How A CIO Can Make An Inherited IT Department Better

As CIOs, some jobs are tougher than others. One of the most demanding is when you find yourself taking on a troubled IT department. This isn’t a job for the faint of heart. Your job will be to repair damage and put things back in order so that the company can realize the importance of … Read more

How A CIO Can Reorganize An IT Department

Hey CIO, how’s that IT department of yours looking these days? If you are like most of us, you are fairly happy with how your IT department has been put together, but there are some areas in which you’d like to make a few changes. Sound like it’s time for a reorganization of the IT … Read more

Why CIOs Who Know How To Slow Down Do Better

As CIO one of your most important jobs is to get as much out of your IT department as is humanly possible. You’d think that that best way to do this would be to always be pushing harder and harder. However, researchers who have been studying this very problem have come up with a different … Read more

6 Reasons That IT / Business Alignment May Be Impossible To Do

A quick quiz for you: what has been the #1 task on every CIO’s to-do list for the better part of the past 20 years? If you guessed “aligning IT with the rest of the business” then you are correct. This has been an IT goal for the past 20 years? What’s up with that? … 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

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

Secrets Revealed: How To Get The Most From Your IT $$$

Every firm spends loads of money on IT, why do only some (Walmart, FedEx) get a clear advantage from the money that they spend? A team of researchers lead by Dr. Gautam Ray talked with 104 insurance firms in order to get to the bottom of this question. Here’s what they found: the key to … Read more