Practical Advice for Working CIOs

About this Blog:

Bob Lewis, president of IT Catalysts, Inc., provides an unconventional roadmap to everything a CIO needs to know about improving organizational performance through practical suggestions and hands-on guidance.

Bob Lewis

Explorers, Servants, and Players

|   Human beings are nature's superior communicators. That's the theory, at least. Watching how often and how persistently we misunderstand each other, we can only be jealous of honeybees. They admittedly have less to say to each other (mostly, the subject is where to find food), but...

Competitors, mechanics, referees, and economists

|   "Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets." - Dr. Paul Batalden Call it governance. Call it "managing the project portfolio." Call it whatever dull, uninspired, bureaucracy-invoking name you prefer.

Time for some LIP (Leadership Intervention Points, that is)

|   Imagine you lead an organization. Now imagine you want to improve how things get done.

Metrics Misuse

|   When someone starts by asking, "What metrics should we use?" nothing good will come of it.

Big Shift, or Shifty Statistics?

|   Bad metrics continue to be worse than no metrics because, as Mark Twain famously said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you do know that ain't so."

Why Steve Jobs Mattered

|   “I’m good, but I’m no Frankie Yankovic.” - Weird Al Yankovic, when asked if he and polka king Frankie Yankovic were related, and wouldn’t this make a great t-shirt?

When App Dev Catches Baumol's Cost Disease

|   Do you suffer from Baumol's Disease? Even worse, do your top executives suffer from Altitude-Induced Baumol Blindness Syndrome?

Persuasion as Human Engineering

|   Engineering doesn't begin as a profession or credentials, but as a perspective:

Objectivity Traps

|   Some studies claim to demonstrate that intuition is more reliable than evidence-based decision-making. Which makes me wonder, if a study presents evidence that intuition is superior to evidence, does it prove itself wrong?

The Enlightenment still matters

|   “Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.” - Jorge Luis Borges What this country's founders had in common was, more than anything else, the Enlightenment -- an intellectual heritage that considered evidence and reason to be superior to faith, tradition, and authority as ways...

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ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
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Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.

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