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...]

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

Dateline: May 1, 2015 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. How fast can IT make something happen?  In most organizations it's never fast enough.  "Slow" is not the adjective we want associated with IT (or for that matter, with any process).   However, to minimize risks and project failure, projects must go slow enough to insure … [Read more...]

Increasing CIO-CMO Alignment

Dateline: September 19, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. This week’s idea about the alignment of CIOs and CMOs comes from a recent post on the HBR Blog Network by Mike Sutcliff, group chief executive of Accenture Digital, titled CMOs and CIOS Increasingly See Eye to Eye.   The Accenture annual survey of CIOs and CMOs found that … [Read more...]

Business Unit- IT Alignment on the Internet of Things

Dateline: September 5, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. This week’s thought builds on our earlier post on the "Internet of Things."  Baseline Magazine reported findings from a recent study by Gartner of 400 IT professionals in the UK and the US about the readiness of IT organization for the impact of adding so many devices to … [Read more...]

Speeding up IT

Dateline: August 29, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Nothing pleases the business partners more than to receive a quality, working IT system delivered on-time and on-spec.  Want to delight them? Deliver it fast.  In an interview by Rob Preston, Editor-in-chief at InformationWeek,  GM CIO Randy Mott suggested that speed of … [Read more...]

Outcome-Based Outsourcing

Dateline: August 22, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. Outsourcing is certainly not a new concept for our readers, and most are reconsidering their outsourced arrangements as cloud computing becomes more palatable.   But recently a new trend in outsourcing has been identified that is thought-provoking: building outcome-based … [Read more...]

Internet of Things: Shift from Products to Services

Dateline: August 8, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. This week’s idea comes from two articles published this year at Information Age, a UK-based website for IT leaders, on the Internet of Things (IoT). The first, published earlier this year, is titled, 4 things that will happen in the Internet of Things space in 2014.  In that … [Read more...]

The Title of CIO Could Be The Problem

Dateline: August 1, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. This weeks thought comes from a recent blog at Harvard Business Review  about the impact of titles and department names.  Professor Robert Plant, from University of Miami School of Business Administration, wrote a blog titled IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite.  In it he shares … [Read more...]

Counterintuitive CIOs

Dateline: July 25, 2014 Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend. This week's idea comes from Heller Search Associates guest blogger, Peter Waterhouse, Senior Marketing Executive at CA Technologies and co-author of a book on service management.  Peter's blog, A Digital World Calls for Counterintuitive CIOs, suggests that counterintuitive … [Read more...]