How to Structure and Mature the Business/IT Relationship

Managing the relationship between an organization’s business units and IT is a strategic initiative that can support corporate objectives, bolster program planning, help set implementation expectations, and improve operational score cards … or, it can become a burden and a detriment to open lines of communication. A liaison model should take into account several company…

Business Leaders Believe Technology Drives Success

Every two or three months I run short surveys with leaders around the world; the project is called the Leadership Pulse. Over the month of July I examined business drivers in this survey. This is a topic I have studied in some depth since 1996 when I first began examining what leaders think drives performance…

How Alignment Helps Organizations Succeed

When I was asked to participate in this series of articles on the alignment of IT within the larger business structure of an organization, my goal was to drive home the overarching impact that cross-functional alignment can have on organizational success. Much like the law of physics which states that inertia is accelerated when forces…

Saving 15% is Easy …

Alright, nothing is that easy, but the point is if you have a mandate from on-high to cut costs and consolidate IT into a centralized, shared-services organization with a solid reporting line back to the CEO’s office, well, then, things are definitely tilted in your favor. In April of 2008, it was just this situation…

The Outsourcing Continuum, Recap

When you start on your journey to outsourcing, you have expectations that you will never have to worry about your technology infrastructure again. That’s not strictly true, because now you worry about the technology on a different level. You now worry more about how you can use the application of the technology to provide your…

Moving Toward Better Business/Technology Leadership

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….

Five More Ways to Cut Costs Without Cutting Services

Last month I wrote about five ways your organization could cut costs without cutting services. While that article offered advice on embracing data center automation, exploring open-source software and eliminating duplicate software, there were several other ideas that didn’t fit into that story. Here, then, are five more ways to cut costs without cutting services:…

3 Reasons a CIO Should Care About Twitter

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…

How to Tell if Your ITO is a Service Organization

I heard a story about a CIO who got such great personal service at a Ritz Carlton hotel that he ended up sending his entire IT staff to Ritz Carlton hotel staff customer service training. That is taking the concept of IT being a service organization to a new level! On the other end of…

Smart Sourcing: The New Normal

In business today the active noun “sourcing” often is preceded by one of a growing collection of adjectives: “global”, “strategic”, “crowd”, “multi”, etc. However, each of these design models and potential pairings is built upon a single premise―no matter how capable each of us might be, in this day and age we simply cannot be…