by Mark P. McDonald | November 16, 2011 | Submit a Comment
Project management performance and capability is a perennial issue among IT leaders. Project management is critical to the success of IT and the organization. Given the dismal rate of project success, one can call the competence of project managers into question. Just about every, conversation I have about project management centers on what is wrong [...]
Category: Management Personal Observation Signs of weak management Tags: IT Leadership, IT Project, personal musing, Signs of weak management
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
by Mark P. McDonald | November 6, 2011 | Submit a Comment
With macroeconomics and international finance dominating world news its easy to lose site of the fact that organizations cannot wait on the sideline for things to get better they have to take action and make the best of a difficult situation. That is the challenge facing CIOs and IT leaders attending this year’s Gartner European [...]
Category: 2012 Economy Leadership Management Strategic planning Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, Business Leadership, Economic conditions, IT Leadership, Strategy and Planning, symposium
by Mark P. McDonald | October 12, 2011 | 2 Comments
Throughout this year we have been talking about the need to re-imagine IT in the face of changing business priorities, technology innovation and IT performance. Re-imagination involves finding new answers to new questions and that involves hearing from you. Gartner Executive Programs runs an annual survey of CIOs that seeks to understand CIO priorities, plans [...]
Category: 2012 CIO Leadership Management Strategic planning budgets Tags: 2012 planning, IT and Business, IT Leadership, Reimagine IT, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | September 21, 2011 | 2 Comments
This post is the companion to others that describe what ‘Thinking small’ about IT means. This post concentrates on a different way of thinking about how IT builds relationships within the enterprise, customers, suppliers etc. It describes how leaders are evolving the ideas behind building relationships from ones based on specialist skills or restrictive processes [...]
Category: Leadership Management Small IT Tags: IT Leadership, Small IT, Technology Leadership
by Mark P. McDonald | September 19, 2011 | Submit a Comment
Are young developers leaving your company? You know the ones who you have hired in the last few years with skills in developing web services, web sites, mobile apps etc. The ones who naturally work in an agile environment, have the energy, and want to innovate in your organization. If you answer no, then great [...]
Category: Leadership Management Tags: IT Leadership, IT organization
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 29, 2011 | 4 Comments
We are all sometimes loose with terminology. Just consider terms like architecture, value, strategy and the like and its easy to see how the same words can have slightly different meanings. However beneath every word there is a meaning, a sense, an idea and its helpful to go back to the root of the word [...]
Category: IT Governance Leadership Management Signs of weak management Tags: Change leadership, Change Management, IT Leadership, IT management, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | July 19, 2011 | 1 Comment
If you want to understand someone you need to do more than walk a mile in their shoes, you need to try and do what they do. The other day I had lunch with a former CIO who has recently been promoted to run a business unit in a mid-sized medical device company. The CIO [...]
Category: CIO IT Governance Leadership Personal Observation Tags: IT and Business, IT Leadership, IT management
by Mark P. McDonald | July 17, 2011 | 2 Comments
Yeah right! This mantra has been something we all have heard and may have said in response to the gap between business and IT. The statement is used as a way for IT to define its way out of being a support function and into being a mission critical function. The problem is that just [...]
Category: IT Governance Leadership Management Uncategorized Tags: IT and Business, IT Leadership, IT management, Strategy and Planning
