Strategic IT planning is central to establishing the IT vision and, more importantly, the vision of how IT will propel the business (or government agency) forward. It’s one of the seven basic competencies every CIO and IT organization should master to bring value to the business.

However, mention “strategic” to IT professionals and the conversation will mostly turn to security, cloud, business intelligence, and various platform and network developments. Sure, IT’s roles in the business underlie the conversation, particularly in issues such as flexibility, enhanced user experience, competitiveness, and the like. The truth, though, is that most of this “strategic” conversation is about issues of IT “supply” — how the IT organization will effectively develop and provide leading-edge and strategic means for supplying the business with IT services and achieve operational excellence doing it. This “supply” view tends to look Read more …

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 emerging (see: The Great Recession Fallout: Will CIOs Be Elevated or Exterminated? Cutter IT Journal, January, 2010. Editor’s note: Non-subscribers can download the 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 …

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 layers of management that previously served as filters and transmitters of information. IT-enabled point-to-point delivery of relevant information lets companies build scale without building mass. Learning from industry, the United States military has taken notice and found ways to do the same.

Drucker identified three major evolutions in the concept and structure of organizations. The first occurred in at the end of the 19th century when management of an organization became distinct from ownership. The second occurred in the early 20th century as the Read more …

At the Cutter Summit this year, I attended Mike Rosen’s talk on “Ten Things an Architect Does” and thoroughly enjoyed the conversation about the job of an architect. But it got me thinking about the different things architects do and how many kinds of architects it would be nice to have.

My Killer Architecture Team would have the following seasoned pros, all with 10+ years experience:

A data architect who understands the nuances of all forms of data, including relational data, XML data and all things in between. Knowledge of data warehouse schemas is a must. A software architect. He or she should understand all things that code can do and how code should be best designed for maximum reuse and minimal complexity. Knowledge of business application architectures would be needed. An integration architect. This person should know the ins Read more …

I finally had the chance to catch up with a long-time colleague of mine for lunch a few months back on a cold, wintry and blustery Chicago day. We sat down, and ordered tea and coffee. Not waiting to order our food, she immediately began to tell me a story about a recently retired CIO and former boss of hers, Hal, who had just returned from a cross-country tour of the United States. I sat and waived off the waiter. She was on a roll, so I listened. As best as I can remember it, this was Hal’s tale, told second-hand to me, about a rather unusual bike race.

Hal was driving west through the Rocky Mountains last autumn and was forced to stop in a smaller town in north central Colorado. The main road was closed off and there Read more …

Please indulge me momentarily and pardon this esoterica. By the time you finish reading this, I hope I will have shown the need for this “scenic detour.”

For a long time thinkers and practitioners in the area of knowledge management have made a distinction between knowledge that is tacit and knowledge that is explicit. Knowledge and expertise in your head that you use nearly effortlessly and sometimes unaware is called tacit. Knowledge that is written down so that others can understand it is called explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is hard to communicate. Explicit knowledge is easier to communicate. Thus we need to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge.

I wonder if this distinction isn’t more of a mental shortcut than a meaningful way of thinking about knowledge. I also wonder if this popular division has handicapped IT people and the Read more …