Every now and again, I see articles, posts and comments about "Shadow IT", nearly always cast as a negative phenomenon--something to be avoided, challenged, even eliminated. As an example, Information Week recently published an article entitled "Shadow IT: 8 Ways to Cope." While all the suggested 'coping mechanisms' make sense, I'm always concerned that Shadow [...]
Some years ago it seemed that much of my management consulting work was helping large, complex corporations implement some form of global shared business services. This was always challenging, disruptive, but ultimately fascinating work. There were always significant benefits to be had (cost savings, service improvements, increased leverage and collaboration) and in some cases, figuring [...]
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for my blog. Here's an excerpt: Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 61,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people [...]
I'd selected several books to take with me on a recent family vacation at the Florida Gulf coast. I was frankly skeptical about A World Gone Social, by Ted Coiné and Mark Babbitt, published by Amacom. The social media domain is vast and I was doubtful that any book could really do justice to the [...]
One of the great things about being a consultant is that you get to see recurring patterns. This helps you recognize organizational dysfuntionality and have some insights into the default future for an organization. One of the sad things about being a consultant is seeing the same mistakes being made over and over – sometimes [...]
In Part 1 of this post I pointed out why I'd named this blog "IT Organization Circa 2017" and why I'd picked 2017. I then offered some musings about the nature and shape of the IT Organization Circa 2017. I set this up by examining the major disruptive forces acting on the IT organization today: [...]
InformationWeek just published an excellent article titled "Goodbye IT, Hello Digital Business." The article presents a compelling case for "Digital Business" as a lens into what the more information and IT-savvy companies are doing. It presents some good case studies from Digital Business leaders in the retail industry. It also presents some interesting statistics on [...]
In Part 1 of this 2-part series I defined the BRM role - with the caveat that it is by no means standardized. In fact, as far as IT Service Management standards such as ITIL® and ISO/IEC 20000 are formalizing the existence of the Business Relationship Manager (BRM) role and corresponding process as a new [...]
Last week I posted a review of the excellent book, "The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership" by Martha Heller. Martha examines the CIO role, stakeholders, staff and future, and provides a rich trove of practices shared by leading CIO's. Reading the book and writing the review got me thinking about the current [...]
I'm often asked to review new books - I usually decline. There's a couple of reasons why I stay away from book reviews: It's just not what my blog is about - there are many sites that do a great job reviewing books, and I love the "wisdom of the crowd" effect you get from [...]