking help in setting up a CPM (corporate performance management) system.

CPM, as you know, is the latest in an increasingly sophisticated series of attempts to harness IT into a tool for steering business. A well-constructed CPM system gathers real-time data from disparate points around the enterprise and represents them in one or more business “dashboards” that managers up and down the command chain can watch to keep the company profitable.

“While generating billable hours was important for this company, our investigation showed that it was equally important to invest in additional education and certification for their people,” says Tony Politano, chief performance officer at Niteo and author of the 2003 book with the same name as his. “If managers concentrated only on driving revenue, their people would fall behind the fast-moving field and the company would lose business in the future.”

The dashboard analogy is apt, Politano says, because companies must look not only at measures of their current success but also at those that predict the future. “In a car,” he points out, “your dashboard gives you not only the speed but also the oil temperature. The speed is what’s happening now, but if the oil temperature is rising, that’s an indication of trouble down the road.”

The solution? The consultancy simply adapted its existing billing system to keep track of training hours, too. Now managers’ pay is tied, in part, to making sure that employees spend at least 10 percent of their time learning.

“The methodology,” Politano says, “is to find the secret sauce that makes a company successful. Next you get everyone at the company to align to those same goals. And finally you build the computer system they can use to track progress.” Solving the technological problems comes last, he says — and CPM can often be implemented using technology that’s already in place. For more on this subject, see Galen Gruman’s “Corporate perfomance management: The right information, right now.”

Also in this issue, don’t miss Jon Udell’s fascinating analysis of Microsoft’s security strategy (see “Is Microsoft trustworthy yet?”), which comes one year after CEO Steve Ballmer outlined his own three-part security plan. Did Microsoft succeed? As the Fox News folks might say: Udell reports, you decide. We’re indebted to artist Darren Thompson, who also did our Steve Jobs cover in August 2003, for the wonderful Ballmer caricature in the article.