IT Management

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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10 CIO Dashboard Tips

June 25, 2009

Catch up on the CIO Dashboard Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 As a wrap-up to the CIO Dashboard series, I’ve summarized some of the key points and added a few new ones to this list of 10 CIO Dashboard tips. Thanks to two of my colleagues at Diamond, Jim Quick and Adrian Vern, who are experts in measuring and communicating IT value through dashboards and provided their ideas. 10 CIO Dashboard Tips 1. ...

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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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Is Agile Development an Option?

May 29, 2009

by Henry Hwangbo, Guest Author Agility is a term that is applied to everything from sports to dog shows, and everything in between. More recently, agility has been used to describe engineering methods, including software. In the mid-1990s, “lightweight” software methods gained some traction, aided in part to the growth of object oriented analysis and design. Finally in 2001, the term agile was ratified as a software development approach and described in the Agile Manifesto ...

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4 Steps to Manage Your Technology Portfolio

May 27, 2009

This post is about managing the life and death of technologies in an enterprise. Not projects or applications, but the portfolio of the underlying technologies – operating systems, DBMSs, development tools, middleware, etc. These must be managed too or you will find yourself in the same situation as a client CIO of a large retailer did a few years ago. The servers than ran the in-store processors – the computers in the back office of ...

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Is the Open Source Conversation Dead?

May 15, 2009

One of my partners was asked by the Chief Information Officer of a major financial services organization for some help thinking through his open source strategy. Honestly, the open source conversation has not come up much lately. Is open source in the enterprise a dead issue? Have companies already tapped into the open source apps and tools and exhausted the options? Or, maybe consideration of open source software is fully integrated into companies’ software selection ...

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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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3 CIO Lessons from Obama’s First 100 Days

April 29, 2009

Today marks President Obama’s 100th day in office. Gallup reports that Obama’s 63% approval rating is the best since Carter’s early approval rating in 1977 (the highest was JFK’s 74% in 1961; CNN’s take). Americans have used the first 100 days as a predictor of Presidential success ever since FDR’s barrage of New Deal programs. NPR even has an Obama Tracker that has been documenting domestic, economic and foreign policy milestones since the President ...

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CIO Tenure: What is Wrong (if Anything)?

April 22, 2009

Along with IT project failure rates, the average time a CIO stays with a company is one of the most often quoted metrics in our trade. Recent studies cite that 1 in 4 CIOs are fired for poor performance and CIO’s have an average tenure of 4.4 years. These don’t seem to bode well for the CIO. Why is the tenure so short? And, is this seemingly short tenure really a bad thing? While certainly ...

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