Archive for Blog

Metering IT consumption

Admin | May 28, 2010 | 0 Comments

In the last past 20 years, CIOs have led the only business function which has cut unit costs many hundredfold.  In storage, processing and other elements of service delivery, costs have tumbled as managers have taken advantage of improved technology and refined their processes.
In a single five year period, unit costs in client/server decreased by [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Management

Managing for Risk & Compliance

Keyvan | April 7, 2010 | 0 Comments

Strengthen compliance. Reduce risk. Improve security. And do all of this while cutting costs. These are all big priorities for CIOs, CEOs ad their counterparts in executive management. But how do you accomplish this? It seems like reducing costs while achieving better compliance, lower risk, and increased security are contradictory goals. However, you can make [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Management

Virtualisation, Cloud Services & Automation

Keyvan | March 8, 2010 | 0 Comments

Virtualisation is understood as one of the key building blocks for private clouds. As a dynamic technology that enables IT organisations to reinvent how they think about management, it has the potential to make some things easier or make all things harder. Silo buying, heterogeneity, politics, poor integrations, and immature management tools can inhibit virtualisation’s [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Cloud Computing

Cloud Services Considerations

Keyvan | February 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

Any enterprise considering a move to the cloud must understand that the perceived benefits can be short-lived without a plan that places cloud computing in the context of its overall business strategy and affects security, performance, and connectivity.
In particular, large organisations will need to be able to integrate cloud computing into existing IT systems and [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Cloud Computing

Does bad IT = bad CEO?

Keyvan | December 9, 2009 | 0 Comments

In an interview at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando 2009, HP CEO Mark Hurd was asked about the interplay between IT and business processes. His response was:
“At the end of the day, [the CEO has] gotta get this part [business processes] of the business right to be able to align IT throughout the company. It’s [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Management

Separation of processes from tools

Keyvan | November 27, 2009 | 0 Comments

Having spent some time recently with a division of a global giant with revenues in excess of $300bn, I thought it would be worth explaining some of the challenges this client has had in aligning IT with its business agenda.
Our client has gone through a significant number of acquisitions, inheriting disparate business functions supported by [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Clients

Zen and the art of change management

Keyvan | November 19, 2009 | 1 Comments

Just as John Sutherland, the narrator’s friend in the bestseller “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” refused to learn to maintain his expensive new bike, always hoping for the best and when problems occurred he became frustrated and was forced to rely on professional mechanics to repair the bike, many of today’s IT organisations [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Management

Are the new generation of CIOs more communicative than the old?

Keyvan | November 14, 2009 | 0 Comments

I am not sure if it is a generation gap or just the demands of the world that we live in. Let me explain….
We all know about the necessity of aligning IT with business and the associated IT transformation programmes to support this alignment. The reality is that IT complexity drives specialised skills working in [...]

Filed Under: Blog, Management