All in Best Practices

Still, knowing that data exist – which is what the inventories will tell us — is not the same as accessing and interpreting the data. Even assuming the public eventually gains access to the inventoried data, we’ll still need contextual information about the programs described by the data and measurement of the impacts these programs have.
In “IT governance is killing innovation” Andrew Horne and Brian Foster argue that IT project selection needs to move beyond traditional capital investment based ROI measures. The authors think it is more appropriate to take into account project support for critical business capabilities and that such a focus will be much more supportive of innovation.

Who Buys Strategy Consulting These Days?

“It seems there are two extreme situations where people buy high-end analytical strategy work. At one end of the spectrum you have a company that’s doing well, has money to spend, and is in the enviable position where management can afford to “sit back” and contemplate what to do next. At the other end of the spectrum you have the company that’s not doing well, has cash flow problems, is having a tough time making payroll, but management realizes it really needs to do something different and wants to have an outsider look rationally at the problem of what to do next.”

Learning from the World Bank’s “Big Data” Exploration Weekend

If you’re serious about data analysis there’s probably no substitute for getting “down and dirty” with real, live, messy data. Sometimes you just have to sift through the numbers with your “bare hands” if you really want to extract meaning from descriptive statistics, predictive models, and fancy visualizations.

Developing a Collaborative Approach to Improving Project Management Practices, Part 1: Culture

In Agile grows up and new challenges emerge author Rick Freedman points out what project managers, sooner or later, learn from the School of Hard Knocks: changing and improving project management practices to improve the likelihood of project success involves not just improved management methods but also cultural changes within the sponsoring organization.
In September 2006 I published The Justification of Enterprise Web 2.0 Project Expenditures. It examined differences between the cost justification of current information systems compared with cost justification of older systems. It discussed how some of the rules for calculating and thinking about technology related costs have changed.