Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

“To make sure they are getting the most from their multiple outsourcers, CIOs need to dedicate staff to oversee each vendor relationship and establish regular reviews of vendor performance with measurement applications such as dashboards or vendor scorecards. In contract negotiations, CIOs need to spell out that vendors should cooperate and refrain from blaming, or else risk losing the job. They need to find qualified staff with financial as well as technical skills to help run a project management office or some other body that can track all outsourcing agreements. “

Read more in this article from CIO.com.

“Managing a portfolio of it investments only gets harder when the benefits are unevenly distributed. But not impossible.”

Read more in this column posted on Cioinsight.

“A 2004 survey by CIO magazine showed that while 80% of IT senior managers believe that IT and business are aligned, only 30% of business senior managers agree. Let’s look at how to determine whether your IT group really is aligned and how to achieve alignment if it’s not. My experience in leading both operations and IT departments has convinced me that it makes sense to look at three areas: process, metrics and employee development.”

Read more in this article from ComputerWorld.

“Transparency liberates the CIO. When someone asks what IT is doing with all that money, the CIO won’t have to panic. Open a page on the intranet, click on the Balanced Scorecard report or the service-level dashboard or the chargeback records, and you’ll have your answer. In fact, the CIO can reverse the question and ask, What are you doing with all that IT?”

Read more in this article from CIO magazine. It includes three case studies.