IT Investment

Inside the Huddle: Connecting Strategy with Execution

July 23, 2010

Co-authored with John Sviokla

Weâ€™ve hit the point in the summer when football training camps are almost upon usâ€”one of our favorite times of the year. Football, in our opinion, more than other American sports, exemplifies the three dynamics we at Diamond use in assessing a companyâ€™s â€œDigital IQâ€â€”Strategy, Mobilization, and Execution…...

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A Resurgence of Portfolio Management?

January 21, 2010

by Chris Curran and Jim Quick Portfolio management was all the rage 5-6 years ago, driven in part by some good management thinking from people like Peter Weill at MIT CISR and Dr. Howard Rubin and in part by some software tool vendors. Back then, most organizations added some kind of portfolio thinking or at least dabbled with it. While most of the interest seemed to be in the IT organization, some organizations actually drove ...

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“None” is Not a Social Media Strategy

July 22, 2009

Saying “No” to social media is a big mistake, especially if the decision was driven by the CIO. Over the last few weeks, I have spoken to two CIOs, one in financial services and one in the public sector, who say their organizations have a “no social media” policy. I agree that there are many reasons to limit what your employees post on Facebook or LinkedIn. That said, shutting off the spigot entirely misses out ...

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Does the Federal IT Dashboard Come With a Decoder Ring?

July 8, 2009

Major kudos to the country’s new CIO, Vivek Kundra for setting a vision for open and transparent information and getting right to work. The amount of time between talking about his vision and starting to execute on it with this Federal IT Dashboard has been weeks, not months or years. I thought government was supposed to be slow? Not in this case. Given the speed and the fact that the dashboard is labeled “beta,” I ...

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The Problem With IT Benchmarks

July 1, 2009

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet with the enterprise CIO of a Fortune 50 company in the chemicals and industrial products industries (and many others, as I guess is the case for many giant companies). The subject was justifying enterprise-level IT investments. IT investments that span business units seem to be a tricky thing for companies without a CEO who isn’t a strong IT champion and those without an investment culture ...

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Device, Desktop or Dead Tree?

June 22, 2009

Catch up on the Building a CIO Dashboard Series: Part 1, Part 2 Now that we have a few questions answered – do I really need a dashboard, what questions will it answer and what type of dashboard we need, we can discuss how to deliver it. This post will cover the 3 channels through which a dashboard is presented: Devices – Blackberries, iPhones and other mobile devices Desktops – browser based dashboards and other ...

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The 4 Types of CIO Dashboards

June 15, 2009

Read Part I of the Building a CIO Dashboard Series I think the biggest challenge in building a meaningful CIO dashboard lies in the question of what to measure. As my partner Jim Quick says it’s either feast or famine when it comes to measuring IT. You either have so much data you don’t know where to focus or you are paralyzed by the idea of figuring this out. In keeping with the best iterative ...

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A CIO Can’t Do More with Less

May 12, 2009

Yes, I realize that “doing more with less” is a saying that is used to encapsulate the increased pressure on the enterprise, and the IT function specifically, to keep the business running with less revenue coming in and lower budgets. But, it bugs me because I think the saying propagates the myths that somehow IT can squeeze even more blood out of the stone, in the same environment in which the business is dissatisfied with ...

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