decision making

CIOs Fix Outsourcing Problems By Putting The Fox In Charge Of The Chickens

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I’m sure that by now you’ve read some of the stories that are out there about CIOs who managed to get themselves into outsourcing contracts that turned out badly. The reasons that the deals took a turn for the worse are many and varied, but the end result is the same: the CIO’s customers were … Read more

3 Traps That Cause CIOs To Make Bad Decisions

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How do you make decisions? We’d all like to think that we carefully weight the available evidence and then use our past experiences to make the right decision each time. However, the reality is actually quite different. As CIOs we are asked to make some very big “bet the company” types of decisions. If we … Read more

CIOs Need To Learn: Plans = Bad, Decisions = Good

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When you are CIO you will quickly come to dread (or maybe you already do) the annual strategic planning process for the IT department. Talk about choices: mobile devices, privacy issues, cloud computing – who can pack strategic planning for all of these issues into one short period at the beginning of the year – … Read more

4 Ways That CIOs Can Start To Make Better Decisions

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An important part of the job of being a CIO is the ability to make good decisions. Lots of good decisions. In fact, the ability to make more good decisions than bad decisions is arguably what allows a CIO to keep his / her job. Now the only problem is that it’s really, really hard … Read more

It Turns Out That Top-Down Decisions Are What CIOs Need To Make

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What’s Wrong With The Way That We Schedule IT Projects? At the end of the day, an IT department is simply a collection of projects. Some of these projects are short lived (“we’ve got an outage!”) and some are much longer (“let’s install a new ERP solution”). However, it turns out that today’s CIOs have … Read more

Faux Market Secrets: How CIOs Capture Innovation

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So picture this: you’re a CIO and you desperately want to be seen by the rest of the C-level executives as something more than a simple cost center. What to do? If only there was some way that you could tap into all of that incredible creative energy that we all know lives in the … Read more

Women In IT: What’s The Current Score?

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How many women work in your IT department? Is your CIO a woman? The answer to the first question is probably “not that many“, and the answer to the second is all too often “no“. We’ve been aware that this is an issue for awhile, how are we doing on addressing it? How Do Women … Read more

Who Gets To Make Decisions In Your IT Shop?

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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

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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