Inspections Should Be A Standard For Any New CIO
Written by Todd L. MichaudTodd Michaud runs Power Thinking Media, which helps retailers and restaurants tackle the convergence of social, mobile and retail technologies. He spent nine years delivering technology platforms to more than 10,000 retail locations as VP of IT for Focus and Director of Retail Technology for Dunkin’ Brands.
As an IT leader, my least favorite phrase from my business partners is, “Well, can’t you just simply…” No matter how someone finishes that sentence, the answer is, “No.” The implication being that this person in Operations, Marketing or Finance believes he or she knows a simple way to solve the problem at hand. But it is never that easy. If it was, it would have been done already.
One of the biggest reasons CIOs fail—and, as a result, have such a high turnover rate—is the ghosts of decisions past. Highly complex systems built on a series of shortcuts and workarounds create a minefield of technology booby-traps that make even simple projects overly bloated and complicated. I think it is about time that CIOs start requiring an external audit of the IT environment prior to taking on the new role. Similar to a building inspector letting new home purchasers know about the inner workings of a house, an IT inspector would give new CIOs a clear picture of what they are walking into.
I had this thought after watching Holmes Inspection on HGTV. In the show, Mike Holmes helps homeowners who have purchased a house that develops serious problems, even after having a home inspector tell them everything was okay. Mike is famous for identifying all of the problems with the house, and then “Making it right” (his tagline). He undoes all of the shortcuts taken by the builder or previous contractors and redoes things correctly. I was struck by how awesome it would be to have an IT inspection done before taking on a new role.
In most retail environments, it is never as easy to get something done as it should be, which is frustrating to all those involved. When the systems are built with bailing twine and duct tape, there are too many resources forced to support the systems versus implementing enhancements or deploying new systems. The development activities that do take place require twice as long and are twice as hard as they would be if the environment were “clean.”
Just as plumbing and electrical are critical to the operation of a new house, data feeds are important to an enterprise application portfolio. Can a company easily identify the data within a company, which system is authoritative of that data, and which systems it is shared with? Are there monitors, error checking and automated retries built into the systems? Are the database schemas documented and easily available? If the answer to any of these new questions is, “no,” then that should be a red flag on the inspection.
The infrastructure of a house (foundation, walls, floors and ceilings) is just like the infrastructure in an enterprise (network, servers, storage and applications). Is the network robust, scalable and highly available? Are the servers virtualized and configured to properly maximize the high-availability tools? Are mission-critical systems clustered and highly available? Do you have solid service-level agreements with third-party providers? Again, if any of the answers are, “no,” then a red flag should be raised during the inspection.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
