Realize

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The “Realize” curriculum will help you understand the supply and demand management tactics that help ensure IT-enabled investments are generating value and protecting the long term needs of the enterprise.

IT spending continues to be viewed as an expense to be managed, not an investment to be optimized. The inability to quantify the value IT delivers to the business is the single most important factor that separates the CIO from a seat in the boardroom. There are financial and non-financial measures of success as defined by your company’s balanced scorecard, and unfortunately, too much emphasis is placed on measuring the financial returns from IT-enabled investments. There is not enough emphasis placed on the “leading indicators” of financial performance, the operational performance measures. By expanding the definition of value, it is possible to implement a closed loop investment management that allocates funds to the right initiatives, keeps initiatives focused and on track, and holds senior executives accountable for demonstrating value.

In addition to delivering value, CIOs are also expected to manage their cost structure efficiently and implement the mechanisms necessary to ensure that the long term needs of the enterprise – infrastructure agility, business continuity, and business compliance – are protected.


Realize Articles

Date Article Curriculum
7/19/10 Outsource the Work, Not the Leadership
When internal leaders outsourced the work, they made the mistake of outsourcing the leadership of the work as well. This is a common outsourcing fallacy, but a crucial one to recognize, because it has led many to believe that there's little need for senior leadership expertise within IT. That is, since IT is outsourced, leadership can be, too. While it's true that IT organizations that operate with an extensive network of outsourcing relationships have fewer employees, those that remain have to be much more sophisticated in their ability to exert indirect — versus direct — influence.
Realize
4/8/10 Eight Things We (Still) Hate About I.T.
In case any of us doubted it, our frustrations with IT — and IT's frustrations with the business — are alive and well. We recently posted a slideshow, 8 Things Executives Hate About I.T. based on the core principles in my book. The intent of all of this is, as the book's subtitle reiterates, "to move beyond the frustrations and form a new partnership with IT. But clearly, there's still a lot of animosity between the two camps. The opportunity, for IT and business leaders alike, is to better understand the needs of the other and create a partnership that is much more fruitful and far less frustrating. It's time to end the hate.
 Realize
3/25/10 IT Leaders, It's Time to Give It Up
Business users want, and need, more direct control over the technology that fuels their business. Ensuring that business users exercise increased control in a responsible manner requires that they become smarter about how to invest, manage, and deliver IT-enabled change and innovation. In general, IT leaders agree that uplifting the IT-smarts of the other parts of the business is a noble goal. But many don't think it's a realistic goal. Extending IT's reach and impact by enabling the IT capabilities of others is the only real world solution to get past resource constraints and expand the capacity for innovation. And while I have yet to find a company that is uplifting IT-smarts on a broad-scale basis, it's easy to find IT and business leaders who are figuring out how, on a small scale, to break through the "business asks and IT delivers" mode of operation.
 Realize
3/3/10 IT and Business Leaders: Getting Along Is Not Enough
We absolutely need business-smart IT leaders. We also need IT-smart business leaders. Companies can increase innovation by uplifting the IT-smarts of the 90-plus percent of the company that works outside of IT. The question is not if we need business-smart IT leaders and IT-smart business leaders, but how we change the fundamental nature of IT-business collaboration.
 Realize
2/16/10 How IT-Smart Is Your Organization?
Consumer electronics. Sensors. Analytics. Web services. The Cloud. The cool technologies that are transforming the competitive landscape and how companies operate are not prototypes in some electronic giant's lab. They're in the marketplace, and affordable. You don't have to overhaul your IT architectures to implement them. If anything, they improve the value of that architecture that you spent gillions putting in place.
 Realize
2/10/10 Why Bad Things (Like Recalls) Happen to Good Companies (Like Toyota)
Success in business, and in life, isn't about eliminating risks, it's about managing them. In spite of your best efforts, Murphy's Law will rule and stuff is going to hit the fan. The leader's job, in a world that is never simple or predictable, is to build safety nets so that when problems occur, they can be quickly reported and dealt with. Anticipating problems is the only prudent course in a world where every company has data issues, buggy software, and security incidents. In the real world, bad things happen to good companies. Be sure, in every change you make, after you have designed what should happen, to take the same amount of time to plan for the unintended disruptions that, you hope, will never come to fruition.
Realize
1/27/10 How to Get Along With Frenemies
You've got senior level buy-in, authority, and resources for your project. But you're lacking a few critical supporters. A few people in the middle of your organization are making it tough for you to get your job done. What to do to get them to buy in!
 Realize
9/11/09 How Are You Defying "Best Practice"?
My last post raised the question, "Why does management behavior often diverge from "broadly accepted" theory or best practice?" In response, you shared insights as to why best practices aren't always practical or desirable and, instead, what should be done to (in your words) avoid "giving up on differentiation" and use best practices as "the basis for innovative practices."
Realize
9/11/09 How to Answer IT's Annual Cry for Help
Something out of the ordinary arrived on your desk today: an "IT Annual Report" brought to you by your internal IT department. Resist the temptation to throw it away. Instead, see it for what it is: a cry for help.
 Realize
8/31/09 Why Do We Ignore "Best Practices"?
Why does management behavior often diverge from "broadly accepted" theory or best practice? This question hit me over the head (once again) during a conversation with a talented, young CIO about a big project that was significantly late and over budget.
Realize
4/30/09 Harness the Value of Scarcity
With the cash crunch, focus is coming back in style. A lot of people are hoping for a future — both professionally and personally — that will be, in the words of Peggy Noonan, "pared down, more natural, more stable, less full of enervating overstimulation, of what Walker Percy call the "trivial magic" of modern times.
Realize
4/9/09 How Sudden Failures Happen Gradually
The book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) discusses the psychological need to feel competent — even when evidence to the contrary abounds. The AIG debacle revealed a classic illustration of this in the denial of responsibility by ex-CEO Maurice Greenberg. He said, "I don't feel any responsibility at all...how can I be responsible for something that happened when I'm not there?"
Realize
4/1/09 Why IT Solutions Are Never Simple
Without concerted effort, what was once neat and tidy becomes marred and messy. Just finding something in the garage feels like an archaeological expedition. Periodically, when someone dies, or relocates, or becomes disgusted, there's a whirlwind of activity to purge and reorganize. This cathartic experience is followed by a brief period of exhilaration, until time passes and entropy exerts itself once again.
Realize
3/20/09 Crisis? It's Business as Usual for IT
If reality was reflected in the media, we'd be in dire straits, both financially and socially. Fortunately, the headlines — consisting of 3 parts crisis and 1 part American Idol — don't reflect our personal bylines. With the 10% unemployed rightfully dominating the front page, it's hard to remember that the 90% employed are working hard, not looking back or acting scared.
Realize
3/4/09 How to Cut Through IT Bureaucracy
In this messed up economy, everyone is working overtime, second-guessing every decision and every dollar. And within every company, there is an IT department struggling with how to make business leaders love them while pushing the bitter pills of strategic alignment, value realization, integration, standardization, self-sufficiency, and risk management.
Realize
1/12/09 The Satyam Truth: Outsourcers Don't Work For You
It’s heavy irony that satyam in Sanskrit means “truth.” So what are the truths behind outsourcing? The Satyam meltdown provides a critical moment for us to re-assess our outsourcing contingency plans. Done right, outsourcing can enhance focus, flexibility, agility, quality and efficiency. Done wrong, outsourcing puts the enterprise at risk.
Realize
11/10/08 Business Cases Are a Waste of Time (But Do Them Anyway)
Many believe that developing business cases for IT-enabled initiatives as a big waste of time. And, most of the time, it is. Everyone knows how to play the game: make the numbers look good, then claim victory at the end. Anything can be justified using 1% increase in sales or profit and no one can disprove assertions about impact to sales or profit given the number of variables in play. McAfee observes that, "Across the hundreds of quantitative IT business cases I've seen, I'd estimate that the average ROI figure was about 100%", and then concludes, with a heavy dose of sarcasm that, "If this ROI figure is at all accurate, why are companies spending money on anything else except IT?"
 Realize
10/30/08 IT Project Funding: Less Is More
When it comes to IT project funding, less is often more. Too much money results in lengthy, bloated projects. While, overall, only 1/3 of IT-enabled business initiatives deliver as planned, project success declines dramatically as project size increases. Of course, big dollars are required to fix big problems. But the way to solve a big problem is to make it a series of small problems.
 Realize
10/6/08 IT Cost Cutting: Like Taking Candy from a Baby
A recent Wall Street Journal blog post mentioned that because of the current credit crunch, IT budgets are being slashed. IT spending is particularly vulnerable to the cold calculus of a CFO because it's difficult to prove that IT investments provide business value and that ongoing, "keep the lights on", costs are well managed.
Realize
8/25/08 Reduce IT Costs by Managing the Truths
When downturns hit, budgets are cut. And yet, the IT budget seems remarkably impervious to budget cuts. The key to further, smart, cost reductions is to recognize the fact that, in general, companies spend too much on IT because they are unwilling to say "no" to IT-related requests. The path of least resistance seems to rule the day: Too many projects are funded, too many die a slow death, too much technology is procured, too many quality defects are tolerated, and users require too much hand holding.
Realize
7/28/08 Your Four IT Imperatives: A Short Story
One day, your company "encouraged" managers to attend a two-day workshop on business unit manager's role in managing IT. You were skeptical, but true to your politically savvy nature, you signed up early – with every intention of appeasing the powers that be and getting back to your “real job” as quickly as possible. But what you learned at the workshop has changed how you view IT.
Realize
7/2/08 IT's Dirty Little Secret: No Accountability
If IT has a dirty little secret, it's this: no one is accountable for IT investments. IT accounts for 50% of US capital but there are few systems in place to show that the capital is well spent. In other words, we're managing IT spending, and not IT returns.
Realize
9/1/06 Value? Added.
"How CIOs can engineer a 'tipping point' to speed up adoption of value management practices and prove—once and for all—that IT matters"
 Realize
4/1/04 Managing IT Demand 101
"Some IT professionals still haven't learned to work with the business to manage demand for IT services."
 Realize
8/1/03 A Cry for Full-Cycle Governance
"It's the only way to ensure project success."
 Realize
12/1/02 Ease the Pain of Your Budget Presentation
"The CIO's green mile..."
 Realize
4/15/02 IT Economics 101
"The fact is, you can work on the 'supply side' all you want and never balance the demand and supply for your resources until you work the 'demand side.'"
 Realize