“Just dig a hole in the ground and throw money in it” was a piece of advice my wife recently received on buying a swimming pool. I was reminded of that when I read something on LinkedIn last week about “the best county technology plan ever.” The plan is public, so I decided to investigate…
Why IT projects still fail In the age of agile development, devops and related management techniques, is IT project failure even a thing anymore? The answer, sadly, is yes. In the past, IT failures often meant high-priced flops, with large-scale software implementations going on way too long and way over budget. Those failures can and…
Technological change is sweeping pretty much every organisation on the planet. And whilst the impact of this change on our legacy systems and the mammoth task of introducing new technologies and processes is, and should be, a huge consideration for CIOs, it shouldn’t be the only thing keeping us up at night. People play a…
IT governance is a formal framework that provides a structure for organizations to ensure that IT investments support business objectives. The need for formal corporate and IT governance practices across U.S. organizations was fueled by the enactment of laws and regulations, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, in the 1990 and early…
Ask 10 CIOs how they define digital transformation and you’re likely to get 10 different answers with one common theme: a laundry list of technology projects intended to foster sweeping business changes. Even so, digital transformation isn’t so easily defined. Surely, digital transformation involves a radical rethinking of how an organization uses technology in pursuit…
Design thinking is emerging as a major ingredient in for digital transformation success. But what exactly is design thinking, and how are leading CIOs harnessing its power to bolster business value? Design thinking is an approach to building products that integrates business and technical needs together to deliver what people require, says Shelley Evenson, managing…
In an age where most companies have a social media presence on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram, it’s somewhat surprising that many still haven’t figured out how to turn the data gathered from company-owned properties and broader social media listening tools into automated and actionable intelligence. “Social intelligence is just making…
The commodity days of the cloud are over. It’s time to get strategic. That’s the message of today’s leading cloud strategies, as forward-thinking CIOs are no longer turning to the public cloud to cut costs. Instead, the public cloud is viewed as an opportunity to get out of the business of managing data centers and…
The more things stay the same, the more they change. That’s not exactly how the saying goes, but it is the phrase that should be engraved over every door leading to IT. It’s certainly better than “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Not a lot has changed since our early days, when IT was…
Customer relationship management is the lifeblood of many businesses. But not every company has the in-house expertise necessary to configure and maintain a complex Salesforce implementation. Here’s where a Salesforce consultant comes in. Steeped with experience and know-how, a Salesforce consultant can pay significant dividends — assuming you choose the right one in the first…