Welcome to Recipes for IT, an IT and digitalization best practices blog. I try to provide practical, workable advice that you can use in your organization. The advice maps out proven approaches and techniques that enable IT leaders and their teams to be more successful. There are no silver bullets here, or solutions that work in all situations. Instead, based on my experience and that of my colleagues, these are pragmatic approaches that fit the situation at hand, but have key learnings and principles to enable broader success. It is important to avoid the all too common tendency where the organization or a manager is focused on applying the latest practice to their situation (often unproven and poorly understood), and because of differing maturity and capability levels or because it is simply the wrong approach, the new practice fails miserably. Recommendations here (the recipes), take into account the environment and the root causes and identify the key principles and how you can customize the approach for success with your team and situation.

I have structured the site into two main areas: posts – which are short, timely essays on a particular topic and pages – which are intended to be a broader and deeper view of an area or practice (also more structured and static).

If you are new to the site, I recommend a few posts for relevance and fundamentals:

• Too busy to be productive? Traps of our modern world
• Delivering more by leveraging the Flow of Work
• IT Transparency: A key approach to delivering value and ensuring focus

The core of the site are the best practices. The horizontal menu just below the header on the home page provides you access to all the best practice segments and detailed pages. Here you can find multiple, deep references for critical areas of technology and digitalization, from project management to the service desk, to efficiency and cost reduction, or to data center and cloud computing , and others as well. There are also separate sections with deep dives on leadership and building a great team.

To supplement the posts and pages, there are reference pages that provide foundational information on core concepts and principles. These include:

• IT Services – a quick definition of the services IT traditionally delivers
• IT Service Desk Definition– the RecipeforIT definition of the service desk and what it provides
• Four Box Reporting– the optimal way to deliver project reporting for any project, large or small, with accompanying templates to enable you to quickly leverage
• Sunset charts– an explanation of Sunset charts, their value in answering critical risk and progress questions, with an accompanying template to enable you to quickly leverage
• IT Hybrid Model– a definition of the IT hybrid model and how it is organized
• IT Metrics Categorization
• IT Metrics Unit Costing and Allocations Structure
• Production Ready– a full explanation of production ready and how to use this method to enable much higher availability for your shop
• Customer Journey techniques (being built)
• End-to-end process digitalization approaches (being built)
• Operational Quality Management (being built)

Further, here are some good industry references that are worth reading:

• history of popularity of programming languages (pretty cool video)
• visual graphic showing acquisitions by major tech companies (also pretty cool)
• good info on Deming who, in my view, is with Shewhart, a principal founder of statistical quality management and process engineering, which are critical for modern high performance IT and digitalization
• visual graphic and timeline the world web for the past 30 years
• for use when trying to convince business leaders or boards to spend for proper IT security, here are the biggest data breaches

I also look to encourage dialogue and contributions from our readers. I look forward to your comments and suggestions and most important, I hope to hear how some of these recipes have helped you succeed.

Best, Jim Ditmore