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...]
The Board of Directors Expectations of IT
September 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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...]
Exploit, Don’t Enable
August 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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
August 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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
August 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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
August 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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
August 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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...]
Making Partnerships Work
July 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Dateline: July 26, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Partnerships can be a tricky thing. On the one hand, building an ecosystem of partners is necessary in today's environment. One organization cannot provide all the services necessary for a successful business. IT is used to working with partners to deliver the variety of systems, … [Read more...]
Change is Possible with Reinforcing Processes
July 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Dateline: July 19, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. MIT Sloan School's Erik Brynjolfsson recently addressed a workshop of executives on how to increase the chances of success of big analytics initiatives. His perspective was to focus on the processes. In all the classroom discussions that surfaced around the big issues from big data — … [Read more...]
When IT Isn’t at the Table
July 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Dateline: July 12, 2013 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Why is there still a disconnect between what IT does and what the business wants? According to the 2013 Cisco Global IT Impact Survey many IT organizations are not as aligned with their business partners as they expect to be. Cisco's survey asked questions of 1,300 IT decision … [Read more...]
