Posts Tagged 'IT-strategy'

Welcome, Giancarlo!

 Anne Mullaney | Nov 29, 2012  1 Response
Nov 292012
 
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I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Giancarlo Succi to our team! We’re excited to have him. In addition to his new role as Senior Consultant with Cutter, he remains a tenured Professor at the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, where he directs the Center for Applied Software Engineering. He has consulted with private and public organizations worldwide (he’s based in Italy) in the areas of Agile methods, software quality/measurements, software system architecting, design, development, IT strategy, and training for software personnel. Dr. Succi’s research interests swirl around Agile, experimental software engineering, open source development, software product lines and software reuse, and software development over the Internet. He is a prolific writer, having authored or coauthored …

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 Agile Project Management, News  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Taking an Adaptive Approach to Improving Business Performance

 Andrew Spanyi and Mike Rosen | Nov 5, 2012  1 Response
Nov 052012
 
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Global competition, increasing customer power, and quantum advances in technology have combined to demand a new and more adaptive approach to managing the business. In spite of significant advances in methods to improve business performance, such as TQM, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR, ERP, CRM, SaaS, and the cloud, many organizations continue to struggle in executing improvements to business performance. In many cases, the culprit is a traditional functional view of the business, where organizations develop plans, budgets, and even reward systems mainly in a functional or departmental context, paying little attention to the “critical few” measures of performance that matter to customers and failing to gain clarity on the type of cross-departmental collaboration needed to …

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 Business-IT Strategies, Enterprise Architecture, General, Governance  Tagged with: , ,

Cutter IT Journal Call for Papers: Making Managerial Dashboards Meaningful

 Christine Generali | Nov 1, 2012  No Responses
Nov 012012
 
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IT organizations worldwide use dashboards to provide managers with the key performance metrics they need to steer their organizations in the right direction and make important strategic business decisions. However, the data being measured must be meaningful for the dashboard to be valuable. Considerable effort and resources can be wasted tracking the wrong information. Dashboards need to be regularly reviewed to ensure they incorporate data from all relevant sources. For example, organizations must now incorporate and leverage the vast amount of data coming in through their various social media channels, as this data provides key information on trends that can affect an organization’s bottom line. So what is the secret to designing a dashboard that …

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 Business Technology Trends, Business-IT Strategies, IT Management  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Call for Papers: Enterprise Patterns to the Rescue?

 Christine Generali | Sep 19, 2012  No Responses
Sep 192012
 
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Change at an architectural level is always transformational. But too often architects have struggled to demonstrate or realize this potential for making a significant, positive difference at the enterprise level. Instead, big changes are more frequently driven by the architectural opportunities from new technologies. This is starting to change, and leading enterprises are planning architectural change that genuinely combines the organizational, business, and technology perspectives. Enterprise transformation that successfully unites all three viewpoints requires a new technique to raise the architectural debate to the level of senior decision makers. Enterprise Patterns elevate the debate by: * Providing a means for aggregating viewpoints and lower level patterns into a holistic visualization of architectural possibilities. * Focusing …

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 Enterprise Architecture, IT Management  Tagged with: , , , ,

Educating Abraham Lincoln

 Vince Kellen, Ph.D. | Sep 8, 2012  No Responses
Sep 082012
 
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As we all know, Abraham Lincoln was largely self-taught in the midst of meager means and living on the frontier in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, far from centers of learning and culture east of the Appalachians. For him, the book represented the path, and he sought them with great effort. As president he sought books on military matters during the Civil War in order to educate himself. As a result of his own drive and intellect, Lincoln emerged as a very capable, if not supremely capable military strategist. It is illustrative to learn how far one person can advance themselves by reading. The bibliography of Lincoln’s reading is noteworthy since it reveals his penchant for …

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 Business-IT Strategies, General  Tagged with: , , , ,

Why We Need to Market IT Operations

 Bill Keyworth | Oct 18, 2011  2 Responses
Oct 182011
 
Why We Need to Market IT Operations

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 …

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 Business-IT Strategies  Tagged with: , ,

Ron Blitstein to Lead Cutter’s CIO Practice

 Anne Mullaney | Feb 10, 2011  1 Response
Feb 102011
 
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We’re thrilled to announce that Ron Blitstein has joined Cutter’s management team and is now Director of Cutter’s CIO practice. While this role is new for Ron, Ron is not new to Cutter! He’s been a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council since 2007, and a Senior Consultant with our Business-IT Strategies practice. As Director of the CIO practice — which includes research, consulting, and training services around business-IT strategy and trends, enterprise risk management, security, sourcing, and innovation — Ron will lead the community of Senior Consultants focused in these areas and will lay out the research agenda in these domains. Ron’s 30-year career includes extensive international operations experience and spans all aspects …

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 Business Technology Trends, Business-IT Strategies, IT Management, Leadership, News  Tagged with: , , ,

Sourcing Process Improved, Cloud Backlash Inevitable in 2011

 Sara Cullen | Jan 10, 2011  1 Response
Jan 102011
 
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Offshoring passes the early adopter stage – the early adoption bugs (customer care, black & white view of specifications, etc) have been largely worked out now, particularly in India.  Customers have gotten better at specifications and remote management – moving away from the “do what I meant, not what I specified” approach to a more professional approach.  Indian firm are better at client management, with most having onshore support cells.  Even with the labor arbitrage decreasing, more value is being added.  This is the year offshoring will no longer be a novelty, but a mandatory aspect of the business case for delivering IT.  Although, many organizations will continue to use a politically acceptable onshore brand …

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 Business Technology Trends, Business-IT Strategies, Outsourcing  Tagged with: , , ,

Echolalia: The CIO is Dead! Long Live the CIO!

 Vince Kellen, Ph.D. | Apr 7, 2010  4 Responses
Apr 072010
 
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It has been painful to watch the perennial angst of the CIO community. Each year, each conference, and each industry rag frets about what ails the CIO and what kind of CIO the CIO will need to be in the future. When viewed as a whole, the CIO community is paranoid and schizophrenic. Not only do we hear multiple conflicting voices in our collective heads, we have a sense that the future we created is out to get us. Here at Cutter Consortium, we tackled this issue of the future of the CIO with some thought provoking and wildly different perspectives, ranging from the CIO is dead meat to a new kind of CIO is …

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 Business-IT Strategies, General, Innovation, IT Management, Leadership  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Is overconfidence a necessary part of IT?

 Vince Kellen, Ph.D. | Feb 28, 2010  3 Responses
Feb 282010
 
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“I don’t hire older CIOs. I like them young.” So barked an experienced and grizzled CEO in a conversation we had a decade ago. Why? Because they don’t know any better, he said. They overestimate their abilities, underestimate the problem, but work hard enough and are smart enough to pull it off. I hope I don’t work for him, I distinctly remember thinking. While overconfidence continues to be a consistent problem in IT, so does too much experience. Those experienced IT folks who may sandbag their estimates (partially out of painful memories from prior battles, partially out of CYA self-protection) constantly run into technology neophytes and amateurs who are deeply convinced that they can move …

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 Business-IT Strategies, Innovation, IT Management, Vendor Relationships  Tagged with: , , ,
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