A financial services client last month asked me if I had read anything about management and the relationship to “commander’s intent.” While I had to confess that I had not, I did some quick searching to find out what the concept was about and how it might relate to effective management practice. What I found was a compelling object lesson on how we should be drawing on the lessons learned from other practices.

The concept of “commander’s intent” has been around for almost 200 years. It’s a compelling military concept, originated by the Germans. The idea is that rather than apply tight command and control, leaders provide a clear sense of the outcomes they seek and the parameters they will accept. It’s a trusting relationship between manager and subordinate, and it’s one that has clear implications in the business environment.

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That there’s turbulence for 2012 that will affect business and IT isn’t much in question.  With great economic uncertainties (recession, Europe, elections) and, at the same time, significant changes in IT such as widespread user devices (tablets) and cloud, a lot is in flux. But what will this mean?

From everything we see at clients and in the press, this means a (perhaps uncomfortable) return to basics in IT. That is, we will see great emphasis by CIOs and CTOs on the things that have in the past been very important. This includes, for example:

Improving Operational Excellence Understanding IT’s costs and taking action to reduce them Successfully delivering IT value (and projects) Doing effective business-focused IT planning Assuring the availability of suitable talents in the IT organization (Re)building the relationship with business

In short, CIOs and CTOs will be Read more …

The critical need for technology to achieve core business goals has never been more pronounced.  Business is rapidly advancing the use of technology to generate better profit margins, improved customer relationships and competitive advantage. As a result, the degree of change within IT organizations is unparalleled. Simultaneously, alternative “business” options for IT services now available outside corporate IT Operations are rapidly multiplying.

Cloud service providers such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are able to quickly resolve the business demands for faster IT provisioning, increased storage capacity, faster response time, and more flexible software business applications. Managed Service Providers can cost-effectively resolve or alleviate the resource handicaps of traditional, internal IT service organizations. But much of what IT does cannot be “handed off” to externally available services. Too often the most expensive parts of maintaining the IT infrastructure are the Read more …

My prediction is short, but maybe not so sweet:

In 2012 a major enterprise will have a catastrophic or near catastrophic outage due to poor Service Management.

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

CIOs and their management teams are facing a leadership crises – with the emphasis on MORE – be more productive, more efficient, more creative, more collaborative, more customer focused and more business savvy. How can leaders inspire their teams to produce technical innovation in a timely, efficient manner? What approaches – or maybe even a science – can help leaders meet these increasing demands?

The March 2012 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor Lynne Ellyn, will address these questions. Please send us your ideas – proposals of interest are due 28 December 2011.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers02.html

Now that approximately half the IT shop is outsourced (on average) either on, near, or offshore, the transaction itself is hardly novel. What remains difficult, however, is getting the results one wanted when the deal was set up. Both academia and the commercial world have started to recognize the importance of the individuals that get those results, not just those who put the deals together.

With regard to sourcing, I see 2012 as the year of the contract manager. More universities will offer contract management as a degree (not just a module), yet it will take some time for the students to enter the marketplace. The professional contract management associations will have a boom in membership (and for those with a job board, an increase in postings). But the demand for good contract managers will outstrip supply — next year Read more …

For several years now, so many pundits, experts, and concerned citizens of the IT world have prattled on about IT alignment with the business. So much so that whenever you hear any phrase that starts with “IT must be aligned with the business,” you already know what’s coming next.

Yawn.

What we often don’t talk about — and really should — is how each employee has (or has not) aligned him or herself with their own skills and interests and their current role. I contend it is here that most organizations struggle at every level, from the top executives on down. Which is worse: misaligned people or misaligned IT organizations? Is there a difference? When I talk to people about this, here are the usual push backs I get that end up getting this line of inquiry tossed aside:

It Read more …

IT organizations devote significant attention to delivering the technology and processes that ensure the achievement of business objectives. It’s what we do in IT. It’s the recognition that drives our actions. It’s our purpose for existing. Yet is it sufficient to simply deliver value without any executive recognition for that contribution? IT best practices require that we not only deliver on the promise of IT, but that we also take the necessary steps toward recognition of that value so that the business “buys IT.” This marketing-style approach allows IT to remain adequately funded, gain support for technology investments, obtain backing for critical IT initiatives, and ensure responsiveness to our dependencies.

Marketing IT Is Not a Natural Behavior

If we don’t ensure market recognition of what we do within IT, it simply won’t happen. Delivery of technology and IT processes for Read more …

Strategic IT planning is central to establishing the IT vision and, more importantly, the vision of how IT will propel the business (or government agency) forward. It’s one of the seven basic competencies every CIO and IT organization should master to bring value to the business.

However, mention “strategic” to IT professionals and the conversation will mostly turn to security, cloud, business intelligence, and various platform and network developments. Sure, IT’s roles in the business underlie the conversation, particularly in issues such as flexibility, enhanced user experience, competitiveness, and the like. The truth, though, is that most of this “strategic” conversation is about issues of IT “supply” — how the IT organization will effectively develop and provide leading-edge and strategic means for supplying the business with IT services and achieve operational excellence doing it. This “supply” view tends to look Read more …

A value stream depicts how “a business delivers end-to-end stakeholder value.” Because a value stream envisions value delivery across business units, product lines, and even organizational boundaries, value streams provide a way for all stakeholders to perform situation analysis, craft a common strategy, and implement that strategy based on a consensus-based solution. This is an essential planning concept when multiple, fragmented processes slow or hinder the delivery of stakeholder value.

Consider, for example, a customer of one set of products or services requesting information about, or help with, a different set of products or services. It is not uncommon to find no recognition that an individual or organization is already a valued customer. Parallel, fragmented processes across various business units and product lines — along with different views of customer, account, and related information — alienates customers, business partners, and Read more …