Health Care Changes: Is IT Enough?

So here’s the $19B question for you: if you were the CIO in charge of the Obama administration’s big health care initiative, do you think that the “secret sauce” that will make it all work out will be better / more IT? Just in case you’ve not been following this developing story, one of the … Read more

What CIOs Need To Know About Performance Management

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past couple of years, you’ve probably had a chance to read about the Business Intelligence (BI) fad that seem to have taken over the IT market. The basic idea is pretty simple: use an application to crunch all of that complicated data that you’ve been gathering and present a … 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

Alignment 101: How To Do It

Achieving alignment between the business side of the house and IT is one of those things that everyone likes to talk about when they are putting together the goals for the upcoming year, and then nothing ever seems to get done about it. A survey that was done by the consulting firm Bain & Co. … Read more

Just What Is This “Alignment” Thing?

Once upon a time the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said that pornography is hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.” In the world of IT it would appear as though alignment with the business side of the house is a lot like pornography in this sense – it’s hard to … Read more

Is IT Alignment Sooo 2008?

Is it possible that the holy grail of IT, getting our act together with the rest of the business, is no longer what we should be working on? A survey that was done by the consulting firm Bain & Co. sure seems to be saying this. Before anyone goes crazy on me, let’s first make … Read more

Where Is Your Next CIO Coming From?

So here’s the scenario: a previously unknown meteor comes streaking down to earth and somehow lands squarely on top of your CIO squashing him/her instantly. What do you do next? Where would your replacement CIO come from and do you know who that would be? A study conducted by the equipment supply firm CDW has … Read more

Who Gets To Make Decisions In Your IT Shop?

A recent study of 89 senior IT executives in a wide range of industries was done in order to get the answer to a seemingly simple question: who’s in charge here? In these days of reigned in IT spending, decisions about how much to spend and what to spend it on seem to have migrated … Read more

Getting & Keeping IT Top Management’s Attention

In my humble opinion, one of the key contributors to why so many IT projects fail is because of simple neglect. I guess the best analogy is if you were starting to drive down a highway road. When you started driving, you’d keep your hands on the steering wheel and make sure that the car … Read more