by Mark P. McDonald | November 2, 2011 | 2 Comments
Raising business impact is something that CIOs and IT professionals have sought for years. The goal has led to the development of ‘tools’ ranging from new IT metrics, program/project management, portfolio management and advanced approaches to business case development. It has also led to a range of ‘beliefs’ in the business and IT relationship – [...]
Category: Lean Thinking Management Re-imagine IT Tags: Business Leadership, Business Management, Business Value, IT Value, Tools, Value of IT
by Mark P. McDonald | October 7, 2011 | Submit a Comment
The IT organization structure is more than boxes in an organization chart. The IT organization and the decisions it contains have a significant influence on IT performance, capability and process. How you are organized also represents the way you think about IT. Leaders are thinking about their organizations in new ways, replacing monolithic IT structures [...]
Category: IT Governance Leadership Lean Thinking Management Re-imagine IT Small IT Tags: CIO Leadership, IT organization, Lean Thinking, Small IT
by Mark P. McDonald | September 23, 2011 | Submit a Comment
A must read for anyone to looking to start something new either in a new company or within a company – Five Stars Every organization faces the need to create new solutions, processes, products and services better, faster and cheaper. Often mislabeled as innovation what firms need is a better approach to ‘start up’ new [...]
Category: Book Review Leadership Lean Thinking Tags: Book Review, Business Management, Lean, Management
by Mark P. McDonald | September 14, 2011 | 1 Comment
Leading CIOs have been re-imaging IT in the face of changing business priorities, technology innovation and resource realities. This is leading some to adopt a new way of thinking about IT — thinking small. Thinking small touches just about every aspect of IT from its foundational assumptions, to how it operates, to how you judge [...]
Category: 2012 IT Governance Lean Thinking Small IT Strategy Tags: CFO, IT budgets, Small IT, Strategy and Planning, Value of IT
by Mark P. McDonald | September 12, 2011 | 5 Comments
IT trends and transformations over the past decade have been driven by a common theme: reducing cost. CIO-led initiatives for outsourcing, consolidation, shared services, applying lean manufacturing principles, have all revolved around the need to take costs out of IT. All of this cost cutting must have worked to one degree or another as IT [...]
Category: 2012 CIO IT Governance Leadership Lean Thinking Management Re-imagine IT Small IT Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, CIO Leadership, CIO strategy, IT Leadership, IT management, Small IT
by Mark P. McDonald | August 5, 2011 | Submit a Comment
An accretive leader is one that allows individual changes to build up, one on top of the other, with little consideration of the cumulative effect of change on the firms. Not every leader is an accretive leader but every organization faces the challenge of managing accretive change. Management systems have implicit incentives for accretive change [...]
Category: Economy IT Governance Innovation Leadership Lean Thinking Management Technology Uncategorized Tags: Business Leadership, Business Strategy, CIO strategy, Leadership, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | August 1, 2011 | 10 Comments
Leaders are responsible for raising performance through having a vision and creating successful change. When this happens, leaders are praised and rewarded for creating new processes, products and organizational capability. Leaders are highlighted for the change they created and the value inherent in the ‘more’ their company is all about. Change is vital to an [...]
Category: Economy IT Governance Innovation Leadership Lean Thinking Management Technology Tags: Business Leadership, Business Strategy, CIO strategy, Leadership, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | July 13, 2011 | 3 Comments
Blogging Note: Like Gary Trudeau I am taking a week off from blogging, but I would like to share a past post that may be helpful. The original posts were made in the Fall 2009, but much of their points remain true. I have made links to the original posts to make it easy to [...]
Category: IT Governance Lean Thinking Management Re-imagine IT Tags: IT Leadership, IT management, Lean Thinking, Tools
by Mark P. McDonald | June 12, 2011 | 2 Comments
Conventional wisdom thinks of a business as consisting of a front office, which markets, sells and serves customers and a back office that fulfills demand and handles operations. I wrote about this topic about a month ago in the following post: It’s time to start talking about the ‘middle office’ The dichotomy of front vs. [...]
Category: Innovation Lean Thinking Strategy Tags: Business Process, Management, mid-office
by Mark P. McDonald | February 10, 2011 | 1 Comment
Remember the global economy right before the global financial crisis? Oil prices were hitting nominal records, food prices were climbing and other commodities were driving resource-based economies forward. Inflation was nowhere to be seen, but it was suspected around the corner. Then the global financial crisis took away demand and seemed to drive us to [...]
Category: 2011 Economy Leadership Lean Thinking Strategy Tags: 2011 Planning, Business Strategy, CFO, Economy, Finance
