Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Staffing has taken an expected hit, according to our recent research on IT trends for 2009.1 While still about half of companies thankfully remain in a stable IT hiring situation, only a quarter of companies are currently hiring, and the remaining 25% are downsizing.

This month I gave a cost-containment workshop at a national conference on IT financial management. While there, I spent three good days listening to a variety of speakers who mostly focused on how better to manage IT investment. I've written about some of the high points and my impressions here.

Initiating the "right" projects is just one aspect of portfolio management; you must also appropriately monitor and guide ongoing development projects as well as systems that are in production or being retired. During development, it is critical to monitor your organization's standard metrics (more on this in a minute), as well as those issues that are specific to the individual project.

A couple of months ago, we complimented the folks at Cutter about the recent Cutter IT Journal (CITJ) on Project Management 2.0. 1 We were impressed with the breadth and quality of the articles and their general themes. However, we also noted that the term "business value" was mentioned only once in CITJ -- and was not discussed in any of the articles.

Conception --> Closure --> Delivery

In general, it is easier to obtain money, even in these hard times, than it is to "buy time." Many times every year, I find someone pressuring me or some hapless CIO or project manager into committing to some schedule that everyone knows is so nearly impossible that agreement is tantamount to eventual failure.

In general, it is easier to obtain money, even in these hard times, than it is to "buy time." Many times every year, I find someone pressuring me or some hapless CIO or project manager into committing to some schedule that everyone knows is so nearly impossible that agreement is tantamount to eventual failure. I often tell a story of a presentation that I made a few years ago to a financial organization that was on a long-term project to replace its 30-year-old core applications.

If frequent mention of business-IT alignment were a capital offense, I would have been executed long ago instead of writing this Executive Update, which intends to amend my various comments in earlier Cutter publications about business-IT alignment. It's no crime to champion the cause of an important business issue, but I must plead guilty to a misdemeanor in overlooking an important subtlety, a fine distinction in the topic whose importance is heightened in our current economic mess.