Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Once considered one of the most valued positions in IT, the business analyst role has been decimated by the recession as cost cutting and a myopic focus on lean ops have done away with much of the bridge building between IT and the business. Now that it appears the economy has finally turned a corner,…
At the end of last year I wrote two columns about business service management (BSM) and introduced a model for BSM in terms of requirements and technologies. This has led to research conducted over the last five months examining the offerings of fifteen vendors, including customer dialogs, to understand how the BSM mosaic really works…
In case you missed these past few years, the job of the CIO has been morphing from top technical propeller head to a that of true corporate leader. Beginning with the dot-com era and continuing through today, the job has arguably changed more rapidly than any other in corporate America. Once just an order taker,…
IT’s alignment with the business is critical to the success of an organization. My experience as CIO of Mannatech, Inc., working with business executives to achieve results for our supply chain management project, confirmed this to me. Such alignment often entails the willingness of key leaders to collaborate and focus on the execution and delivery…
Attention members of the C-suite: your CIO is having an identity crisis … and it’s your fault. That’s what you’d hear if you could be a bug on the wall at a CIO convention: “What do they want me to do? Oil the machines? Contribute to strategy? Take charge of business processes? Save money? Please…
Cost pressure is nothing new for IT. In this economic climate you are getting even more pressure than usual, so why not make the CFO your best friend. If the thought of this seems odd or impossible, take a minute to step back and consider the benefits: less angst and more money. It’s not impossible….
With a global recession still in full swing, many wonder if it is the right time to invest in ITIL. The short answer is that you don’t have to invest in ITIL per se, but you should invest in what’s necessary for aligning with the business, controlling costs, improving quality, balancing resource allocations and doing…
More than ten years ago, EMA consultants assessed processes and technologies involved with monitoring and managing manufacturing floors, utilities, transportation fleets and other “business infrastructures” and came to the conclusion that great economies of scale could be achieved by consolidating these requirements. In other words, by leveraging IT capabilities for monitoring, instrumentation, asset planning, security,…
As I’ve been writing about this and working with IT organizations, I see that CIO’s fall into two camps regarding taking ownership of IT/business alignment: “Not my job.” Some CIO’s have given me pretty direct feedback that people like me should get out of the way, and stop giving IT a bad rap. And that…
The Innovation Value Institute (IVI) at National University of Ireland (NUI) Maynooth today announced the launch of the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). The IT-CMF provides a concise management roadmap to optimize business value derived from IT investments. This unique framework has been proven to deliver greater business value from IT while reducing the complexity…