Is IT Collaboration an Unnatural Act: Part 3

I started discussing the organizational change implications of collaboration a couple of posts back, then introduced a specific case study in the last post.  Now I want to pick up that case study and look at how it played out.
The team rapidly fell into two camps - the enthusiasts (4 people) and the resistors (4 [...]

Is IT Collaboration an Unnatural Act: Part 2

 
I posted recently on collaboration perhaps being an unnatural act for some activities in some types of organization.  I want to come back to this topic and look at it through the lens of one team’s experiment with a new IT-enabled (Web 2.0) approach to collaboration.  We will discuss the results and potential implications of this experiment.  [...]

Recession and Business-IT Maturity

Just as a lot of CIO’s were gearing up for a year or two of growth and innovation, many are now being told to “hunker down” for a period of austerity.  The usual first victims - cut travel, cut training, cut anything that smells like overhead!  That Enterprise Architecture initiative that was starting to pay off? [...]

SaaS and the IT Organization Circa 2017

I’ve speculated before in this blog that Software as a Service was a significant force of change on IT organizations.  A colleague just turned me on to a (new to me) blog called Think IT Services, and its latest post Why IT Now Sees SaaS As A Savior.  In his post Jeff Kaplan cites several indications [...]

Business Implications of SOA: Part 3

The previous post and the post before that addressed the first 3 business implications of SOA.  Let’s discuss the other two major business implications of SOA.  First, with SOA it becomes important to understand the distinction between “enabling” and “actualizing” a business process.  Actualizing a business process embeds IT automation elements such as workflow into the [...]

Business Implications of SOA: Part 2

In the last post, we talked about the first two business implications of SOA. The first is the rapidly evolving market ecosystem for “services in the cloud” and the increasing availability of plug-’n’-play “widgets” all made possible by the underlying standards and methods of SAO.  This innovation is equivalent to that brought about by the early [...]

Managing IT Infrastructure vs. Platforms

I was in an interesting discussion with one of my consulting clients recently.  I was with a group of IT managers responsible for their firm’s shared IT assets.  This is a large, global enterprise that has been on an aggressive journey over the last 5 years to transform business-IT maturity.  By any measure, they have been [...]

Surfing and IT Innovation

Thanks to a colleague for pointing me to a remarkable post by John Hagel entitled Innovating on the Edge of Big Waves.   Hagel explores the evolution of ‘big wave’ surfing - both from a perspective of the technology innovations (e.g., fibreglass, foam core, changeable stabilizing fins) and techniques (e.g., tow-in surfing, insights borrowed from wind [...]

Clues from Google for IT Circa 2017

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ, March 18, 2008, Business Technology page) published an interesting article, “Pleasing Google’s Tech-Savvy Staff.”  WSJ interviewed Google’s impressive CIO Douglas Merrill on “How do you run the IT department at a company whose employees are considered among the world’s most tech-savvy?”
I liked the piece for a couple of reasons.  First, [...]

Retiring Retirement - A Path to Business-IT Maturity

I’m increasingly invited to retirement celebrations for former and current consulting clients and friends.  They are quite distressing events.  First, the retiree is typically putting on a brave face, boasting about all the golf and fishing they will enjoy.  But often beneath the surface bluster is a deep-seated fear.  Sometimes they ask me if my [...]