Retaining Key Talent Through Succession Planning

All CIOs depend on having skilled personnel to meet their departments’ objectives. However, when managers are focused on cutting costs and meeting service level requirements with fewer resources, retention can move to the back burner. After all, it’s easy to think that employees feel fortunate just to have jobs in this economy. If you’re not…

Saving Money with Application and Service Consolidation

Organizations are waking up to the costs associated with operating and maintaining applications in production. And the Green IT movement is highlighting the environmental issues and hard accounting costs associated with the electricity consumption of data centers. While there are many vendors frothing at the opportunity to sell technical solutions, there are, in fact, many…

How to Do More, For More?(Without More)

The truth is that all IT managers have more to do than they can do. While success comes from focusing on the most valuable things first (and in the correct order) most managers don’t know how to value the IT services they manage. Instead, they choose to do the easy or familiar. Managing IT activities…

Why Software Development Projects Fail, Part IV: Release

This series of five articles takes a closer look at software development, the reasons for failure and how to avoid them. For project success, it is best to involve users early in the testing process and continue to engage users until it is time to go live. In theory, once the software has been built…

Tips for Maximizing Your Staff

In these difficult times, it seems every company is trying to do more with less, and central to that goal is maximizing employee contributions and productivity. While increasing workloads can be a short-term solution, over time it will lead to staff burnout, so organizations must find other ways of addressing their business needs under tight…

BSM Defined: What It Is and Should Never Be

Business service management (BSM) is a relatively new term in the IT management community. Over the last few years it has become a sort of buzzword – many vendors are adopting the term and using it to market their products and services. The average executive is now inundated with vendors and products all claiming to…

Execs See Technology As Important – But Not IT

Another survey about business/IT satisfaction gaps—yet again. The more things change, in many ways the more they remain the same. This one points out that business functional view of the importance of technology is not synonymous with IT’s ability to adequately support it. This article revolves around Forrester’s July 2008 survey of 600 business executives…