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
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Having had the opportunity to work with Jim over the past eight years, while he has led two very large IT organizations, I can definitely attest to the fact that Jim knows what he is talking about when it comes to raising the bar and improving the maturity of an organization. For for the first five years I had the privilege of working for Jim and watching him as he led our organization to a best in class status. During the past three years, as a consultant, I’ve watched as he has moved his current organization to a more mature state. Jim not only knows what it takes to be a best in class organization, but he is also an excellent leader to guide his team in the journey. I look forward to following this site and highly recommend it to anyone else who is interested in developing high performing teams.
Jim,
It’s great to “see” you again after working together for 5 years at a previous financial institute. Thanks for sharing your passion for IT Management on this site, what a great idea! I’ve witnessed your 5 cost-cutting strategies in action and they were very effective. Your focus on the operating efficiency ratio and educating the definition of what that means to contributors at every level is particularly noteworthy. One of the success factors you mentioned in your article that I found extremely effective was assigning a senior leader and a finance member to spearhead the cost reduction initiative and take accountability. Accountability always starts at the top and modeling this behavior for those that deliver for you has incredible returns. I look forward to an article that highlights your success with goal driven performance plans that enable and empower every leader to exceed expectations. Talk to you soon!
Iris,
Thanks for the kind words. I think you are right on the mark about setting goals and accountabilities correctly to get high performance teams. I will definitely cover this in a future blog!