What and When to Outsource
Outsourcing has been an ever increasing trend for many years now, and accelerating with the new, evolved term for it, “the CLOUD”. OK so there is a lot...
IT is NOT the Center of Anyone's Universe
I’ve read hundreds of articles on how IT is the innovator of business. I am repeatedly amazing and astonished at the pure arrogance and lack of business...
Optimized Service Delivery? Prepare to be Jettisoned!
Information Technology organizations have varying degrees of relationships with the business. These are typically grouped in to 5 levels of maturity...
The CIO is Dead; Long Live the CIO
Since the initial advent of the CIO title, CIO’s have lamented their lack of a seat at the “big table” – that elusive peer relationship with the CEO,...
Why IT Strategy is a Misnomer
There is no such thing as IT Strategy. Or IT Innovation. Or IT Initiatives. There are only business strategies, business innovation and business initiatives,...
Citizen Developers
Everyday People Writing Code
Gartner defines this evolving category as “a user who creates new business applications for consumption by other...
Managing IT - A Different Perspective
We don’t try to manage technology - per se. We put in place the governance processes that facilitate effective IT management. Face it, there is probably...
Eliminate Application Development
Application development is like accounting - a necessary evil that adds nothing to the bottom line - at least in many cases.
IT is made up...
The Continued Evolution of Information Technology Process Automation
In the early days, computers were sequestered into data centers, and the operation was called "Electronic Data Processing" - reflecting what the computers at the time did. Then it became "Management Information Systems", reflecting management's exclusive use of the processed data. As the benefits of data-converted-to-information became more useful to a broader population of workers, the name morphed into just "Information Systems" - still typically in the centralized data center. Then the empower-the-user PC revolution happened, and technology became ubiquitous, and the name morphed yet again to "Information Technology".
However, in today's world, Information Technology is a simplistic misuse of the term; IT today SHOULD exclusively be about enabling BUSINESS to operate cheaper-better-faster, though "Process Automation" or some such term. Today, too much of IT is IT for IT's sake, and not enough emphasis on business value. Hence the advent of Chief Digital Officers and Citizen Developers, as too many IT organizations have lost sight of the ball. To be truthful, CIO Magazine's State-of-the-CIO survey has indicated 70-80% of IT organizations are out of touch with the business, operating as a cost center or service delivery organization - a trend that has remained stable since I first read this survey in 2003.
And the thing that should resonate with CIOs: Those CIOs that just run a service delivery or cost center function, have an average time-in-job of 18-36 months, whereas those that work as business partners, business peers, and even business leaders, average about 13 years.