Business Value Of IT

IT Strategy for the Fast Twitch Crowd

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 10, 2013 ⋅ One comment

This evening (Monday, 11 Feb 2013) , I did a presentation on Developing IT Strategy in a “Consumer IT” Environment – an expansion on some of the ideas that I have written about previously. I’ve posted my slides here – I realize that they do not “stand on their own”, and need some explanation, but if you weren’t in [...]

Reading for Understanding – Business

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 20, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

You are only as good as what you know, and half of what you know comes from books Truth be told, it’s not an original thought – I heard it many years ago, but it rang true for me personally. I still have many of my old college textbooks – engineering volumes bound in impressive [...]

Developing an IT Strategy: Approach

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 26, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment

Previously: Timing The new year approaches, and most IT groups aspire to start out with a completed IT Budget, derived from a well thought out set of short-term Objectives, that align with an IT Strategy – that itself aligns with the overall Corporate Strategy. If your timing is a bit off, and you haven’t established [...]

Developing an IT Strategy: Timing

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 23, 2012 ⋅ One comment

In some companies, IT struggles to find a voice amid the other functional areas of the business – Finance, Operations, Sales and Marketing, even Human Resources. “Business Alignment”, a regular item on lists of Top 5 IT Concerns each year, pops up because (I believe) it’s difficult to glibly draw a line connecting IT systems [...]

Coffee Shop IT

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 8, 2012 ⋅ 2 comments

Ron Tolido recently used the metaphor of a local Starbucks invasion and the impact on the local coffee shop, comparing it to the introduction of PaaS services such as Amazon Web Services. I like to use the coffee shop metaphor for corporate IT, to illustrate the need for design, usability, sustainability, rigor – and operating [...]

The Hegemony of Large Numbers – Ignoring Common Sense

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 28, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Ok, maybe I’m stretching the meaning there, but that’s a cool sounding title, and what I see as an interesting phenomenon. People get excited about Large Numbers, and think they have meaning and importance simply because they are Large Numbers. Big Errors For example – years ago, when an application manager was whirling around the [...]

Chargebacks vs. Allocations – Defining IT’s Relationship with the Business

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 16, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Some IT departments prefer chargebacks, while others do not. My own preference is to allocate IT costs to the business units, based on some reasonable balance of simplicity and accuracy. General services could be allocated by headcount, COGs, or revenues, with each business unit taking their proportional share. Some easily identifiable items might be allocated [...]

Defining Business Benefits: Hard and Soft

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 6, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

All projects should have a clear objective, a practical plan, and an understanding of the costs and benefits to get the thing done. Easy to say, but a lot of project teams struggle to crisply and clearly define specific business benefits. One way to move the process forward would be to have a clear understanding [...]

Calculating the Business Benefit of Effective Training Material (4 of 4)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

In previous notes, I’ve written about the importance of training and, by extension, effective training material. It’s a common requirement in many organizations … … well, actually more of a “nice to have”, am I right? Truly effective training material is difficult to create (at least, to create material that does the job), and difficult [...]

Business Proposals and The Lesson of Jabberwocky

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 28, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

When someone asks my opinion on their writing, I’ll get fairly detailed; I’ve noted in the past that there is a lot of power and influence in the written word, and it’s fairly important to get it done well, or your project proposals just never seem to get off the ground. This particular proposal suffered from [...]