Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

It is all too easy to make high-level general statements about CIOs and IT organizations. Often these statements work from the assumption that all CIOs and all IT organizations are alike. For example, since the turn of the year, we've seen a lot of "CIO's Concerns for 2011" and similar articles.

A great deal of attention has been given to the design, deployment, and management of Web services as part of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) within the enterprise. The attention is well warranted as SOA represents a substantial advance in the architecture of enterprise systems. However, I've seen relatively little discussion related to Web services that face outside of the organization.

In an age when rates of project failure sadly top 50%, having the chance to actually restart a project that has been stalled, cancelled, or put on hold for whatever reason, can be very positive. But it is definitely not without great challenges. Often, the project manager asked to restart the engagement is not the same one who ended its previous iteration. It's worth noting here before we go further that restarts -- like second marriages -- are just as likely, if not more likely, to fail than the original engagement.

With the increasing importance of information systems for business success, the risks associated with the temporary inaccessibility of information due to any unplanned failure of computer systems have significantly increased. Failure of a computer system may be the result of various factors, such as faulty or improper actions of users, or external factors, including man-made or natural disasters.

The title "project manager" is cheap. In some organizations it is given to administrative assistants, lead technicians, or senior business analysts in lieu of a raise. Senior PMs play a vital role on large, complex, mission-critical projects.

Once again, I am sitting here, sipping a cup of coffee at my local McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the steady stream of people going into the H.H. Gregg electronics store that took up residence in what previously was a Circuit City electronics store.

This is the sixth and final Advisor in this series on green IT. In it, I briefly outline the importance and usage of the ISO14000 family of standards associated with carbon emissions.