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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions

November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.

Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group

The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.

Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award

Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.

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RESOURCE CENTER
 
 
 

Leaders Can Learn from Employees' Vantage Point

AFTER A FEW MONTHS in my new position as director of software development at a midlevel ERP applications company, an ...

 

July 01, 2001CIO

AFTER A FEW MONTHS in my new position as director of software development at a midlevel ERP applications company, an amazing thing happened to me. I had run through all the classic management techniques of holding staff meetings and one-on-ones with my managers, maintaining an open-door policy and so on. I was comfortably ensconced in my cushy corner office, and my only major concern at the moment was the CEO’s total lack of technical knowledge. Then good fortune smiled on me, and the lights went out.

This is hardly the occurrence that most executive dreams are made of, but it brought me closer to my staff of 60 than anything else I could have imagined. When my office lost electricity and heat, I moved my PC and some paper files, had the phone extension switched and set up shop for two days next to one of our senior QA analysts.

What an experience! It had been 15 years since I was a cube dweller. We are all familiar with sending IT analysts out into the business units to experience "real life"?I now make the case that top-level managers need to climb into the trenches to experience real life too.

For all the CIOs and VPs out there this is going to be an eye-opening experience. Let me share my insights with you.

Hardware

I had a 19-inch monitor, and I used it mainly to read e-mail and access Microsoft Office. My programmers, on the other hand, had 14- or 15-inch monitors, and they needed to have multiple windows open at once for coding, debugging and documentation. No wonder they made typographical errors?they were continually misreading variable names or transcribing code incorrectly because their work area was too small. My PC, installed by the friendly IT manager on my first day, was the most powerful in the department. Company policy equated rank with CPU speed and disk capacity. My junior programmers had machines that barely did the job. Lesson: Just as I needed a big desk to function, they needed big screens and a powerful CPU.

Software

If the daily environment in which we place our staff does not reflect a commitment to quality, what right do we have to expect it in return? When crashing e-mail servers, network and printer outages, and the need to restart browsers and PCs throughout the day are standard operating practices, what are the realistic expectations for your staff to "get quality"? Lesson: If you expect quality output, give your staff quality tools.

 
 
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Real World Performance: More Than Just Benchmarks

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