Drive Innovation by Leveraging Your Inexperience!
What makes someone truly qualified to work in information technology? In recent months, my news feeds have been teeming with passionate, and at times toxic, debates on the level of experience required for an IT career. These … Continue reading
Why Great Meetings Are Killing Your Productivity
There’s nothing like a bad meeting to ruin your productivity, and sometimes your day. Though, without a deliberate approach to collaboration, even great, productive meetings can be silent – and … Continue reading
To Innovate Successfully, Question Everything
In my experience, the people driving business transformation, creating new products or services, or innovating in any context, who are not deliberate about “questioning everything” throughout the entire lifecycle of … Continue reading
A Collaborative Approach to Escaping the Doom of Fanatical Process Orientation
“Why does fanatical process orientation seem an almost inescapable doom as an org/business grows? Is it possible to stay results-oriented?” This great question is not simply a perception based upon … Continue reading
Digital Privacy: Why We Need Clear Notice & Consent Protocols and Trust Frameworks
Read the fine print When was the last time you read the full terms of service or privacy policy for an app? Have you ever read them? When you received … Continue reading
What Musical Theatre Can Teach Us About Business Strategy
Musical theatre actors are amazing strategists. The similarities between the types of strategic decisions by a single actor in a musical and someone running a large organization are striking. Those … Continue reading
You’re Not Failing if You’re Learning
How “learn-fast” thinking can improve innovation and combat fear of failure “We’re a large organization. We can’t fail fast and break things!” It’s the type of statement I frequently encounter, … Continue reading
Even Angels Need a Guiding Light
Make your innovation program more effective by training its governing team During a recent Lean Entrepreneurship CIO Event in Atlanta I was asked a fantastic question: “Did you have to … Continue reading
Why Innovation Competitions Backfire
Understanding the evolution of breakthrough ideas can be the key to a successful innovation program. Why do innovation competitions — aimed at delivering breakthrough ideas and improving morale and engagement … Continue reading
What Wilderness Navigation Taught me About Lean Transformation
Lean approaches drive benefits far beyond their profit-driven, private-sector roots I hear it often. “This lean and agile stuff is cool, but it’s not really applicable to me.” “We’re not … Continue reading
What Motivates Successful Intrapreneurs
by George Watt At a summit in Boulder, Colorado, I spoke with a group of founders about what motivated them to become an intrapreneur (an entrepreneur who creates a new … Continue reading
New Book! Lean Entrepreneurship: Innovation in the Modern Enterprise
I am pleased to announce that Lean Entrepreneurship, my newest book, is now available. In this book we discuss obstacles to innovating in established organizations, the behavioural anti-patterns that result, and how they can … Continue reading
Four Signs Too Many Resources are Killing Your Innovation
How to spot the signs and what to do about it. Often when a new idea promises to be the next big thing, organizations will throw as many resources as … Continue reading
Five Innovation Killers and How to Stop Them
Want innovation to flourish at your company? Avoid these common problems. By George Watt Innovation is hard. Many of the hardest parts of the journey come long after an innovative … Continue reading
Innovation programs: the worst thing to happen to innovation
Why many innovation programs kill innovation, and what you can do to change that. In “The Innovative CIO” I wrote about several innovation killers ranging from interpersonal styles to unnecessarily … Continue reading
What being half naked on an airplane taught me about innovation
How to tap the true power of innovation and avoid building new products nobody wants. You never forget being half naked on a fairly full airplane. But what can that … Continue reading
Are IT security and the business really disconnected?
A recent survey suggests IT security and the business are closer than you might have thought. “If they think so alike, why do IT teams and the business teams they … Continue reading
How is the application economy impacting your job?
It’s not just senior IT and business leaders feeling the impact of the application economy. It’s causing a culture change across entire enterprise organizations. Rarely now do I open my … Continue reading
Surviving the “application economy paradox”
How an encounter with my grandfather and an oil change changed my innovation perspective forever. What is the “application economy paradox”? It begins with the desired result: modern apps deliver … Continue reading
The innovation pot of gold you may not know you already have
There’s nothing like success to suck the innovation out of a great team. I have seen it many times. A team has a great, innovative idea. They have that magical … Continue reading
Supplier partnerships are a strategic weapon in the application economy
What being a cloud provider taught me about licensing and supplier relationships. “Please don’t make me count.” Just as we were celebrating that we had solved a tremendous business agility problem with … Continue reading
We all need a life jacket when wading into the application economy
What a canoe trip taught me about the application economy and how preparation is key for those charting new waters You may not think that canoeing and the application economy … Continue reading
Increased Productivity Can be a Symptom of a Dysfunctional Culture
Though the many dire consequences are well known (low morale, lowered productivity, lack of creativity, decreased innovation, lack of motivation…) we still frequently encounter corporate and institutional “cultures of fear”. … Continue reading
Beware! Aggregated Data Can Harm Your Business
This is truly an exciting time for people in the information technology industry. We have more capability than we’ve ever had, and we are more connected than we’ve ever been. … Continue reading
In 2014 Cloud Computing is So Last Year
Let’s face it. Cloud computing just isn’t that exciting anymore – mainly because it’s no longer something people feel compelled to debate or question. Not only do we continue to … Continue reading
Cloud Computing’s Shockwave and How It Can Benefit Your Business
The value of cloud computing is becoming widely understood, with many reporting that it has delivered beyond their expectations. But there is an opportunity for even greater return from cloud … Continue reading
Cloud Computing: Embrace Diversity and Avoid The Money Pit
If we have learned nothing from the recent Snowden revelations and stories of cloud outages the one irrefutable lesson we have learned is that you should always choose the most secure, most resilient cloud service, right? … Continue reading
Prepare for More Cloud Outages
A recent outage at Amazon, which was caused by a network device failure, has reignited discussion and debate about the reliability of cloud computing services. While I believe that cloud services can … Continue reading
The Mobility Bar Has Once Again Been Raised
Microsoft’s recent purchase of Nokia’s handset division has left many people focused on what that might mean in terms of a new CEO for the software giant. While some are writing off … Continue reading
Privacy is Dead. Long Live Privacy!
Recently Ben Way (@bway) tweeted the following question to me: That is an outstanding question, and since this topic is so broad, the greatest challenge is where to begin. Though … Continue reading
Stop Innovation Loss! Prepare Innovation’s First Responders!
In today’s economy, and with today’s new business models, innovation is more than ever the lifeblood of business. Yet every day businesses let that lifeblood flow away. Every day countless … Continue reading
The You, Me and We of Innovation’s Managers
Have you ever seen someone assigned to a project they were passionate about, but they found themselves unable to bring that passion to the work? Have you ever seen someone … Continue reading
Cloud Computing: Regulatory Complexity Requires Systems Thinking
In a recent article Peter Wayner cautions that “No one knows which laws apply” in reference to the fact that a customer may be in one jurisdiction and the cloud instance they … Continue reading
Mobility Trends Demand CIOs Become Chief Experience Officers
Recently, while thinking about several of the technology trends impacting mobility and mobile computing, my thoughts again turned to the one trend that I believe is driving all of the … Continue reading
The 4 MYs of Cloud Computing and IT Transformation
It is often stated that technology is easy and people are hard. Whether or not you agree with that, the sentiment must be heeded. Otherwise, even the best technical solutions … Continue reading
Cloud Computing Myth 7: Cloud Only Makes Sense for Large Deployments
In recent weeks there appear to have been an increasing number of articles written about cloud computing myths. I am not complaining about that. In fact, I have written a few … Continue reading
Preparing for the Cloud Computing SLA Cold War
In a recent article, “Cloud Providers Ready to Strike With Nuclear Option“, Simon Phipps stated that issues related to cloud service level agreements (SLAs) are “under acknowledged and overdue for … Continue reading
Here’s to 2013, The Year of the Customer
Recently CA Technologies released our top IT predictions for 2013. There are, of course, many other interesting predictions from our customers, colleagues, and competitors alike. As I was about to close … Continue reading
Measure the Cloud for Business Value
Despite decades of talk about how IT needs to align to the business, in many organizations, IT and the business are not speaking the same language — if they’re speaking … Continue reading
The Innovative CIO: How IT Leaders Can Drive Business Transformation
I am excited to announce the publication of a book I co-authored with Andi Mann and Peter Matthews. You can obtain this book from popular book sellers. I have included … Continue reading
A Simple and Effective Acid Test for Innovation
Many believe innovation rarely happens by accident. That the eureka moment enshrined in popular culture is mostly myth. Certainly there are times when momentous insights and ideas pop into our heads as bolts out … Continue reading
There’s No Free Lunch at the Cloud Buffet!
Consumption styles can dramatically impact cloud benefits What do cloud service consumption patterns have in common with the way people approach all-you-can-eat restaurant buffets? During a recent discussion of some … Continue reading
Is Consumerization Blowing You Off Course?
What do a late morning canoe trip and the current state of consumerization and BYOD have in common? More than you might imagine. This summer as my ten year old … Continue reading
Why Some Clouds Fail to Deliver
Recently in ZDNet, Keith Allen of CA Technologies gave his perspective of how cloud computing can have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, and perhaps even reduce the likelihood of rogue IT. … Continue reading
Cloud Computing: “Working Together Is Success”
What capacity planning taught us about the value of alignment with Business There has been quite a lot written about the benefits of IT-Business alignment, and even more written about … Continue reading
Cloud Computing: “…and business always wants it in a week”
I agree, Chris O’Malley, business should align with IT Recently I read a post by Chris O’Malley, Nimsoft CEO wherein he makes the point that, while IT must align with their business consumers, … Continue reading
Is Email Killing Innovation?
Or is it a harbinger of something worse? For quite some time now I have been asking whether email is still the productivity tool it once promised to be (and … Continue reading
Is All This Hype Giving Cloud the Business?
Is cloud computing disruptive innovation or great marketing? For what feels like forever there have been debates regarding whether cloud computing is a game-changing approach or simply an unbelievably well … Continue reading
IT Self-Service Improves Customer Experience and IT Efficiency
Can we be of better service by providing less service? “There is unrest in the forest” During a recent Cloud Exchange event the discussion turned to business consumers bypassing their IT colleagues and … Continue reading
Cloud Computing: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Give your customers what they need. It’s not always what they ask for. Soft skills a key ingredient to cloud computing success Last week I had the pleasure of joining … Continue reading
Innovation, Technology, and Life in the Cloud 