In his Forrester blog post Thoughts On Recession…And ECM Adoption, Kyle McNabb writes: "To put it bluntly, implementation teams know who their users are, but they know very little about the people that will use the technology. And focusing on users often leads to implementing technology in a way that materially changes the way people […]

Where does tech jargon – or technobabble – come from, as Ben Worthen asks in his WSJ post, Where Tech Jargon Comes From: An Insider’s View. I have some theories: Geek chic – The IT industry has its roots in science; on day one those in IT were indistinguishable from scientists. Subsequent advances in technology […]

I recently read Chris Potts piece on CIO.com where he explores the idea of the IT department being run as a business. He sees the sense in this but guards against getting too carried away with the notion because unlike a real business it does not have access to growth funding through shareholders or banks. […]

I came across a very interesting article on the Harvard Business School website – click here. Whilst the focus was on how corporates could learn from the medical world’s approach to ‘error handling’, it did resonate my own career development in the IT industry. I broke my arm very badly circa 20 years ago. Bone […]

My most recent piece in the Financial Times stresses the importance of the technology management at board level. Click here to read the article. Here I am trying to shift the thinking that IT is just an IT department issue to being one that needs boardroom control. Given that IT is a significant investment of […]

Paul Wallis CTO of Stroma Software wrote an interesting piece on the role of IT in business. Click here. I agree with his comments. The IT function is often too focused on the delivery of a system as opposed to the delivery of better circulation within the business. By circulation I mean data, information, knowledge […]

It was refreshing to read the Boston Consulting Group paper Gaining a Seat at the Innovation Table on the role IT has to play in business innovation. The paper rightly highlights the role the business side has to play in this. The focus though is on what the IT function should be doing. I particularly […]

Have a look at Avoid the IT alignment trap, an article by Bain employees Steve Berez, Vivek Gambhir and Amit Sinha. My reaction: I agree that IT-business alignment is not the solution. I also agree that an IT department lacking in engineering and operational discipline will fail to meet the users’ needs. But even IT […]

Interesting piece by BEN WORTHEN of wsj.com: IT Struggling? Put a Business Person in Charge. It shouldn’t be as that is what IT staff are paid to do. However it highlights how far the industry has to evolve for these Renaissance IT stories to become mundane Bell curve norm events rather than notable extremes. We […]