IT Management
Does the CIO Control IT Spending?
Tweet At Diamond, we are in the early stages of analyzing survey data from our 2010 Diamond Digital IQ study, a multi-industry study of the strategic use of IT. The respondents are equally distributed between business and IT leaders. For more details on what to expect, have a look at the DDIQ results from the […] MORE
January 29, 2010
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Run IT Like a Business, Not As a Business
Tweet A recent InfoWorld article by Bob Lewis questions the IT organization concept of “running IT as a business.” Paraphrasing, he poses several problems with it: No one inside your company is your customer IT’s costs are always higher than external options Building software that “meets customer requirements” is short-sighted and reactive Software product focus […] MORE
January 25, 2010
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A Resurgence of Portfolio Management?
Tweet by Chris Curran and Jim Quick Portfolio management was all the rage 5-6 years ago, driven in part by some good management thinking from people like Peter Weill at MIT CISR and Dr. Howard Rubin and in part by some software tool vendors. Back then, most organizations added some kind of portfolio thinking or […] MORE
January 21, 2010
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6 Ways to Find Weak Signals
Tweet One of the fundamental mysteries in the practice of IT management is “why cant we get better at delivering projects?” Much has been written about the subject, with the balance focusing on the negative – project failure, IT Fail, etc. A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review got me thinking about another angle […] MORE
October 09, 2009
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Using Weak Signals to Detect Troubled Projects
Tweet Every little bit helps in sniffing out projects that are destined for trouble. You would think that with 10+ years of project success data from Standish and others, we would have collectively improved things significantly. This is not the case. So, I read with interest Paul Shoemaker and George Day’s article in the Spring […] MORE
October 02, 2009
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The Problem with Pay-Per-Service in Healthcare and IT
Tweet I caught part of a Charlie Rose interview with Jay Rockefeller this morning (episode not online yet) and heard the senator say that pay-per-service healthcare is a bad idea. Being deeply immersed in the cloud computing discussion that hangs its hat on a similar payment model, I paid more attention than I might normally. […] MORE
September 18, 2009
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The Skinny on Lean IT
Tweet by Chris Curran, Steve Legnine and Rob Boudrow Lean, an optimization philosophy embodied in the Toyota Production System, is re-gaining popularity among some of our consumer products clients as they continue to search for ways to do more with less. I’ve asked Diamond’s business process expert, Steve Legnine and our IT optimization guru, Rob […] MORE
August 07, 2009
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First Aid for IT Project Failures
Tweet I spent last week at Boy Scout Camp in Oklahoma. One of the benefits of attending a Scout camp as an adult is the great training opportunities available. This year, I was able to get Red Cross certifications in First Aid, Wilderness First Aid and CPR during the week – all very important when […] MORE
July 20, 2009
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4 Steps to Manage Your Technology Portfolio
Tweet This post is about managing the life and death of technologies in an enterprise. Not projects or applications, but the portfolio of the underlying technologies – operating systems, DBMSs, development tools, middleware, etc. These must be managed too or you will find yourself in the same situation as a client CIO of a large […] MORE
May 27, 2009
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A CIO Can't Do More with Less
Tweet 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 […] MORE
May 12, 2009
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