Thought Leadership Archive

Infosys graciously asked me and many others to join its thought-leadership summit (Infosys Confluence 2016) in San Francisco in late April. As the event promos stated, the summit was intended to discuss how to leverage technology to create a future different from the past of doing more of the same. Here’s what I learned.

CIOs need to check for “outsourcing bloat.” Many companies in mature, offshore, FTE-based outsourcing environments experience substantial bloat. From our knowledge of our clients’ situations and our research for companies seeking objective data to help them determine the return on investment in outsourcing, it’s clear that many companies today are paying too much for

CIOs and IT departments need a new cost emphasis beyond slashing their own costs. Put your own house in order before you start giving advice to others is a popular idiom. And CIOs have been doing that for years, incrementally cutting costs in IT functions. But what if the mandate from your CEO is

Service-level agreement (SLA) contracts can drive the wrong business outcomes. Some technology leaders want to move away from those SLA-driven contracts. If you’re like many CIOs, the chances are your company compensates third-party IT service providers for something they didn’t do or pays them twice for something. Technology leader Nipa Chakravarti realized that’s what

ITaaS is a game-changer, a radically different way to manage IT. Here’s what you need to consider before making the switch. If you’ve read a couple of my blogs about the IT-as-a-Service model, you probably realize it’s a game-changer. To refresh your memory, it maximizes the value IT delivers because it aligns IT much

DevOps is changing the services industry, especially in the people model. Here’s an important question for service providers in the Digital Age: Can you achieve the same impact in a distributed DevOps environment as you can in a collocated DevOps environment? Clearly, because of where the industry makes money, the industry would like the

My wife and I are like the service industry, particularly the arbitrage-based talent service industry – maturing rapidly. These days, while we think about how we’re moving into our golden years with the prospect of being surrounded by loved ones and hopefully grandchildren, I think the prospect for the service industry is quite different.

CIOs and their IT teams are bombarded with major changes on nearly every front these days. Shifting to a software-defined environment is one of the top agenda items in many enterprises. But what does this shift in operations really mean? Are the benefits really worth the headaches of major operational change? We are in

I’ve been observing the end-user computing environment and believe it’s time for a complete rethink on how IT groups support their end users. What I usually find is that the support interactions are a lot like support interactions with cable companies – and most cable company customers feel that’s an infuriating experience. Cable companies

CIOs need to make sure IT metrics align with business users’ expectations. Once your IT organization aligns with business users’ needs and commits to the journey of achieving those business objectives, you can then determine how to do that. After determining your strategy, you’ll then establish metrics to measure IT’s performance. As Winston Churchill