Digital Competency is Critical for Success in the Creative Economy

Forbes contributor, Steve Denning, recently interviewed Haydn Shaughnessy, co-author with Dr. Nick Vitalari of The Elastic Enterprise (mentioned earlier in this blog here).   Denning suggests that: The Elastic Enterprise is one of at least twenty-four books of a management canon that spells out the implications of coping with the emerging Creative Economy of the 21st Century. In effect, a … [Read more...]

Key Measures of IT: Business Value, not Costs

Dateline: September 27, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. In a recent interview of Michelle Bailey, vice president of datacenter initiatives and digital infrastructure with the analyst firm 451 Research, CIO Insight shared her views of what IT leaders ought to be focused on these days.  Bailey suggested that IT organizations have … [Read more...]

Graduates and Tech Skills

Dateline: September 20, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. As the fall begins, let's consider the education of our next generation for a moment.  A recent CNET article by Heidi Golledge, CEO of CyberCoders and CareerBliss, suggests that we need better focus of our education agenda on the new tech skills.  She writes, More importantly, … [Read more...]

Personal Productivity: When Do You Do Your Best Work?

Fast Company recently published a thoughtful blog titled,  Why Productive People Get Up Insanely Early by Paul DeJoe, the co-founder of Vancouver- based Ecquire, a sales productivity tool.  In his quest to figure out how to appreciate the present, he stumbled upon an unusual solution, What I was depriving myself from was time in the day where there was no pressure and no expectations. For the … [Read more...]

The Board of Directors’ Expectations of IT

What does the Board of Directors (BOD) expect from IT?  Recently my friend and mentor, Dr. James Cash, published a blog in the HBR  blog network, A Board Director's Perspective on What IT Has to Get Right,  outlining 4 things: 1.  Generating Top-Line Growth-Every discussion on the role of IT and CIOs should start with the question: "What are the potential uses of this technology that will … [Read more...]

Exploit, Don’t Enable

Dateline: August 30, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Two of my favorite IT researchers, Dr. Cynthia Beath and Dr. Jeanne Ross from the Center for Information Systems Research at MIT (CISR),  recently published a blog on the Harvard Business Review blog network about their recent work.   They suggest that company leaders can no longer … [Read more...]

KISS- Keeping it Simple

Two recent Fast Company posts by contributor Drake Baer, reminded me of the criticality of simplicity. Baer built his thoughts on The Simplicity Thesis , an article written about a year ago by Aaron Levie, the CEO and co-founder of Box).  His first blog was about the importance of keeping products simple.  Baer writes, Since the mass market is so massive, your product needs to be massively … [Read more...]

Work-Life Balance

Its the 'dog days' of summer and the fall is just around the corner.  Since the summer is usually a time of fun and more carefree days,  the fall signals time to buckle down and get serious once again.  But being serious doesn't mean all work and no fun.  Recently, Glassdoor published it's list of the top 25 tech companies for work-life balance. The top companies: SAS Institute National … [Read more...]

When Surprises are the New Normal

Dateline: August 9, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Management guru and Harvard Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter recently published a blog about the difference in winners and losers.  It's not about how you win, but what you do when you lose, that really defines a winner in the long run.  To quote Professor Kanter, The difference … [Read more...]

Big Data for Revenue Generation, not Cost Savings

Dateline: August 2, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Finding new ways to utilize data is on everyone's agenda these days.  A recent HBR blog summarized an interesting survey done by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)   of large global companies found that companies who made large investments in their big data projects generated excess … [Read more...]