Thoughts
Ideas that transform people, businesses, and industries
Deeply rooted in our organizational ethos is the celebration of authentic and unapologetic “thought.” We believe each member of our team brings with them a unique view of themselves, our clients, and of the world we live in. We make a point to not only articulate our individual experiences, senses, emotions, and actions internally, but to share them with you here.
What should IT call the rest of the business?
I blogged on this question in October and no one commented, so either no one has any brilliant ideas or I’m the only one obsessing about this. I was running some internet searches today on another topic, using various words like “user”, “client”, “customer”, and ran...
Coming soon… our first “Geek in Chief”
I’m in Kansas City for the holidays, so I’m getting my news from the Kansas City Star instead of the Wall Street Journal and Economist. I love this article from yesterday’s paper: “Obama to boldly go where no geek has gone before”. Not only did I finally learn the...
What MBA programs really need
There are some interesting discussions underway about the future of management education. Harvard Business School recently convened academics, recruiters and executives at its 100-year anniversary to assess MBA education and plan changes to their programs. The report...
Denver – More resilient than we thought?
We are all reading about layoffs in the papers, but over the last week, it seemed that almost every person I met with personally had either been laid off or was in a company in the midst of lay-offs. Some of the public ones in Denver include Sun, ULA, Western Union,...
There’s no crying on strategy projects!
“Should we do this project internally or hire consultants?” I get this question all the time, but I think the asker usually knows the pros and cons and just wants me to help weigh them. Consultants bring proven frameworks, perspectives and insights from similar...
Has arguing gotten a bad rap?
During my drive across Kansas yesterday, I listened to a Teaching Company course on Argumentation (sidenote: I love the Teaching Company, especially anything about music by Professor Greenberg). It was a timely topic since Jim and I were just discussing the importance...
IT must earn its right to innovate
When I tell people I help CIOs run IT organizations more effectively, I often get a response along the lines of “oh, you have to help OUR company’s IT department!” The issues I hear boil down to two: either the existing systems are unreliable or new projects aren’t...
How can ITIL, CMM, COBIT and their other friends be implemented together effectively?
I’m in a conciliatory mood this week – first about IT and “the business”, now about various groups within IT. This noodling started while I was out to dinner last night with Michael McGaughey, my favorite ITIL expert. I started picking his brain on something that’s...
When will we stop calling them “the business” and badmouthing “IT”?
So I was having coffee today with a friend of mine and he asked me how I would describe our customers. As I started into my usual spiel about how we tend to work with mid-large sized companies, about half of the time with the CIO and about half of the time with their...
Is this $700B bailout already making a difference?
This has nothing to do with business or technology, but I’ll be throwing in random comments on a variety of topics here and there…I came out of dinner last night around 11 PM on Larimer Square in downtown Denver and was shocked to see Larimer Street busier than I have...
Could we engage employees and “customers” in IT strategy development?
I spent yesterday at CSIA’s DEMOGala conference. Before I get on to the topic at hand, I want to congratulate CSIA for another amazing event! I have attended the last four years and it just keeps getting better. We had over 900 attendees this year and a full day of...
Introducing my blog
Hello to everyone out there and thank you for coming to visit my brand-new blog. For those of you who don’t know me, my background is a mix of business and technology, with a focus in IT organizational performance. I did my undergraduate studies in Computer Science...
Testing 1, 3, 6 …
Isn't it more fun when it takes you a moment to determine the next number in the sequence?