Brainstorming – Current Thinking for IT Leaders

Aug 17, ’10 10:17 AM

Following is a curated list of resources that reflect current thinking on a topic of interest to IT leaders. You can assist this effort by contributing insight from your own real-world experiences, and are invited to suggest changes or additions here.

Current Thinking Includes:

Current views include the need to set ground rules and have a formal approach to Brainstorming activities, limiting initial manager/leader input so as not to skew the output of the process before it begins, and a discussion regarding the merits of an individual, group, or combination individual/group (“hybrid”) approach to brainstorming sessions.

Wharton School: Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea

We find evidence that the best idea generated by a hybrid process is better than the best idea generated by a group process. This result is driven by the fact that the hybrid process generates about three times as many ideas per unit of time and that these ideas have significantly higher average quality.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Eight Rules To Brilliant Brainstorming

The power of group brainstorming comes from creating a safe place where people with different ideas can share, blend, and expand their diverse knowledge. If your goal is just to collect the creative ideas that are out there, group brainstorms are a waste of time.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Eight Rules To Brilliant Brainstorming

Creativity comes from a blend of individual and collective “ideation.” This means building in time for people to think and learn about the topic before the group brainstorm, as well as time to reflect about what happened after the meetings.

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Alternative Views Include:

In addition to the lack of formal process or ground rules cited for Brainstorming failure, the most discussed alternative views focus on the benefit/drawback of group involvement, and the question of whether the dangers of group think, potential laziness of participants or undesired conformity outweigh the benefits of Brainstorming in group environment.

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General IT Automation – Current Thinking for IT Leaders

Aug 17, ’10 10:16 AM

Following is a curated list of resources that reflect current thinking on a topic of interest to IT leaders. You can assist this effort by contributing insight from your own real-world experiences, and are invited to suggest changes or additions here.

Current Thinking Includes:

CIO.com: Why IT Automation May Be Critical to Your Success

Got automation? Whether you believe that the economy is rebounding or not, it behooves IT leaders today to scrutinize business and IT processes like never before with the goal of finding more efficient ways to get the job done. Reducing ongoing costs and “doing more with less” are fundamental to positioning your business for growth. IT automation—the process of automating routine IT activities to drive down costs—is gaining traction for this very reason.

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Alternative Views Include:

While there are a great many practice suggestions for specific automation efforts (such as within the data center or for a particular process such as staff on-boarding), the topic of General IT Automation has perhaps more current ink on the problems and challenges inherent in the effort, including the danger of automating a flawed or misunderstood process, the lack of access to humans once automated and the rigidity of automated systems that are not able to change with the circumstances presented:

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Managing IT As A Business – Current Thinking for IT Leaders

Aug 17, ’10 10:15 AM

Following is a curated list of resources that reflect current thinking on a topic of interest to IT leaders. You can assist this effort by contributing insight from your own real-world experiences, and are invited to suggest changes or additions here.

Current Thinking Includes:

Much of the recent discussion around running IT “as a business” has focused on the meaning of the term, with some confusion.  Does it refer to managing the IT function as a separate business unit with “customers”, internal charge-backs and the rest, or is it an admission that IT has historically not been run in business-savvy terms in many organizations?  In this second definition “as a business” might be code for the opportunities that exist to improve general accountability, business-iT alignment, transparency of costs etc.. capabilities that would be expected in other departments run by professional staff.  As to solutions, there appears to be general consensus that a successful ITIL adoption can go a long way towards leading the IT function in a more professional, business-like manner.

CIO.com: Leading IT as a Business

What’s so bad about being a cost center? Nothing really… if your business isn’t too worried about profitability. Assuming it is, however, the problem with being a cost center is that you are mostly going to be valued by productivity of your people and assets without a clear link to value. Each year’s budget conversation will then focus on how to simply squeeze more out of IT. When every last dime has been squeezed out, we can finally outsource IT, because it’s not a critical capability, right?

CIO.com: IT Is A Business Unit Too

I know a lot of IT strategists and consultants push the idea that IT should be an integral part of the business and shouldn’t be thought of as an independent organization. And that may be what it should be, but it’s not what it is today. Today’s IT is by and large a separate organization even when it is distributed across multiple business units.

CIO Dashboard: Run IT Like a Business, Not As a Business

The primary goal in “running IT LIKE a business” is to improve the business-IT communication (I hate that “business-IT” thing, but we have to deal with it for now…) and reduce the translations from business need to value delivered.

IT Business Edge: Running IT as a Business

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