Digital transformation has the potential to be, well, transformative; when done right, a digital transformation can enable your business to reap significant, and well-documented, benefits. But with many things IT, there comes a tendency to get wrapped up in the hype and not think through the hard truths of execution until the promise doesn’t live…
CIOs have long struggled to quantify the value of IT services relative to production costs, a financial black box that sows distrust between the tech department and business divisions. As IT implements additional digital capabilities in service of the business, this disconnect is widening, inspiring more CIOs to embrace technology business management (TBM), a discipline…
At first, it was just a whisper. Someone from Marketing was complaining to a colleague from Sales about the new home-grown sales and marketing automation system that IT installed last year. The system wasn’t working right, it was too hard to use, and the features weren’t exactly what Marketing needed. The marketer’s point: IT was…
Successful digital transformation requires internal disruption, and CIOs intent on embracing a digital future must often alter their IT operating models to get there. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to developing software and services. To build software faster, CIOs are kicking old waterfall habits in favor of agile methodologies in which…
Companies considering moving workloads to cloud environments five years ago questioned whether the economics of cloud were compelling enough. The bigger question at that time was whether the economics would force a tsunami of migration from legacy environments to the cloud world. Would it set up a huge industry, much like Y2K, of moving workloads…
In almost every conversation I have with CIOs, a common theme comes up: how to get the silos within IT to work together. The relationships between the different groups vary, but the one that seems to have the most tension is between network and security operations. It’s no secret that there has been, and continues…
With all its emphasis on forward-looking innovation, digital transformation is also triggering increased interest in an age-old IT practice: outsourcing. Most CIOs are migrating applications to public cloud services, offloading operations and maintenance of computing, storage and other capabilities so they can reallocate staff to focus on what’s strategic to their business. The same is…
I am loving an article on CIO.com by Martha Heller right now which opens with a great proposition – “How to strengthen IT’s connection to your business.” I think that it’s crucial that this connection is strengthened. The difference between firms that have aligned IT and business strategy and those that have not is quite…
Digital disruption across a wide array of industries is forcing companies to double down on innovation. Painfully aware that competitors are racing toward the same goals, companies are taking new risks as they pursue digital transformations, experimenting with new digital services and capabilities to augment existing offerings or to slide into adjacent markets. And few…
In IT, the bigger the hype, the greater the misconceptions, and data analytics is no exception. Analytics, one of the hottest facets of information technology today, can result in significant business gains, but misperceptions can get in the way of a smooth and timely delivery of analytical capabilities that might benefit business users and ultimately…