It seems that following IT fashions is very good for the CEO. A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review by Ping Wang concludes that following IT fashions delivers long-term benefits for the organisation and for CEO remuneration.
I won’t insult your intelligence with an elaborate discussion of how important information systems are and how your organisation is as good as dead if there is a wholesale failure – you know that. Contingency planning should be a part of every CIO’s agenda. The focus tends to be on hardware and the creation of [...]
Lou Gerstner, the once CEO of IBM, called the dot com boom nothing more than ‘fireflies before the storm’ – turns out he was right in the main. Just as dot coms were largely experimental, so the current fad for social networking is also experimental, and largely unproductive (in a commercial sense). The promise of [...]
Only two things really affect the success of a firm. Firstly there should be customer preference for its products and services. Secondly the markets in which it participates should be growing. Everything else is secondary. There are many stories of companies with poor management and inefficient processes that have thrived because they just happened to [...]
The social networking bubble shows no real signs of bursting and every supplier of IT software claims to have social networking capability somewhere within their products. If we take a look at what has happened in the social networking environment we are all familiar with (mainly Facebook) it might give us some clues on what [...]
Making predictions in the face of uncertainty has always been a tricky business. To help business managers get a better handle on some uncertainties we have seen a number of suppliers offer ‘predictive analytics’ capabilities. These technologies will trawl through historical data looking for correlations and trends and report them so that managers can hopefully [...]
I’ve written about overconfidence on a number of occasions and such is its dominating influence in the way many organisations use IT that it is worth mentioning once again. I should add that overconfidence affects many strata of management and one of the best-known research projects looked at the overconfidence of CEOs when contemplating an [...]
The role of the CIO is not well defined. In one organisation it might equate with Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and an emphasis on making sure the technology works and costs as little as possible. This is a fairly common role, and the CIO may not even have a place on the Board, but report [...]
‘Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.’ - John Maynard Keynes Our corporate structures are based on the idea that ownership and management can be separated. The people who own a corporation, usually the shareholders, and those who manage [...]
There is a Taoist saying that “Those who know do not speak, and those who speak do not know.” Where IT is concerned this could be rephrased as “Those who know the business typically do not understand IT, and those who understand IT do not know the business.” It’s a fundamental problem that is not [...]
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