August 2007

More tips for dealing with IT vendors

Now that I’ve covered the more humorous (and hopefully the less typical) side of dealing with vendors, I’d like to present some “lessons learned” for developing and maintaining positive relationships with hardware, software, and service providers. After all, we all need to use vendors’ products and services, and I’ve learned in my own experience that [...]

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Watch out: Top 10 statements by IT vendors

Enough serious posts for the moment: it’s time for a little bit of humor, hopefully with a moral or two in tow. About 15 years ago, when I was still a director and not a C-level executive, I worked a great deal with vendors providing services, project management, software development, and so on. In particular, [...]

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tanstaafl: An Introduction to IT Portfolio Management

I’ve already written about how the most important task of management is the proper allocation of resources. By that, I don’t just mean figuring out that Joe and Bob need to work on Project X this week. At a higher, macro level, the issue of resource assignment deals with how the company, as a whole, [...]

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‘Rithmetic: quantitative approaches necessary in the CIO/CTO role

We’ve established the importance of targeted reading and writing for the senior information technology executive. I’d like to turn my attention now to the third R, ‘Rithmetic. Even though the “soft skills” of management are probably most crucial to a successful executive, IT is one area where quantitative skills are a regular (and, sadly, often [...]

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Guest appearance on E-commerce Consulting blog

Sally McKenzie, with whom I worked when I was CTO at Classmates Online, writes a fine e-commerce-oriented blog that I read regularly. So I was especially pleased when Sally asked me to guest-contribute, via a back-and-forth interview format, on the subject of how IT folks and Marketing people can work better together. Not only is [...]

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