Numerous State, County and Municipal entities are facing difficult times managing finances and workforce cost. With the continued economic slump, government and its departments/business units are experiencing tighter budgets and are insisting upon greater value from investments. At the same time, financial and budgeting systems have aged to the point where it’s time to look at replacing them. While still useful, many existing business systems are lacking integration capabilities, hindering much-needed increases in workforce efficiency and effectiveness. New systems come with high expectations for improvement.

Financial ERP systems for State, County and Municipalities will be a major focus area for replacement and upgrades. While IT organizations have been prominent in developing project management offices (PMOs) over the last several years, IT leaders seem to have still not discovered how to gain the full support of the business. And with so Read more …

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handicaps of being unable to identify over 15-20% of our infrastructure’s endpoints1 due to issues of hidden, missing, outdated, or misconfigured agents required for anti-virus, inventory and patches?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, I would venture that the answer is ‘yes’  …but with the qualifier that agentless technology be an essential component to many IT service management tasks Read more …

Jim Highsmith and I have finalized the content and the format for our forthcoming Cutter Summit seminar. The seminar is structured around a case study which includes four exercises. We expect the case study/exercises will take close to two-thirds of the allotted time (the morning of October 27). In the other third we will provide the theory and practices to be used in the seminar exercises and (hopefully) in many future technical debt engagements participants in the workshop will oversee.

The seminar does not require deep technical knowledge. It targets participants who possess conceptual grasp of software development, software governance and IT operations/ITIL. If you feel like reading a little about technical debt prior to the Summit, the various posts on technical debt on my blog and here on the Cutter Blog (search technical+debt) will be Read more …

Technology governance is something every company needs. But it’s also something that most companies would prefer not to discuss — or publish. The fact is that without explicit, consistent, well-communicated and well-supported governance, you will experience some degree of chaos in the technology acquisition, deployment, and support process.

I’ve written a lot about governance over the years. I am one of those who believe that governance can make or break a technology organization’s ability to deliver business value to its clients. I also believe that governance is absolutely, positively political and therefore complicated, convoluted, and at times deranged. Because of the politics, personalities, and corporate cultures that influence and manipulate governance, it’s necessary to be as explicit as possible about governance definitions, processes, and power. Really, you have to write this stuff down and publish it every way you can Read more …

Pendulums swing back and forth in lots of areas. This is especially true in corporate and technology governance. But it may stop swinging for good very soon. Let’s look at why things are so different now — and likely to stay that way forever. THE OLD DEFINITION Let’s begin with a definition of technology governance. Wikipedia describes it as: … a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives, for instance Sarbanes-Oxley in the USA and Basel II in Europe, as well as the acknowledgment that IT projects can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization. A characteristic theme of IT governance discussions is that the IT capability can no longer be a Read more …

Senior Consultants Bob Benson and Tom Bugnitz are guest editors for an upcoming issue of Cutter IT Journal. Here is their Call for Papers, I hope you’ll consider submitting an article idea by September 10th.

All organizations face difficult decisions in the current economic times like downsizing and cost containment. New technologies like the “cloud” force strategic decisions. Critical business and technical decisions have to be made for IT to contribute to organizational success and survival during the current downturn. At the same time, the economic situation makes resources much harder to find and justify. A risk is that current turbulence leads to blunt-instrument decision-making to deal with market and cost pressures.

We believe organizations that practice effective IT governance are much more likely to make these difficult decisions effectively. IT governance can be a good thing Read more …

If agile methods are to achieve the position of strategic organizational capability rather than tactical engineering capability, then one of the key factors in achieving that position is changing the way we measure success. Many agile teams are now caught in a dilemma. On one hand they are told to be agile, flexible, and adaptable, but on the other they are told to conform to pre-planned traditional Iron Triangle framework of scope, schedule, and cost. In essence they are being told “be flexible in a very small box.” Agile teams are striving to meet one set of goals and managers and executives are measuring against another set.

Measuring success it tricky. Motorola’s ill-fated, multibillion-dollar satellite-based Iridium project was a spectacular failure in the market. Meanwhile, the movie Titanic, which was severely over budget and schedule–and viewed by early pundits as Read more …

Agile Project Management, 2nd Edition, July 2009. by Jim Highsmith. Listen to a podcast interview with Israel Gat and Michael Cote later this week at http://theagileexecutive.com/. The new edition:

Focuses on fundamentals of Agile project management, plus a new emphasis on issues impacting enterprise agility. Includes a new chapter Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Measuring Agile Performance. The Agile Triangle: Value, Quality, Constraints; what quality is and why it is important; outcome performance metrics; output performance metrics; shortening-the-tail. Revises agile values and concepts chapters to reflect three agile management values: Delivering Value over meeting Constraints (Value over Constraints), Leading the Team over managing Tasks (Team over Tasks), Adapting to change over Conforming to plans (Adapting over Conforming). Includes a four-level agile framework: Project Governance, Project Management, Iteration Management, Technical Practices. Includes a new chapter on Advanced Release Planning: Value Read more …

“You can lead an organization through persuasion or formal edict. I have never found the arbitrary use of authority to control an organization either effective or, for that matter, personally interesting. If you cannot persuade your colleagues of the correctness of your decision, it is probably worthwhile to rethink your own.”

– Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board

In order to build knowledge organizations that are both enduring and of the highest performance each employee has to be maximally connected to their passion and placed in the right role. Doing this requires expertise in eliciting and assessing employees’ passion for their work as well as being able to fully understand the complexities and challenges of the work at hand. Rather than leading through edict and the seduction of traditional power, RightPlacing and transformational leadership (both of Read more …

In our just-published Cutter Benchmark Review article (see “Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value,” Vol., 8, No. 7), Tom Bugnitz and I report that only 27% of managers of large companies believe their IT is superior to that of their competition. (By “large,” we mean companies with more than US $50 million annual spend.) For all companies, regardless of size, only 39% of managers believe that their company’s IT is superior.

Wow.

Forget about the idea that a manager may not actually know what his or her competitor’s IT is and how it compares. Forget about the problem of separating IT from IT-enabled business and management process — for, of course, that’s what really matters. Forget that this survey did not touch every senior manager in the company, so that the result might Read more …