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Monthly Archives: July 2012
Will it all go to the cloud?
Whether done with the support of an outsourcing partner or done in house with your own staff, most IT in most enterprises is still done locally. Cloud vendors (the -as-a-service types) follow the logic of Nicholas Carr (The Big Switch) … Continue reading
Breaking up the monoliths
I worked with a fellow analyst in the 1990s who used to stand on stage and say that buying SAP was a lot like pouring concrete over an organization. That’s not a dig at SAP — you could have said … Continue reading
“Good enough” is good enough
In a comment exchange here a few days back, John DiMarco made some observations about how he’s handling total cost of ownership and operation (TCOO) that made a great deal of sense, so much so that today I want to … Continue reading
Posted in Asset Portfolios, Services
Tagged ideas for redundancy, ideas for TCOO, periodic retesting
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What do CEOs want from IT?
Very senior leaders of organizations are seldom very good at giving IT the direction IT wants. Expecting that to change is to play a fool’s game. It has nothing to do with the “technological awareness” of CEOs, COOs and the … Continue reading
Half of what you have
Most managers have lived through cutbacks, especially when the economy turns down. We’re asked to give up 5% … 10% … maybe, in a really bad year, 20%. What if you were told “half” — give up half of all … Continue reading
Posted in Governance, IT Finance, Management & Leadership
Tagged AROIO affects, crisis spending cuts, staff effects, TCOO affects
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Management is not the art of meeting
If you looked at the typical diary of a manager, you might think that the primary purpose of managers is to meet. Perhaps — in the era of poor communication — it needed to be. In the twenty-first century, with … Continue reading
Posted in Human Resources
Tagged decisions, managerial tip, meetings, personnel matters, reporting
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The basics of Total Cost to Own & Operate (TCOO)
So, you’ve decided you’d like to look at what the metric “Total Cost to Own and Operate” (TCOO) can do for you. Good! Here’s how to get started, if you’re an enterprise architect: Define all your existing platforms. A platform … Continue reading
Digging into deployment
You can’t get the promised return on investment (ROI) if people don’t use the features that supposedly generate that return. That’s why spending time after deployment understanding usage, and making changes to get the benefits, matters so much. It’s one … Continue reading
Are You Doing a Good Job?
How does the IT organisation manage to tell the rest of the business if it’s doing a good job? Other functions apparently have an easier time of it. For sales, it’s dead simple: you made plan, or you didn’t. Finance … Continue reading
Posted in Enterprise Architecture, Governance, IT Finance
Tagged AROIO, measures, performance, planning, TCOO
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Getting the cart before the horse
We all know the picture of the person who hitches the cart up in front of the horse. It’s good for a laugh: how’s he going to get anywhere? In IT, we have a annoying tendency, though, to do just … Continue reading
Getting Value from IT 