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There’s been a lot of talk about cloud computing, and mobility has been in the news for years. But apps and an enterprise app store are going to bring it all together to remake the face of IT. Cloud Computing Cloud computing is a method for delivering computing resource. Its principal attributes are outsourced management, [...]
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Here’s the way most people justify automation of a manual process: they replace a high variable labor cost with a relatively fixed system cost. I’ll illustrate using graphs, then show how cloud computing fits into the picture. Before: A Manual Labor-Intensive Process Before any automation, the financials for a manual process look like this: With [...]
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Note: This article is intended for a business audience. For a technical explanation of cloud computing, see the sidebar below the business article. To the non-technical among us, “cloud computing” may sound like something vague and amorphous. After all, it’s a cloud, right? So that means it’s something that’s insubstantial, floating in the sky. If [...]
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I talked about Due Diligence in a previous article, and gave you 13 ways to spot lies and deception. Here’s an additional list that’s specific to Information Technology, although you can probably see parallels in other types of due diligence: 12 More Ways to Spot IT Lies and Omissions The current solution doesn’t scale up [...]
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The word “scalable” has been used in IT for over forty years. IBM used the word when they first talked about their 360 series of mainframe computers in the 1960′s. Since that time scalability has been a consideration in every aspect of computing: mainframes, minis, personal computers, servers, networks, proprietary systems, open systems, even smartphones. [...]
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In last month’s newsletter I talked about business/IT alignment, explained the problem, and gave you the 7 criteria for achieving IT alignment. This month I’ll give you some tips for better and easier IT alignment. I’ll start with a five-step process to change your IT budget to better support alignment. First, let’s clean up maintenance [...]
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Two months ago I did an article on span of control, pointing out some of the variables that make an IT manager’s span of control so unlikely to conform to any consultant-recommended norm. I received a number of positive emails about the article, but one email in particular asked about a different kind of span [...]
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The world is full of cycles. There are stock market highs and lows, periods of good weather and bad weather, even apparent cycles of good luck and bad luck. Many of the people-related cycles are caused by basic human nature. The bad part of a cycle starts when we hear bad things about a particular [...]
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The subject of outsourcing is in the news a lot lately, particularly when the outsourcing is done to a location outside your country. Based on my experience, a company should consider outsourcing when one of the following criteria is met: The vendor can do the job better than your company, at a reasonable cost. The [...]
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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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