Mark McDonald

Good question, tough answer.  Jim Collins provides ideas regarding the differences between good and great.  He discussed them at these years Gartner Symposium CIO Program in Orlando.  Collins, the best selling business author and advisor, has studied the differences between good and great companies and leaders for more than twenty years.  His books Build to [...]

[Read more →]

An attendee at the Gartner Symposium in Cannes last week handed me a piece of paper and said “write about this in your blog” so here goes.
The person did not give their name so I hope they see this post.
Question: In a world where we are faced with throwing away our people through outsourcing, how [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Prioritizing and managing the demands on IT resources is complex and fraught with risk. IT executives balance across multiple factors making IT planning complex and time consuming. The plan, also known as demand management seeks to address the imbalance between fixed IT resources and an apparent infinite demand for IT solutions.
Business executives can find [...]

[Read more →]

I have had the priviledge to talk with you all through this blog for almost a year and more than 160 posts.  That is a lot of dialogue and I thank you for it.   Anything of that size contains good things and other things that perhaps are best unread.  This post highlights entries related to [...]

[Read more →]

This post is coming from Gartner’s Annual Fall Symposium in Orlando where more than 1,500 CIOs and another 5,000 other IT executives are gathering to discuss what is going in IT.  I had the privilege to talk with them in a session focusing on the 2010 agenda for CIOs.  Here are a few thoughts.
It is [...]

[Read more →]

Jim Collins has researched and written extensively about the characteristics of successful companies.  Recently he has published a short book, “How the Mighty Fall,” describing the characteristics of companies that fail.
Collins defines five stages of decline prior to the company’s failure.  Thinking about these characteristics it should be possible to provide insight into changes in [...]

[Read more →]

When you think of a book about design, you tend to think that it is more about art and form rather than function and process.  This book presents a new way of management thinking and problem solving centered on human interaction, innovation, information and insight.  Change by Design by Tim Brown the CEO of IDEO [...]

[Read more →]

Watch a courtroom drama on TV or in the movies and you will learn that hearsay evidence is not admissible in court.  Hearsay occurs when someone says they heard someone else talk about an event, action etc.  They cannot be witness to the person actions; they just heard them speak about it.
If hearsay is inadmissible [...]

[Read more →]

Business intelligence (BI) provides managers with a wide range of management and operational information stored in data cubes or warehouses.  The availability of all of this information is driving new levels of analytics and fact-based decision-making.
Analytics is a welcome addition to the executive toolkit.  Leading organizations are using analytics to make critical decisions across the [...]

[Read more →]