by Mark P. McDonald | September 24, 2009 | 3 Comments
Commoditization has been the buzzword threat for IT professionals for years. This reached a fever pitch with Nicholas Carr’s books about IT. If you wanted to scare a CIO all you have to do is raise the threat of IT becoming a commodity. The commodity threat abated some as people rushed to cut their budgets [...]
Category: 2010 budgets CIO Economy Leadership Strategy Tags: 2010 planning, IT budgets, IT Leadership
by Mark P. McDonald | September 17, 2009 | 5 Comments
Lean principles are all the rage. Cutting the fat and reducing waste are leading people to affixing ‘lean’ to everything: lean manufacturing, lean process management and recently lean-IT. Lean principles were originally applied to manufacturing processes and since IT is a process many of these practices apply. Eliminating waste, what lean calls ‘muda’, is the [...]
Category: budgets Leadership Lean Thinking Tags: IT budgets, IT management, Management
by Mark P. McDonald | August 21, 2009 | 1 Comment
In the U.S., the debate is over national healthcare. A central issues is the balance between cost and availability. It’s a balancing act that business executives and the CIO engage in every year when they determine the IT budget. In the national healthcare debate the issue is about having a fixed budget in order to [...]
Category: 2010 budgets CFO CIO Leadership Strategy Tags: Business Leadership, IT and Business, IT budgets, IT Leadership, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | July 31, 2009 | Submit a Comment
It’s the time of year to kick back – a little – it’s the calm before the storm. With summer halfway gone, late July and early august are two weeks when even people in America seem to be on vacation. So chances are no one will read this blog entry, at least not right away. [...]
Category: 2010 Tags: 2010, IT budgets, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | June 25, 2009 | Submit a Comment
It’s near the halfway point in Fiscal 2009 for many companies and its time to take stock of what is going on now and start planning the resources needed for 2010. It is also a critical time for CIOs, particularly those who have been urging their teams to ‘work harder’ or ‘do more with less.’ [...]
Category: 2010 CIO Strategy Tags: 2010 planning, IT budgets, IT Leadership
by Mark P. McDonald | June 17, 2009 | 3 Comments
Commercially successful technologies such as Business Intelligence, CRM, SCM, SOA and the like have a similar investment pattern. Once the proof of concept is complete, gaining value at scale from the technology requires significant investments to acquire, install, customize and operate the technologies. There is symmetry in this logic, the larger the investment required – [...]
Category: 2010 CFO Strategy web 2.0 Tags: 2010 planning, CFO, IT budgets
by Mark P. McDonald | June 8, 2009 | Submit a Comment
Yesterday, Gartner released the results of the their first quarter 2009 IT budget update survey. The survey reported that IT budgets have declined a global weighted average of 4.7% since the end of 2008 with reductions present in all geographies and the majority of companies. The reductions came in two waves. First, the more than [...]
Category: 2010 CIO Economy Strategy Tags: 2010 planning, IT budgets, IT management
by Mark P. McDonald | January 13, 2009 | 1 Comment
In tough economic times its logical to think that IT budgets across the board would see deep cuts like they did in 2002 when IT budgets went from a projected 10% growth in 2001 to zero growth in 2002. However, the results of the 2009 Gartner CIO survey indicate that global commercial and government IT [...]
Category: CFO CIO Economy Uncategorized Tags: CIO, Finance, IT budgets, Spending
