“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 […]

Last December, we asked the Cutter Business Technology Council to provide some advice for surviving the recession. Since there are now some signs that things are beginning to turn around, we thought it would be interesting to see what the Council thinks will be different as we emerge from the recession. The consensus: Post-recovery ≠ […]

Every year, the IT trends issue is one of Cutter Benchmark Review’s most popular, probably because of CBR’s unique approach to looking at the trends.  This is the fourth year expert practitioner Jeroen van Tyn and academic Dennis Adams bring their divergent experiences to the table to analyze our trends survey.  As always, they’ve delivered […]

Cutter Innovation team members Rob Austin, Dick Nolan and Shannon O’Donnell have a new book coming out this spring, The Adventures of an IT Leader. With this novel, you get to be a fly on the wall, accompanying new CIO Jim Barton through his first year on the job. Though The Adventures of an IT […]

I had just gotten off the phone with a Merrill Lynch advisor who I know well. She surmised that maybe there is even more capitulation ahead. Maybe we will soon see the Dow at 8,000? Jokingly, I said I would start buying at 6,000. The fear, however, is real and the effect of […]

I just can’t wait to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The housing bubble bursts. The highly interconnected U.S. economy, overly dependent on overstated home values, buckles at the knees and is taking a standing eight-count. Stock prices are falling. Confidence in the market is waning. Global markets are impacted.
Time to batten down the hatches, […]

The November Cutter IT Journal invites useful, innovative, and thoughtful debate on how IT can take on strategic leadership roles in the new global environment. We invite anyone who is interested to send us an abstract for consideration.
Cutter IT Journal Call for Papers

Moshe Cohen, Guest Editor
Abstract Submission Date: 15 August 2008
Articles Due: 26 September 2008
Guidelines […]

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 […]

It is back. And it is angry.
And it is called virtualization. And it has people afraid. But not me.
Think of it. All CPU cycles completely fungible. Imagine the possibilities.
Got 500 idle desktops running Microsoft Vista? Assign the CPU and I/O resources to your core ERP system. Need to bring up seven servers with a full […]

Twenty years ago, Peter Drucker wrote about the coming of the new, information-based organization, which twenty years later we now take nearly for granted as incarnate everywhere. While information-based organizations rely on and have been largely created by advanced IT, Drucker notes that not all such organizations require advanced IT. Advanced IT lets firms eliminating […]