Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Before considering any strategic moves, one must take a hard look at your company’s current state of affairs. Although we should continually be cognizant of current activities, it is important to truly step back, on occasion, and really assess the state of the organization. In doing these occasional assessments, I continue to find that the…
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….
Does your organization have a high success rate in delivering IT projects? If the answer to this question is “No”, then it’s probably safe to assume that the project management maturity level within your organization is low. As a former CIO I know project management is one area that many CIO’s tend to take for…
The media are all over Twitter. It was recently the subject of a cover story in Time. Del Jones (@jonesdel on Twitter), USA Today’s leadership reporter, wrote a story a few weeks ago on capitalism vs. socialism using Twitter as his only source for information and quotes. The Wall Street Journal offered its readers (your…
Money makes the world go ’round. Score one: CFO. Technology moves the money ’round. Score one: CIO. Earning money is the point of business. Money is earned with technology. Score one each. One would think that sooner or later these two chiefs would discover their common ground and mutual interests, and that stories about the…
Those clicks you hear: that’s the sound of IT shutting off in-house servers because the data they once held has been moved to the Cloud. No, we’re not exaggerating. “Cloud is the next solution in computing platforms,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke, a San Francisco-based analyst firm. Right now, we are at the start…
Having served in many roles over the past 20 years in the IT industry I have noticed “collaboration” is a term increasingly gaining momentum. Where other efforts fail, collaboration can help CIOs build real alignment and achieve success with the business. This alignment requires a concentrated focus on the part of the CIO. It is…
So, you think your IT clients are demanding? Walk a day in Alan Cullop’s shoes and you will see the world from a whole new perspective. Cullop is the CIO of NetJets, a Warren Buffet-owned company that caters to the extremely rich and extremely demanding. First of all, if you’re part of Berkshire Hathaway (Buffet’s…
Although it can be overwhelming at times, the toolbox of IT management frameworks, methods and standards are a good thing. (Anything that helps us to understand and improve the IT management processes must be helpful, right?) There is of course the question of which ones to implement. The actual modus operandi will be unique to…
This series of five articles takes a closer look at software development, the reasons for failure and how to avoid them. As we wrap up this series on managing software development projects, one final factor to consider is location. The Internet, messaging, collaboration software and videoconferencing make it easy to unite users and developers into…