Alignment, staffing and culture are often more critical than software and apps
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Collaboration is becoming an overused term, despite the fact that few people seem to agree on exactly what it is. It's a little like the Supreme Court's long-running -- and thus far unsuccessful -- ... More >
When I interviewed David Meyer, SAP''s SVP of Business Insight and Emerging Technologies, about the company's new StreamWork collaborative decision-making environment, he wanted to know if I'd trie... More >
Earlier this year I suggested talking about the total cost of ownership of IT investments could help CIOs win friends in the finance department. Finance folks like hard numbers and can relate more ... More >
When the going gets tough, the tough start saving. That's a theme that comes through clearly in ComputerWeekly.com' s interview with Paul Coby, the CIO of British Airways . Like many CIOs, Coby's I... More >
A few months ago I wrote a post in which I suggested that CIOs should be specialists in a given industry rather than generalists who lead business technology initiatives in different industries. Su... More >
I am no cloud computing expert. But when I interviewed a bunch of experts last spring, it quickly became clear that the types of applications used by a company, both existing ones and ones it planned... More >
Performance reviews remind me of blind dates. In both cases, I'd look forward to them, thinking they'd provide new dimension or insight into my life (social or professional). More often than not, how... More >
When I interviewed Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison, co-authors along with Tom Davenport of "Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results," they emphasized the importance of employing data a... More >
Earlier this year I wrote about Microsoft's PowerPivot, a new business intelligence tool that allows users to bypass IT by using Excel as a front end for data. Taking IT out of the BI loop that way c... More >
Diamond Management & Technology Consultants' Chris Curran, writing on his excellent CIO Dashboard blog, got me interested in the question of whether CIOs spend too much time looking inward. E... More >
Indianapolis certainly sounds like a good candidate for a shiny new ERP system. According to a Computerworld report, the city and the county in which it's located, although a merged entity, ... More >
Earlier this year John Kitchen, SVP and chief marketing officer for Datawatch Corp., wrote a guest opinion for IT Business Edge in which he discussed his company's approach to dealing with what he c... More >
One of our IT guys here at IT Business Edge is a Facebook friend of mine. Usually he is surprisingly restrained in posting techie stuff. He shares the occasional link to support calls gone wrong, whi... More >
For me, the social computing and self-service trends go together. Social computing helps me accomplish things I might previously have been unable to do without assistance from some kind of corporate ... More >
There are several interesting short posts on the Temkin Group's "Customer Experience Matters" blog highlighting some insights from its newly published Customer Experience Survey. A couple of... More >
While lower upfront cost isn't the only reason to consider open source software, it's one that initially gets the attention of many organizations. (I guess most of us are no different. When I'... More >
Even companies on the leading edge of technology realize there is no real substitute for good, old-fashioned face time. In 2008, I shared some insights from a software developer named Sergey Solyanik... More >
With a son who is 9 going on 16, I am dreading the teen years. Patience isn't my strong suit, and I know it'll be sorely tested. My friends who are parents of teens tell me that the occasional flash ... More >
As I wrote back in April, applications for H-1B visas got off to a slow start . The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services got about 13,500 applications in the first two weeks it accepted them, a... More >
Earlier this year Gartner found most companies using software-as-a-service seemed pretty happy with it . However, it hinted at possible problems down the road, noting relatively few companies had po... More >
Managing outsourced operations, particularly those located offshore, often proves to be a much bigger challenge than companies anticipate. Barclaycard, the credit card arm of British banking giant Ba... More >
My son is taking guitar lessons, which cost me about $90 a month. I pay an additional $10 a month to rent an electric guitar. We started with an old acoustic guitar that had belonged to Dad, but swit... More >
Earlier this year I wrote a post listing some of the pros and cons of using a chargeback system, in which business units are charged for the IT services they consume. Those in favor of charg... More >
With almost any technology initiative, there seems to be a lot of discussion about who drives the initiative, business or IT. Since the ultimate aim of the technology is to fill business needs and en... More >
Knowing that I regularly attempt to get into the heads of CIOs, a colleague sent me a Harvard Business Review column written by former CIO and CFO Susan Cramm, in which she asks: "Is the Typical C... More >
Technical certifications, a good idea, a not-so-good idea or a really, really bad idea? Discuss. The perceived value of IT certifications is a perennially hot topic, but it heats up even more ... More >
I and IT Business Edge colleagues Lora Bentley and Loraine Lawson have all written about health care IT this week, specifically the push to get doctors, hospitals and other organizations to adopt ele... More >
When HP announced its plan to cut some 9,000 jobs over the next few years, most of them likely data center professionals, it sent a collective chill through the ranks of IT professionals. I've writte... More >
There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when some old fogies -- including me -- thought of the idea of Facebook in a work setting with scorn , if we thought of it at all. My, how times... More >
When I interviewed Ed Moran, director of product innovation at Deloitte, he told me companies needed to develop success stories to illustrate the sometimes hard-to-quantify benefits of online commun... More >
Last summer I wrote a post about how the proliferation of social channels is making it tough for companies to coordinate their social communications efforts. I quoted Dell chief blogger Lionel Menc... More >
With almost any enterprise application, consultants and other experts advise incremental implementations rather than a "big bang" approach. Incremental implementations make it easier to assess risks,... More >
Though companies are always looking for the proverbial win-win, many of them aren't getting it in their outsourcing agreements. Too often, those agreements are structured so that, for one party to wi... More >
With an IT skills shortage apparently in the pipeline, it's more important than ever for employers to think about how they will attract technology talent. It's an especially big dilemma for startup... More >
I've written two posts on telework this week, one on the Telework Enhancement Act passed by the U.S. Senate and another on a Brigham Young University study that found telecommuters could work long... More >
In my posts on telework, including the one I wrote this morning about the Telework Enhancement Act recently passed by the U.S. Senate, it's hard to keep my pro-telework bias from showing. I've been... More >
Last month I wrote a post in which I wondered whether federal agencies could set a good telecommuting example for the private sector. I wondered whether the winter "Snowmageddon" that essentially s... More >
It's been less than a year since I wrote a post in which I asked if it's the end of the e-mail age. I cited a FederalComputerWeek article that mentioned several government agencies' efforts to red... More >
Perhaps not surprisingly in this still-depressed economy, offshoring is cast as a convenient scapegoat in a couple pieces of recent legislation. As Beth Bacheldor writes on CIO.com , the Hous... More >
A few months back, I wrote a post about the demand for products that make complicated technologies seem simple to end users, a demand that proves maddeningly difficult for most tech companies. It's... More >
Is process automation the new offshoring? I made that case several months back, noting that companies may increasingly opt for automation over outsourcing as a cost-saving measure. I cited a... More >
Earlier today I wrote a post about how many government agencies struggle with the idea of Government 2.0 because of an organizational culture that prizes insularity and ingrained practices over inn... More >
As I write fairly often in my posts here, making cultural and process changes to support new technology almost always presents a greater hurdle than implementing the technology itself. While this is ... More >
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