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Change management is a loaded term. Too often, it’s viewed as interchangeable with project management activities, such as training and communication. Sometimes it gets a somewhat superfluous reputation because it draws on the “people side of things” rather than more measurable and technical aspects of change. Other times, it gets confused with IT change management – or version control. http://avavolleyball.com/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/1052 Read More
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In strategic decision making, we have certain expectations about the world and how it behaves. In order to find your blue ocean, you are on the lookout for distinguishing elements.
The aim is to make competition irrelevant by carving out for yourself a hopefully close to inimitable competitive advantage. These processes are often similar to paradigm shifts in sciences. These shift describe the advancement from one paradigm, e.g the sun circulates the earth, to another, e.g. the earth circulates the sun.
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No matter how clean and accessible your business documentation is, it is dead weight if it’s out of date. And this is the sad reality in many organisations today. Your business is growing, optimising, and doing things differently every day. Document maintenance becomes a nightmare. Read More
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As you might have noticed, the first episode of Game of Throne’s new season was released by HBO. You have probably been as excited as million of other fans and have eagerly awaited the start.
HBO was probably excited as well but ruined the fun for some of its users. HBO GO, the streaming platform, crashed during the release and none of its users where able to watch their long anticipated show. Read More
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“We had some great documentation but it is now out of date from all the changes we made in the past years”
Sounds familiar?
How many times do we put the effort into constructing something only for the projects we run to invalidate it. This is especially the case with operational documentation. Organisations get it in place for a whole host of reasons but so many just ignore updating it when they run a project which becomes a false economy as the update job will happen at some time. Once they are established in a job, the organisation forgets that useful asset and ignores it when they make changes to the way they work. Read More
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Those of you familiar with this blog know that a recurring theme in our posts is planning ahead and being proactive. We like to think that strategy is a living process in organisations and not a one off and random act. Well sadly in many, and especially in big organisations, planning ahead strategically can be sadly lacking.
Let us examine a simple fact, way back in 2007, Microsoft announced that it would end support for XP that much loved but inherently insecure beast of an operating system that we all love and hate at the same time. They gave us all 7 years, yes 7 years, to migrate to something newer, better and more secure. The end date is 8th of April – after that, support will require penal license fees. Is the world ready? In a word, No.
To continue reading this post, please visit our sister blog at: ‘ATMs, Microsoft and the End of Life’
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It might not seem straightforward, but the benefits of having an up to date and accurate business process documentation are much more imperative than you may think. The need for a proper operational package can be driven by different organizational triggers and objectives. Some common scenarios include:
Regulatory compliance: Highly regulated industries (e.g. financial services) more than others require strict compliance in terms of documenting your business processes. This task then becomes mandatory and cannot be ignored – it’s not a “nice to have” process. Read More
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IT Governance is no piece of cake. While there is no such thing as one-size governance, “over-governance” and “under-governance” are pretty easy to spot. The terrors of the former include redundant committees, attendees who show up because “it’s nice to know what’s going on,” and long paper trails that obstruct decision-making. The problems associated with the latter are arguably even uglier: failed audits, delayed projects, and political crises. As the CIO, you need to strike the right balance in setting up governance, and then walk the tightrope ever on.
2013 Deloitte Report: Exploring Strategic Risk
As a small but growing consultancy, we receive an increasing amount of applications on our vacancies with an increase in the quality of applicants.
This is an interesting trend and constitutes a shift in the perception of applicants towards big multinational corporates. As Maslow outlined in his famous Hierarchy of Needs, the need for self-actualization is most highly desired but often not fulfilled in a junior position within a large corporation. Generation Z, 18-30, tends to value this criterium with an increasing importance. This is one of the reasons to choose a startup with all its risks over the safety of a big MNC because you are often given freedom in how you are doing things and often partly what you do, e.g. Google’s 20 per cent set aside time per employee for own projects.
Chris Ham, Managing Director of cibsys, has spoken in cooperation with John Holland at the Eleven Canterbury event ’New Technology Trends – Risks and Opportunities for Non-Executive Directors and Boards on the 20th of January at the Institute of Directors. Often Non-Executive Directors find themselves in the position to ask critical questions about unfamiliar topics and this event aimed to equip them with the necessary tools and a critical set of questions to be able to stand up to seasoned IT executives.
In the following, we have picked five interesting questions which you can use to “penetration test” your CIO with. For your convenience, we have added related blog articles below the questions.
