Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
As 2011 gets into high-gear, we are seeing the predicted IT spending increases come to pass; with companies often shifting their focus from cost-cutting initiatives to growth and innovation projects. Accompanying this spending increase is a shift in the role of the CIO towards an architect for business innovation. This increased, highly visible responsibility creates…
By the numbers Another look at our data on “business metrics” shows that the top three measurements are: business process impact metrics, business activity metrics, and metrics to show end user effectiveness in interacting with applications. Classic SLA/OLA metrics came in fourth. Other business metrics included metrics to show end user application preferences, and then…
In my last column, How to Make User Experience Count, I wrote about user experience management (UEM), and how I believed it was a continuum of customer experience management and business impact. The reason why is that all IT services are ultimately consumed by flesh-and-blood mammals (most often of the homo sapiens genus), and how…
The quest for business agility became nearly universal as the U.S. was appearing to emerge from recession. The central idea is that organizations of all sizes need the speed and agility of a startup to respond rapidly to changing conditions. Now that the U.S. economy is sputtering again, demands for business agility are becoming even…
Organization readiness – An enterprise first needs to adopt the principle of service-orientation. However, successful SOA depends on the readiness of the enterprise to become service-oriented. To get started with SOA, the guide recommends conducting a maturity assessment. Such an assessment is available from The Open Group and enables a practitioner to assess an organization’s…
by Stephen Bennett of Oracle Confronted with the age old problems of agility and complexity, today’s CIOs are under more pressure than ever to improve the strategic value of IT to the business. At best, these challenges have increased costs, limited innovation and increased risk. At worst, they have reduced IT’s ability to respond to…
Many Fortune 500 companies are recognizing enterprise data as a strategic business asset. Leading companies are using troves of operational data to optimize their processes, create intelligent products, and delight their customers. Also, increased demands for regulatory transparency are forcing companies to capture and maintain an audit trail of the information they use in their…
Anxious to read IBM’s 2011 biannual CIO study The Essential CIO? If you are, I can save you a lot time. At 72 pages, I found the report a slog overall. Although there’s lots of white space and diagrams that make the read a bit easier, the first 85% of the report was a trudge,…
At some point cloud services will be as reliable as the electricity in our homes and offices. Now, I am not an old man by any stretch, but I remember as a child in the UK, expecting to have power cuts in the winter. We took candles and matches or flashlights to bed. Wood was…
The M&A volume is expected to rise by 30 percent or more in 2011, and may increase even more in 2012 as the financial and lending environment returns to something resembling its pre-downturn state. This “merger mania” is fueled in part by a heady combination of available capital and a target rich environment comprised of…