by Mark P. McDonald | December 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
This thought hit me in the UK a few weeks ago as it was cold outside and I was trying to wash my hands with warm but not scalding hot water. In the hotel I was confronted by a sink with two facets, see example below taken from this do it yourself website. As you [...]
Category: Leadership Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, IT strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | December 22, 2010 | 6 Comments
This Holiday season is a time to think about what CIOs want and need in 2011. Here are a few thoughts: Cloud service providers with the courage and the confidence to provide a standard easy to use way to allow CIOs to take their data and applications and leave. CIOs are savvy enough to know [...]
Category: Personal Observation Tags: CIO, CIO strategy, personal musing
by Mark P. McDonald | December 20, 2010 | 2 Comments
Answering the fundamental questions in one profession often shed new light on another. In this case it is applying marketing questions to IT, not from the perspective of increasing IT’s reputation, but by looking at its market penetration. In this case thinking about IT market share helps illustrate the need for a new way of [...]
Category: 2011 Innovation Leadership Strategic planning Tags: 2011 Planning, IT and Business, IT management, IT strategy
by Mark P. McDonald | December 17, 2010 | 2 Comments
An Executive Vice President at a company I visited recently asked me the question above. He went onto explain, “You know the technologies that everyone said a few years back would really change the way we were supposed to work.” I took deep breath and came up with the following things. Please feel free to [...]
Category: Innovation Technology Tools Tags: Innovation, Technology, Technology Leadership, Value of IT
by Mark P. McDonald | December 16, 2010 | 4 Comments
Looking back at the various waves of IT it is easy to see them driven by different forces. In the early days, the demands of the technology required setting IT apart as deep specialized skills normally associated with university labs became part of the company and became data processing. As the industry settled down and [...]
Category: Personal Observation Strategic planning Strategy Tags: CIO strategy, IT Leadership, Leadership, personal musing, Strategy
by Mark P. McDonald | December 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
In a conversation with a CIO at Gartner’s EMEA Symposium at Cannes, they asked me that question. “I’ve noticed that Gartner is telling people to be more assertive with the business, to be out in front, why, what is different about this year?” The question is a good one, because after three years of the [...]
Category: 2011 Leadership Strategic planning Tags: 2011 Planning, CIO Leadership, IT and Business, IT strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | December 8, 2010 | 3 Comments
Since the 1980’s the dominant model for information technology (IT) has been an industrial one. Modern industrial IT models have concentrated on building out the technical, application and information structures and infrastructures that have made the global interconnected economy possible. Understanding the tenets of the modern industrial IT model provides a starting point for envisioning [...]
Category: Strategic planning Strategy Technology Tags: Business Strategy, CIO Leadership, IT and Business, IT strategy, Strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | December 6, 2010 | 7 Comments
You have heard these words sitting in the audience or perhaps you have spoken them when you have the floor. Either way the message behind these six words is clear. I am here. This is what I want to say. I do not really care about what you hear. Sure, I might have been interested [...]
Category: Personal Observation Signs of weak management Tags: personal musing, Signs of weak management
by Mark P. McDonald | December 2, 2010 | 1 Comment
Accelerating the delivery of new or improved solutions is one of the key sources of IT value and the importance of application development. Methods and techniques for building solutions has also been the subject of intense focus from the original creation of structured methods to current innovations in agile development. While there has been significant [...]
Category: Applications Tools Tags: IT Leadership, Management, personal musing, Tools
