Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

Through some of the work that I do for my Clients, I’ve helped to identify and reduce Shadow IT as a part of better aligning IT delivery with strategic business goals.  It has been sort of a mantra, that Shadow IT is a bad thing and must be eliminated.  Over the past couple of years [...]

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I was having a drink with an old friend of mine, who is a very prominent and globally sought after risk management professional, and we got around to talking about Disaster Recovery Planning Software.  I asked him, “have you ever found one of those that you like?”  His response was not positive. Quite often, I [...]

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This morning I was reading a short piece by Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus of CIO Magazine in which he asks if he’s “certifiably nuts” for encouraging broad-based, state-administered technology certification programs.  The short answer from me- no, not really.   I would though, like to support the spirit of Gary’s call with my own encouragement.

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As a part of the enterprise IT assessment process, and as a component for articulating the rationale for elevation of IT service capabilities to achieve alignment of IT with the strategic goals of the business, a description of the current level of IT maturity is a beneficial measure. ISACA is a global provider of information, [...]

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Across the world there are new opportunities for data center and IT consulting companies to capitalize on the consolidation projects being launched in the Government sector.  Like commercial enterprises, governments focusing on governance (no pun intended) of IT see the benefits of consolidation of the data processing footprint.  Also like commercial enterprises, governments have business [...]

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Confusion Persists Through several posts on this blog, we discussed the many aspects of confusion around the term, “Cloud Computing.”¬† After attending this year’s Cloud Expo in New York City and seeing the same three-layer stack (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) slide in fifty half of the presentations, I have to conclude that confusion still exists in [...]

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A quick perusal of a typical contemporary IT project portfolio will show a strong representation of projects dependent upon, or directly related to the data center.  Changes in the growth and scale of data processing, applications, content storage, data communications, risk, compliance, and maturity of IT governance are all in some way connected to the [...]

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When launching a new data center build project, where the data center will be located is a fundamental issue. There are many factors in deciding where the data center will be, but all of these factors can arguably be consolidated into two issues- Risk and Cost. We mention risk in terms of Risk Management. Even [...]

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Posted by:¬† Bob Landstrom The latest issue of CIO Insight has results from their annuals survey of top ten priorities of CIOs.¬† The online presentation can be found here.¬† Looking over this year’s top ten list left me with a few notable observations.

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Posted by Bob Landstrom The attention and interest in netbooks has been on the sharp increase over the past six months.  A recent post in IT Business Edge makes the claim that netbook sales can be credited with the resiliency the PC market has had through the recent recession. When one looks for the reasons [...]

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