Mark McDonald

Lightweight technologies, those that do not require a heavy upfront investment or operational requirements, will meet many management and strategic applications needs.  Technologies, such as social computing and software as a service, give business unprecedented levels of choice in how they provision their technology.  Executives are making that choice not for back office commodity systems [...]

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Proctor and Gamble and their Connect + Develop process for innovation is a leading example in the potential of innovation to restore growth and profitability.  Yesterday I was reading The Design of Business by Roger Martin that dedicates a whole chapter on P&G and its innovation process.
Latter that day I read an article in the [...]

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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 [...]

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Review Headline: Excellent book on executive collaboration, falls a little short in other areas.
Every company wants collaboration, but few know how to go about it.
Collaboration by Morten Hansen is highly recommended reading for those who want to create collaboration rather than just read about it.  Collaboration is often held up as a universal virtue – [...]

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Information Technology (IT) requires ongoing investment to deliver value to an enterprise.  The introduction of web 2.0 technologies coupled with the release of development platforms such as Salesforce.com, Facebook and Google are changing the economics of IT and the distribution of IT responsibilities.  A simple view sees this as changing IT economics, however the implications [...]

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U.S. comedian Stephan Wright used to tell a joke about smart business people, “Sell to the stupid rich” was his advice.  Selling to any other group did not make sense as the poor and stupid had no money, the smart poor people would take your idea and do it for less, and the smart rich [...]

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Mention the word capability and people ask you to define it.  Define it and people ask you to tell them how it is different from a process.  When you mention that many capabilities are named after processes they say “aha” so there is no difference.  But, they miss the boat.   So here goes.
A process is [...]

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The discussion and debate regarding cloud computing all point in one direction – there will be some form of cloud or clouds and those forms will play a significant role in IT strategies and decisions. 
How can I make such a bold assertion? 
Well by simply looking at the past – in this case the emergence of [...]

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The April 20th, 2009 issue of BusinessWeek focused on the issue of innovation and the its role in the economic recovery.  The article featured a survey of CEOs conducted by the magazine and Boston Consulting Group that showed that innovation interest is waning in the face of the economic crisis and investment in new products [...]

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Executives often do not consider the differing evolutionary pace of technology and management thinking.  Executives over invest in technology and more importantly under invest in management capability because of this gap.  The result is the incomplete business cases and benefits realization rates that are endemic in IT. 
Executives need to recognize that IT evolves faster than [...]

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