What CIOs Need To Know About Performance Management

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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

Hey IT – Forget ITIL, Say Hello To BDIM!

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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

Forgotten IT Skills: How To Ask Questions

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It’s easy to get caught up in all of the servers, routers, applications, and firewalls that make up a modern IT environment. After a while we tend to start thinking that the path to our next great IT insight must lie somewhere in this jungle of IT “stuff”. And that is where you’d be wrong! … Read more

When Giving IT Information, More Is Better

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So just what is the job of an IT department once you get past the keeping the network up and applications running stuff? I think that we can all agree that it must have something to do with the company’s data, but exactly what does that mean? Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are … Read more

Do You Have An IT Dictionary?

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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

IT Solutions: How To Build A Poor Man’s Netflix Entertainment System

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Normally in this blog I try to cover issues that are facing CIOs and everyone who works for them. You know, things like aligning IT with the rest of the business, staffing and retaining the best talent, prioritizing IT projects, that sort of thing. But not today. Instead, I’m going to take a break from … Read more

How IT Can Help Uncover New Products

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“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

Is Allstate’s IT Department In Good Hands?

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Awhile ago over at the Wall Street Journal they had a chance to sit down and have a talk with Catherine Brune who is the CIO over at the big insurance company Allstate. Catherine had some interesting things to say about how she is adapting Allstate’s IT operations and strategy to deal with the current … Read more

Alignment 101: How To Do It

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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?

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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