News & Views

January 18, 2010 from InfoWorld – “IT should relinquish its increasing stance as an order taker, and earn and advance its intended role as the qualified engineer of what makes a business hum…

Nobody in IT should ever say, “You’re my customer and my job is to make sure you’re satisfied,” or ask, “What do you want me to do?”

Instead, they should say, “My job is to help you and the company succeed,” followed by “Show me how you do things now,” and “Let’s figure out a better way of getting this done…”

180 View – The article assumes that the IT leaders are qualified business engineers, which is a big assumption. However, for those organizations fortunate enough to have this kind of IT department, then putting the head of IT on an equal playing field with the business leaders, makes a lot of sense.

October 30, 2009 from Deloitte – “Scanning the dark clouds of the current crisis for a silver lining? Take a look at the relationship between IT and the Business. The difficult environment is providing an unprecedented opportunity for IT leaders to show their added value and significantly increase their impact at board level…”

180 View (written by Graeme Booth) – In the third edition of Deloitte’s IT-Business balance Survey, 2009 the author’s contend that the current economic and business climate provides an “…an unprecedented opportunity for IT leaders to show their added value and significantly increase their impact at board level”. Fair enough. However, what is less clear is how this worthy objective is to be accomplished. Much time is surely spent on talk of business alignment and strategy but organizations spend insufficient effort translating their strategic decisions into activities and processes that will directly support key corporate initiatives. And even when reasonable tactical decisions have been made, the measurement of results against critical success factors (CSF’s) is lacking.