HP Can’t Pay Its Salespeople – Another CIO Failure?

Being a salesperson is a hard job. More often than not they live from quarter to quarter and if you don’t make your numbers, then you end up getting shown to the door. Hewlett-Packard is a huge IT products and services company that lives and dies by the actions of its sales teams. Making sure … Read more

PayPal Outage Points To CIO Failure

The basic job of a CIO is to ensure that a company’s IT infrastructure operates smoothly and allows the company to conduct business. On Monday, August 3, 2009, PayPal’s CIO failed at this most basic of jobs. A quick check of PayPal’s senior management structure reveals that they don’t have a CIO position (which in … Read more

Unified Communications Is An Opportunity For CIOs To Show Their Value

The role of a CIO in any organization is to find ways to enable the company to be more successful. This can include introducing new products quicker, reacting to changes in the marketplace faster, or even lowering the cost of doing business. Underlying all of these different ways to assist the business there is one … Read more

5 Things That CIOs Need To Stop Doing

I firmly believe that the reason that any firm has a CIO is so that they have someone who can drive the company’s IT department to provide services and support that will enable the rest of the business to grow faster. It really is that simple – if you can leverage your IT department to … Read more

3 Ways To Bring Business And IT Together

In the end, it all comes down to execution. No, not chopping heads off, but rather how you go about having your IT department perform the tasks that the business needs them to do. How hard could this possibly be? What’s The Goal? The power term “alignment” is tossed around a lot these days. I … Read more

Hey IT – Forget ITIL, Say Hello To BDIM!

The world of IT is changing once again, are you ready? We have evolved a great deal in the last thirty years and it looks like we’re getting ready to make another great leap forward. This time around we have a name for what’s going to happen and it’s called business-driven IT management (BDIM)! Antão … Read more

Do You Have An IT Dictionary?

In IT we often get accused of willy-nilly making up new acronyms on the fly. In all honesty, yes we do do this sometimes. However, there is a more subtle word problem that has been creeping around the edges of IT for a long time that nobody’s been brave enough to bring up: we have … Read more

How IT Can Help Uncover New Products

“Alignment”, “Innovation” – arrgh! Who in the world of IT is not sick of hearing these two words used over and over again? Yes we’d like to be able to help out the rest of the business, but our IT budgets are being slashed left and right. We don’t have either the staff or the … Read more

What Should A CIO’s Top 10 Concerns Be Right Now?

Let’s take a quick snapshot of the business world as it stands right now: uncertainties (and hope) about a new president coming in, financial markets don’t seem to be responding to stimulus programs, gas is down to $2.00 / gallon but for how long, and Paris Hilton hasn’t been hear from for most of the … Read more

10 Ways That IT Can Solve Real-World Business Problems

My favorite word is “alignment”. This describes the situation that happens when an IT department gets it act together and focuses on solving problems for the business. This is actually different from what an IT department normally spends its time doing: keeping the network up and providing help desk support for end users. The folks … Read more