Alignment, staffing and culture are often more critical than software and apps
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Any idiot can take a simple task and make it complicated, but it's the rare person that can simplify a complicated one. It's been a little more than two years since I wrote about it, but I am ... More >
A few months ago I wrote about an event put on by the MIT Sloan Symposium during which folks put forward some suggestions for a new title that would better describe the role of today's CIO . Among t... More >
I have a love-hate relationship with e-mail. While I don't see how I could live (or at least work) without it, I sure would like to try. I'm not alone. Writing on his Candid CIO blog, Will Weider, ... More >
Just the other day, I wrote about a minor brouhaha over the phrase "IT/business alignment," the latest in a long series. Peter Hinssen, a consultant and instructor at the London School of Business, t... More >
I've begun to realize my pop culture references date me as the dinosaur that I am. Just the other day, I used a clip of a Saturday Night Live sketch (starring the original cast, with Gilda, Dan and C... More >
Following 2007's flurry of acquisitions of business intelligence specialists by enterprise software powers like SAP, Oracle and IBM, Gartner predicted the BI market would enter a flux phase , wit... More >
Anyone who has ever lived through a layoff -- or even a near layoff -- knows the experience is generally a demoralizing one. Leon Grunberg, a professor at the University of Puget Sound intervi... More >
Microsoft's SharePoint is the Shimmer Floor Wax of the enterprise. Like Shimmer, which is a floor wax and a dessert topping, SharePoint seems to do it all. Microsoft certainly seems to thi... More >
For a long time now, alignment with the business has been seen as the holy grail of IT. Yet at least some folks think IT is expending a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources chasing after t... More >
I am mildly shocked at some of the numbers contained in a recent survey about cloud computing, conducted by Applied Research West for vendor F5 Networks. According to the survey, 66 percent of IT man... More >
Jim Quick of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants tells a pretty sad tale on CIO Insight , an IT version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in which IT either manages to too many metrics... More >
No one seems sure whether millennials, the generation born between 1980 and 1995, are going to be winners or whiners in the workplace. Millennials' optimism and tech savvy , among other qualit... More >
Facebook has money to burn, thanks to a $200 million cash infusion from Russian investment group Digital Sky . So it's decided to spend some of the scratch on staff. Less than two weeks after... More >
Trying to come up with the right requirements for your business intelligence system? Most companies simply ask business users what they want. This certainly seems like a logical approach. But it's no... More >
Based on their growing and constantly shifting list of responsibilities, I once called CIOs the hardest-working executives in the enterprise. Yet they are relatively unsung. Unlike their pee... More >
We've got a wiki. But I don't use it, and neither do many other folks in the office. Our production team uses it, mostly as a repository for documents. When I queried one of the more active wiki user... More >
Apparently there's a so-called third wave of outsourcing on its way, at least according to Sudhakar Ram, chairman and managing director of Indian services provider Mastek Ltd. He's quoted in a rece... More >
When I wrote about RFID's mostly unfulfilled potential last summer, I quoted consultant Greg Malkary, who listed three things he felt were needed to move RFID forward : "a full embrace of these tech... More >
How often have we heard about the growing importance of using business intelligence to unlock the insights bound to be contained in corporate data? It's a perennially popular theme, one that has ke... More >
Risk management is a lot like gambling. It essentially comes down to knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Business seems to instinctively "get" this; IT not so much. That's what Mich... More >
Does IT defer too much to the business? In cases where the two sides communicate well enough to work together -- by no means a given -- it seems it does. A supporting view came from Jeanne R... More >
Last week I wrote about a teaming of four vendors to offer a cloud-based stack of business intelligence software . It sounded like an intriguing proposition, especially for smaller companies whose B... More >
For my money, the most interesting takeaway from this article on social media from the Chicago Tribune 's business section is a quote from Jeffrey Kalmikoff, chief creative officer of Chicago-base... More >
In thinking about interviews I've done in the past year or so, one that consistently comes to mind as a favorite was with Vida Killian, manager of Dell's IdeaStorm network. Vida was exceptionally gen... More >
Every year, to promote whatever clothing designers have decided is the "it" color of a given season, fashion writers everywhere refer to the designated shade as "the new black." The other day, one of... More >
Earlier this year when I wrote an article on the importance of executive succession planning , the company cited again and again as an example of successful succession was Intel. So I wasn't ... More >
Social media and Web 2.0 technologies have been around for a while now. Once-reticent organizations are giving them a try. Oddly, the holdouts haven't seemed to change their views at all. Wou... More >
I’ve written a fair amount about the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) over the past few years, including back in May when I wondered whether the tough economy would drive or derail ITIL initiatives ... More >
Not quite a year ago I wrote about what sounded like a pretty big outsourcing failure, involving a contract for IBM to take over IT and procurement services for 27 state government agencies in Texa... More >
A BlackBerry social network run by device manufacturer Research in Motion sounds like a great idea. Bringing together users could yield a community akin to one hosted by Intuit in which customers a... More >
Every marketer worth his or her snuff is advising companies to have conversations with their customers. Actually, companies have always had these conversations. In marketing 1.0, though, they were pr... More >
By most accounts (including this one in the New York Times ), Microsoft's SharePoint has been a wildly successful product for the software giant. As the article notes, while sales for the company'... More >
There's big news in the world of business intelligence today. Not quite as big as the flurry of BI acquisitions that happened back in 2007, but pretty big nonetheless. As PCWorld reports, ... More >
I've written several times about retailers' challenges in creating an effective clicks-and-bricks strategy , one in which customers enjoy similarly happy experiences shopping in physical stores and ... More >
It turns out I was too hasty in announcing the death of the URL shortening service tr.im in a blog post yesterday. I used its demise to explain why companies who use lots of shortened URLs might want... More >
A few months ago, in a post about outsourcing social media campaigns , I shared my strong dislike of the word "guru" when used for anything other than a spiritual guide. But it seems hardly o... More >
In late 2007, I wrote about Marks & Spencer's restructuring of its IT department. Marks & Spencer decentralized IT , placing tech staff in different business units throughout the British ret... More >
Reading customer reviews has become a key part of the online shopping experience for many people. According to an Opinion Research Corporation study released a few months ago, 84 percent of consume... More >
One of the first things Twitter neophytes discover is URL shorteners, the free services such as TinyURL.com and bit.ly which shorten URLs and thus allow Twitter users to include lengthy Web links... More >
In a perfect world, every time you dialed a call center, you'd be quickly and seamlessly connected with a customer service agent who could easily solve your most complex problems, who'd ask if there ... More >
Creating a national electronic medical records (EMR) system is a laudable goal. But it won't be easy, as IT Business Edge blogger Loraine Lawson wrote earlier this year. She covered some of the key ... More >
Using the right words can certainly tip the balance in your favor. Look at the highly charged debate over abortion. Those favoring abortion rights call themselves "pro choice" while abortion opponent... More >
Sure, there's a need for folks with serious mathematics chops to help companies make sense of the rapidly growing amount of information on the Internet, in their databases and elsewhere. Without thos... More >
The short-term IT job outlook is looking pretty grim . Emerging technologies like cloud computing are changing the longer-term jobs picture as well, creating a demand for new combinations of IT and... More >
One of the perceptions that has hurt business intelligence is the idea that it creates more intangible benefits than tangible ones. For that reason, some BI experts (including several I interviewed f... More >
For the first year in recent memory, there are plenty of H-1B visas to go around. As of last month, 20,000 of the 65,000 controversial H-1B visas awarded each year were still available. The ... More >
Would anyone pay for a cow if they can get milk for free? The abundance of free content on the Internet has made it tough for anyone trying to charge for it, from porn purveyors to online news site... More >
Last month when I interviewed Jeanne Ross , co-author with Peter Weill of “IT Savvy,” she told me that many companies couldn't tell her how much of their annual IT spending is run vs. change. And th... More >
If there's one thing "Sex and the City" has taught us, it's that shopping is an inherently social activity. Which is why it makes perfect sense for retailers to sell stuff from online stores on Face... More >
In a contest to find the technology with the most obvious appeal in these recessionary times, I think video conferencing would win, hands down. Check out the numbers in a SiliconValley.com s... More >
Like a rolling stone, business analysts gather no moss. It's been nine months since I examined the changing role of the business analyst in a story and follow-up blog post, but I am still somewhat in... More >
Telecommuications providers like Verizon, Sprint Nextel and AT&T Wireless are mired near the bottom of a vendor satisfaction survey by market research company VendorRate. According to VendorRat... More >
The economy is still scary, but is it getting better? The Obama administration sees signs for optimism regarding an economic recovery , though cautious ones at best. As the larger economy goe... More >
You can automate your organization to enhanced efficiency, but only to a point. A belief that process automation can solve everything has resulted in business process improvement process hitt... More >
I've always felt one of the issues dogging Google, from an enterprise standpoint, is the concern that the company -- and by extension its products -- just aren't "serious" enough for the corporate wo... More >
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