CIOs and their management teams are facing a leadership crises – with the emphasis on MORE – be more productive, more efficient, more creative, more collaborative, more customer focused and more business savvy. How can leaders inspire their teams to produce technical innovation in a timely, efficient manner? What approaches – or maybe even a science – can help leaders meet these increasing demands?

The March 2012 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor Lynne Ellyn, will address these questions. Please send us your ideas – proposals of interest are due 28 December 2011.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers02.html

As expected and sudden was the inevitable and tragic end to Steve Jobs’s life, so too is it surprising yet necessary that an outpouring of praise and emotion would follow. We all loved his inventions. The Twitterverse was rightfully aflame with stories about Steve.

As if drawn nearly as perfectly as the interfaces he and his team dedicated their lives to, the final measure of his arc marks a very clean and a nearly perfect transition into history. The last brilliant burst that characterized his second tenure at the helm of Apple was a perfect, if not — from today’s vantage point — a seemingly inevitable concluding crescendo. Beethoven would have been proud. Jobs will have no discordant, lengthy, and painful downward spiral that we too often see afflict charismatic founding CEOs; no tragic battle with a colorful competitor that Read more …

The latest findings in neuroscience have broad implications for all aspects of business, from product design to leadership. Hot topics include human task performance, learning, motivation, attention, and memory. Deep insights from this research can lead to the creation of better software. For the IT professional, this will change the way software is designed and developed. It will also change how software teams are assembled and managed.

Software-enabled tasks are astonishingly diverse — reporting an electrical outage to the utility company, comparing investment portfolios, analyzing blood test results, trading commodities, ordering books, or even playing Angry Birds. As diverse as these tasks are, each draws on the attention, learning, motivation, and memory of its users.

Today’s neuroscience research reveals the role of neurotransmitters in attention, learning, and memory formations. Dopamine, for example, is critical to “rewarding” the brain. Often referred Read more …

Too often IT projects are initiated on the basis of the “who shouts loudest” syndrome, dominated by the biggest egos in the business management arena. Another form of this malaise arises when internal politics, with business unit managers jockeying for position, sidelines the needs of the organization as a whole. If demand management is to be applied effectively to help align IT with business needs, then a certain objectivity must be achieved.

Older readers may recall the idea of egoless programming advocated by Gerald Weinberg nearly 40 years ago [1]. Simply put, the concept of egoless programming advocates that a programmer should review the code of another programmer in an objective way such that personal feelings are put aside. That way programs develop and progress much more productively in line with the needs of the organization as a whole.

We Read more …

In a recent e-mail exchange with Cutter Fellow Lynne Ellyn (SVP and CIO of DTE), she mentioned that one characteristic of agile leaders is providing focus and clarity for an organization or team. Her comments sparked my thinking about why it’s so hard to be a good agile leader. We tend to create lists of what leaders do or their agilelike behaviors, but these lists and the item descriptions obscure the difficulty in actually being an agile leader.

Consider providing focus and clarity. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Why do we embrace agility in the first place? Agility helps us manage change and uncertainty. Turbulence — business, economic, and technological — creates change, which in turn creates both opportunity and peril. Change does not yield to rational analysis; responding to change requires a leap of faith. Sure, Read more …

“I didn’t take this position for the money,” he said looking at me somewhat smugly and for a very brief moment perhaps too honestly. “I did it for the power.”

I remember the conversation well. It was about 15 years ago. As a consultant then, I was, from time to time, in the offices of business leaders who I was lucky enough to do business with. Obviously this was a case of a young manager impressing me with his new-found power. I could see the glint in his eye as he relished the chance to exercise power. As I sat there, I began to wonder. Has he been telling everyone his motives behind the advancement? Probably not.

I grew up in a family business where I saw at a very young age there was little glory in power. While my Read more …

I try to keep up with what’s going on in the industry by reading magazines, articles, blogs, and so on. Perhaps it’s the economy, or just coincidence, but in the past few months, there seem to have been more than enough articles about the impotence of IT.

One editorial in Information Week quoted a survey that asked IT professionals to rank 10 items that would contribute to improving their job productivity. Top items were:

Better guidance from business leaders on the most important processes, measures, and metrics. A clearer sense of corporate strategy from top executives. More support from top executives to implement policies and procedures companywide. More money and more staff ranked at the bottom of the list.

In a different editorial titled “Global CIO: Prove IT’s Business Value to Your CEO — Or Else,” a fictitious Read more …

So long to the gorilla dust at GM. That’s what billionaire entrepreneur founder of EDS and ex-General Motors executive Ross Perot called the annual optimistic projections of GM executives during the 1980s, as it continued to lose market share. “When gorillas fight, they throw dust in the air to distract one another,” Perot said.

Gorilla dust wasn’t just thrown only by Chairman and CEO Roger Smith throughout the 1980s, as GM’s US market share dropped from 46% to 36%, but also by his successors Robert Stempel and Jack Smith throughout the 1990s and Richard Wagoner into the 2000s as well. GM’s current US market share is under 18% — that was, before the bankruptcy announcement on June 1, showing it owing creditors US $173 billion against assets of only $82 billion.

So, a company that was for decades the largest Read more …

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 up front and in cash?”

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Circuit City’s inability to manage its enterprise risks:

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company sold in a few years, or at the very least, its top management replaced.

At the time I wrote that Circuit City had decided that it would replace its higher-paid employees with lower-paid ones. Those who were laid off were told that they could reapply for their positions or similar ones in 10 weeks, but at Read more …

According to some observers, the new generation of workers entering organizations are different. This generation, sometimes labeled “millennials” or “digital natives,” number almost 70 million–greater than the prior “gen Xers” (51 million) but somewhat smaller than the generation of “boomers” (83 million). Some are suggesting that these digital natives, having grown up in an environment rich in information technology, approach knowledge work differently and present challenges for current management and organizational practices.

Have you noticed any differences in work habits as new hires enter your organization?

We put together a short scenario that illustrates what some see as how these new workers may be different. Here is how it begins:

Jeri Smith heads down the corridor to HighTec’s conference room for a meeting with four of her most experienced project managers. The managers, in their last monthly meeting, realized that Read more …