IT Governance: how much are we walking the walk?
The "G" word is one of those words that's bandied about with increasing abandon these days - but for many, "governance" is just a more sexy way of saying "management" (in the same way that "architecture" is quite often used as a sexy way of saying "design").
So how much are organisations really walking the walk with IT governance initiatives? This is something we're expending significant effort on finding out through 2009, and one of the ways we're doing it is through surveys like
this one, which we're carrying out in conjunction with CIO UK magazine.
We'd love to know
your thoughts. We'll make sure we point to the results back here (they'll be published at cio.co.uk) and we're sure they'll throw up a load of interesting insights.
Labels: CIO, governance
Collaboration momentum building in 2009; what do CIOs think about IT Governance?
A few days ago the results of our second CIO UK poll were published in this piece -
CIO Debate: Collaboration is building momentum in 2009. The poll corroborated earlier research that we carried out for our
Collaboration advisory service in the summer of last year, in conjunction with the guys at Freeform Dynamics.
The headline findings: despite all the hype, collaboration adoption is still just getting underway. A big part of the reason for this is the difficulty of justifying big up-front infrastructure investments. Where collaboration is growing fastest, though, it's business activities "at the edge" - those involved in interactions with external parties - which seem to be driving things along. There is a significant amount of appetite for collaboration technology, though, and our research indicates that 2009 will be quite a strong year for collaboration technology adoption.
Our third CIO UK poll is now live at
cio.mwdadvisors.com, and this time we're asking a handful of questions about approaches to IT Governance. How many organisations are pursuing formal IT Governance programmes, and if so what are the reasons? Are they basing their efforts on established frameworks like COBIT and ISO 38500? And what are their plans going forward? Those are some of the questions we're looking to explore.
If you're a CIO or IT Director - or you know someone who is - please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the
link)! We'll be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic in the next few weeks.
Labels: CIO, collaboration, governance, MWD, poll
IT spending in a downturn: broadening sourcing options, rather than radical cuts
A few weeks back I
highlighted that we'd just started running the first in a series of short polls in conjunction with
CIO UK (part of the international network of CIO magazines) - with a poll focused on how CIOs expect their spending to change in 2009, given the current economic climate.
The first poll threw up some really good insights, which corroborated what I'd heard in a number of other CIO interviews I'd just completed (at the
Nordic CIO Summit I chaired at the end of November).
We take the output from each poll we run, and write an exclusive piece for CIO UK - which is then used as the kick-off point for some further CIO debate that's published online.
Here's the first article. The headline: on balance, UK CIOs appear to be expecting IT budgets to dip marginally overall, but key projects will still progress (albeit in more bite-sized chunks). Fixed IT costs / IT infrastructure budgets will be managed very tightly - but in a way, this is "business as usual" these days. The health warning: with the economic / political situation changing almost daily, the analysis and assumptions could well be out of date by the time you read the article!
The next poll is already
live on our website: it's on the topic of collaboration and social software. Are companies doing more than paying lip-service to collaboration, and what do people think about social software's value? With our short poll we hope to be able to report some more interesting insights for CIO UK.
If you're a CIO or IT Director - or you know someone who is - please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the
link)! We hope to be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic early in the New Year.
Labels: CIO, collaboration, MWD, open source, outsourcing, poll, social software
The economic downturn, and outsourcing choices
That's the title of a
short online poll that we're now running, in conjunction with
CIO.co.uk - the online presence of CIO Magazine in the UK (the sister of the "big brother" CIO Magazine in the US).
If you're in a senior IT management role, we'd really like to hear about how the economic situation looks like affecting where your company gets its IT services from. If you know someone else who's in a senior management role, it would be great to hear from them, too. Just pass them the
link.
This poll is set to be the first in a monthly series that we'll run in conjunction with CIO.co.uk, as part of the community's new "Debate" channel. We'll be taking the results from each poll, and using them as input to monthly opinion articles from MWD analysts that will be hosted over at CIO.co.uk. Members of the CIO community will be invited to pitch in with their views, and all of those will be posted alongside our piece. We'll be picking off a range of topics in the coming months, and we're really excited about participating. It should be fun, and we should be able to uncover some valuable insights, too.
The results of this first poll are set to be delivered as part of the first MWD opinion piece towards the end of November. The more responses we receive, the better our articles should be - so please see if you can spare us a few minutes. As we post our articles, we'll be sure to highlight them here so you can check them out.
Labels: CIO, MWD, open source, outsourcing, poll
CIO podcast
Over here is the first of what we hope will be a series of podcasts with CIOs who've instigated work to improve IT-business alignment in their organisations. The interview is with New Zealand-resident Peter Burggraaff, until recently the CIO of NZ retail chain
Farmers Trading Company. It follows on from the work we did last year on our
forthcoming book, which is due out in a couple of weeks.
Peter talks to us in this 31'34" podcast episode about his initiative at Farmers and the outcomes he achieved.
In the podcast Peter explains that Farmers was in a situation where IT cost was way too high, and although the IT organisation was doing some things well (particularly managing operational services) it wasn't seen as a real contributor of business value as Farmers looked to put some big business changes in place. He goes on to explain how he started to turn this situation around and built a solid and trusted relationship with Farmers business management.
We're very excited to present this podcast, and we very much hope to be doing more of these over the coming weeks and months. Thanks Peter!
If you'd like to get involved in this programme of podcasts don't hesitate to
let us know.
Labels: book, CIO, podcast
