6 ways CIOs sabotage their IT consultant’s success
As an IT leader, it’s up to you to make the consultants you engage successful. If you weren’t serious about their project, why did you sign the contract?
Stories by Bob Lewis
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Bad metrics are worse than no metrics
When it comes to setting goals and assessing your progress toward achieving them, be smart about how you use metrics and what you pay attention to. Not SMART.
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What CIOs get wrong about optimisation
Optimisation efforts too often fall afoul of an essential principle: To optimise the whole you must sub-optimise the parts.
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XaaS isn’t everything — and it isn’t serviceable
‘Everything-as-a-service’ doesn’t include every service IT provides, not to mention everything outside IT that can be characterised as-a-service.
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The CIO’s missing priority
Directing decision-maker-awareness to the right targets is a key skill for CIO success. Investment risks that pit security vs. IT prove the point.
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In Pictures: 10 old-school IT principles that still rule
These graybeard IT tenets still reign -- when applied in their modernized guise
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Run IT as a business - why that's a train wreck waiting to happen
"If you board the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the other direction," said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It's the "standard model" of information technology organizations - the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies and ITIL.
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SURVIVAL GUIDE: Rocking the boat
Management Speak: I will accept no excuses! Translation: I don’t know the difference between an excuse and a real problem.
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SURVIVAL GUIDE: Web services a saviou?
MANAGEMENTSPEAK: Application of this tool in our environment is critical to successfully meet our objectives. TRANSLATION: We have to find a place to use this, or I won't be able to justify spending the leftover funds I had to burn to secure our budget for next year.
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SURVIVAL GUIDE: The O-word that IT fears
Some words inspire terror. Their mere mention causes blood pressure to rise, mouths to dry, and skin to shed beads of cold sweat. Words such as vampire, final exam, orthodontist.
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MORPH: Stay visible keep face
The president of a rather large technology company recently told employees he wants them to be fungible, or so a correspondent reports. This might actually mean something, although probably not. The term "fungible", meaning interchangeable, is generally restricted to non-sentient beings, _after all.
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Picking technological winners/losers is easy
If you know the formula, picking technological winners and losers is easy. "But they are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso on computers. Among the many careers I want to try before I die - televangelist, rock star, college bar owner, psychic - is founding an organisation to help a neglected group of which I'm part - Sarcastics Anonymous.
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IS survival guide: drawing pictures for architecture
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: We are not interested in helping the users here. We are only interested in clearing the help desk queue. No translation will do justice to this sentiment.
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Does Microsoft have a monopoly?
Does Microsoft have a monopoly?
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Training with difference
Training with difference
