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 | 7 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 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 5, 2011 | 1 Comment
I am flying back from Dubai as I write this post following Gartner’s first CIO Leadership Forum held in the Gulf Region last week. It was a successful event by just about every measure: attendance, attention and engagement. The Gulf Region is one of the most dynamic areas of the world and one that often [...]
Category: 2011 CIO IT Governance Leadership Management Personal Observation Strategy Technology Tags: 2011 Planning, Change leadership, CIO Leadership, Events, Gulf Region, IT and Business, Leadership, Personal Observation, Strategy and Planning
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 | 5 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 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 | January 28, 2011 | 2 Comments
The Essential Advantage is a good business book, providing a different perspective on strategy, corporate development and business operations. The book ostensibly is about being capabilities driven organization, but in reality the book’s main theme is coherence rather than capabilities. Its central argument is that firms who are, in the author’s words, resolutely focused and [...]
Category: 2011 Book Review Strategy Tags: Book Review, Business Leadership, Business Strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | January 26, 2011 | 2 Comments
According to CIOs responding to this year and past Gartner CIO surveys, CIO IT budgets remain flat and below their 2008 historical high. It will be sometime before CIO it budgets return to real growth. This creates a seeing paradox as IT suppliers project continued growth in the corporate IT market segment. So if budgets [...]
Category: 2011 CIO Tags: 2011 Planning, Value of IT, Vendors
