April 2008

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

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 [...]

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Nuts: the biggest trap of all for IT stakeholders

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. [...]

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How not to get what you want from IT

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 [...]

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Using feedback loops to improve IT department service

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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