CIO Insight Staff

Aligning strategy with technology is all about execution: developing and carrying out successfully the tactical maneuvers that lead on to fortune. Organizing the IT department properly, budgeting, allocating resources and managing the project portfolio are just part of the battle. But strong governance will ensure that every face-to-face encounter, every collaboration between the business side […]

Jim Collins, author of two landmark management books, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (HarperCollins, 1994) and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t (HarperCollins, 2001), doesn’t belong to the arm-waving school of management advice. His skill lies in performing powerful research that identifies the […]

The goal of every corporate strategy is to win—to increase the value of your business to its constituents, whether they be customers, employees or shareholders. The goal of information technology is to assist that effort by bringing its rapidly increasing power to bear—creatively, efficiently, effectively—on both top-line and bottom-line growth. A clearly articulated, well- communicated […]

Communication Gap The keystone of alignment is corporate strategy. Unless strategic goals are clearly articulated and well-understood throughout the organization, IT has nothing to align itself with—cart without a horse. Yet a significant percentage of companies have no well-defined corporate strategy, according to the results of a recent CIO Insight/Balanced Scorecard Collaborative survey of IT […]

Leadership Gap Our research on the development and communication of IT and corporate strategy showed that many business and IT executives feel they do a relatively poor job communicating that strategy to employees. Sadly, there’s a similar trend when it comes to managing the link between overall strategy—and IT strategy—and the needs of employees as […]

Execution Gap If practice makes perfect, many of the executives we surveyed feel their companies have a long way to go. The practice of alignment involves planning and successfully executing all the tactics that combine to link technology with corporate strategy: the budget, how much is actually spent on what, the ongoing relationship between IT […]

We spoke to Haim Mendelson, professor of Electronic Business and Commerce, and Management at Stanford University and codirector of the Center for Electronic Business and Commerce, for his views on alignment. CIO Insight: What difference do relationships make in alignment? Mendelson: Very often, personal relationships can make a big difference. As a matter of fact, […]

You need one more decision on your desk, right? One more of those CIO issues that go beyond technology into the messy realms of people and politics and philosophy. Well, it will be hard to escape this one: open source software—in particular, the operating system known as Linux. Created by Helsinki University student Linus Torvalds […]

Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation By Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes Free Press, June 2002 144 pages, $22 You can practically hear the crystals and wind chimes playing in the background: “Success, failure—who is to say?” “The biggest regrets in life are for the risks we didn’t take, not for […]