March 2008

CIO pet peeves: small drains on personal productivity

I promised a while back to write more about some of the pet peeves I’ve developed in the CIO/CTO role. So here are a few more. We all have pet peeves. Working as an executive in IT seems to present a lot of opportunities to develop a long list of these. They’re minor grievances, to [...]

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Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI, and how it misses the point: Part 1

Let’s talk some more about one of my favorite topics, project portfolio management (PPM). A lot of literature on PPM tends to focus on evaluating risks and returns. An excellent article on IT governance last week in The Wall Street Journal had the following sage advice: “Create an IT portfolio by evaluating risks and returns. [...]

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“Channeling”: a technique for preparing IT presentations to management

The Skeptic’s Dictionary tells us about a concept called channeling: “Channeling is a process whereby an individual (the “channeler”) claims to have been invaded by a spirit entity which speaks through the channeler. ” Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not recommending that anyone get invaded by a spirit entity. But I am recommending that you learn [...]

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More Peterisms: lessons learned on IT practices

More pithy sayings that (at least in my view) I reuse in an attempt to succinctly express key concepts and lessons. Or, perhaps in many cases, to annoy my staff via tireless repetition. I have several dozen of these sayings, most likely (I haven’t actually counted), and for many of them I can no longer [...]

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The flip side of common myths: how some are perpetuated by IT

As promised, I’m going to follow up on my last post (“Optimism, resilience, stamina: the make-up of the CTO/CIO“), covering the myths IT deals with on a regular basis, by talking about its flip side: the ways that IT itself can unfortunately perpetuate or contribute to some of the myths I’ve been discussing. Here’s a [...]

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