Time is the biggest challenge to the value of our IT budgets.

Around this time of year, most IT organizations start the early process of looking at their next year’s budgets. Unfortunately, companies’ satisfaction with their budgeting and forecasting processes has never been very high. Worse, the number of companies reporting that they are “fully satisfied” with their budgeting processes has dropped by half over the last ten years. Why? The budgets we create very quickly don’t reflect what’s really going on in the business.

This isn’t just an IT problem either; it’s a problem that occurs across the entire organization. In fact, according to our colleagues who work with CFOs, corporate IT is one of the most efficient functions during the formal budgeting process.

While IT manages the up-front budget planning relatively well (compared to other corporate functions), it’s what happens afterwards that starts to cause problems.

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Are your job descriptions up-to-date?

The way work gets done is changing fast. Work is ever more interdependent and knowledge-intensive, and employees face continuous change and an ever wider choice of technologies. As my colleague Raf wrote recently, these shifts are creating IT talent gaps and role changes. To stay ahead of the curve, CIOs should move beyond the use of job descriptions as one-time hiring tools. As IT roles change, expand, and grow more complex, it is vital to have a workforce plan and to keep job descriptions up-to-date. Read More »

Are you using the right criteria to hire BAs?

Applications groups struggle to understand who is a good fit for the BA role, particularly when the role involves a broader range of responsibilities and candidates apply from a variety of backgrounds.

Hiring based on the criteria that delivered results in the past may not suit for what will be needed in the future, based on the shifts we’ve been seeing in project portfolios and business engagement model. Looking for a great business analyst for the next five years? Do these three things. Read More »

Do you really know what employees want from IT?

Over the next five years, business leaders want a 20% increase in employee productivity to meet their business goals. Unfortunately, IT typically struggles to uncover employees’ productivity needs because they are fast-changing, diverse and difficult to articulate, which often leads to the misalignment of investments. To overcome this challenge, leading organizations use anthropological techniques to capture the needs of employees across the many different individuals, organizational cultures, and collaborative practices. Read More »

Why isn’t IT more innovative?

All IT teams aspire to be innovative, but the reality is somewhat different. There are three common misconceptions that hinder IT’s ability to help create and exploit genuinely new and impactful ideas.

1. IT Should Enable, Not Generate, Innovation Ideas

The media repeatedly describes how IT should become an engine of innovation, but I have yet to see an example of a true business innovation where the idea itself came from IT. In fact, this is probably an unrealistic expectation. Few IT staff understand their company’s customers, competitors, operations well enough to identify real innovative opportunities. The real role for IT in innovation is to be there when others in the business comes up with ideas, and be ready to develop the idea, improve it, and bring it to market.  Read More »

The warming weather has reminded me that soon summer will be upon us, which in Washington signals the return of the annual intern invasion. Many of you will soon have summer interns joining your teams (or if you don’t, you should consider recruiting for them), but unfortunately we know that internship programs often don’t produce the desired results. Here are a few tips on how progressive architecture groups are making architecture internships a success.

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The nature of work has changed. CEB recently described the four realities of the new work environment: greater employee interdependence, frequent organizational change, greater knowledge intensity, and more technology choice. The four realities affect government and private sector organizations alike. The adoption of mobile technologies is one sign that the public sector is embracing these changes. Government organizations across the world see mobility as key to helping their workforce navigate the new work environment and deliver data-driven improvements to citizen services. As they face the demand for more productivity and better services at lower cost, public sector leaders need to adopt a cooperative approach to building mobile solutions. Read More »

What differentiates the best program managers from the best project managers?

We’ve done extensive work on what makes effective Project Managers. The key finding: the PMs who most consistently deliver on project business outcomes share a set of ‘entrepreneurial’ skills and approaches.

But an increasing percentage of work is done as part of a program and the importance of the program manager role has spiked. As a result, when we talk with project management leaders about talent, we often get the following question: ‘What about program managers? What differentiates the best program managers from the best project managers?

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“There has to be a better way to know what our customers think…”

The customer satisfaction survey is a longstanding tool used by IT functions of every shape and size. Unfortunately, the traditional customer satisfaction survey often gives us a misleading read on where teams need to focus their time and attention. Two better approaches focus on what most customer satisfaction surveys miss: the alignment between IT and business partners, and the impact a service (or its components) has on employee productivity.

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In the new work environment, the ability to absorb change rapidly and cheaply becomes a source of competitive advantage. Recently, I have been meeting CIOs to discuss CEB’s new findings on the Future of Corporate IT 2013-2017. While most want to embrace the opportunities for IT described in the report, many bemoan the difficulty in driving the necessary change.

Today’s approach to managing change is usually a change program. But change is not a point-in-time project; it can’t be when the average employee experiences a change in objectives or organizational structure every seven months. With a change management program, it takes up to two years before employee engagement and performance return to pre-change peaks. By then another couple of changes have happened so some employees never catch up. Our research into organizational change found three approaches that accelerate change and reduce the time employees need to fully recover.
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