Pretend for a moment that you are a CEO, and you learn that an asset that costs your company a cool quarter of a million dollars a year is chronically underutilized. Wouldn’t you want to do something about it? (more…)
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The Most Mismanaged of All IT Assets
IT Value Alert: IT and Legal make strange, but potentially synergistic, bedfellows
In a recent article on ForensicUpdate.com, author Johnny Lee shares the results of a recent survey of IT and legal professionals and points out that IT and legal departments appear to be working together even less at a time when collaboration between those two departments may be critical in protecting the company’s interests in the face of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement and ever-stricter eDiscovery requirements when defending the company during litigation. (more…)
CIOUpdate: Being Unreasonable With Software Vendors
Distinguished writer Jeff Vance explores how to apply Paul Lemberg’s Be Unreasonable: The Unconventional Way to Extraordinary Business Results to drive additional value from relationships with software and other technology vendors in this recent article on CIOUpdate.com. (more…)
IT Value Alert: Two surprising opportunities to leverage IT to reduce business costs
CFO Magazine ran a story late last week discussing the results of Greenwich Associates’ latest survey of financial executives at midsize companies, including the results of a question about how and how effectively those companies saved money last year during the economic downturn. However, there is a disconnect between the “how” and the “how effectively” that suggests two significant opporutnities for even more savings — opportunities that can be realized from leveraging existing IT investments many companies already have made. (more…)
Grant Thornton releases results of Federal government CIO survey
Earlier this week, professional services firm Grant Thornton released the results of its highly-anticipated 20th annual survey of Federal government CIOs, prepared in conjunction with TechAmerica. This year’s survey highlights Federal CIOs’ top challenges in the coming year and insights on how to address them as well as their views on how IT will contribute to creating one of the President’s top priorities — a more open government that is transparent, participatory and collaborative. This report may also be of interest to state/local government and CIOs.
To read the complete survey, please click here or visit Grant Thornton at gt.com.
A CFO Speaks: Three Mistakes to Avoid When Pitching IT Spending
In a new article on CIOUpdate, Logicalis CFO Greg Baker shares three critical failings he often has encountered in a population of hundreds of IT spending requests. Two of these, warnings about unexplained jargon and incomplete paperwork are valid points that hopefully most executives will already have learned to avoid. The third of his points, however, is highly valid and reflects an unfortunately common occurence:
The most common mistake is when IT concentrates too much on how a project solves technical issues―things like bandwidth constraints or deployment requirements―but then fails to talk about payback; how the project can improve sales or reduce costs. (more…)
InfoWorld: Tech apocalypse – Five doomsday scenarios for IT
InfoWorld last week posted an intriguing article discussing five extreme (but not entirely improbable) disasters that could impact IT operations of not just one company or cities, but entire industries and entire geographies:
If you think these things can’t happen, think again. Some already have occurred on a smaller scale. But we thought it might be fun to turn up the volume and see what might happen — how likely a “tech doomsday” scenario might be, how long it would take us to recover, and how we might prevent it from coming to be.
While perhaps falling short of addressing such doomsday scenarios as national power outages or solar flares, look for a series of upcoming articles on IT Value Challenge exploring practical, actionable steps every company should take to go beyond simple IT disaster recovery and instead address business survivability in an increasingly risky world.
Gartner Group: Only 30% of CIOs have direct responsibility for business process improvement (BPI) leadership
Today’s issue of Intel’s “Timely Intelligence For IT Professionals” includes Gartner Group’s 2009 research note “Cost Optimization Through Improving Business Processes.” While it comes as no surprise that companies are increasingly looking to IT to drive operations performance improvement, the report revealed an interesting dichotomy:
While 60% of CIOs indicated that “improving business processes” is their #1 priority, only 30% indicated they have direct responsibility for business process improvement leadership.
Look for a series of upcoming articles on IT Value Challenge in coming weeks that set out the value case for business executives to engage and empower their CIOs to drive performance improvement initiatives and some leading practices for doing so.
McKinsey: More than half the synergies in a merger are strongly tied to IT
A Harvard Business Review Daily Stat released today shared the results of a McKinsey study that indicates 50% to 60% of the initiatives intended to capture synergies are strongly tied to information technology. While the premise of the article should come as no surprise, it highlights the importance of keeping IT front and center when approaching merger transactions.
To read the McKinsey Quarterly article, click here. (Free registration required.) To read the IT Value Challenge’s recent article discussing how companies can leverage IT to realize such synergies when pursuing merger transactions, click here.