Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Would you describe your own team as creative? Do your employees help set industry trends, or do they just follow them? With everyone focused intently on the day-to-day aspects of their jobs, your staff simply may not be thinking about developing new ideas or recommendations. As a leader, you can change that by setting the…
by Derek Lonsdale, Nilesh Chandra and Chris Gallacher of PA Consulting – The IT function exists to support the business in achieving competitive advantage. However, many business users often see IT merely as a barrier to their initiatives; a function that over-spends and under-delivers. In order to foster a better relationship with the business, IT…
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…
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…
Doing the opposite has always been a smart strategy for breakthrough. Today, though, it has special implications, because in so many ways our entire world and everything about it is going through an intensely rapid and comprehensive reversal. The acceleration of digital technology is turning conditions on their heads, creating a profound shift in the…
There has been a lot of discussion in many forums about the role of the modern CIO. To me it’s fairly simple and it’s in the title: Information. The CIO’s role is about information. Information to make strategic business decisions; Information to make tactical business decisions; Information about the state of the business; Information about…
If I could offer one idea that will have a huge impact on your success and your satisfaction with work it would be that you give yourself time to think — with purpose. (You can stop reading here if you accept that point!) I work with so many executives that tell me they would be…
Since the Tower of Babel, large organizational changes have had a tendency to fall apart during implementation. Even with modern engineering methods and technologies only about 1-in-3 of organizational change initiatives survive beyond their initial implementation. So can anything be done to improve the odds and avoid costly failures? Yes, here are some steps to…
I have always approached my role as CIO with the mindset that IT has to be more involved in the business in order to help the company. The Journey to the Future-State CIO framework from the CIO Executive Council immediately struck me as a good model with specific goals for advancing my own role and…
Stupid obstacles often come in the form of people’s opinions, corporate policy, changes of direction, fire drills, conflicting goals, delayed decisions, unclear strategies … shall I go on? In IT, this is particularly challenging because no one outside of IT really understands IT. You do important heroic stuff that keeps the company running, and no…