Thought Leadership Archive

One of the great struggles in today’s enterprises is the ongoing shift of influence from the CIO community into other stakeholder groups. I’ve blogged about this before. An important aspect of this influence shift is the fact that IT has increasingly become unaligned with business goals. But the pendulum is now swinging back. The

Too much. That’s an accurate assessment of IT environments in most, if not all, enterprises. They have more data center space than they need and more servers than they can use at any point in time. They have more software operating systems, middleware, and enterprise licenses than necessary. They also have more of the

It’s the season when analyst/advisory firms flood the media their predictions and top-10 lists. One problem with those lists is the services world rarely has 10 things that are different from the year before. Another problem is we tend to hype new technologies and business models and make predictions about their impact in the

The cloud experiment is over and the debate in enterprises about its benefits and risks is settled. We know it works, it’s more flexible and cheaper, and it makes it easier for IT to align with business needs. So should buyers put their applications into a cloud environment? My advice: Don’t rearchitect your legacy

In observing the global services industry players in recent weeks, I was amazed at how much frenetic activity India’s providers undertook in joint ventures and acquisitions in Q4 2014. What does all this noise signify? Change is coming. There are signs that let us know seasonal changes are coming. Before winter arrives, we see

As I recently looked at service providers’ PowerPoint decks pitching their as-a-service offering, the well-known tangled-web-we-weave quote from Sir Walter Scott’s 1808 poem “Marmion” came to mind. It’s very clear that the industry is interested in moving to platform services. And it’s a fabulous idea — great content reduced cost, agility and focus on

I’ve observed an unusual acceleration of new activity here at the end of the year — a season when global services initiatives activity traditionally tapers off dramatically. It looks like this year the industry is getting a big Christmas / New Year’s present of accelerating sales. What’s the reason for this strong uptick in

As the services industry struggles more and more with growth, providers naturally think: “We’ve saturated the large clients, so let’s go to the midmarket clients. After all, there are so many more midmarket companies than large ones. So if we can sell to midmarket companies, happy days are here again. We can reignite our

What a difference a few months with a new CEO makes. Things are different at Infosys today. When we talk with them, it’s clear that it’s a different organization than it was a few months ago because of Vishal Sikka, the new CEO. On one level, very little has changed; but on another level,

One of life’s realities is that he who has the gold makes the rules. I mention this because it’s now affecting the global services world and providers need to be aware of how the rule impacts their business. Over the last three years we’ve seen companies task their CIOs and shared services organizations with