From the category archives:

Pillars of Purview

The Practical CIO: Difficulties in project prioritization & selection, part 2

August 14, 2009

OK, let’s assume you’ve gotten great at picking the right projects to do to benefit the company. How do you know you can actually accomplish the ones you’ve picked with the resources you have? If you’re like most companies I’ve seen, it’s done on a wing and a prayer. But there’s a better way. Last [...]

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The Practical CIO: Difficulties in project prioritization & selection, part 1

July 31, 2009

How does your company pick which projects to undertake?  Demand outstrips available resources: nearly always, there are far more “good ideas” for things to do than can actually be done in a given time period.  So how do you decide which ones you take on? If you research this general topic, you’ll find a lot [...]

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IT, the CIO, and the business need for “roof projects”

July 7, 2009

Have you ever had to replace the roof of your house? It costs lots of money, and there’s no visible or immediate benefit. Metaphorically, that situation comes up astonishingly often in IT organizations that struggle with how to get “roof projects” prioritized and worked on.  “Roof projects” (a term of my coinage, as far as [...]

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A rational CapEx purchase and tracking process for IT

May 19, 2009

How often does someone in your company (often the CIO, or the CTO, or the head of infrastructure) end up running through the halls, waving a purchase order that “has” to be signed off that very day, or else key systems will allegedly go dark? Maybe you’re in the fortunate situation of being in a [...]

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Get multiple arrows for that quiver: selective and competitive outsourcing

May 6, 2009

As I’ve written before (“Offshore development: target the destination, even if you never go there“), the reality of the CTO/CIO’s life is to be constantly challenged to produce more. Most technology executives, given that challenge, focus on squeezing out greater efficiency from existing processes, which is of course a necessary and constant push. What many [...]

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Mantra for IT: “Participate in the process rather than confront results”

November 4, 2008

Let’s sail into a stretch of a metaphor this time. You probably know by now how much I embrace metaphors as a way to impart, often via a concrete example, ideas and concepts that are hard to grasp. So let’s go way back and talk about a metaphorical influence from long ago. When I was [...]

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More astounding IT utterances

August 15, 2008

A few months back, I wrote a post on various “Astounding Sayings” that I’ve encountered in my career in information technology.  It turns out that it’s been one of the more popular posts I’ve written, judging from page views, so in true Hollywood fashion, it must be time for a sequel.  I am retitling it [...]

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Getting an IT assessment: pitfalls to watch for

July 21, 2008

One key ongoing goal of mine is that I constantly strive to pay attention. In this case, specifically, through web logging reports, I can see the Google searches that drive people to this blog every day.  One of the most common of these, it turns out, is people searching on the phrase “how to improve [...]

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