IT for Economic Growth

Dateline: December 13, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Last month, former President Bill Clinton addressed an audience in China about the role of IT in creating economic wealth. Clinton contends universal access to high-speed broadband raises education levels across any given community, which in turn creates the skills needed to … [Read more...]

IT Leadership is Conveyed in How You Speak

Dateline: December 7, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Recently, speaking coach and presentation guru Dr. Nick Morgan gave an online interview to Boston Society for Information Management (SIM) President Tom Catalini about how the way we speak can support, or undermine, our ability to lead IT.  The 20 min podcast is full of … [Read more...]

Structure Deadlines that Work

Dateline: November 29, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. A recent blog post from Fast Company came to the surprising conclusion that setting 'extremely short' deadlines was not just more productive, but reduced anxiety and made work less boring.  Building on Parkinson’s Law about how work expands to fill the available time, Blogger … [Read more...]

Engagement with Online Articles

Dateline: November 22, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Nate Weiner, the founder of Pocket, the "DVR for the web" and a popular online site for keeping track of links you want to view later, has learned some very interesting facts about what people save and what they actually do with what they save.  In a recent Fast Company … [Read more...]

Innovation Secret: Culture Wins over Strategy

Dateline: November 15, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Innovation can be an elusive goal for some organizations. Corporate strategist and author Chris Potts recently wrote a thought provoking piece for Information Week suggesting Innovation Stalled? Bad Culture Defeats Good Strategy. Potts writes, Why do some organizations … [Read more...]

Why Social Business Initiatives Fail

Dateline: November 8, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Getting social business initiatives right is hard. According to Boston College Associate Professor Jerry Kane, who quotes from a recent Gartner study, 80% of social business initiatives will deliver disappointing results. Professor Kane's recent blog at Sloan Management … [Read more...]

Killing Innovation in the Organization

Innovation is, to some, the holy grail of continued success.  Getting the innovation process right puts an organization on the path of growth and renewal.  Recently, Scott Kirsner, editor of Innovation Leader, an information service for corporate innovation executives, and blogger at Harvard Business Review, wrote about  11 ways a big company undermines their own innovation efforts.  To summarize, … [Read more...]

Leading IT Today: Knowing when to Speed Up and when to Slow Down

Dateline: October 25, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. CIOs and their IT departments are among the newest leaders to experience the push for doing things quicker, what researchers and authors Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier, from  University of Oxford, explore in their blog, IT on Steroids: The Benefits and Risks of Accelerating … [Read more...]

CIO’s Role in Social Business-What You Can Do Today

Social business is increasing, not decreasing, in importance for CIOs.  We've discussed the CIO's role in social business in several blog posts (see here, here and here for some of this discussion).  Recently, the former editor of eWEEK and executive editorial manager of eWEEK Labs, Donna Donston-Miller, shared her thoughts on how CIOs can show social business mettle.  She suggested 5 very … [Read more...]

Organizing IT Better

Designing an IT organization to best meet the needs of your business is a never-ending task.  Just when you think you have the optimal design, factors such as changes in the business, new technologies, or new ways to work come along and mess up the success.  CIO Insight recently published a slideshow of the Nine Ways to Better Organize Your IT Department.  Their suggestions, based on IT consultant … [Read more...]