Feature
Articles by Bob Lewis
Feature
11 old-school IT principles that still rule
Technology changes rapidly, but beneath the buzzwords, the fundamentals of sound IT strategy remain. Here are 11 legacy IT tenets that still reign — when applied in their modernized guise.
Opinion
10 steps to becoming a horrible IT boss
Good-bye, IT peers; hello, power to abuse at your whim
Opinion
8 dark secrets of organizational change management
In the digital era, organizational change management is crucial to business success — far too crucial to be dogged by its misconceptions and false assumptions.
Opinion
IT-as-a-business is dead. Long live BusOps
Thanks to digital transformation, technology is embedded in every business process and practice your company relies on. It’s time to take a tip from DevOps, and rethink the business-IT divide.
Opinion
Digital transformation’s dark secret
Much of what passes as digital transformation these days is more cosmetic than foundational. The root of true change is deeper than you think.
Opinion
The case against the ‘business-savvy CIO’
Being business-savvy isn’t a radical recommendation. It’s clichéd. These days, tech know-how and business smarts are inseparable when it comes to transformational CIOs.
Opinion
The dark secrets of enterprise architecture
Architecture matters too much to entrust to a framework or methodology. But don’t worry: Not having a methodology isn’t a problem; it’s a liberation.
Feature
12 bad habits that slow IT to a crawl
Bottlenecks always seem born of the best intentions, but they must be rooted out — and broken. From governance to manual provisioning, here's what's holding up your IT organization's ability to deliver results.
Feature
Agile’s dark secret? IT has little need for the usual methodologies
For all its emphasis on collaboration and time to market, agile is all about product delivery — not business improvement, let alone transformation.
How-To
How to kill a dead project
Think you might have a zombie IT project on your hands? Killing it can be challenging. It takes just the right mix of forensics and logistical know-how, and a lot of political will.
Feature
9 warning signs of bad IT architecture
A sound IT architecture keeps your company’s technology strategy humming. From kludges to manual re-keying to redundant apps, these are the telltale indicators of an IT environment on the brink of collapse.
Feature
10 Business Skills Every IT Pro Must Master
Here are the 10 business skills that truly matter to your career in IT. A lot.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Explorers, Servants, and Players
Human beings are nature's superior communicators. That's the theory, at least. Watching how often and how persistently we misunderstand each other, we can only be jealous of honeybees. They admittedly have less to say to each other (mostly, the subject is where to find food), but they're able to ask and understand the answer with perfect precision.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Competitors, mechanics, referees, and economists
"Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets." - Dr. Paul Batalden Call it governance. Call it "managing the project portfolio." Call it whatever dull, uninspired, bureaucracy-invoking name you prefer.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Time for some LIP (Leadership Intervention Points, that is)
Imagine you lead an organization. Now imagine you want to improve how things get done.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Metrics Misuse
When someone starts by asking, "What metrics should we use?" nothing good will come of it.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Big Shift, or Shifty Statistics?
Bad metrics continue to be worse than no metrics because, as Mark Twain famously said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you do know that ain't so."
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Why Steve Jobs Mattered
“I’m good, but I’m no Frankie Yankovic.” - Weird Al Yankovic, when asked if he and polka king Frankie Yankovic were related, and wouldn’t this make a great t-shirt?
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
When App Dev Catches Baumol’s Cost Disease
Do you suffer from Baumol's Disease? Even worse, do your top executives suffer from Altitude-Induced Baumol Blindness Syndrome?
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Persuasion as Human Engineering
Engineering doesn't begin as a profession or credentials, but as a perspective:
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Objectivity Traps
Some studies claim to demonstrate that intuition is more reliable than evidence-based decision-making. Which makes me wonder, if a study presents evidence that intuition is superior to evidence, does it prove itself wrong?
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
The Enlightenment still matters
“Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.” - Jorge Luis Borges What this country's founders had in common was, more than anything else, the Enlightenment -- an intellectual heritage that considered evidence and reason to be superior to faith, tradition, and authority as ways of understanding the world.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Leaders Have to Learn the Job, Just Like Everyone Else
Buy yourself a didgeridoo and blow into it. The consequent auditory experience will be less than euphonic (although it might be helpful anyway if you suffer from sleep apnea, not that this has anything to do with anything).
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Still the “Toughest Job in the World”?
Is IT leadership the toughest job in the world?
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Providing Technology Leadership
IT governance is a bread-and-butter topic for consultants like me. Relatively few companies are happy with how they go about deciding:
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
The pitfalls of gauging craziness
Do you work for a psychopath? Someone who’s just plain nuts? One of the crazies mentioned last week?
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Dealing with crazies
Craziness can be good. Positive feedback loops can be good. It's like steak and hot fudge ... two good things that aren't so good when you put them together.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
A CIO’s-Eye View of the Debt Ceiling Crisis
I'll probably regret writing this piece, and I apologize in advance for so overtly bringing in, not just the headlines, but an attitude about them. But if I wrote about anything other than the debt ceiling I'd feel like Nero with his fiddle.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
News flash! IT does its best to circumvent capitalism!
Capitalism depends on two principles -- the law of supply and demand, and the ability of every customer to take his, her, or its business elsewhere (I include "its" because the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people too, but hasn't commented on their gender).
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Keeping Current
Why keep up with current events? Not as in reading the newspaper and knowing what's going on, although that's important if you want to be a responsible citizen.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
CIO Time Management at the Speed of Light
According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, time is just another linear dimension, no different from forward and backward, up and down, or right and left.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
One More Cloud Benefit Becomes Cloudier
When a state government shuts down, the proximate root cause is a lack of funding. The next-level root cause is that the two sides weren't able to find an acceptable compromise. The deep root cause is that THE OTHER SIDE IS EVIL, STUPID, AND ENTIRELY LACKING IN THE SLIGHTEST SENSE OF HOW THINGS WORK.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
The Hellstrom Enterprise Chronicle
Talking about business ethics is like drinking bourbon. It starts out as a conversational lubricant and can lead to interesting exchanges of ideas. But if you keep going, mostly you'll end up just shooting your mouth off, without saying anything at all interesting and possibly getting into a pointless fight.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
End of the Wild West for IT?
"Isn't it time for IT to figure it out, and be like Accounting where everyone knows how things are supposed to get done?" What's a self-important pundit to do? So, socially awkward or not, I answered. "I sure hope not," is what I said.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Development team ethics, Part II – The Cesspool
Are standard project management practices really unethical? Or are they simply the lesser of the available evils? I won't stoop to an Anthony Weiner tie-in. I won't stoop to an Anthony Weiner tie-in. I won't I won't I won't I won't ...
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Development team ethics, Part I – The Abyss
Before calling anyone unethical, make sure you understand the subject. The less people know, the stronger their opinion. It's a fine American tradition, and it's nowhere more in evidence than when people get on their high horses about other peoples' ethics.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
A Week in Provence
A week in Provence provided insights and parallels with running IT.Peter Mayle spent a year in a farmhouse between Menerbes and Bonnieux, wrote about it, became famous, and inflated the real estate market for kilometers around.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
End-User Computing Manifesto, v3
Companies used to value employee innovation. The value is still there. The interest? Here's one way to increase it.Apple and internal IT have a lot in common.Not really. But they could.Take the App Store, and Apple's well-known policy that before you control what you install on your iPad, Apple first controls what can't.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Encourage innovation? What does that mean?
There are reasons companies don't encourage employee innovation. None of them are good, but there are reasons.The session was titled End User Computing. I thought it was a grammatical error ... I expected it to be about end-user computing, not about how to end ... as in prevent ... user computing.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Tablets won’t be disruptive ’til the future gets here
"Disruptive technology" used to mean something important. Now it means "good." That's too bad. 2nd of three parts.ManagementSpeak: This is a disruptive technology. Translation: I have no idea what this is good for.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
A tablet-driven view of what’s wrong with American business
The iPad's success mirrors quite a few of our failings. Why? Read on.ManagementSpeak: None of the established commercial packages met our needs, so we had to write our own. Translation: We don't do things like any other company, and would rather spend money than reconsider.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
ROT (“Relationships Outlive Transactions”) turned upside down
Trying to impress someone almost always backfires, and in multiple directions.ManagementSpeak: Lessons learned. Translation: Mistakes we refuse to learn from.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
The Godfather of Gore on Project Management, Part II
Making movies is project management, and has a lot in common with what IT does. But not everything. "Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?" - Marilyn Monroe, quoted in Jack Kastorff's Lessons from Life calendar (jack.kastorff@comcast.net)
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
The Godfather of Gore on Project Management, Part I
Making software and making movies have a lot in common"Woody makes films. I make movies." - Mel Brooks when asked about how he and Woody Allen differed.Metaphors can't prove a point but they're terrific ways to illustrate them.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Agile Iron Chefs?
Entrepreneurs and corporate managers are fundamentally different. Agile and Waterfall are different in the exact same way.ManagementSpeak: Sure the product can still be delivered on-time. We can leverage our existing resources to implement these new features.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Words Enterprise Architects should only speak in whispers
Attention enterprise architects: Showing how smart you are is a losing propositionManagementSpeak: It's not about ego. Translation: It is about ego: mine! And mine won't suffer, yours will.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
For in that sleep of outsourcing, what Dreamliners may come … and when?
When executives ignore their engineers, the only questions are when disaster will occur, and what the disaster will be.ManagementSpeak: What do you think would be best for the company? Translation: Tell me what is best for me and what I want to hear.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs
Enterprise Architecture / Enterprise Technical Architecture Cage Match
Which matters more, enterprise architecture or enterprise technical architecture? EA has the altitude, but ETA pays the bills.ManagementSpeak: We run a lean organization here. Translation: We have far too few people doing way too much work, and none of it is done particularly well.
Practical Advice for Working CIOs