Is the Cloud a Key to Sustainability?
The MIT Industrial Liaison Program holds an annual conference for its sponsors focused on technology and telecommunications. This year’s event had excellent breadth, featuring Esther Dyson, the CTO of Blue State Digital (developers of Obama’s online social media platform), the director of MIT’s game development lab in Singapore and several others. The one presentation that […] MORE
May 20, 2009
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Is the Open Source Conversation Dead?
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 […] MORE
May 15, 2009
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A CIO Can’t Do More with Less
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 […] MORE
May 12, 2009
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5 IT Governance Attitudes Foreshadow Failure
After you have the organization following your core IT processes (more on that here), you are ready to add effective IT governance to increase productivity and alignment. Before you do this, make sure that you squash any of these five attitudes that may exist in your teams that will implement governance - they will virtually […] MORE
May 07, 2009
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Do CIOs Develop Leaders Like NCAA Coaches?
by Chris Curran, with research by Michael Mariani I am very passionate about coaching team sports and have been a basketball player most of my life. So, I read with great interest a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, What Can Managers Learn From College Basketball? There are three very interesting points: 1. That the […] MORE
May 05, 2009
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Stop the Web 2.0 Flood
I recently spent a few days with several CIOs and IT leaders at an MIT Center for Information Systems Research briefing. Prof. Wanda Orlikowski led a discussion around some early work exploring the uses and value of Web 2.o technologies in the enterprise. For purposes of our conversation, we defined Web 2.0 technologies as those […] MORE
April 30, 2009
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3 CIO Lessons from Obama’s First 100 Days
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 […] MORE
April 29, 2009
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CIO Tenure: What is Wrong (if Anything)?
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 […] MORE
April 22, 2009
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IT’s Keystone Skills
Process issues are not alone in contributing to IT’s success or failure. People (and their skills) are also part of the “holy trinity” of People - Process - Technology, the three interrelated building blocks of any business capability, IT included. With the dramatic uptake in outsourcing over the last several years, CIOs have been faced […] MORE
April 16, 2009
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IT Governance: Does it Work?
My good friend Peter Weill, Chairman of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), defines IT governance as “specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT.” In a perfect system, desirable behavior would be the norm and governance would deal with the exceptions. Unfortunately, in many organizations, […] MORE
April 14, 2009
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