Insight for Current and Future Business Leaders
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A lot of people think that the creation of business strategy is a mysterious process — something that’s secretly practiced behind closed doors in the boardroom. There’s a lot of mysticism around strategy setting, and so we avoid it for fear that we’ll do it wrong. But there’s no magic in strategy — just as [...]
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I wrote a book on this subject but it focused on the management and leadership aspects of IT — not the technical stuff. Now I’m looking at doing a two-day class on IT for business executives. I’ll include the stuff from my book, but I’m trying to identify the technical topics that I should also [...]
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How a New CEO Affects the CIO A few weeks ago I ran into a CIO I hadn’t seen in a few months. The last time I had seen him we talked about his job situation. The CEO he worked for had just been replaced, and the CIO and the new CEO were butting heads. [...]
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I was having dinner with a CIO who had retired after a long and distinguished career. The conversation had been mostly small talk, but suddenly a thought occurred to him, and he sat up straight in his chair. “Why is it,” he asked vehemently, “that CIO’s have to work so much harder than every other [...]
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Results of the latest SIM CIO Survey were announced at SIMposium 2008. Once again, “IT and Business Alignment” was number 1 on the list of top IT management concerns (it’s been number 1 for a lot of years). It’s amazing to me that CIO’s haven’t yet learned how to solve the IT alignment problem, so [...]
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A lot of people who move up through an IT organization are surprised to find that the higher in the IT organization they get, the less the job is about technology. At the very top of the IT organization in the CIO role, the focus isn’t on IT at all – it’s on doing the [...]
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Success in IT is a lot like success in the stock market. People who don’t understand the stock market sometimes think that there’s a “right” price for a stock based on some elaborate and mystical formula. Similarly, people who don’t understand IT sometimes think there’s an objective way to measure an IT organization that will [...]
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Last week I was interviewed by a writer from a popular business magazine. He wanted my views on the question, “How do you talk to a CTO or CIO?” It’s an interesting question, and what makes it most interesting to me is that I’ve never heard anyone ask the question about any other senior executive [...]
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Recently a newsletter reader told me that his CEO asked the question, “Is our IT organization the best in the country?” The reader wanted to know how it’s possible to “benchmark yourself against other IT organizations so to be in a position to answer such a question.” First Answer I think there are two answers [...]
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In last month’s newsletter, I said that Information Technology (IT) is about people and change, and that software and hardware are just a means to an end. However, some of you are operating under the impression that the IT organization itself is just a means to an end. To use an analogy, some of you [...]
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