The Premier Blog For Learning How To Become A Successful CIO
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
If your career plans call for you to one day to become a CIO (or if you all ready are), then it would be most helpful if you knew what a CIO looked like. I mean goodness gracious, if you walked into a room of IT professionals, wouldn’t you want to be able to pick … Read more
I don’t know about you, but my eyes start to roll up into my head anytime I see an article with the word “ethics” in its title or if a speaker makes the mistake of saying “… let’s talk about ethics…”. Yeah, yeah I know that this is the wrong attitude and that if I’m … Read more
Man – what a mess! I’m almost afraid to unwrap the paper each morning because the font size of the headlines seems to be getting bigger and bigger as the financial news gets worse and worse. Stock trading firms are going belly up, others are getting bought. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (who are they?) … Read more
Wicked IT problems can frustrate even the best of us – by their very nature, wicked IT problems have no solution (that’s why we call them “wicked” and not just “hard”). As we talked about last time, although you may not have the tools to solve these types of problems, you do have the tools … Read more
So we’ve chatted about Wicked IT Strategy problems – these are the ones that you really can’t solve. Given that, you’ve got a couple of different things that you can do. The easiest is to throw your arms up in the air, say “this can’t be solved”, and then work very hard at getting promoted … Read more
No holding back this time, I’m just going to let it all come out. I just got done reading my 1,000th article on how to improve an IT department and it was as worthless as most of the others that I’ve read. For way too long I’ve been listening to gurus, consultants, and other so-called … Read more
Businesses today spent roughly 5% of their gross revenue on IT and end up with very little to show for it. A couple of very bright guys over at the Harvard Business School (David Upton and Bradley Staats) have come up with a new approach to Enterprise IT Projects. They started their research from Eric … Read more
Current industry wisdom estimates that companies end up spending 5% – 10% of their gross revenue on all things related to Information Technology. Ouch! That means for every $1M in revenue, the IT cost could reach up to $100,000. You do the math! In a recent article in Baseline magazine, Cary Westmark who is the … Read more
In the past, the IT department was left alone and was only noticed if something stopped working (like email!) However, in the 21st Century IT has become a critical part of how business competes. The problem is that very few firms have figured out how to evolve from treating IT as a simple cost center … Read more