“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 ≠ […]

Funny how some days everything you look at seems related. This morning I was catching up on my Cutter reading list. I was sucked in by Steve Andriole’s recent Business-IT Strategies Advisor, “The Subtle, the Sublime, and the Nefarious: What We Don’t See Sometimes Tells Us.” It’s a short piece on reading between the lines. […]

I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald’s, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store. “I wonder,” I joke with the McDonald’s manager, who I know pretty well, “if they had to pay for those banners […]

The unraveling global economy and its effect on our companies and our lives is about the only thing on people’s minds these days.  So we asked the Cutter Business Technology Council Fellows for their advice to IT leaders about how to survive during this financial mess. Here are some snippets of what they advised.
Tom DeMarco: […]

Is information technology accelerating the wild swings in the market?
Oil barrel prices, thought to cross over $200 are now around $50. The stock market jitters 5% - 7%  in a day looking like warmed-up jello. The talking heads on TV are talking with more emotion and I can see their veins popping on […]

For the IT community, the incoming US administration could be a very interesting one.
President-elect Barack Obama is going to be the US’s first tech-savvy president who understands the power of the Internet. It is obviously overstated, but some political observers, such as Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, claimed that, “Were it not for […]

For Abraham Lincoln, it was the telegraph. For John F. Kennedy it was the television. For Barak Obama, it is Web 2.0.
Each of these politicians proved adept at adapting new technologies to communicate. Lincoln took to the telegraph and used it for rapid communication. No doubt the advantages of the telegraph were on Lincoln’s mind […]

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 […]

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 […]