Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
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For years now, CIOs have contended with business management's questions about the value of IT. But this is only half of the issue: CIOs also have to contend with the cost of IT. In our experience, the ways in which IT cost is managed -- how IT's cost affects the business units -- is a critical element of IT management and governance. For example, it's hugely different whether business units pay for IT (with fungible money) or whether the costs are assigned to them. In either case, knowing what the costs are is critical.
In my last Advisor (see "Working Around the Delete Key, Part 1," 24 August 2006), I told the story of how I had spent a year or more getting around a malfunctioning delete key on my laptop. The article pointed out the lengths to which I, a fairly savvy computer user, was willing to go to avoid giving up my principal computer. This article is about some of the thoughts this experience brought to mind.
In June of this year, Toyota and its Lexus brand took the top spot in 11 out of 19 vehicle categories in the J.D. Power and Associates' automotive quality survey. Yet less than a month later, Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe bowed deeply in front of the world's press, publicly apologizing for the numerous quality problems that recently have been plaguing Toyota automotive products.
Readers of last week's Advisor (see "Verifying the Value of Offshoring, Part 1," 31 August 2006) were introduced to the idea that the exploration of value created from an offshoring initiative is the last but not least important component of total management in the offshoring lifecycle.
Conjure the image of the UN chambers, where delegates from around the world, their ears hidden behind headphones, listen with rapt attention as a colleague delivers an oration from the podium. The only thing permitting members from vastly different cultures and languages to work together is the army of translators who take the speaker's utterances and convert them into the native tongues of the audience. Would that this were so in the multilingual inner sanctum of information technology.
SeeWhy Software is offering a version of its real-time BI platform free for download. With SeeWhy Community Edition, SeeWhy Software is stealing a page from the open source community's strategy in order to accelerate interest in its products and services.
While many people may view governance as a bureaucratic burden, it is a necessary part of corporate life. Governing, especially financial governing, is part of what executives and managers must do as part of their fiduciary responsibility to all business stakeholders, including employees. From a project perspective, governance relates to making sure that monies spent provide the benefits and returns that were projected.