Cutter Benchmark Review

IT Governance in 2009: A Thorn in IT's Side

2 Sep 2009 01:01:12 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 September 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This month's installment of Cutter Benchmark Review takes an in-depth look at one of the critical issues that typically emerges in our yearly series on IT budgets and the budgeting process: IT governance, which we define as the process of identifying responsibilities and implementing decision-making tools and structures for appropriate oversight of the management and use of IT resources. Stating that governance is of paramount importance is guaranteed to bring nods of approval from any audience; if the subject is IT governance, then the "approval meter" is likely to register even higher. This is not surprising given the significant financial impact of IT expenditures for most organizations, the role that IT alignment plays and has historically played, both in rhetorical exercises and in practice, as well as the intuitive necessity of control for informed decision making. Yet, in the very same presentations where the audience agrees on the importance of governance and governance mechanisms, the immediate follow-on is typically a statement about the intricacies and difficulties of implementing "effective" governance systems for something as far-reaching, complex, and ever-changing as IT.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/09/index.html

IT Budgeting in 2009: Weathering the Storm by Taking a Long-Term View

1 Aug 2009 16:05:03 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 August 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This month's installment of Cutter Benchmark Review is the fourth in our yearly series on IT budgets and the budgeting process. The budgeting process is of critical importance to the IT and business professionals in our readership. That last statement may have never ringed as true as it does today in the midst of the greatest economic upheaval we have witnessed, perhaps in our lifetime. As you get ready to read and evaluate the results of the survey to make sense of what we've uncovered, you need to bear in mind that the data gathered in this survey was collected during the worst economic climate in the modern computer era. Contextual and environmental events of this magnitude have an impact that is felt throughout a benchmarking survey of this kind, beginning with a very low response rate as the belt tightens and IT professionals around the world find themselves working harder, and on more responsibilities, than ever before.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/08/index.html

Personal Productivity and IT: The Never-Ending Love-Hate Relationship

1 Jul 2009 14:59:38 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 July 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

Humans have always had a love-hate relationship with technology in general and IT in particular. A testament to this troubled relationship is the fact that to this day it is seemingly OK to loudly pronounce: "I don't do computers." Imagine the same person saying: "I don't do reading." The truth is that we don't quite know how to relate to IT. We like the potential that it offers in terms of productivity, research, improved quality of life, more responsive service, and its general association with progress. But at the same time we fear the risks of depersonalization, deskilling, and job loss associated with IT, and we react negatively -- just like modern-day Luddites.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/07/index.html

Life Is Service: Even for the IT Shop

1 Jun 2009 14:58:36 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 June 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

As IT professionals we are not generally famous for our polished savoir faire, some recurrent stereotypes in fact have us being just the opposite when it comes to social skills. Yet if it is true that "life is service," working on our customer orientation and service skills can be a great investment, not just individually but collectively as the IT professionals in our respective organizations. This issue of the CBR is full of tangible guidelines and actionable ideas to help you get started.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/06/index.html

Unlocking the Organizational Potential of Social Networking

1 May 2009 15:52:43 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 May 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

Is there any opportunity for organizations seeking to benefit from their customers' use of social networks? How can organizations take advantage of the explosive growth of social networking? Here the answer is not so simple. For this reason, we focus this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review on this important and timely topic: organizational uses and opportunities in social networking.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/05/index.html

Cloud Computing and Software as a Service: The Hyper, the Hype, and the Facts

1 Apr 2009 15:53:54 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 April 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This issue of Cutter Benchmark Review represents a classic example of what we attempt to do every month with this publication. We identify emergent, emerging, or consolidating trends of great interest to IT shops around the world, and then we bring to bear the many components of the "CBR machine" to benchmark them and provide tangible guidelines that our readers can immediately implement in their day-to-day operations. There are two critical components to our operation here at CBR: our expert contributors and the Cutter Consortium office. The office manages the madness that is putting together the monthly issue of a survey-based journal that benchmarks current trends with fresh data, including managing the survey creation process, collecting and organizing the questions produced by our experts, computing results, and editing and publishing the issue.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/04/index.html

Mobile Technologies: Harnessing the Potential of the Anytime/Anywhere Future

1 Mar 2009 15:08:03 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 March 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

With last month's issue of CBR, we took a bit of a chance, peering into the future and into a trend that has yet to consolidate (digital data genesis). Conversely, this month's topic is perhaps overdue. The importance of the mobile platform as a tool in the arsenal of modern organizations is undeniable. What is less clear is how firms should incorporate the potential of mobile technologies into their IT and process infrastructure. That's the challenge I seek to contribute to solving with my work on customer service systems, and that's the challenge that our authors in this installment will help you meet in your own organization.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/03/index.html

Press Release: IT Still Strategically-Focused, Despite Weakened Economy

12 Feb 2009 22:08:34 GMT

Cutter Consortium | 12 February 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

Recent research, published in Cutter Benchmark Review, has revealed that despite the global economic recession, IT is continuing to focus on the big picture. This study is the fourth in Cutter's yearly series on IT trends and technologies. As in previous years, the data collected was analyzed by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jeroen van Tyn (providing the IT practitioner's perspective) and Dennis Adams, Associate Professor in the Decision and Information Sciences Department at the University of Houston, taking the academic perspective.

http://www.cutter.com/press/090212.html

Trends for 2009: Leveraging Four Years of Data to Better Manage the Coming Year

1 Jan 2009 13:46:20 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 January 2009 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This month's installment of Cutter Benchmark Review is the fourth in our yearly series on IT trends and technologies for the coming year. As you know if you have been following CBR, at the beginning of every year we ask our practicing and academic contributors to take stock of current trends. Based on our benchmarking survey of investment priorities, we ask our contributors to explain the results and look ahead to extrapolate these to create some guidelines for our readers on how to tackle the new year in the IT shop.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2009/01/index.html

IT Services and Service Functionality: The New Frontier of Opportunity

1 Dec 2008 19:30:19 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 December 2008 | Cutter Benchmark ReviewIf you've been succeeding with agile in your organization for a while, you've experienced projects that make more visible progress, are done earlier, and provide a high level of satisfaction for everyone involved.

But some people who try to move to agile in their organizations are not entirely successful. The teams are not dedicated to just one project at a time, or the support from a previous release is overwhelming their ability to move a project forward, or they have too many emergency projects. While these problems don't prevent agile adoption, they certainly don't help. All these problems are symptoms of management's having insufficient tools to manage its project portfolio. But management doesn't need fancy-dancy tools to manage the portfolio. All a management team needs to do is answer one question and select one answer from three options.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2008/12/index.html