Vendor management

Valuable vs. fun: learning to love IT Asset Management

Tweet My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength. – Michael Jordan As with so much in life, so it goes with IT: the parts that are fun aren’t always valuable, and the parts that are valuable aren’t [...]

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The CIO and the fine art of vendor negotiation

Tweet “Don’t write about that,” I’ve been told by several colleagues, when I’ve mentioned that I was working on a post about how best, as the senior technology executive, to negotiate with vendors.  “You’ll give away all your tricks!” they’ve said. Well, actually, no.  Here’s the main trick: this particular CIO doesn’t have any “tricks”, if [...]

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A case study of “going to the cloud” (SaaS)

Tweet Here’s one series of questions that’s great to ask a candidate for a senior position in IT, be it in project management, development, operations, or whatever: Tell me about a recent project or initiative for which you were responsible. What was the goal, and how did you ensure that the goal was achieved? What [...]

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Get multiple arrows for that quiver: selective and competitive outsourcing

Tweet 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 [...]

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Offshore development: aim for it, even if you never go there

Tweet 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 [...]

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The pitfalls of the implicit “buy” bias for IT systems and services

Tweet 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 [...]

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Buy vs. build, and why Scott McNealy thinks the CIO doesn’t need a staff

Tweet I’m going to unabashedly steal someone else’s anecdote for this post. I’ll justify doing so on the grounds that the anecdote has stuck with me since I heard it; I’ll talk about why, and why I tend to repeat it to my staff at opportune moments. Starting with this post, I plan to follow [...]

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Is there any CIO/CTO out there who is still inclined to answer a desk phone?

Tweet Just a quick one, this time, in what may become an ongoing motif of describing some of the pet peeves I’ve developed in this role. For years now, I’ve been unable to answer my desk phone. Or rather, I’ve been unwilling to answer it, at least for calls that I can tell are coming [...]

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