So continuing my recap from the CFO conference earlier this week, and particularly the keynote presentation from James Dallas of Medtronic...
As the CFO conference started, the moderator flashed some statistics on the screen from a recent study conducted by CFO magazine focusing on a few areas around technology. One of the statistics focused on whether or not CFO's felt that the technology they had in-house gave them a competitive advantage. Approximately 60% of the survey respondents said that they thought that technology "did" give them this advantage.
As Mr. Dallas started his speech, he seemed to question these results--querying the audience and asking them who had ERP, who had CRM, who had BI? And as everyone answered that they did, he asked the $64,000 question: "So if we all have the same technology, if we're all using SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc., how does that make us more competitive? We're all using the same products!"
Well that got the room buzzing, and certainly set the tone for the rest of his excellent keynote speech. But something struck me as ringing very true in his statement. If we all have the same technology, how CAN we make it so that we're more competitive and excel ahead of our competition?
The answer for me is crystal clear. You use the product better, smarter, you find ways to make your people more productive and make the technology work for them. In their jobs, in their roles, in their processes. The reason that so many technology projects fail is because we ask our teams and employees to change the way they work to fit the product. What results is a huge spike in usage of the product right after training, followed by the "blue" (if you're typical) or "green" (if you're lucky) ski slope of erosion of usage as people drift away from the product or leave the department, and return to what they were previously using. And the technology hasn't helped anyone.
But by fitting the technology into the way your company works, and focusing on what makes your workers more productive with the same technology that your competition is using, that's where the difference lies between #1 and #2. The game isn't won in the center--everyone has the technology.
No, as Mr. Dallas reminded us so capably, the game is won at the margins--and a focus on making the technology work for you, vs. you working for the technology--that's where the battle is being fought today.
Showing posts with label CFO Conference. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CFO Conference. Show all posts
Friday, November 02, 2007
Thursday, November 01, 2007
My Culture Will Eat Your Strategy For Lunch...
While Performance Guy Pat was up closing big business in PG's Guy and Nic's hometown earlier this week, we were both at the CFO Technology Summit in Chicago for the annual conference held by CFO Magazine to tie together finance and IT people and see what happens.
The keynotes are worth a few posts here, as they were very substantial and insightful, particularly right out of the gate, with the CIO of Medtronic, James Dallas, who spoke about the need of IT and Finance to start speaking the same language if they want to truly move the business forward together.
Mr. Dallas started his career in finance, and had a role in an Atlanta-based bank in the cost accounting side of the house when he started getting more involved with IT projects, and thought he could become the conduit between IT and Finance to help them understand each other and where they were both coming from. He's kept to that creed over the years, to the point where he mentioned that the entire IT staff at Medtronic is enrolled in a "finance competency" course (my words, not his), so they can learn "the language of the business." Seems like an excellent idea to me, I wish more groups would go forward with this.
However, one of his slides was particularly insightful in terms of getting these type of finance/IT projects off the ground--and that is, to keep in mind the company culture before imposing new technology on your workers. He took this comment, "My culture will eat your strategy for lunch" from a colleague in his company, who made the comment in response to the proposal of a new stratetic project within the organization.
And while it's humorous, it's also a often overlooked aspect of performance management projects. The technology can look great, do great things, even let you get to the "leading edge" of data access, but if it doesn't fit in with your people, it will fail. We've all seen the surveys and graphs charting new software usage, where it climbs during the pilot phase and peaks the weeks after training, only to fall back down to the 15-20% of the population who regulalry use the product or have an acute need for it.
Mr. Dallas' point is that we need to consider how our people use information to get them through their day--and give them the tools that help them do their job better. In other words, understand the culture of your teams, and make the technology work for how they do their jobs--not the other way around.
Sage advice that we'd all do well to heed as we think about blanketing the world with our respective applications!
The keynotes are worth a few posts here, as they were very substantial and insightful, particularly right out of the gate, with the CIO of Medtronic, James Dallas, who spoke about the need of IT and Finance to start speaking the same language if they want to truly move the business forward together.
Mr. Dallas started his career in finance, and had a role in an Atlanta-based bank in the cost accounting side of the house when he started getting more involved with IT projects, and thought he could become the conduit between IT and Finance to help them understand each other and where they were both coming from. He's kept to that creed over the years, to the point where he mentioned that the entire IT staff at Medtronic is enrolled in a "finance competency" course (my words, not his), so they can learn "the language of the business." Seems like an excellent idea to me, I wish more groups would go forward with this.
However, one of his slides was particularly insightful in terms of getting these type of finance/IT projects off the ground--and that is, to keep in mind the company culture before imposing new technology on your workers. He took this comment, "My culture will eat your strategy for lunch" from a colleague in his company, who made the comment in response to the proposal of a new stratetic project within the organization.
And while it's humorous, it's also a often overlooked aspect of performance management projects. The technology can look great, do great things, even let you get to the "leading edge" of data access, but if it doesn't fit in with your people, it will fail. We've all seen the surveys and graphs charting new software usage, where it climbs during the pilot phase and peaks the weeks after training, only to fall back down to the 15-20% of the population who regulalry use the product or have an acute need for it.
Mr. Dallas' point is that we need to consider how our people use information to get them through their day--and give them the tools that help them do their job better. In other words, understand the culture of your teams, and make the technology work for how they do their jobs--not the other way around.
Sage advice that we'd all do well to heed as we think about blanketing the world with our respective applications!
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The CFO Presentation
So in my last post I talked about the theme of the keynote presentations at the CFO conference--and how mine was different and why I thought it was important that it was.
And it's not a huge long ego trip for me to say that it was great "because" it was different, or great just for the sake of being different. Or that it was even great. Which it was, but that's beside the point.
The point was that CFO's are inundated today with the same information when they're at work--they hear the vendor pitches, the inventive direct marketing campaigns designed to somehow skirt the executive assistant and magically make it onto their desk--they've seen it all.
And if they're going to pay money to leave work for two days and spend time in a darkened conference room, then they're not looking for 2 year old market stats. They're looking to be inspired. They're looking for that spark that starts a process, an idea, heck, that something keeps them awake.
And so talking about the importance of strategy and strategic planning was an interesting approach for me, as we obviously could have trotted out the same old slides about process and closed loop solutions. But when we saw that no one was talking about strategy, a topic that's in the forefront of a CFO's mind, but which they don't get to spend as much time as they'd like, we knew we had a winner. And grabbing almost 40% of the conference into our presentation up against 4 other vendors was great validation.
And it's not a huge long ego trip for me to say that it was great "because" it was different, or great just for the sake of being different. Or that it was even great. Which it was, but that's beside the point.
The point was that CFO's are inundated today with the same information when they're at work--they hear the vendor pitches, the inventive direct marketing campaigns designed to somehow skirt the executive assistant and magically make it onto their desk--they've seen it all.
And if they're going to pay money to leave work for two days and spend time in a darkened conference room, then they're not looking for 2 year old market stats. They're looking to be inspired. They're looking for that spark that starts a process, an idea, heck, that something keeps them awake.
And so talking about the importance of strategy and strategic planning was an interesting approach for me, as we obviously could have trotted out the same old slides about process and closed loop solutions. But when we saw that no one was talking about strategy, a topic that's in the forefront of a CFO's mind, but which they don't get to spend as much time as they'd like, we knew we had a winner. And grabbing almost 40% of the conference into our presentation up against 4 other vendors was great validation.
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