Designing for IT Service Delivery Not Hierarchical Efficiency

Dateline: May 22, 2015 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Shifting chairs around on a sinking ship does nothing to stop the root cause of the ship's problem: sinking.  Likewise, moving boxes around on an org chart does nothing to stop the root cause of bad IT service delivery.  Recently I ran across a blog that nicely laid out this … [Read more...]

Design Mistakes of IT Organizational Structure

Dateline: May 15, 2015 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. In updating my textbook on Managing and Using Information: A Strategic Approach, I came across an interested blog post by author Lex Sisney titled The 5 Classic Mistakes in Organizational Structure. In this must read post, Lex shares his take on mistakes he's seen that get in the … [Read more...]

Texting as UX

Dateline: April 3, 2015 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. A recent Fast Company article about user interface of an app using texting instead of other modes of notification caught my attention.  In How Texting with Chatbots Creates a Better UX Than Apps, author (and clearly digital native) Chris Gayomali shared his experience with two … [Read more...]

Apps are Headed for Extinction

Dateline: March 20, 2015 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Recently Paul Adams, VP of Products at @Intercom, a customer communications software company, published a thoughtful blog, titled The End of Apps as we Know Them on the future of apps.  In it he suggests, The idea of having a screen full of icons, representing independent … [Read more...]

Required: Outstanding Listening Skills

Dateline: January 24, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. This week we continue to explore personal leadership topics, since January is a time of reflection, resolutions and  personal-objectives-setting.  Recently, Nancy Settle-Murphy, President of Guided Insights, published an article at Executive Briefs titled  Great (Virtual) … [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

Dateline: September 13, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. 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 … [Read more...]

The Board of Directors Expectations of IT

Dateline: September 6, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. 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 … [Read more...]