by Mark P. McDonald | March 30, 2011 | 8 Comments
Many people think of a business as consisting of a front office, which markets, sells and serves customers and a back office that fulfills demand and handles operations. The dichotomy of front vs. back is the basis how we think of everything from compensation structures and rewards (front office) to information systems (back office) and [...]
Category: 2011 Applications Management Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, Business Strategy, mid-office, Signs of weak management, web 2.0
by Mark P. McDonald | March 27, 2011 | 1 Comment
Customer focus, thinking outside-in, walking in the customer’s shoes are all slogans used to encourage people and companies to adopt more customer focused strategies and operations. While this is all well and good, it got me thinking about what it really takes to be customer focused and one word came to mind COURAGE That may [...]
Category: Leadership Management Personal Observation Strategy Tags: Business Leadership, Culture, customer, Economy, personal musing
by Mark P. McDonald | March 25, 2011 | 2 Comments
Disruption is an essential part of your global economy and in fact a theme for this year’s CIO Leadership Forums in Phoenix and London. So the topic is on the mind of many executives and managers. There are many books that say you need to ‘disrupt’ your business to remain competitive. There are almost no [...]
Category: Book Review Re-imagine IT Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, Book Review, Business Strategy, RE-imagine IT, Strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | March 23, 2011 | Submit a Comment
Creative destruction was the theme of this year’s CIO leadership forum reflecting the essence of the challenge facing CIOs around the world. The event represented a significant opportunity for more than 350 CIOs to work together on their challenges and the requirements for leading in a future that demands: growth and continued cost containment, innovation without additional [...]
Category: 2011 CIO Innovation Leadership Management Personal Observation Re-imagine IT Tags: 2011 Planning, CIO Leadership, IT Leadership, Personal Observation, RE-imagine IT, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | March 22, 2011 | 3 Comments
For the first time in nearly 10 years IT has the ability to use technology change to reposition itself and its role in the enterprise. The existence of light weight technologies such as social media, cloud, etc. give IT the potential to slip the bonds that have been holding it back and keeping it in [...]
Category: 2011 Leadership Management Re-imagine IT Strategic planning Tags: 2011 Planning, CIO Leadership, CIO strategy, IT Leadership, Reimagine IT
by Mark P. McDonald | March 21, 2011 | Submit a Comment
IT’s strategic relevance is always the subject of great debate. It is interlinked with issues of business alignment, the strength of the business relationship and the value of IT. It is an area ready for re-imagination in order to reduce strategic inflammation. CIOs responding to the Gartner 2011 CIO Survey indicated that they felt their [...]
Category: 2011 Re-imagine IT Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, CIO Leadership, IT strategy, Reimagine IT, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | March 18, 2011 | 6 Comments
Re-imagining IT involves changing a few fundamental assumptions and factors that reset the context of IT, its operations and contribution to the business. Re-imagining reflects the reality of the technical, business and management changes facing CIOs. The cloud, drive for growth and need to accelerate cycle times all require keeping much of what makes IT [...]
Category: 2011 Leadership Management Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, Business Leadership, Business Strategy, CIO Leadership, IT strategy, RE-imagine IT, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | March 16, 2011 | 1 Comment
How do you identify new opportunities for IT to create value? It’s a complex question, in part because IT can create value in many ways and often ways it is not trained to see. The result is that IT often identifies new solutions in terms of the solutions they already know – or by making [...]
Category: Innovation Technology Tools Tags: Innovation, Tools
by Mark P. McDonald | March 14, 2011 | Submit a Comment
Who is in an industry defines that industry. When the definitions of the major players change it often indicates a seismic shift in industry priorities and structure. Over the past two months there has been a subtle but important change in the definition of high technology companies. A shift is happening and is being recorded [...]
Category: 2011 Economy Personal Observation Technology Tags: personal musing, Technology
by Mark P. McDonald | March 11, 2011 | 2 Comments
There is a difference between playing for food and playing for fun. I mentioned that analogy in an earlier series of blog posts as one of the reasons between the observed disconnect between the IT organization and the business. The idea here is that the business plays for ‘food’ as they are likely to lose [...]
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