CIOs must consider that every application is integrated in some way. Here's how to make your next broad deployment successful.

July 24, 2008

By Howard Baldwin, CIO's Custom Solutions Group

When research firm Gartner released its list of top IT trends for 2008 last December, the first five topics-power efficiency, unified communications, business process modeling, enterprise information management and virtualization-were familiar to CIOs. Still, the list also presented a clear challenge: Each of the items demands an enterprise-wide deployment.

Application silos have been dead for years. In order to be as efficient as possible, CIOs must therefore ensure that business processes, infrastructure, data warehouses and communications accommodate input and output from across their global organizations. When we asked CIOs for advice on surviving enterprise-wide deployments, they offered several worthy tactics, from understanding all the moving parts and managing expectations, to starting small and committing to ongoing training. Following are their best and brightest ideas:

Get the big picture.

Before starting an enterprise-wide deployment, Mitch Davis, CIO of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, recommends stepping back and cataloging all the moving parts of an organization that the technology will affect. "Start by working with each department to understand how they are doing their jobs today," he says. "Then clearly define the project and define what success looks like for each team." Assessing the project before deployment rather than after will give you a sense of how the technology will interact with each of your departments; if nothing else, Davis says, it's a good lesson in IT alignment.

Manage expectations.

This is one of the most important aspects of any technology deployment, and it's incrementally important for one that affects the entire enterprise, according to Fernando Gonzalez, CIO of Byer California, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of women's and girls' clothing. "Sometimes we just tell our key people that they're not going to like a new application compared to the old one," he says, remembering his company's switch from a homegrown ERP accounting system to an Oracle ERP system. "We told them that switching to it won't be easy, because there's no way it will be as user-friendly as the old system. We said outright that the goal wasn't to make the employees' jobs easier. It was to give senior management better data to make decisions. You do a disservice when you spend a lot of time convincing people that it's for their benefit when it's for the company's benefit."

One technique Davis uses to manage expectations: Create a side-by-side view of the old process and the new process so employees can see how their work will be done after the application is in place. Ideally, this shows how their work will be made easier.

Move in increments.

It's crucial to start small, insists David Silversmith, chief technology officer of Carfax, an online vehicle history report service based in Centreville, Va. A frequent user of software-as-a-service applications, he signed a 15-month contract that had a three-month trial period built in to protect the company. That way, Carfax could gauge how many employees were using the application, and how well they were accepting it.

When he replaced his company's intranet last year with Microsoft SharePoint, Silversmith's department created new segments on the server-one department at a time. Although working incrementally frequently means running systems in duplicate, Silversmith feels it's worth the cost. "Doing it this way lets people give feedback," he says, "and the IT department is more open to questions because they know it'll be harder to change something when all the systems are up. If people know there is room for change, they'll have those discussions."

The only drawback to moving incrementally is that timing can be a struggle. If too many people are kept waiting for their upgrade, they might get impatient. What's more, if the deployment gets delayed for any reason, IT may have to deal with the resulting frustration. "It's important to show ongoing progress," Bowdoin's Davis says, suggesting that you celebrate small successes along the way in order to keep everyone motivated.

Train and train again.

Any technology that encompasses the entire enterprise is going to have new features and capabilities unanticipated by employees. That's why Byer California's Gonzalez recommends ongoing employee training-both initially, when the technology is introduced, and again later, once your team has had a chance to explore the new application. "You cannot over-educate users about data that's now available for them," he says. "Previously, they couldn't ask the question because they didn't have the data." Although they now can find more information and be more efficient, employees require some level of comfort with an application before they can know what questions to ask about it.

The value of enterprise-wide technology deployments is clear, especially for CIOs, who can establish reliable business processes and propagate them throughout their organizations. It's component reusability at its best. It's also important to remember how those deployments affect users, however, as usability will affect your success just as much as the technology itself does.