IT Culture
Building a bridge between IT and business starts with problem definition. Many times we can trace the gap between these functions to the fact that they both address different problems ...
We as an IT industry should be forcing the bridging of the IT and business gap. Why? The two should be one, like Peanut Butter & Jelly ...
We have been talking about this problem for years - the gap between IT and Business. All the experts have advised that bridging this gap should be a high priority for any company. The following is catalog of suggestions from across the APM industry on how to bring IT and Business closer together ...
The changing shape of IT is causing CIOs to question the role of IT in the organization and the part they will play in it, according to Gartner, Inc., which has identified four dominant futures for IT in the organization ...
I had a series of meetings recently with a senior finance director for a Central Government organization in the UK. His problem was simple; due to government cuts every department was being asked to show its value. After a few meetings the board were convinced that measuring application performance was a good KPI to measure. But they voiced their challenge - how to get the IT director to work with them ...
Aligning IT to the business has a few benefits for organizing hardware and software spending as well as where you and your staff’s time is spent. By understanding business goals and how IT services align to those goals you can prioritize how you ...
Convincing the astute executive who is cautious in making an impetuous decision on an APM investment can prove to be challenging. The following are three points to consider when presenting APM's panoramic view of the enterprise and articulating its benefits ...
In many organizations, security operations work in siloes to IT Operations. As a result, security vulnerabilities have to be handled twice: once by the SOC groups or security teams, and secondly by the IT Operations team who could not initially identify the issue. Consequently, you cannot establish any automation for information sharing or event correlation between security vulnerabilities and performance issues. Here are 10 tips for efficient SOC/NOC collaborate ...
CMOs and CIOs must join forces in order to connect with today's consumer across new channels including mobile devices and social networks. However marketers often point to their lack of alignment with the company's IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today's consumers ...
In my first two blogs I discussed how the ‘new world’ IT department is raising the profile of DevOps, and how this fundamental shift is making visibility across business risk and system metrics more important than ever before. Now I'd like to talk about how you can leverage this ‘new world’ by positioning your IT department to drive innovation at your company ...
CIOs are ultimately responsible for ensuring that IT investments are closely aligned with strategic business objectives ...
The real obstacle to application optimization isn't technological, it is organizational. Application performance depends on two fundamental elements: application design and network configuration. Unfortunately, in too many organizations these two elements are responsibility of two separate and sometimes competing groups -- the application development and network operations teams ...
I think there's a fallacy in the idea that there is any such thing as a ‘traditional’ SysAdmin. I've functioned in the SysAdmin role in many organizations, and many types of IT structures and industries – in every single instance my job description was notably different from the previous and subsequent employer. Different organizations have different needs – sometimes completely irrelevant to the local vs cloud question – sometimes it's just a function of the technological maturity of the organization itself ...
If you're an IT executive trying to take control of your environment and optimize it for business outcomes — you're likely to be getting a lot of advice from a wide range of glib sources, and very little actual support ...
It's no secret that we live in a siloed enterprise IT world. Many attempts have been made to better connect functional departments before but it seems like very little progress has been made. Not only are the different applications that underpin common business processes run as fiefdoms, but the distributed tiered nature of modern application architecture creates walls around functions and tiers. When you add operations to the mix you have multiple stakeholders with conflicting agendas, delegating application performance to the firefighting exercise that ensures once business is severely impacted ...
It’s important to have a dynamic view of the production environment in order to optimize system performance and visibility. This is no secret, but I’m baffled to see the patterns of technology segregation and operational exclusivity continue ...
As companies look to maintain a competitive advantage, IT professionals are increasingly being charged with adopting a business-focused mindset. The role of an IT manager is no longer simply ensuring that systems and networks are functioning properly – they now need to be adept at anticipating business needs and having a recommendation on how to address them ...
As someone who might call himself a “humanist” who has worked 31 years in high technology as of this April – I’ve developed a few areas of persistent complaint that seem to reoccur without getting much better. And having spent thirty-one years in the industry, and therefore getting old — I guess I’ve come to feel entitled to a little orneriness from time to time.
If an attacker were bogging down your apps, how would you know? You wouldn't, unless you bridge the gap between ops and security ...
If you were promoted from a technical position to CIO, it´s clear that leadership and communication skills will take you much further than reading technicalities about virtualization engines. And if you are in a more technical position, it could have even more> impact.
What is the core business that your IT services support? Your vision should be mapped to the overall business goals of the company or organization. If you cannot map a goal as part of the vision, it probably doesn’t belong. This is a great exercise to build IT goals that will truly transform your IT services organization into a true business partner.
I hear lots of debate about whether IT should be in a customer/supplier relationship (often described as being a Service Provider) or seen as an integral part of the business along with their colleagues in other departments ...
I had originally intended to make this blog about mental health. A supportive article for those of you trying to support change in your own environment wrestling with the stubbornly persistent caricatures and silos still so dominant in many IT organizations.
Why do organisations have ITIL projects rather than targeted improvement projects which happen to use ITIL as one of the inputs/influences?
It's fairly common to find organisations who say that they are implementing ITIL, and I almost always find that this is increasing the risk that the project will fail to deliver on the expectations people have for it. How can you adequately manage and communicate with your stakeholders if they don't understand the objectives of the project? ITIL shouldn't be the objective.
