by Mark P. McDonald | February 28, 2011 | 1 Comment
People talk about culture all the time, its importance, the need to build the right one, how you best fit in it, how important leadership is to creating it. People talk about culture constantly as if it was broken, a work in progress, something that they have but always can be better. Its like they [...]
Category: Leadership Management Personal Observation Tags: Business Leadership, Change leadership, CIO Leadership, Culture, IT Leadership, Personal Observation
by Mark P. McDonald | February 25, 2011 | 3 Comments
Wednesday’s post discussed the difference between people playing for food or playing for fun. The analogy applies to the difference between pro-athletes who play for food and college athletes and others who play more for fun. The idea expressed in that post was that food and fun are part of the IT/Business context. The question [...]
Category: IT Governance Leadership Personal Observation Strategy Uncategorized Tags: Business and IT, Business Management, IT and Business, Leadership, personal musing
by Mark P. McDonald | February 23, 2011 | 10 Comments
People ask about the differences between ‘the business’ and ‘IT’ and what people can do to eliminate them. It is a great question and unfortunately a persistent one. Usually when you have an issue that people recognize and work to resolve but cannot, there are deeper issues involved. I think that this is a big [...]
Category: IT Governance Leadership Management Personal Observation Tags: Business and IT, Business Management, Leadership, personal musing
by Mark P. McDonald | February 21, 2011 | 1 Comment
The Dragonfly Effect is recommended as one of the better books to discuss how social media works and to get advice on how to think about your own initiative. The authors focus the book on the application of social media to social causes, but do not let this focus deter you from thinking that the [...]
Category: Book Review Management marketing web 2.0 Tags: Book Review, Social Computing, social media, web 2.0
by Mark P. McDonald | February 17, 2011 | 2 Comments
Imagination creates new ideas based on asking what could be. Re-imagination opens new opportunities by asking what would be possible if? Its time to re-imagine IT, by that I mean that its time to recognize that some of the fundamentals of IT are changing and those changes open the door to new possibilities. Re-imagination is [...]
Category: 2011 CIO Innovation IT Governance Leadership Management Re-imagine IT Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, CIO Leadership, IT organization, IT strategy, RE-imagine IT
by Mark P. McDonald | February 15, 2011 | 4 Comments
A message from our sponsors. The theme of this year’s Gartner CIO Leadership Forum is Creative Destruction. That sounds like a strange title for a leadership conference as on the surface it asks people to tear down what they have build. After all, isn’t leadership about building for future success and what about destruction, haven’t [...]
Category: 2011 CIO Leadership Management Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, CIO Leadership, Management, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | February 10, 2011 | 1 Comment
Remember the global economy right before the global financial crisis? Oil prices were hitting nominal records, food prices were climbing and other commodities were driving resource-based economies forward. Inflation was nowhere to be seen, but it was suspected around the corner. Then the global financial crisis took away demand and seemed to drive us to [...]
Category: 2011 Economy Leadership Lean Thinking Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, Business Strategy, CFO, Economy, Finance
by Mark P. McDonald | February 8, 2011 | 3 Comments
I have written about my personal experience with the iPad since its release in April. The last post I asked about great applications and you all recommended the Good Reader for PDFs and some other great tools. Thanks for that. Now I wanted to ask about the accessories that go with the iPad and its [...]
Category: Technology Tools Tags: iPad, personal musing, Technology
by Mark P. McDonald | February 4, 2011 | 3 Comments
In recent discussions with IT executives concerning the cloud an interesting thing has come up – the nature of migration to the cloud. In talking with executives many see their migration to the cloud as similar to migrating to other technologies. The migration path is described as a slope with cloud technologies coming from zero [...]
Category: 2011 Cloud Technology Tags: cloud computing, IT strategy, Strategy and Planning, Technology
by Mark P. McDonald | February 2, 2011 | 4 Comments
Perhaps the best example of modern mixed media marketing in recent history is playing itself out in the media. Last month the Wall Street Journal publishes an article in it’s weekend edition about ‘Chinese Mothers’ and touting their superiority to their Western counterparts. The article written by Amy Chua represented an excerpt from her book, [...]
Category: Book Review marketing Personal Observation Tags: Marketing, Personal Observation
