From the monthly archives:

April 2008

Climbing the ladder to CIO/CTO: a biographical sketch from eWeek

April 30, 2008

Another heads-up to readers: I was recently interviewed by eWeek for my thoughts on the difference between mid-market CIOs and enterprise CIOs.  As these things sometimes go, the interview turned into more of a discussion of career path and how you climb to executive ranks in IT.  I’ve written about this topic before, but if [...]

Read the full article →

Nuts: the biggest trap of all for IT stakeholders

April 28, 2008

As I promised last time, there’s one more key way, the biggest way of all, not to get what you want from your IT organization.  This is, in fact, the trap I have seen virtually every entity I’ve ever worked for fall into to some degree, some to the point of actually destroying the company.
The [...]

Read the full article →

How not to get what you want from IT

April 21, 2008

As much as any part of your company that supports the key prongs of the corporate mission (deliver product, sell the product, support the product), IT is constantly on the hook to deliver more and more.  As I’ve written before, expectations are deservedly high, and getting higher all the time.  And when expectations are so [...]

Read the full article →

Using feedback loops to improve IT department service

April 15, 2008

As I’ve written here before, I strongly advocate thinking of IT in general as a service organization to the rest of the business.
Any service organization needs one or more forms of “feedback loop” to be able to gauge whether it is successfully accomplishing its mission.  However, I’ve observed relatively few IT organizations that actively seek [...]

Read the full article →

Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI and how it misses the point: Part 2

April 10, 2008

As I promised in my previous post on this, and along the lines of the “intensely practical” goal of this blog, we’ll now take a look at the financial cost analysis for a specific project.  This is only an example, with details changed or obscured, but it is based on a real proposal from a [...]

Read the full article →