Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Corporate leaders commit enormous sums to technology investment and often, despite reams of “business cases”, on a hope and a prayer that this money will actually buy solutions to their problems. Investments in information technology are particularly mysterious, because it is so new and constantly changing. Nevertheless, it now accounts for half of all capital…
How to Govern the Ever-Extending Enterprise, Part II Technology is breaking down traditional management practices and paving the way towards the horizontal enterprise, writes CIOUpdate columnist Faisal Hoque of BTM Corp. Here’s how to cope. In Part I of this two-part series I talked about the concept of the “extended enterprise” being nothing new but…
Business leaders use the term “agility” to describe their business plans and strategic initiatives, but it’s often little more than just a vision. Agility is something that requires planning and a full incorporation in business and management processes. It’s a philosophy and action. And, most of all, it requires courage and commitment. But what does…
It’s nearly impossible to pick up a technology magazine or sit through a strategy meeting without encountering a reference to what some consider the next and greatest wave in enterprise computing – the cloud. Cloud is a fitting term for something so shrouded in mystery and hard to grasp. We’re not helped by the plethora…
Technology-driven transformation in the 21st Century business environment puts a premium on the type of model we adopt. Not only are entirely new business models possible they are also necessary for survival. But they must be designed in a manner that allows them to morph into something new on the fly when the environment changes…
When Marilyn Carlson Nelson was CEO of Carlson Companies, the privately held hotel, restaurant, travel and marketing giant, she used technology strategically to expand the company. In fact, the company has invested more than a billion dollars in technology, a sum one would not expect for what doesn’t seem like a high-tech enterprise. “When I…
The financial crisis has done a thorough job of weeding out companies that were extended beyond their means. Those who believed they were immune quickly learned that this economic tsunami was more than they could overcome. We who remain look in the mirror and wonder if we are next. This economy makes times gone by…
Every study shows that organizations as a whole, and especially CIOs, continue to struggle with business/technology alignment. It remains one of the top management issues. No other group in any organization talks about alignment as much as IT. I have long been arguing that aligning technology with business is a fundamentally flawed and limiting concept….