Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Software Project Failure: The Reasons, The Costs – When a major software project fails, the results can be devastating to an organization. This article uses economic criterion to define what it means for a project to fail and examines common traps that contribute to or accelerate project failure. Effective Project Management, ITIL and BSM –…
Today many organizations are considering whether to keep IT functions internal or outsource them to a third party. There a number of factors that need to be considered when choosing a service provider. (Or, if you already have one, you can still evaluate their role in your organization using these guidelines.) First and foremost this…
I have loved every one of my years in the IT business, which, to give you an idea of how long that’s been, was called EDP, or electronic data processing, when I started in 1966. But lately I have come to realize that I had a career, not a profession. By definition, a profession implies…
PALO ALTO, CALIF. — Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira wants to make one thing clear to people who think it’s more effective to juggle multiple tasks at once: “There’s no such thing as multitasking,” Spira said. “We’re switching between tasks, but we [human beings] are not capable of multitasking.” The comments came during a recent…
“You Say Po-tay-to, I say Po-tah-to.” In my last article, I argued that because we really don’t have a much needed, shared vocabulary for “our kind” of architecture, there is justified skepticism about the legitimacy and value of the discipline. In this article, I’ll try to support that assertion by surveying the diversity of opinion…
With the economy slowing, IT managers are going to have to make do with less money than they thought come 2008. While this is not new news to many, to counter this trends adverse effects, it is important to look at and track two numbers: new initiatives spending and spending for ongoing support (i.e., keeping…
A 2006 study claims that 97% of IT workers say they experience job-related stress on a daily basis. Some 80% say they feel stressed before they even get to work, and around 25% admit to taking time off to deal with the stress. These numbers place IT as the most stressful profession -– beating out…
For many CIOs telling their line-of-business (LOB) counterparts that a particular project isn’t a good idea is hard to do. The LOB manager, VP, president, etc. have project “X” in mind and feel it is exactly what they need to make situation “Y” better, go away, produce, etc. The problem isn’t that the LOB manager…
There’s no doubt that executives with a technical orientation—those logical, analytical left brain folks—bring many positive attributes to the table, but they can also pose a unique challenge for a CIO. A technology orientated management team will naturally want to challenge the CIO’s ideas. Although this can be healthy, executives that second guess everything a…
The role of the CXO, particularly the CIO is primarily one of leadership, but it’s the one thing we generally never get trained for. Ironically, it has become the “definition” of the CIO in recent time as the job becomes increasingly complex and specialized. More Dan Gingras on CIO Update Is the CIO Obsolete? The…