An interesting concept came up during today’s #convcloud Twitter chat (Thursdays at 1 pm Eastern, if you’re interested in joining): “flat-packing IT.”

If you Google “flat pack” you’ll find a lot of results centered around ready-to-assemble furniture. As one site put it, “Flat pack is really a philosophy of manufacture and delivery that does not compromise the resulting product.”

What does this mean for IT? As HP Software VP and evangelist Paul Muller (on Twitter as @xthestreams) tweeted “the problem with current app delivery is that each build is treated as a bespoke thing.” Instead, Muller tweeted, “think like a designer.”

Recently, I shared my meeting with a CIO from a Global 50 company. When I discussed with him the importance of IT performance management, this CIO said that no one talks to him about IT performance management. He went onto say that having a performance management system would ensure he gets the business transformation and ROI out of the IT toolset purchases that he makes. “What I need is best practice KPIs to measure along the journey,” he said. Given this, I will turn my attention in this blog to quality management and what measures matter for this activity.

If you haven’t caught these already, HP Software has been running a series of cloud think pieces on YouTube. The This Week in the Cloud series features host Paul Muller, HP Software VP and evangelist, as well as a variety of cloud gurus.

The latest episode is a must-see for anyone who wants to know more about OpenStack, the open source cloud management platform on which HP’s chosen to build its Converged Cloud offerings.

Discover Performance community POV

By Mark Evans

Mark Evans is an IT Manager at Rider Levett Bucknall in Birmingham, UK, and a member of the HP IT Performance community. Have something to say about driving innovation in IT? Subscribe to our newsletter, join our LinkedIn group and let us know what you think. Periodically, we’re featuring community members’ POV on this blog.

I sometimes shudder at the "hair shirt" we IT professionals tend to wear when it comes to discussions of IT’s value and performance. And I get frustrated when I see us beating ourselves up when our contributions aren't quantified, qualified and valued by any form of metric which will stop senior managers in their tracks.

We underpin any business we work in and touch almost every element of every business. Some of the brightest, most articulate and fully-functioning contributors to any business I have met have had a major IT background, yet they metaphorically flay themselves with the old fallacy that IT is just a black hole into which a business pours money. The problem is, we measure ourselves against the wrong yardsticks.

Guest post by Joel H. Dobbs

Joel H. Dobbs is the CEO and President of The Compass Talent Management Group LLC (CTMG), a consulting firm that assists organizations with the identification and development of key talent and with designing organizational strategies and structures to maximize their ability to compete in the business worlds of today and tomorrow. He is also an executive coach and serves as Executive in Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Business.  Joel is also a popular and frequent contributor to the Executive CIO Forum where a version of this article was first published.

One of the top areas I am asked by coaching and mentoring clients to help them with is becoming better strategic thinkers.  Strategic thinking is one of those skills that are critical for advancement to the executive suite and it is critical if you want to stay there.  Strategic thinking can be learned. I wasn’t born a strategic thinker and you may not have been either but, with practice, you can get better.

Read this post for insight into the six ways that successful people think differently.

A while back I wrote a blog post explaining the difference between NoOps and DevOps - with a slant from the Information Security perspective.  If you haven't checked it out yet, I encourage you to do so as a primer to this post, and to get a more grounded understanding of where my head's at when it comes to addressing the NoOps movement.  Is NoOps just another excuse to forget security?  Or do we (Information Security Professionals) actually have a chance to affect fundamental change in how code gets deployed in a risk-averse manner?

By Charlie Betz

Charlie Betz is research director for IT portfolio management at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and author of the white paper, “Business Intelligence for the Business of IT.”

Have you seen any of the reality TV shows about hoarding? There’s “Hoarders,” “Extreme Clutter,” “Life Laundry” and many more. Some of the overstuffed environments on these shows will make your skin crawl. But this is essentially the same thing that’s going on in most IT organizations. Old and redundant applications are kept around for the same reasons that people keep unnecessary stuff.

The sad truth is that many companies are spending tens of millions of shareholder dollars on application “stuff” that might come in handy … someday. So how do you tame your application clutter? Here are three steps.

Recently, I met with the CIO of a Global 50 company. When I discussed with him the importance of IT performance management, this CIO said that no one talks to him about IT performance management. He went on to say that having a performance management system would ensure he gets the business transformation and ROI out of the IT toolset purchases that he makes. “What I need are best practice KPIs to measure along the journey,” he said. Given this, I will turn my attention in this blog to project and portfolio management (PPM) software and what measures mr this tool and its related activities.

By Joshua Brusse, Chief Architect, Asia Pacific and Japan, HP Software Professional Services

I spend a lot of time helping clients transform their IT organizations into ones that are ready for the future. We may talk about consumerization and cloud and how they are affecting IT. But what’s really happening is the democratization of IT. That is, IT doesn’t have the monopoly anymore. Businesses can go anywhere to buy IT services.

IT leaders who don’t see this and continue with the status quo risk irrelevance, or worse. But for IT leaders thinking about how to transform their organizations for the future, it’s essential to develop a hybrid delivery operating model and thus a service integration and management (SIAM) strategy.

One of the big things the cloud promises us is this thing called agility.  Agility basically means the ability to respond faster to changing business needs with IT services and support.  What does that really mean in a world of DevOps, continuous release, and digital business models as they collide with traditional business strategies?

By Ravichandran Durairajan

Ravichandran Durairajan is the worldwide practice lead for HP Testing as a Service.

Out of 20 years of applications services experience, I’ve spent more than 12 years setting up and managing testing practices (including delivering enterprise-to-enterprise software testing services). During that time I’ve watched enterprise applications grow more and more complex. Application development is undergoing significant transformations – we’re now in the age of RIAs (rich Internet applications), cloud apps and mobile apps – but application testingis not keeping up.

Why is this a problem? Application failure is a business failure. So when application development outpaces an organization’s testing capacity there are real bottom line consequences.

That’s the question HP enterprise security guru Rafal Los asks in his latest video. It’s a question that has absorbed a lot of attention lately at Discover Performance. 

Cleverly positioning his camera on the dashboard of a high-performance sports car, Los asks CIOs and CISOs what they’re afraid of today—and then points out that that’s no basis for running IT security. 

By Susan Merriman

WW Leader of Emerging Technologies, HPSW Education

As a progressive CIO, you’re always looking for new ways to give your company the competitive edge to thrive. Technology can play a key role in realizing that goal. But once you’ve convinced your organization to invest in an new IT system, the pressure is on to make sure the deployment is a success.

By Miron Mizrahi

Miron Mizrahi has had a career spanning more than 20 years in the software industry. In recent years he served as the WW Solution Lead for Business Service Management (BSM) as well as Converged Infrastructure for HP Software Professional Services, where he is now a Portfolio Strategy Lead.

Many of the customers I talk to say agility and faster time to value are some of the primary business drivers for considering cloud-based services. But when you actually look at how good the various cloud computing solutions are at delivering agility you notice something interesting. While it may take only minutes to provision a service, it usually takes weeks to design one. Where the current generation of cloud solutions falls short is they provide little to no help in designing and building cloud services – which should be a key part of your cloud strategy.

Most cloud deployments today focus on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – basically the ability to provision on-demand computing, network and storage resources, all offered via a self-service catalogue. We can pick how many machines we need, how many CPUs we want, the amount of memory and storage and even the OS. All the user has to do is choose and go. But the real question is, what does one do with a bare metal server or even with one running Windows 2008 or Linux? It’s nice that I can have it up and running in 12 minutes, but is that enough? Or rather, is it going to solve the business problem I have? Is this all the bang I can buy for my buck in the cloud?

Recently, I receive a warm reception from a very interesting new Vice President of Applications – let’s call her Mary. Mary and her team were manually building scorecards and dashboards for the extended IT management team. Mary was using these, as it turned out, not only to establish her position within the IT organization, but more importantly to establish credibility for the IT organization as a whole with its business customers.

Guest post by Joel H. Dobbs 

Joel H. Dobbs is the CEO and President of The Compass Talent Management Group LLC (CTMG), a consulting firm that assists organizations with the identification and development of key talent and with designing organizational strategies and structures to maximize their ability to compete in the business worlds of today and tomorrow. He is also an executive coach and serves as Executive in Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Business.  Joel is also a popular and frequent contributor to the Executive CIO Forum where a version of this article was first published.

CIOs and IT leaders simply must do their due diligence. If you don’t do your homework someone else will and you will come out looking foolish, or worse. The ability to objectively and critically evaluate emerging technologies may be the single most important technical skill CIOs need in the years ahead.

HP Discover, HP’s largest customer event, takes place June 4-7 in fabulous  Las Vegas.  I’ll be there and I can’t wait.  There will be more than 800 exhibits, displays, demos, sessions and hands-on labs, and those are always educational, thought-provoking and packed with useful, relevant information.  But it’s the people I meet and the stories I’m told that stay with me long after the exhibits are torn down and I’ve left the bright lights of Vegas behind. 

Recently, there have been some articles and a lot of blog chatter about IT Key Performance Indicators. This of course is a good thing because improved measurement and management is critical to IT organizations getting a seat at the table. A key element of this discussion has focused around the question of what is a leading indicator versus a lagging indicator per the blog posts by Eric Brown and Jerry Bishop.

Erez Yaary is the product line manager for the HP IT Performance Suite (ITPS), focusing on new and innovative ways to deliver IT software. Discover Performance asked him to talk a bit about the origins of HP ITPS and explain the thinking that led to its creation.

Could you tell us a bit about the background experience that gave rise to ITPS and the Executive Scorecard?

Dashboards and scorecards have always fascinated me as they provided a means to better see and manage operations–and IT is no exception. I come from the operations space and served as BSM Chief Functional Architect. In that position I focused on service health and operations bridge where one would consolidate operational data and give it a business context, thus managing operations from a business view. Drawing from that experience it dawned on me that in order for IT to perform better, a performance system is required, making sense out of isolated pieces of data by means of giving them business sense.

Last week, I attended two roundtable events put on by Information Week and Hewlett Packard. During the lead-in for the event, the moderator asked the attendees about the importance of performance management and the current state of IT management and measurement at their companies.

By Swamy Ramchandran, Business Consultant, HP Software Professional Services

Swamy Ramchandran has more than 12 years of experience in Process and Services Outsourcing and Retail Payments. He consults with HP FSI and retail enterprise customers specifically around ATM and EFT POS monitoring and management.

Retail banking is an extremely competitive landscape. For consumers, the cost of switching to another bank is minimal. So banks must look for every edge they can when it comes to attracting and retaining customers. One way to find competitive advantage is by optimizing ATM operations.

Security is a front-and-center concern for businesses today. Cyber threats are getting more sophisticated and even more unpredictable. More importantly, the risks associated with getting security and risk management wrong include everything from financial loss, reputation damage, customer loss, lawsuits and even human life. As it turns out, it is a lack of IT coordination between people, process, and technology that actually creates the blind spots attackers exploit. Piling on more software, more processes, and more stopgap measures is simply not a sustainable option.

In part one of this two-part post, I highlighted the evolution of bring your own device (BYOD)into BYOE (Bring Your Own Everything) and what it means to the performance of enterprise IT.  Here in part two I describe the concrete steps you can take to avoid IT backlash with a balanced approach designed to mimimises consternation while encouraging innovation.

By Joel H. Dobbs

Joel H. Dobbs is the CEO and President of The Compass Talent Management Group LLC (CTMG), a consulting firm that assists organizations with the identification and development of key talent and with designing organizational strategies and structures to maximize their ability to compete in the business worlds of today and tomorrow. He is also an executive coach and serves as Executive in Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Business.  Joel is also a popular and frequent contributor to the Executive CIO Forum where a version of this article was first published.

IT analysts predict that four trends -- cloud computing, social media and social networking, mobility and “big data” or information management -- will be the factors that will attempt to wrestle control of IT spending, and with it control of the IT environment, away from IT. I believe that the four areas described above combined with the overall trend towards the “consumerization” of IT has the potential to completely disrupt IT as we know it.  Sadly, many CIOs will ignore this trend and, in the tradition of Kodak, who even though they invented digital photography, couldn’t let go of the film business and now face bankruptcy, will face irrelevance.

Recently, after hearing from my peers about what they think IT Vice Presidents of Operations care about, I decided to put my undergraduate anthropology degree to good use. For those of you that don’t know, anthropology is the study of cultures and involves doing field work and often asking hard and sometimes seemingly stupid questions. In the world of IT, anthropologists would try to discover what are the common cultural traits of the IT Operations leader, these overseers of the network, servers, and help desk. What is their unique world view? And they would seek the answer to the classic of all cultural anthropology questions, “what tools and technology do they use to solve problems?” 

Is it time to reboot the role of the CIO, of IT and IT management before IT management gets the boot?

By Charlie Betz

Charlie Betz is research director for IT portfolio management at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and author of the white paper, “Business Intelligence for the Business of IT.”

One thing I’ve seen over and over again throughout my career is that IT is undermanaged. When you compare it to disciplines such as retail merchandising and supply chain, IT’s management capabilities are immature and underdeveloped. It’s the deepest irony that IT, which enables the business, is managed by spreadsheets even within the largest organizations.

Why is this? IT leaders typically rise through the ranks. They typically don’t have MBAs. In order to be competent with computers, you don’t have much time left over for business school. Now, I don’t think that MBAs are the answer to all IT’s problems – far from it! But people who get a degree in operations management or industrial engineering, for instance, learn important principles in school. They learn about Six Sigma, Lean, and Total Quality Management (TQM). They learn about measurement and statistics. And I think these kinds of skills are noticeably missing in IT management.

If IT leaders could apply these management techniques to IT, they could transform their organizations. Here are two examples of how IT leaders could apply industrial thinking to better manage the business of IT.

As adjunct faculty at the University of Phoenix, I get to talk to students about the future of marketing and communications. In our dialogues, we discuss how business success increasingly depends upon understanding and leveraging information.    To make things more concrete, I share in particular the work of Alvin Toffler. In “The Third Wave,” Toffler asserts that we live in a world where competition will increasingly take place on the currency and usability of information.

To me, this drives to three salient conclusions for information age businesses.

1)   Information needs to drive further down in organizations because top decision makers do not have the background to respond at the pace needed by change.

2)   Information needs to be available faste,r which means that we need to make preprocessed, unstructured information readily available.

3)   Information needs to be available when the organization is ready for it. For multinational enterprises this means “Always on” 24/7 across multiple time zones.

HP Discover, HP’s largest event of the year, takes place at The Venetian │The Palazzo in Las Vegas from June 4-7. This year’s conference offers a vast array of informative keynotes, educational breakouts, open discussions, and best-practice solutions, as well as continual networking opportunities.

At HP Discover you’ll learn about important technologies and strategies that will shape the next decade of IT.

• Preview upcoming technologies in confidential disclosure sessions.
• Explore how specific products and services can solve business challenges you face.
• Learn the outcomes of customer case studies of HP and partner technologies in action.
• Hear new industry insights from enterprise IT thought leaders.

Register now and save $300 off the $1795 entrance price. Your resulting admission price will be $1495. Simply enter code DSCVRSW when registering to take advantage of the $300 discount.