Thursday, October 29

Case: Managing Your Boss in a Crisis

Moderator: Rogelio Oliva, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant

Does it seem as though you are constantly managing emergency after emergency? Would you be prepared if one of those emergencies turned into a true crisis? One that puts the future of the entire organization at stake? How do you manage your team? And, even more important, how do you manage your boss? In this session, Cutter Fellow Rogelio Oliva will lead you through two Harvard Business School-type cases bluntly titled,Crisis and Damage, in which you'll "walk in the shoes" of a newly-appointed CIO as he makes decisions on how to handle a major security and customer data breach, as well as the decisions he makes about what and how to inform his CEO. You'll gain insight into management preparedness and response, the process and importance of the CIO managing his or her boss, the CEO, and understand some of the pitfalls that make the job of CIO one of most volatile, high turnover jobs in the business world.

Rogelio Oliva is Associate Professor of Information and Operations Management at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University and a Fellow of Cutter Consortium. His research explores how behavioral/social aspects of an organization interact with its technical components to determine the firm's operational performance. His current research interests include service operations, behavioral decision making in supply chains, and the transition that product manufacturers are making to become service providers. Dr. Oliva's research work has been published in several academic journals, among them, Management Science, California Management Review, European Journal of Operational Research, System Dynamics Review, and the Int. Journal of Service Industry Management.

A native of Cd. Valles, Mexico, he holds a B.E. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Monterrey Technological Institute (ITESM) in Mexico, an M.A. in Systems in Management from Lancaster University (UK), and a Ph.D. in Operations Management and System Dynamics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the Mays faculty, Professor Oliva taught for six years at the Harvard Business School and for three years at ITESM in Mexico. He has worked for small manufacturing businesses in Mexico and as a researcher for the Center for Organizational Learning and the System Dynamics Group at MIT.

Professor Oliva has consulted on business strategy, improvement of service operations, and organizational change initiatives, and designing learning laboratories using system dynamics models for organizations such as IBM Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., Federal Express Corp., Hewlett-Packard de Mexico, Ford Motor Co., Intercontinental Hotels Group, PLC, The Swiss Industrial Group (SIG), and The World Bank.

Geography Matters, What Measurement Is Telling Us About Outsourcing, Agile, and the Flat World

Keynote: Michael Mah Director of Cutter Consortium's Measurement & Benchmarking practice and Senior Consultant with Cutter's Business Technology Trends & Impacts, Agile Product & Project Management, and Sourcing & Vendor Relationships practices.

Has the digital revolution really made it possible to do almost anything collaboratively with people separated by time and distance? Or are the decisions to outsource IT coming primarily from pressure by CFOs to cut costs?
Countering the outsourcing trend is a powerful new movement that looks at the force of concentration, or the “clustering” of human creativity and talent, claiming that powerful innovation and economic gains result when smart and talented people locate closely to one another, in the view the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas. This is also a message of the Agile revolution.
Who is right?

To answer this question, this talk looks at what measurement data says about outsourced projects versus Agile, and teams separated by distance or co-located. Michael will present actual case studies from real companies and contrast the results from the two philosophies. What you find may challenge long-held beliefs about knowledge work, commoditization, and innovation. .

Michael manages Partner of QSM Associates, Inc., a firm specializing in software measurement, project estimation, and "in-flight" control for both inhouse and outsourced/offshore development. QSM has developed and maintains one of the largest databases of more than 7,500 completed projects collected worldwide, with productivity statistics and trends on cost, schedule, and quality from more than 500 organizations and 18 countries.

With more than 20 years' experience, Mr. Mah has written extensively and consulted to the world's leading software organizations while collecting data on thousands of projects. His background is in physics, electrical engineering, conflict resolution, and mediation. Mr. Mah's work examines the dynamics of teams under time pressure, and its role in contributing to success and failure. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com