Business-IT Strategies

Guidance for optimizing your IT investments, avoiding IT strategies that fail to support your business objectives, and leveraging IT for competitive advantage.

Why We Need to Market IT Operations

Bill Keyworth | Oct 18, 2011 2 Responses

Oct 182011

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 …

Strategic IT Planning: Get the Business of IT Right

Bob Benson | Oct 4, 2011 3 Responses

Oct 042011

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 …

Value Stream’s Role in Project Planning

William Ulrich | Sep 6, 2011 2 Responses

Sep 062011

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 …

Business Architecture in Practice: Lessons from the Trenches

Christine Generali | Aug 25, 2011 No Responses

Aug 252011

In the past year, business architecture crossed a major threshold in terms of industry awareness and acceptance. Business architecture is now viewed as an important business discipline that executives should pursue and is being used to enable a variety of business solutions that range from ongoing operational improvements to major transformation scenarios. What about you? Do you have a business architecture story to share? The November 2011 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor William Ulrich, will examine business architecture experiences from the trenches. Proposals of interest are due 9 September 2011. To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers03.html

What Is the Due Diligence Process for Evaluating Cloud Providers?

Bill Keyworth | Aug 23, 2011 2 Responses

Aug 232011

Cloud computing is truly one of the major technology shifts of our era. It’s natural for a technology solution as pervasive and beneficial as cloud computing to be oversold to users with inflated expectations. Industry observers have consistently highlighted the rapid adoption of cloud computing and cloud services by end users, which is driving an explosion of interest within the vendor community.1 Given the conservative growth rates for most software and hardware in our current economy, it’s understandable that the huge growth rate forecast for cloud attracts almost every high-tech vendor. That pervasiveness is hype, but it’s a “good” hype in that critical technologies do emerge as legitimate offerings. Unfortunately, that pervasiveness also means that …

12 Steps Toward Confident Excellence

Vince Kellen, Ph.D. | Jul 12, 2011 No Responses

Jul 122011

Excellence is an old topic, more honored in a book than observed in the workplace. Nonetheless, it is an important topic because of some almost unbearable forces that are shearing the workplace. IT may be lowering barriers to entry in many industries allowing new, smaller firms to find a home, even for a short while, and threatening larger players. But despite the thousand flowers blooming, IT-intensive markets tend to get dominated by a few very large companies, with fast-growing upstarts that are getting too big for their britches getting mercilessly culled in this economic Darwinism. But things aren’t as rosy for even these large firms. Firm life expectancy is shortening over the 20th and now …

Creative Destruction: How to Keep From Being Technologically Disrupted

Christine Generali | Jul 6, 2011 No Responses

Jul 062011

Today, CIOs are faced with the challenge of predicting how rapidly evolving information technologies might positively or negatively impact their organizations’ strategy, product lines or customer relationships. Most IT managers are in the reactive role when it comes to disruption. The October 2011 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor Dennis Adams, will examine the issues associated with potentially disruptive innovations and how to anticipate the impact of these new technologies on your enterprise. Proposals of interest are due 22 July 2011. To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers01.html

What’s the Role of Agentless within IT Operations?

Bill Keyworth | May 19, 2011 2 Responses

May 192011

We seem to invest heavily in IT service management solutions that are highly dependent upon agent technologies for the visibility needed to “drive” (i.e. access, secure, manage and control) the desktops, laptops and servers within our IT infrastructure. Are these applications so compelling that we trust traditional agent-based management models which are inherently vulnerable to the same risks as the endpoints they manage? Is it wisdom to introduce the resultant IT operational handicaps of being unable to identify over 15-20% of our infrastructure’s endpoints1 due to issues of hidden, missing, outdated, or misconfigured agents required for anti-virus, inventory and patches? Given the significance of the functionality of these mission critical IT management and security applications, …

Apples and Oranges

Claude Baudoin | May 17, 2011 No Responses

May 172011

On one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to, someone just posted this discussion item: “Is Open Compute for Everyone? I guess the cloud is no longer technology’s darling. All the IT buzz now surrounds the Open Compute Project. If you are not familiar with the Open Compute Project, take a quick look at http://opencompute.org. You will see that this is really the brainchild of some bright engineers at Facebook, and the results are impressive.” Here’s the comment I posted in reply, and I think I missed several more points in the heat of the moment: “‘The cloud is no longer technology’s darling?’ Nonsense. If you look at the blogs, the conferences, the papers by …

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