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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Here’s a disquieting little secret that few of us ever really acknowledge, maybe because it’s rather painful and also an unavoidable part of the fabric of our existence in IT. I don’t know how to say it more eloquently (or less bluntly), so here goes: being in information technology is hard. In our day-to-day […]
As I wrote last time, a large part of my reason for opposing offshoring is because I’ve rarely, if ever, worked in a company where I felt the necessary prerequisites were in place to be able to even consider offshoring as a viable option. Let’s go into that in more detail now.
I’ve observed before […]
Of all the numerous cold calls I get, inquiries from potential offshoring partners lead the pack. Their main pitch, of course, is that I can lower my development (or support, or QA) costs by leveraging offshore labor at a third or less of domestic rates. This argument is of course all the more […]
I wrote last time about how there are twin truths to the buy vs. build dilemma: outsourcing can be a superb way to leverage external expertise and keep your own team focused on core functions; yet, outsourcing is not an easy or friction-free choice, and it’s easy to simply substitute one set of problems with […]