Developing Project Management Competency
MDA in 2004
The Object Management Group (OMG) continues to work on its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) standard. There are a number of ways to describe MDA. From the OMG's perspective, it's a set of specifications. From a vender perspective, those specifications are potential products. And from a user's perspective, some of the MDA products can prove very valuable.
Avoiding Show-Stopping Project Risks
Avoiding Show-Stopping Project Risks
Avoiding Show-Stopping Project Risks
MDA in 2004
The Object Management Group (OMG) continues to work on its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) standard. There are a number of ways to describe MDA. From the OMG's perspective, it's a set of specifications. From a vender perspective, those specifications are potential products. And from a user's perspective, some of the MDA products can prove very valuable.
MDA in 2004
The Object Management Group (OMG) continues to work on its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) standard. There are a number of ways to describe MDA. From the OMG's perspective, it's a set of specifications. From a vender perspective, those specifications are potential products. And from a user's perspective, some of the MDA products can prove very valuable.
Think Introspective, Not Retrospective -- Why Wait Until the End
Corporate IT Spending Outlook for 2004 -- Part I
Contrary to the rosier findings of other studies, a recent Cutter Consortium survey of IT decisionmakers shows that IT spending, as a percentage of total organizational expenses, will remain steady, although a bit flat, in 2004. The survey finds that the actual amount of money that corporations plan to spend on IT may increase slightly, but it won't keep pace with inflation or growth in other expenses. Even a slight increase in spending is welcome, but suppliers and IT managers might want to wait a bit before cheering an end to the technology slump.
Corporate IT Spending Outlook for 2004 -- Part II: Cutting Costs, Boosting Service Top 2004 IT Budget Plans
Part I presented an initial analysis of IT spending plans for 2004 based on a 2003 survey of 97 companies. Here in Part II, we try to help you understand how your spending plans compare with our survey sample. To that end, we examined some important demographic and strategic drivers of IT spending and delved deeper into the data by examining respondents' major spending priorities. While 2004 spending plans will, on average, be flat compared to 2003, and while most organizations are in cost-cutting mode for IT, some firms plan to build new technologies and applications.
Maximizing the Effectiveness of IT
Contrary to common wisdom, the level of IT expenditure should reflect the performance objectives and communication style of a company. Researchers at the InterUnity Group studied 500 companies and found that only a few technologies universally improve corporate performance and that increasing IT expenditures in companies with low levels of IT/business-unit partnership is most often a waste of money. While most companies fail to achieve competitive advantage from their IT strategy, companies with high levels of IT/business-unit partnership outperform others.
IT Must Focus On Business Value, Not IT Cost Cutting
A business executive recently told me that IT was too busy focusing on the needs of IT rather than on those of the business community. This user claimed that IT had various projects in the works to consolidate certain databases, address hardware cost performance, deploy new packages, and pursue myriad other projects that did little to recover bottom-line revenue or streamline business costs. This emphasis on IT cost cutting over delivering business value is quite common.
Trends in Corporate IT Spending: A Permanent Change Or a Pause to Digest?
During the go-go years of the Internet boom, I used to run an exercise in some of my executive education classes that went like this: I'd ask each participant to write a list -- not to be shared with anyone -- of his or her top five ideas for using IT to create economic value for his or her own company. After the participants had finished, I'd ask them to consider their list and code each item "R" or "C" based on whether the idea created value primarily by increasing revenue (the "R") or by reducing cost (the "C").
Following the Money
In the classic film All the President's Men (about the Watergate break-in), Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively, receive a recurring piece of advice from the unknown informant Deep Throat: "Follow the money." Over and over, Deep Throat cautions the young reporters to "follow the money" and that if they do, all their questions will be answered. It turns out to be good advice.
Allocating Resources for Strategic and Operational Effectiveness
Resources should be allocated to those activities that most directly influence a company's strategic and operational effectiveness. By managing to improve those effectiveness factors (the causes) through IT, we can contribute to the company's future financial performance. By prioritizing, aligning, planning, and measuring IT's performance with strategic and operational effectiveness as the focus, we can improve the bottom-line impact of IT and communicate it to the enterprise. How should companies respond to this issue? In two ways:
What We Talk About When We Talk About IT Spending
In Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," two couples have a few predinner drinks and talk about love. But, as with many complex ideas, the story's characters cannot talk directly about love. Instead, they try to communicate through an emotional and conversational triangulation; each character offers multiple points of reference, which taken together converge as their ideas of love. In talking about love, the characters reveal, directly and indirectly, more about themselves and their relationships with one another.
