The Innovation Dilemma

Innovation is perhaps today’s ultimate buzzword and most over-hyped topic. People can’t seem to get enough of articles and dialog on how Innovation is the answer to any number of potential issues – yet in all the countless discussions occurring online and in print about this topic, how well do any of the folks discussing innovation really understand it? That’s part one of the dilemma. Part two of the dilemma is that for all the lip service about...

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Building Effective IT Strategy - part 3

In our last two post on IT Strategy, we highlighted how Strategy can be structured, how it differs fro Tactics (although we will explore that in more depth in this post) and how to employ a consistent process towards developing strategy. The first two steps involved determining what the core strategic approach might be; the second focused on goal-setting. The third and most difficult part is assigning actions to goals... So, using our Big Data case...

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Building Effective IT Strategy - part 2

In yesterday's post, I introduced three elementary categories for IT Strategy: Product  Portfolio Transformation I then pointed out that each of these follows a basic cycle of: Determination of Strategic Approach Goal-Setting Assigning actions to goals So, now as promised, I will use this to take a look at a specific scenario. But before we begin, let me mention an important caveat to the three categories listed above. While all strategy...

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Building Effective IT Strategy - part 1

Every great endeavor begins with a strategy, well that may be true but was it an idea, a single spoken command, a drawing on a napkin? How do we quantify precisely what Strategy represents? In military history, Strategy is the highest level of planning - the combination of complex goal-setting and the definition of an over-arching approach designed to achieve said goals. In the American Civil War, A. Lincoln decided early on that the North must...

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What is Digital Transformation?

It sounds a bit misleading perhaps - maybe one gets the impression that this is something akin to rendering special effects for movies. In mainstream IT however, Digital Transformation has come to mean something quite different. The shorthand definition for it is this; "the coordinated integration of all customer-facing digital capabilities." This includes mobile, web and social media. There is perhaps an implied level of underlying integration...

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The 5 Rules of IT Architecture

It is perplexing that after nearly 20 years since the emergence of IT Architecture as a discipline, there is still so much confusion surrounding what architects do (or more precisely, what they are supposed to do). Many people in IT refer to themselves as "Architects" now - yet how can employers or colleagues quantify or otherwise validate that they are indeed actually Architects? I will propose five simple rules or tests to help clarify this: Rule...

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