IT As A Service: Organizational, Talent, And Process Transformation

As I’ve discovered—and described in my last post—CIOs are much more concerned about how to deliver IT as a service (ITaaS) to the business faster and more transparently than they are about cloud infrastructure. So what are the challenges to doing that? In my conversations with them, they all talked about over hauling the structure and processes of their organizations—and the need to build or attract new skill sets.
 As one executive told me, “People and process are huge challenges. The required skillsets are different from traditional IT. People need to be more script-savvy. Server people have to understand more about storage, network architecture and so on.  We even created a new job description called ‘virtual platform administrator.’”  
A private cloud is by far the most popular approach to providing ITaaS. Private cloud deployments provide the stability, control and security that companies need, but it’s not easy to get there. The technology journey is complex. There are no out-of-the-box solutions—at least not yet. No instant gratification.
 And even if there was, at least on the cloud infrastructure side, reskilling staff and restructuring the organization take time. In traditional IT, everything’s vertical. You have a storage team, a compute team, a network team. You have a system administrator team. And a database team.
 With cloud computing, everything is horizontal.You have a cloud services architecture team and all of the infrastructure is abstracted and virtualized, so everybody works across functions. If you don’t do that, then you actually don’t get the transformational benefits of cloud. You’ve bought the infrastructure, but you haven’t really done anything with it.
 There’s also the cultural barrier. If you’re going to provide transparency and self-service to business users who’ve never had it before—like they’re shopping online to order IT as a service—that’s a big change. You have to be ready to handle that. It means IT really needs a salesforce. They’ve got to build a services catalogue, market it, and be good salespeople. If they’re not, the business won’t use their services. And then they can’t afford to exist and they get outsourced. It’s a completely different game.
 And everyone’s role changes, including the CTO. The CTO becomes the chief broker of the workload.That’s the job: how to prioritize, understand workloads and applications, provide the right solution for each, and manage them.
 Even once this transformation is complete, companies can have difficulty retaining skilled cloud personnel.  “It’s a hybrid skillset,” a publishing executive confided. “These people are rare and in demand. I’ve lost a few because they got better offers. Sometimes we have to go to service providers because we can’t keep the talent in house.”
 Given the complexity of the transformative task, it’s no wonder public cloud solutions can seem more attractive. It still requires work for IT, but not the long-term organizational re-engineering that can come with a private cloud initiative. The implementation is less involved and carries a lighter organizational footprint while providing comparable service levels. That’s why many executives find that a hybrid approach, which combines private cloud deployments and public cloud services, delivers the greatest value and most effective path to ITaaS success. I’ll explore that in more detail with my next post.Outsource IT

Worried You're In A Dead-End Job? Here's How You Can Find Your Dream Career

EDITOR’S NOTE: Forbes launched an e-book on finding your dream jobtoday. In it you’ll find everything you need to succeed in your job search. Some of our best careers writers penned the original articles used in this compendium. Even if you like the job you currently have, this job guide offers tips and tricks for becoming an indispensible worker and making the most of your career.


In life we’re taught to plan for the worst, to be prudent and hedge our bets. We’re told, “Be realistic! Keep your dreams in check.” For the most part that advice is sound.
However, these “words of wisdom” may be keeping us from pursuing our dreams, particularly in the job search arena. In many ways, finding a job is a job in and of itself—it’s time-consuming, stressful and contingent on demonstrating your skills and mettle to others.
Your dream job, unfortunately, won’t fall into your lap out of the blue one day. That happens, but it’s so rare that nobody should ever bet on that boon befalling him. No, finding a job first involves assessing your current station. Do you like your job right now? Is there room for growth? Does it capitalize on the skills you’re best at?
If your job doesn’t pass muster on these fronts, don’t just send out your resume en masse. “What works best in any market is for the job seeker to take a pure, entrepreneurial approach to their job search process,” executive resume writer Mary Elizabeth Bradford says. “Go around H.R. That’s provocative, right? Well, it works.”
There is a right way and a wrong way to get a great job, and many, in their eagerness to find new work, fail to realize that the shiny new thing may not always be better. Best to research the companies you want to work for, smartly target the people who can open doors there and arm yourself with a flawless job application.
Find And Keep Your Dream Job, The Definitive Careers Guide From Forbes is a blueprint for doing just that during one of the hardest periods to find a job in recent history. Despite the economic headwinds, there are battle-tested, effective ways to secure good job leads (and no, they don’t involve resume blasts or job sites), and our best careers and leadership writers have collected this sage advice here. In fact, they were so good at synthesizing the ins and outs of smart job hunting that they have each scored new jobs in the last year.
Even if you don’t think you need a new job, anyone in the workplace can benefit from the sections that identify your skill set and strengths, along with the sections suggesting tips to becoming a better worker, like this infographic on how your boss is judging your appearance.

CMO = Is Your 2014 Marketing Plan Obsolete?

As CMO, you’re constantly trying to answer these 2 burning questions:
  1. Are customers responding to our marketing campaigns?
  2. What are we doing to adjust to the market demands?
Perhaps in the past you laid out a multi-year marketing plan, or simply went year-to-year. World class CMO’s are perfecting the agile approach to marketing campaigns. The agile approach is paying off. The average tenure of CMO’s has doubled since 2006. It’s now up to 45 months.
cmo marketing plan
There are a number of reasons for the increase in tenure. But one combination always sticks out. It’s a solid marketing plan with an agile process approach. There are many components to a solid marketing plan. In this post we’ll focus on the B2B Demand Generation (DG) plan. Download the 2014 B2B Demand Generation Planning template here to get started.

B2B Demand Generation – Building a Base Plan

Like a football coach going into a game, you start with the baseline plan. Developing the game plan involves multiple groups and huge amounts of research about your customers. This research includes accurate buyer personas and buyer process maps. The plan going in must start with a clear set of goals and objectives. Then continue with a set of strategies to support those goals.
As an example, you may run 3 different types of campaigns for the year:
  1. Growth campaigns focused on increasing the wallet share from your existing book of business.
  2. Retention campaigns focused on reducing churn in the existing customer base.
  3. Acquire campaigns focused on new logo acquisition within a specific vertical, channel or region.
In many cases the overall campaign framework or approach remains the same. You may have a proven methodology for reaching your audience. What changes or is customized is the content. What may work in one vertical or region doesn’t necessary work in another. An example may be in the small to mid-size market; a customer in Oklahoma may buy differently than someone in Los Angeles.
The game plan continues to evolve with the associated tactics, target audience (both internal & external), execution responsibilities (RACI) and schedule. When you’re watching football you notice the coaches constantly looking at picture or results of prior plays. This is agile coaching; agile demand generation is no different. You’re constantly analyzing feedback from campaigns and making the necessary adjustments to campaigns.  This may mean completely scraping a campaign. Your goal is the greatest return on the marketing’s investment as possible.
When you apply this approach to affiliates, partners or your sales channel the same concepts apply. More collaboration is involved with a clear communication plan and quality data being the cornerstones. A closed loop communication process both internal and external supports better decision making.

Agile Demand Generation Execution Process

Agile execution by nature is what marketing is supposed to be doing. What often happens is you’ve not adopted an agile culture across your team. The team starts executing the plan but doesn’t feel empowered to make quick decisions. The result is the team executes the initial plan and ignores critical data. The team misses the opportunity to adjust a campaign or stop it all together. The result is typically a reduced return on marketing spend.

Key Components of Agile Execution:

  1. Pilot Plan – A small segment of the market is selected by working with sales leadership.  Launching with the purpose of validating and fine-tuning the campaign prior to a broad launch. This reduces risk and increases speed to market.
  2. Test & Learn Plan – A/B Testing leveraging a planned run-off between two versions (a control version & alternative).
  3. Lead Management Score Card – Captures existing performance and provides historical and external context to evaluate performance. Conversion rates between stages are tracked and compared against B2B averages, B2B world-class conversion rates, and where possible industry metrics. 

How to Get the Benefits of Agile Demand Generation

The benefits are worth the extra effort to change the way you work. You may meet resistance, but you will realize tremendous gains, including:
  • Results generated in half the time
  • Success probability increases by 2X
  • Greater measured return on marketing investments
  • Supports the constantly changing buyer
  • Collaboration among affiliates, and channel partners improves
  • Greater speed in the marketing team
  • Improved buyer personas, and buyer process maps
  • Increased number & quality of SQLs handed off to sales
  • Improved relationship with sales
  • Greater campaign execution
  • In some cases less reliance on 3rd party support

Trade info industry grows 4.4% in first half of 2013

Dec. 5, 2013 - For the first six months of the year, business-to-business media and information company revenue totaled $13.108 billion, up 4.4 percent from the $12.560 totaled over the same period in 2012. ABM's Business Information Network (BIN) Report, an ongoing research project that calculates the size of the industry, considers revenue from trade events, print advertising, digital (online) advertising, and business information products and database services (collectively, "data").
H1 2013 BIN Report Table
Event revenue, as reported to ABM by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, rose 2.7 percent. CEIR is projecting that "there will be minimal growth through 2013" -- although the CEIR report emphasizes that the trade event industry has experienced twelve consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth.
Print advertising revenue is slowly declining, showing a 4.3 percent dip compared with the first half of 2012, although it remains a substantial contributor to total revenue (see pie chart). Some segments, such as health, tech and agriculture, are doing very well. ABM's print advertising data is reported by publishing service bureau Inquiry Management Systems.
Digital advertising surged 24.8 percent in the first half of 2013, driven by two factors. Search engine revenue, which is not included in the BIN Report, is growing at a slower pace. That may be because marketers are pushing ad dollars into mobile platforms, which are included in the BIN Report; mobile ad revenues rose a startling 145 percent over the first half. That growth rate is accelerating -- considering the second quarter only, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, mobile advertising rose 149 percent compared with the second quarter of 2012.
The data component of the BIN Report, which includes business information, online directories and database services, grew 7.1 percent in the first half of 2013, driven by growth among several major players. McGraw Hill Financial's Commodities & Commercial Markets division saw revenue grow 7 percent in the half. Hearst Business Media, which reported its 12th year of record revenue in 2012, has recently launched data services focusing on credit reports and electronic medical records. The data component of the BIN Report is provided by information and research firm Outsell, supplemented by publicly available data and ABM estimates.
H1 2013 BIN Report Revenue Share By Stream
By Michael Moran Alterio