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How Overhauling IT Was a Life-Saver For the American Cancer Society
Lemeowski writes: American Cancer Society CIO Jay Ferro lets readers peek behind the curtain of the nonprofit's IT organization, saying that when he took on the role a little over three years ago, the nonprofit had 12 different divisions — each with its own independent IT set-up and more than 600 independent applications in its portfolio. In the past three years, Ferro has aligned the entire IT organization into one global entity, consolidating dozens of data centers into three; increasing spending on strategic projects from 5 percent to 40 percent, and reducing 600 core systems down to fewer than 200. His journey is a powerful reminder that while streamlining IT can often be painful upfront for IT managers, the payoff for sticking with it, especially for nonprofits, can feed into saving more lives.
IT leadership is lacking in most companies.
The idea a good manager can manage anything is wrong.
After many years, I had a friend in manager ask me a question or two outside the office.
He had been in many management roles, and was working as a project manager for some major Oracle DB projects.
After explaining and doing a short lesson on all the major tech terms the DBs & system admin use.
I asked what does management understand.
On time (or not), Manpower Head count & budget.
They almost never have a clue about the interaction of the systems, quality, maint, network (or any infrastructure) & replacement (timing)
One manager I worked for needed a powerpoint to explain why upgrading the memory in the main unix server was needed,
after all we had just install 8gb in his PC.
Buy another tape cabinet with every project - BOFH (?)
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
I read the linked article hoping for insight on how to identify redundant infrastructure, steer divergent IT departments towards common solutions, or at least practical examples of uniformisation / centralization of *something*, anything, but there were none. It's all just a tech-free summary of the guy's accomplishments, as you'd present in a management meeting to tout your success as an IT manager. That's good for him and for the ACS, I guess, but it's pretty pointless to post it here.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
increasing spending on strategic projects from 5 percent to 40 percent
Rarely does this sort of change involve spending more money in absolute terms. Most likely people doing stuff like support were retasked, outsourced, or simply cut.
Most of the stuff in the summary sounds like a good move, but I've seen companies that were fairly short-sighted in making these kinds of moves. At work we've been focusing on "strategic projects" for a long time now in belt-tightening mode and it seems like the biggest result is that every department under the sun has sprouted its own mini IT department that does all the stuff that IT stopped doing, usually less efficiently than it would be done if centralized.
When IT cuts a service that really was necessary, the result usually involves a net loss of money.
one global entity ... consolidating dozens of data centers into three ... increasing spending ... reducing 600 core systems down to fewer than 200
As far as I can tell he created a single point of failure, reduced diversity and thus resilience, and instead of getting a cost advantage, it cost more. Reminds me of a joke:
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd... "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered "sure".
The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep. "That is correct; take one of the sheep." said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.
Then the shepherd says: "If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?", "OK, why not." answered the young man. "Clearly, you are a consultant." said the shepherd. "That's correct." says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answers the shepherd. "You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don't know crap about my business...... Now give me back my dog."
Will it work? Some of the aside projects maybe be due to incompetency, lack of coordination and redundancy, but I bet a few are to escape giving accountability to the HQ. Seeing all this problems as a technical project is doomed to failure. What are they doing to prevent this situation won't happen again in a few years? Who says nowadays one needs a local physical datacenter anymore when rogue players can put together a datacenter in the cloud?
One would hope that the American Cancer Society would, at least, be an organization that understands that uncontrolled proliferation can be seriously detrimental to an organization; and that sometimes substantial resection, however unpleasant and expensive, is the best available course of action.
It's a lucky coincidence that that applies to IT systems as well!
The CEO of the ACS is paid well over a million dollars per year for his services, in addition to having 24/7 use of a private jet, personal limousine and chauffeur, and security guards.
For every $1 the ACS spends on direct patient benefits, it pays $6.40 in salary, compensation, and overhead, according to 2008 financial filings.
why do these stories always attract the Gandalf wannabes ?
It seems they've done a good job pulling all the disparate regions of support into a more compact set of teams, tools and services and have done a fairly good job of it so far.
That being said, the consolidation of IT services always leaves out the most important and most broken aspect of IT - communications. Companies assume business communication improves with the introduction of better phone tools, more robust email services and more efficient instant message systems. Generally, the exact opposite is the norm because no business wants to spend money on a communications coordination department to keep the flow organized and moving smoothly. Instead, they implement social media systems to give the sharing of useful and useless information equal time in the spotlight. It's becoming an annoying habit for businesses to install Facebook-esque systems that are supposed to help but ends up with everyone back-slapping everyone else for being good and smart and strong.
Honestly, makes me want to throw up in my mouth. A lot.
"Courage is being afraid to do the Right Thing, and doing it anyway."
The problem is there is a hierarchy structure while for IT projects the Manager, Systems Architect and Project Manager really need to be on the same level, and not try to take over each other's roles.
The Manager: On Time, Manpower, and Budget is a lot more work than it sounds, doing such work means you cannot really focus Technical Details, even if you take a good tech and give him a manager job, he will either make bad tech decisions, xor fail to manage effectively. The same with having the manager trying to be a PM or a SA and vice versa.
The PM is track of the state of the project, handling time lines, Insuring dependencies are met.
The SA deals with the technical decisions, how things should work, and if there are road blocks they come up with alternate solutions, or work with the PM to figure out new dependencies or adjust time lines.
The Manager, looks the the PM Time line and ensures resources are available to work on it, and that they are doing it the way the SA needs it to be done.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
>> while streamlining IT can often be painful upfront for IT managers, the payoff for sticking with it can feed into saving more lives.
This made me giggle. The CEO of the American Cancer Society pulls down more than $2M a year. Any IT savings are much more likely to be plowed back into executive bonuses than charity work. https://www.charitywatch.org/c...
Reading through the summary I can't see a breakthrough in cancer so I'm pretty dubious an IT shift has "saved lives" unless somehow it is directing more funds into research - but I doubt that is the case.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Still approving of testing on animals and still trying to hide the fact. Let them rot and everyone who works for them.
My dad ran the epidemiology department for the American Cancer Society when I was a pre-teen and teenager in the '80s. I grew up dialing into their VAX 11/780 with a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. At first I used a DECwriter terminal, which didn't have a screen—all the output was noisily printed to 132-column tractor feed. Eventually my folks brought home a VT180, around the same time that we upgraded to a 1200 baud modem. I'll never forget playing Crystal Caverns, and creating ASCII "animations" as a kid that scrolled up the screen.
Also, it means that as a 9-year-old kid, FORTRAN 77 was my first programming language. I think in some cultures that qualifies as child abuse.
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