Mark McDonald

Demonstrating the business value of IT is challenging CIO’s, CEO’s, CFO’s and other managers.  The problem is not that IT creates no value; it is just how do I measure and communicate that value.  Current practices in IT measurement and metrics do not help as they concentrate on reporting how IT spends money (projects on [...]

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Overproduction is a source of waste or muda as defined in lean thinking.  In manufacturing overproduction is defined as making things before they are needed. Reducing overproduction in lean manufacturing involves concentrating on changes that reduce finished goods and WIP inventories.  In IT overproduction waste comes from IT solutions or services that are in excess [...]

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Commoditization has been the buzzword threat for IT professionals for years.  This reached a fever pitch with Nicholas Carr’s books about IT.  If you wanted to scare a CIO all you have to do is raise the threat of IT becoming a commodity.  The commodity threat abated some as people rushed to cut their budgets [...]

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Recessions entail more than just a pullback in economic growth; they include a retrenchment in business innovation and activities.  The global recession that began to be formally recognized about a year ago in August 2008, has hit companies hard and their business practices harder – particularly in IT.
With global corporate IT budgets declining an average [...]

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Lean principles are all the rage.  Cutting the fat and reducing waste are leading people to affixing ‘lean’ to everything: lean manufacturing, lean process management and recently lean-IT.
Lean principles were originally applied to manufacturing processes and since IT is a process many of these practices apply.
Eliminating waste, what lean calls ‘muda’, is the essence of [...]

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In the U.S., the debate is over national healthcare.  A central issues is the balance between cost and availability.  It’s a balancing act that business executives and the CIO engage in every year when they determine the IT budget.
In the national healthcare debate the issue is about having a fixed budget in order to care [...]

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Project definition is one of the central concepts in IT.  Projects form the unit work, the unit of change we deploy and often the unit of value IT creates.  Traditionally projects are defined and scoped along technical lines – what fits together for team(s) to work on.  This makes sense from IT’s need to control [...]

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Measuring the relationship between IT expenditure and business activity is a challenging subject.  While measuring IT as a percent of revenue is a popular comparative benchmark, it is a measure that can provide a misleading indicator, particularly when it is considered in isolation.
IT as a percent of revenues is a ratio and therefore subject to [...]

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Personal Observation – like all of these entries
Companies will start their 2010 strategy and planning sessions in the next six weeks, unless they have not already started.  Every planning process looks first at current operations and the competitive marketplace in an effort to forecast future operations, investments and resources. 
That is the rub – many will [...]

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In the first quarter of 2009, CIOs experienced significant IT budget revisions as executives gained a greater understanding and solidified plans for addressing the global financial crisis, according to a worldwide survey of 900 CIOs by Gartner Executive Programs (EXP).  
The results of this survey were compared with the results of the Gartner EXP 2009 [...]

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