Hello! This is the first post for the Recipes for IT blog. As I outlined in the introduction to the site, I am looking to provide a good reference discussion site for best practices in IT and in particular for IT management. I will try to touch on 1 or 2 themes or topics each week and I look forward to the responses and discussion that they spark.

As some of you may know, I have worked as a senior leader in IT for over 20 years and I have spent most of my time in IT being responsible for turning poor-performing shops into high performance teams that provide competitive advantage. Over the years, I believe I have been able to ascertain numerous best practices and approaches that enable IT leaders to be much more successful. Delivering IT today, with all of the cost reduction demands, the rapidly changing technology, the impact of IT consumerization, and security and risk demands, is, simply put, tough work. It is complicated and hard work to get the complex IT mechanism, with all the usual legacy systems issues, to perform as well as the business requires.

So to help those IT leaders out, I have started this site to provide recipes and ideas on how to tackle tough but solvable problems they face.

I will cover topics from how to recruit and develop a high performance team, to how to deliver projects predictably with speed, to how to vastly improve your production availability. And we will discuss and provide perspective on the latest trends from cloud to mobile to agile.

Later this week, I am thinking the first topic should be how to tackle cost reductions in a tough environment given the economic situation.

Best, Jim