The following interview took place some time in 2001,as the bubble was bursting.

Q: My company is thinking about developing a commercial web site. When  developing a commercial site – is hosting in-house a wise thing for a  company to do or should we consider co-locating with an ISP, or outsource  as much as possible. If we do go in-house, what are the costs of providing adequate bandwidth?

This question is unavoidably contextual – but the answer will most likely be to outsource as much as possible. A general set of principles apply here. First you have to work out what service level you intend the web site to provide and how much traffic you are expecting to regularly visit the site. But please note most people get this wrong. If you estimate the service level too low then you have no choice but to throw money at incrementing it if it causes problems to your business and a low service level on a web site always does. And if you guess the traffic wrongly then, of course, the service level dives. So the intelligent solution is to outsource to a large scale provider that can simply increase the service level to suit the business requirement and the traffic level.

There are a number of such ISPs. It is, of course, possible that your site is as large as that of such providers and that you have the same operational capability as a large ISP. In which case keeping it in-house becomes an option. As regards the question:  what are the costs of providing adequate bandwidth? The question needs to be rephrased, from its how-long-is-a-piece-of-string format. In general the unit costs fall as the bandwidth rises but this can depend on your precise geographical situation.

Q: I’ve heard all the messages about IT getting closer to the business drivers. I hold my hands up and say message received loud and clear. However, my next job is to convey this to my footsoldiers who deal directly with users. Can you offer any advice, for example – five clear guidelines.

Here are five suggestions/guidelines:

1. Find out what the true business drivers are, if you don’t already know. Then send an email to the whole IT department telling them what they are.
2. I get bad feelings about this expression: footsoldiers who deal directly with users. Make a list of all the people in your department who don’t ever deal with users. Now find out how your department has managed to create such insular jobs and work out whether it really should be that way.
3. Explain to your whole department, including the cannon fodder you referred to above, that IT is a service department that sells its services to the rest of the company. Run a marketing campaign to the rest of the company on this basis, but do it subtly on the basis of “fostering customer care”.
4. Follow up the marketing campaign with an education campaign based upon your staff helping other departments to understand the business advantages of intranets, extranets, the internet and all the other joys of IT. Anything where IT makes a difference. Advertise these as regular liaison meetings for idea exchange, but really they are training sessions.
5. Appoint users on to all development projects including any that are outsourced. If the users are any good, make them the project manager, or at least joint project managers. That way you’ll infect some of them with It knowledge and you may save on staff costs.

Q: A year from now our company is going to amalgamate two offices into one  central location in Derby. As head of IT, what sort of strategic plans should I be making in preparation for this – I am thinking of things such as my role in change management and staff retention. Isn’t this a golden opportunity to dispose of the old and bring in the new?

It could indeed be a good opportunity to burn some dead wood, but naturally that depends on context. If your own staff are involved then you need to do two things immediately. Identify quickly who you don’t want to lose and find out what their attitude to the move is. Then get ready to replace those who aren’t going to move. The reverse applies to staff you want to lose. Find out how to discourage them via legitimate means. In the meantime, there can be little doubt that you have a logistics project on your hand.

I’d be inclined to appoint a project manager at once so that a budget can be determined. There may also be another opportunity here. Some IT Directors have problems convincing companies to spend on IT infrastructure (even though it is a necessary expenditure), so it is often less healthy than it should be. Here is an infrastructure spending necessity which definitely isn’t IT’s fault. It’s time to get the company to buy the things that are normally difficult to justify.

Q: I keep hearing about knowledge management and I can see there is value locked away somewhere that has to be harnessed. We are looking at KM from a standing start and practical advice seems to be very vague. I don’t just  want to throw money at a project that will give us an extra layer of information to deal with. Is KM an IT issue or a cultural issue? Can you give me at least three clear points of advice about how to approach KM adoption?

The problem with knowledge management is that it is a hype term, which a whole host of vendors have grasped and attached to their products. Because of this, Knowledge Management cannot be taken as referring to any specific technology and neither can it be taken as delivering any specific benefit. As such KM is neither an IT issue nor a cultural issue, but a hype issue. Here are some points of advice about KM.

• Don’t even think about adopting a buzz word.
• Research the KM product space to see what benefits the vendors are promising and can deliver and see where that fits within the three major areas of IT:
  a) transaction processing,
  b) business intelligence,
  c) work flow.
  You will probably discover that the so-called KM products fit either with b) or with c). In either case see how they fit with existing systems, existing technology and existing projects.
• Get your list of business drivers and critical success factors for the company and see if any of the technology can make a difference either at corporate level or departmental level. If none of it does ignore these products and move on to something useful.

Q: My company has expanded its global operation over the past year with several acquisitions overseas. As we get bigger, I must come up with an IT/e-business strategy that sits as comfortably in the UK as it does in Thailand and Spain, for example. Can you suggest areas that I should concentrate on? Will I encounter problems trying to work around all the regional laws that exist? Should I follow a laissez -faire policy that embraces all cultures?

The major point here is to distinguish between the general and the contextual. Despite the fact that the web tramples on geography it doesn’t destroy it. Neither does it destroy cultural differences. The general has to do with common systems and common data. Try to get the maximum possible buy-in from every territory for the implementation of a common strategy for systems and data, while allowing separate contextualisation (i.e. the user style and interface) for each area (this means that each geogrpahy designs its own web site, but uses common applications). Beneath this you can hopefully work out a common strategy for infrastructure and on top of it, a common strategy for support. These both tend to be general with some contextual bits.

Q: I’m under pressure from the board to facilitate a strategy that reduces users time on personal e-mails. Obviously, I am aware that users should have a degree of freedom to use the e-mail for non- work related matters. Can you give me practical advice on an IT solution that will strike a balance between users wants and company rules.

If you are going to allow personal email at all, then you must place a constraint on it that is workable and you must also have the ability to monitor users accurately. And while you’re at it, you may want to cover internet usage as well. Here’s an idea. First start monitoring so you know the extent of the problem. Don’t do anything until you know the true picture. (and by the way, how does the board know what it claims to know?) Then agree a policy with the board based upon a large reduction in usage and have this declared openly. (No more than an average of one email per day, or no more than three named receivers of email, or whatever). Pick off the abusers of the rules one by one: a good way to achieve this is to pick the worst offender and start automatically copying their emails to their manager after sending an email to the manager explaining why you have done this. If they do not act, then escalate.

Q: ERP users within our company have been complaining for the last six  months that the users do not have adequate competencies and that our organisation offers inadequate levels in training. As a result the improvements in productivity that were expected from the investment hasn’t occurred? The user group has made it clear that they believe it is our responsibility to ensure that both initial and update training is provided on these systems. We do not see ourselves as trainers, nor do we have the resources to do this, but at the same time HR claim IT training is not within their remit. To make matters worse, our company’s performance is not what it should be and management is not sympathetic to making sums of money available for training. Anyone have any suggestions on how we can get ourselves out of this quagmire.

You should probably bite the bullet. This is someone’s fault. If it’s yours then admit it and go cap in hand for the money. If it is someone else’s fault, then pin it down and tell them to go and find funds. If no funds appear then the only solution is to fund it from existing resources or by cunning. One possible get-out-of-jail-free card is a “new support desk system” that just happens to have remote training capabilities. Buy one, claiming massive savings from this brave initiative (and there should be some unless you already have an excellent system). Now tie the two problems together by implementing the new support system on the ERP software first and make training an invisible part of this. If none of this works then turn to the job pages.