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Category Archives: Strategic positioning
Getting past the impulse to order everything
There’s a constant temptation in management more generally, and IT specifically, to presume that everything not only can be ordered, but that it ought to be. Perhaps, for IT people, it comes from the origins of the work. The original … Continue reading
Portfolio classes for the greater recession
In an economy that doesn’t move forward easily if at all, the traditional classes in portfolio planning aren’t enough. A Governing Board needs to establish a mix designed to deal with a long period of malaise. That would be now, … Continue reading
The core governance decisions
IT governance is a noxious task, yet leaving it undone — or asking the Chief Information Officer to bear the load alone — is a recipe for trouble. I have written at length about the Governance Board, and how it … Continue reading
Getting to the basics
It’s amazing how many enterprises don’t have the basics agreed to, even after all these years. Take your basic insurance company. It doesn’t matter what kind, as long as it’s customer facing. Let’s take property and casualty. What’s good customer … Continue reading
Keeping it small
Organizations exist to grow. (It’s why we make the transition from being a solo practitioner to thinking about working with others, and, of course, organizations create room for newcomers to learn “on the job”, making them ideal for new entrants … Continue reading
Building in Operational Control
Shortly after Enron blew up, most enterprises undertook a multi-year effort to tighten operational control, under the rubric of “compliance”. The presumption was that, if executives were going to be legally-bound to “know” the operational state of the enterprise, then … Continue reading
Posted in Services, Strategic positioning, Value Generation
Tagged alerting, compliance, flows in the business, innovation
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IT spending to fall: what should you spend on?
There’s a presumption that growth should always be occurring. Vendors count on it; most managers do, too. What if that’s not true? For enterprise IT, that’s in the immediate future. (Take a good hard look at how this year’s “growth” … Continue reading
Posted in Asset Portfolios, Governance, Services, Strategic positioning
Tagged budgets, cuts, falling economy, what to do
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There’s a belief in magic
Everyone in management elsewhere in the enterprise shares three beliefs: “I don’t really understand information technology.” “I read about this really interesting thing and we should have it, too.” “We can make millions from our data.” What information and communication … Continue reading
Base Costs of “Being in the Game”
For too long, enterprises have tried to do “IT on the cheap”. By that, I don’t mean that they don’t spend a lot of money on it. I’m also not someone who thinks the amount your should spend is formulaic: … Continue reading
Don’t Jam the Process into a Package
It has been said of IT organizations that, in the past decade, they have suffered from process myopia. Partly this is due to the transition of IT provisioning from a fundamentally “build” model to a “package implementation” model: package vendors … Continue reading
