by Mark P. McDonald | December 5, 2011 | Submit a Comment
I was at a large conference recently and I noticed a very helpful ad hoc tool a team had developed. The tool was a list of people and rooms taped to a wall so people could see where their peers were without having to stand in line and ask a coordinator to direct them. Now [...]
Category: CFO CIO Leadership Signs of weak management Tags: Business Leadership, Business Management, CEO, Signs of weak management
by Mark P. McDonald | November 30, 2011 | 1 Comment
Precision is the enemy of IT value and a root cause of why it is so hard to measure IT’s. About the only thing that you can prove with precision is that is not wasting money. Precision requires that specific investments that produce pre-defined and specific results. You want to produce more widgets, then you [...]
Category: CFO CIO Management Tags: Finance, IT Value, Metrics, Value of IT
by Mark P. McDonald | November 17, 2011 | 3 Comments
Business relevance and alignment is a persistent issue in IT and a challenge for CIOs. In this year’s CIO agenda presentations at Gartner Symposium these issues were discussed and measured based on CIO business priorities and plans. The 2011 CIO survey looked at this issue and we described it in an analogy that IT believes [...]
Category: 2012 CFO CIO IT Governance Leadership Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, Business Strategy, IT and Business, IT strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | July 5, 2011 | 2 Comments
It is time to begin formulating the team that will develop the 2012 Business Strategy. You may have already held preliminary discussions; the heavy lifting of strategy formulation and execution planning is just beginning. While preliminary meetings involve discussing high-level goals, like grow by 20%, the next round of strategy work requires a comprehensive view [...]
Category: 2012 CFO CIO Leadership Management Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, Business Strategy, IT and Business, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | June 29, 2011 | 1 Comment
The Wall Street Journal published the results of their first CFO network meeting in the Monday June 27 edition. The network includes 60 CFO’s from leading organizations as well as subject matter experts including Clayton Christensen and Arthur Levitt. The discussion sheds interesting light on a world that few people outside of the finance organization [...]
Category: CFO Leadership Management Strategic planning Strategy Tags: Business Leadership, Leadership, Management, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | May 2, 2011 | Submit a Comment
There is no doubt that CIOs have one of the more challenging sets of responsibilities on the senior executive team. It is easy to see the CIO as accountable for everything that happens in an organization while only be responsible for a specialized set of resources to make those things happen. Over the past 30 [...]
Category: CFO CIO Leadership Management Personal Observation Re-imagine IT Strategic planning Strategy Tags: Business Leadership, CFO, IT and Business, personal musing, Technology Leadership
by Mark P. McDonald | April 13, 2011 | 1 Comment
It is time to replace the traditional IT business case with a Business Investment Plans. Why? For the simple reason that they do not work, at least they do not work from the perspective of helping an organization realize benefits from IT investments and projects. Part of re-imagining IT is taking a hard look at [...]
Category: CFO Economy IT Governance Re-imagine IT Tools budgets Tags: Business, Business Management, Business Strategy, CFO, RE-imagine IT, Tools
by Mark P. McDonald | March 7, 2011 | 1 Comment
A progressive and comprehensive look at a future capitalist system. Umair Haque’s book makes an argument for what 21st capitalism should look like in the face of the economic, social, environmental and technical challenges we all face. Haque points out that the open-ended consumption model we have today is not sustainable and certainly crazy to [...]
Category: Book Review CFO Economy Innovation Management marketing Tags: Book Review, Economic conditions, Economy, personal musing
by Mark P. McDonald | October 11, 2010 | 5 Comments
Cost is part of the appeal of cloud computing as organizations lease services based on scale pricing rather than owning and operating IT assets on their own. While the efficiencies of large scale IT operations are undeniable, current IT financial management practices pervert that savings and actually make it cheaper to a business unit to [...]
Category: CFO CIO Cloud Personal Observation Strategic planning Strategy Technology budgets Tags: 2011 Planning, Personal Observation, Strategy and Planning, Technology, Technology Leadership
by Mark P. McDonald | August 31, 2010 | 3 Comments
CIOs and their IT teams can unnecessarily limit their influence and options in ways that seem small, but have major consequences. Take for example how you present options. IT is as much about decision making as it is about cost effective operations or innovative solutions which makes shaping and presenting options a critical management activity [...]
Category: CFO CIO IT Governance Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, Finance, governance, Strategy and Planning, Tools
