IT Metrics - How to manage IT while adding value to the business

This post is more a thought on what has been a difficult period of time for many people all around the world, and of course I was not an exception….. I couldn’t be! Since March 2019 we have been forced to change our ways of life, work and relationship to a point we would never imagine. We are undoubtedly immersed in an unprecedent situation that despite all the difficult moments we faced and perhaps we still have to deal with, had helping our society to do a substantial and qualitative leap. In less than one year the world reacted and created the conditions to work pursuing a common objective. As a result of that or because of that, we have seen an unprecedent evolution and in some cases revolution, in the way we manage R&D innovation and related technology.    The Information Technology industry has not been an exception by any means. Many technology products that were launch to the market before the COVID or during this particular period, especially the ones looking at i...

There was upon a time when IT Managers were people focusing just on target setting and process control. The line manager was a person having special focus on proper delivery and project achievement rather than anything else. In recent years coaching has become a required skill for any senior manager driving a team to excel on everyday challenging agendas. Still very often some business leaders believe that coaching has to be a separate management activity in order to not interfere with the day-to-day activities.  Based on my own experiences this statement is far from the reality.   It has been demonstrated that an IT leader having the capabilities and the means to act as a coach in parallel to the rest of his/her managerial activities is a person that will get the best from their team, either operationally or from the compartmental point of view. Coaching is all about listening, paraphrasing and guiding rather than anything else. It is a time well expended to ...

Transformation has been an undeniable reality for IT since the beginning of the times. Whether it has been called process reengineering, business adaptability, technology agility, cost saving programs or more recently IT consumerization-commoditization, the fact is that we have never been laid back managing the IT agenda. Transformation is linking several variables together to come up with the most likely and add-value scenario for the business. These scenarios are in the context of reducing costs, increase productive, regain business momentum; meaning all of them are looking to a better business positioning for which IT will have to respond in a prompt and efficient manner.   I often went reading IT news around the world but also having interesting discussions with some colleagues about this non-stop subject of business transformation and the required IT support. As the debate went on, I became overwhelmed with the feeling of loneliness as regards my ow...

The other day I was having an intense debate with a friend of mine regarding the real value of an IT organization. He argued that IT is not longer the true add value organization it used to be in the 90’s or at the beginning of the 21st century. This mainly due to the fact that some of its heritage competences and skills has been moved progressively to other business areas (process modeling are now managed within each of the functional areas or then lead by a separate Lean – Sigma6 organizations, data modeling and data architecture are also cover by specialists within the business functions, the Cloud concept and the related storage market has made possible to move the infrastructure landscape out of the operational control of company IT functions by outsourcing this services, etc. Complementing these ideas, today I read an interesting article at InformationWeek produced by the Forrester Research group predicting that most of the IT functions will gradually dis...

Make IT work ; this is by the way the title of a book that was written at the end of the 90’s by 16 senior students of Business Economics associated to the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and supported by Arthur D.Little consultancy under the umbrella of a Management information technology project. During this project, an extensive research was carried out over a period of more than one year in Netherlands and United States. Companies such Pepsico, IBM, 3M, Unilever, Shell, Singapore Airlines, HP and many other big corporations were visited and assessed by the project team. As a result of this extensive exercise the team ended up defining an IT framework that is supporting any IT organization to develop and implement an IT strategy in clear alignment with the business. Furthermore, the book describes in detail every stage of the processes, comparing with best practices observed in the organizations that were visited during the research project.  Although recognizing t...

People management as we all know is one of the most challenging managerial activities we are confronted with when driving any business area. Furthermore, if this people are IT professional then the challenge become even more complex because we have to add technology related matters on top of the so-called business streams. IT people are by definition a community using a common language, having common problems and they share a common success factors. They have their own career-path within the business organisations as it is not easier to find IT professionals getting career opportunities outside IT, at least not at the extend of other business professionals. Even at today’s business, people don’t look at their IT colleagues as potential candidates for a job opportunity in a different business area. This becomes even more clear as we go up in the career-level. There are very few IT professionals that have reached a senior position outside IT (with the exception of some...