Don’t Look for ROI on Enterprise 2.0 – Look for Value!

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

Dion Hinchcliffe had a superb post on Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0.  The post cites several authoritative and useful sources on the subject.  It also hypothesizes several reasons for the mostly “wait and see” attitude currently taken by most IT leaders and business managers. But I mainly want to focus on the business case [...]

Filed under: IT Management, Next Generation Enterprise, Next Generation IT, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Supposing You Funded IT Like a Charitable Donation?

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

I’ve had this IT funding fantasy for years (I know, it’s really sad that my more exciting fantasies are to do with IT funding scenarios!) Supposing the CIO had to do a fund drive every year or every six months the way our local National Public Radio stations had to operate in order to fund [...]

Filed under: Business-IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Management, Portfolio Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

An IT PMO Glossary

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

I’ve been working with a couple of clients around PMO’s and the thorny space of Portfolio and Program Management.  Not coincidentally, this continues to prove to be an area of great leverage for organizations trying to drive up their business-IT maturity (and with that, increase the business value delivered through IT investments, assets and capabilities.)  [...]

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IT’s Toxic Assets and Self-Funded Stimulus Plan

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

OK – so I’m climbing on the latest news headlines – forgive me, but I do see an analogy that is important for IT leaders to be aware of.  Current business conditions mean this is a great time for CIO’s to clean up their back yards, and aggressively “kick the IT legacy problem in the [...]

Filed under: Business-IT Governance, IT Management, social networking, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Portfolio Management: So Much More Than a Collection of Projects!

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

I’ve posted recently about Program Management – mainly in response to a reader’s question about how to group projects into programs.  Her question, in turn, was in response to one of my most popular posts on the distinctions between Project, Program and Portfolio Management. IT Portfolio Management Matters! I’m delighted that my old post on [...]

Filed under: Business-IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Maturity, Portfolio Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Art and Science of Grouping Projects into Programs

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

I just received a comment on an old post, Project vs. Program vs. Portfolio Management.  This has been a popular post since it was written back in October 2007.  The comment read: I’m doing a research on how do organizations group their projects into programs, please tell me how do they go about doing that. [...]

Filed under: Business-IT Governance, Change Management, IT Management, Portfolio Management | Tagged: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

IT and Recession: Time to Partner With the CFO?

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

I’ve posted before that realizing value from IT-enabled business investments requires both a partnership between IT and the business (duh!), but also a partnership between the CIO and CFO.  This can provide the credibility and linkages necessary to ensure that meaningful metrics are defined and tracked, and that accountabilities, both for costs and value, are [...]

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Business-IT Alignment As Simple Rules

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

Back in 2001, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Donald N. Sull published a Harvard Business Review paper called “Strategy as Simple Rules.“   This was a great paper that spoke to the need for a few straightforward, hard-and-fast rules that define direction without confining it.  It resonated strongly with my colleagues and I as the term “simple [...]

Filed under: Change Management, IT Management, IT Maturity, Key Frameworks, Useful Tools | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Increasing Business Value Through Demand Shaping

Posted on January 26, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

A key role for IT leaders, especially during recessionary times, is Demand Shaping.   A perennial reality in the business-IT world is that demand seems to exceed supply. Of Backlogs and Early Cloud Computing When I entered the field of IT back in the 1960′s, the term “backlog” was pervasive – that huge list of requests [...]

Filed under: Business-IT Governance, IT Maturity | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Why a Good Business Case or ROI Analysis Doesn’t Ensure Value Realization

Posted on January 20, 2009 by Vaughan Merlyn

I find that most companies I work with nowadays are pretty good at insisting that business requests for IT solutions are accompanied by a robust business case that surfaces all the costs (including total life cycle costs), expected return on investment (ROI), risks, mitigation strategies, and so on.  They have good business case templates, and [...]

Filed under: IT Management, IT Maturity, Key Frameworks, Portfolio Management | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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