Financing the BI Solution: The Corporate Architecture and Complexity of Data Links
This series is looking at the financial factors of building your BI solution. Most larger corporations today already have some form of business intelligence in place so the interest here may be more in applying these principles to upgrading your solution. Yet surprisingly there are always greenfield solutions being applied is some corner of the [...]
Financing the Business Intelligence Project (Buy or Build?)
In order to finance the project it is necessary to decide how the underlying Data Warehouse is to be created. This means the Project Board will need to decide:
Whether to use a ready-made solution or have it custom built
What degree of external staffing resources are [...]
Virtual Teams, Project Slippage & The ‘Fear Factor’
One of the biggest challenges in managing remote, or viurtual projects, has always been one of communication and collaboration. From the management perspective it is not possible to simply walk down the corridor and see the fear in people’s eyes: not fear of physical harm, but the fear that you are going to ask them [...]
Analysis: Continuing to Involve our Collaborators
It has always been clear that the process of defining application requirements has always been a collaborative process, not simply involving IT people, but a whole raft of people across the business. So for such a collaborative process why do we tend to document the results in a private way?
What I mean here is that [...]
Applying the 80-20 Rule to Add Value
The 80-20 Rule suggests that 80 percent of your return comes from 20 percent of your investment. IT has had a version of this rule since its very inception, including some of the following:
80 percent of time and effort goes into deploying the 20 percent requiring the most customisation.
Developers spend 80% of their time debugging [...]
Deploying Solutions on a Shoestring Budget
One of the outcomes from the changing economic circumstances faced across the globe is the need to scale down on costs across the corporation. Improvements to business effectiveness are more important than ever before, so change must go on and IT projects still need to be delivered. In a recent article (click here) I indicated [...]
CIO Strategy Development
The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has changed forever.
Today’s CIO’s role is more than simply managing IT staff and ensure that systems and networks are up and running. They need to serve as integral members of the senior management team within the corporation. They need to take part in [...]
Satisfaction Guaranteed?
Vendors of both software and hardware products are known for disappointing their customers. Often promised features do not exist or are delivered late. In a recent poll IT Leaders have stated that they need their vendors to be truthful about how products meet requirements (34%) and would like vendors to take time to understand requirements [...]
Handling Competing Priorities
We would all like to say “Hold your horses we are only running 1 project this year” however this simply does not meet business reality. For the IT manager as soon as they have defined the annual list of priorities, there is pressure to add new projects, or to change the scope of existing authorised [...]
IT Professional: Gaining Control of Your Work Day
Every professional, irrespective of job title or industry faces a problem of too many deadlines and too many projects competing for our time. We have all seen it before, just when we have it all smoothly running, then new crisis erupts. We constantly have to change our priorities and scramble to get control of our [...]
What are to Steps to Managing Succesful Projects?
By Peter B. Giblett
Project management has traditionally been one of the hottest topics in business. There is a perception (largely unfounded) that the majority of projects fail. David Wright recently published an article “13 Steps to Better Projects” in ComputerWorld Canada in which he offers a personal view to overcoming change. I would like to [...]
