Category: Finance and Investment

Sometimes we technologists can be a bit too clever for our own good. The term technical debt, attributed to Ward Cunningham in a 1992 OOPSLA conference speech¹, may be an example. We use the term often these days, generally in the context of justifying investments in nonfunctional aspects of IT; that is, investments intended to […]

In earlier blog posts I’ve talked about the CIO-CFO relationship, how it’s changing, and how it needs to change. In this post I’ll begin delving into what sorts of conversations should really be taking place between CFOs and CIOs and how the CIO can better frame these discussions. Must-Spending: The Historical Focus Beginning in, oh, […]

In my third installment on digging deeper into deciding between buying software and building it in house, I want to describe how organizations can transition from a “mostly bought” environment to one where they can productively build bespoke solutions. As an industry we are mildly guilty of repeatedly showing great target pictures but then falling […]

My previous post highlighted that even seemingly straightforward decisions can become challenging in the context of the vast scope and complexity of enterprise IT. For example, when considering whether to build a bespoke software in house over buying a commercial one, many companies overlook several critical nuances: You pay in opportunity cost, not just direct […]

If you’ve been doing something for a while, and now you change course, is that an admission that the way you were doing it before was a mistake? If you’ve spent a lot on something, should you toss it out when something better comes along? If your budget is full of “keeping the lights on” […]

Many enterprises anchor their IT strategy on buy vs. build decisions: what software packages or systems they buy versus which ones they prefer to build themselves. Buy over build is the default for most organizations, which is a sensible approach when considering that the majority of the IT estate doesn’t differentiate the business. For example, an […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz Back around the end of 2018 we ran a series of blog posts on the implications of the cloud on cost structure, where we discussed some of the interesting and more subtle consequences of changing fixed costs to variable. In particular, as I pointed out, the cloud and DevOps let you […]

Your cloud migration was off to a good start: you set out with a clear plan, used the “Six Rs” to segment your workloads by the different strategies of moving to the cloud, and have closely tracked core metrics like number of applications migrated. However, your stakeholders have become increasingly doubtful as to whether the […]

In my last post, I talked about one type of governance—the make-a-rule-and-enforce-it governance style, which applies to standardization, controls, compliance, and other areas that can be handled through general rules. For that type of governance, the digital world changes nothing aside from making it substantially more effective.

In business school, we learned that companies need to develop sustainable competitive advantages. To build value for the long term, you needed to develop distinct competencies that your competitors would not be able to imitate, and then find a way to apply them as an advantage in the markets in which you compete. For some […]