deal architect

Six Uncomfortable Questions IT Teams should ask

This continues  a series of periodic posts to recognize articles, blogs, books, videos,  interviews I think are worthy of sharing. The category A Rare Medium Well Done says it nicely.

Chris Murphy is one of my favorite tech influencers. He writes  about CIOs and innovation, not as much about vendors. And he is the master of a “dense” article – summarizing a body of knowledge into a punchy column dotted with real life examples. He coached me/edited my Information Week column summarizing my 400 page book here.

Now, he does the same in a column which summarizes nuggets from the magazine’s annual 500 ranking, research, and reporting. 

“our annual profiles of the most innovative users of business technology always deliver a swift kick in the pants as well. That pants-kicking feeling was particularly strong this year. I kept thinking about the hard questions that our profiles of various innovative companies should raise for anyone reading them. I settled on six…

1. What opportunity is so big that it scares us?

2. Is our IT team good enough to build customer-facing apps?

3. Are we spending enough time studying our customers' needs?

4. Do business units turn to us when they have an idea that needs fast action?

5. Are we helping business colleagues run their own analytics, and break their dependence on IT?

6. What do we do next?”

Chris has a customer example for each question. Read it and also respond to his question “Do you have some hard questions that IT organizations should be asking themselves? Share them below (at his site) and keep the inspiration flowing.”

Cloud specialization

This continues  a series of periodic posts to recognize articles, blogs, books, videos interviews I think are worthy of sharing. The category A Rare Medium Well Done says it nicely.

Good friend Tim Chou has written this nice column for CFO magazine

So as you look to move to the cloud, think about who are the specialists, whether that’s a specialized JDA supply chain application cloud service, a financial services compute and storage cloud service from CFN, or an airline industry specialized compute and storage cloud service from SITA.

After all, no matter how good your plumber may be, you wouldn’t have him do your taxes, would you?

Read it at length. Worth your time.

A Historic Day

This is one in a series of periodic posts to recognize articles, blogs, books, videos interviews I think are worthy of sharing. The category A Rare Medium Well Done says it nicely

This time it is Sam Fuld of the Tampa Bay Rays describing the wild night of last year’s baseball regular season. Two things that stand out – an athlete who is so articulate, and a first-hand account of someone who was part of one of the historic games and one who watched the other in the clubhouse with his just-as-exuberant team mates.

My memories of that evening: I was on a Southwest flight coming back from the West Coast cursing that the flight did not have wi-fi and cursing even more at the pilot I had asked to provide periodic scores – he had to weave around weather most of the way so could not. The whole plane erupted in joy and disbelief as soon as all of us turned on our phones upon landing.

Credit for bringing story to my attention – Jarret Pazahanick

A Rare Medium Well-Done

I am introducing a new category of periodic posts to recognize articles, blogs, books, videos interviews I think are well executed.

I appreciate the compliment when people tell me I am a prolific writer. Actually, I am a much more prolific reader. The New Florence blog cites/embeds over 4,000 articles/videos from over 500 different sources. My next book had over 500 citations in the back credits.

This category will allow me to recognize items that stand out as I continue to research for my blogs, books and consulting.

They may be pithy like Richard Corliss’ short column about Hollywood’s challenges in Time I referenced last week. They may be substantial on a somewhat obscure topic like Dr. Michael Lamoureux’s paper on Spend Visibility this week – 130+ pages, 70+ figures!  They may be investigative pieces. They may be period pieces. But they will stand out in my broad reading.

Hope you enjoy my selections. And, of course, I would welcome reader recommendations on any items they found impressive and should merit mention in this category.

A fine piece of analysis

It’s less than 450 words. It’s written by a movie critic, not an industry analyst.

I was impressed, however, how crisply Richard Corliss summarized trends in the movie industry in his Time column – its challenges and its global growth.

The analytics he embeds – seasonal, demographic, related to genres – speak a thousand words each.

Be nice to see more technology analysts and bloggers abstracting higher -  not just talk about product features or happy vendor talk, and more about trends in sectors. And yes, even those trends that don’t look positive.