Entries Categorized as 'Leadership'
by Mark P. McDonald | February 6, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Every business book you read says that you need to have ‘executive sponsorship’ for any major initiative. Fail to involve the executives and you are likely to fail. That advice has become so prevalent that it is almost worthless. Getting executive sponsorship is not what matters; it’s the quality of the sponsorship that makes all [...]
Category: 2012 Change on the cheap IT Governance Leadership Management Personal Observation Signs of weak management Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, amplify, Leadership, Management, Personal Observation, Signs of weak management
by Mark P. McDonald | January 30, 2012 | 5 Comments
What is one of the hottest roles in IT? What is the role that is in demand and will play a critical role in the future? I believe it is the business analyst. But not the type of business analyst we have today. That type of business analyst was a junior position in IT. The [...]
Category: 2012 Amplifying the Enterprise Leadership Re-imagine IT Tags: 2012 planning, IT organization, IT Roles
by Mark P. McDonald | January 20, 2012 | 3 Comments
For the past 10 years, cost has been the mantra facing CIOs and IT organizations. Cost benefits are a factor in just about every major technology wave in the past 10 years. Cloud, the current theme, is presented as a cost play so is sourcing, services, virtualization, open source — if I did not know [...]
Category: 2012 Economy Leadership Management Strategic planning Tags: 2012 planning, amplify, CIO Leadership, CIO strategy, CIO-Forum-NA, IT strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | January 18, 2012 | 2 Comments
Last year, CIOs responding to the Gartner Executive Programs CIO Agenda indicated that it was time to re-imagine IT. Re-imagining IT meant recognizing that business priorities and technologies had changed enough for IT to rethink its role in the enterprise and its value proposition. For some this meant adopting cloud technologies to reallocate resources from [...]
Category: 2012 Leadership Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, amplify, CIO Leadership, CIO strategy, Strategy and Planning, Technology, Technology Leadership
by Mark P. McDonald | January 3, 2012 | 3 Comments
Every year is important and pundits, myself included, contribute to the annual strategy and planning cycle that is based on the premise that the coming year must be the most important year. That position makes sense when you consider that without a compelling plan for ‘next year’ the CIOs and IT organization will not get [...]
Category: 2012 Leadership Management Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, Business Leadership, CIO Leadership, CIO strategy, Strategy, Strategy and Planning, Technology Leadership
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 25, 2011 | Submit a Comment
This past week marked a milestone as Gartner brought its symposium format to India for the first time. More than 1,000 Indian IT professionals met in Mumbai to learn, discussion, participate and contribute to each other on issues ranging from cloud computing to the future of IT itself. Between the presentations, workshops and 1 on [...]
Category: 2012 CIO Economy Leadership Management Strategic planning Tags: 2012 planning, IT strategy, Leadership, Personal Observation, Strategy and Planning, symposium
by Mark P. McDonald | November 19, 2011 | Submit a Comment
I am reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, no surprise there as many people are doing so. In one of the earlier chapters, Isaacson describes the relationship between John Scully and Steve Jobs as one where Scully kept seeing himself in Job’s actions and behaviors. He was living under the impression, for a while, [...]
Category: Innovation Leadership Management Personal Observation Tags: personal musing
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 | November 14, 2011 | 1 Comment
Every organization has administrative work. It needs to be done and done right even if it is not directly touching the customer, creating value, or saving resources. Administrative work can be characterized as work that follows a prescriptive process to produce a predictable result and a predefined value to the organization. Do your job, your [...]
Category: Leadership Management Tags: Business Management, IT Leadership, Leadership, Management, Value of IT
