Project Management Organization - A necessity for Corporate Success

Project Management Organization(PMO), irrespective of the discipline, is a necessity for Corporate Success since it helps organizations to achieve their corporate goals and objectives. To this end, one must establish the need for one, assess its maturity, measure and benchmark to realize the full potential of its existence.

PMO's maturity can be broadly classified into 5 and they are,

1. Ad hoc processes with reactive response
2. Repeatable processes with reactive response
3. Standardized processes with proactive response
4. Optimized processes with measurable/proactive response
5. Agile/Optimized Processes with predictable/proactive response

The best performing PMO should maximize business value and minimize business risks!

Cloud Storage comes of age with IBM's new offering !

IBM recently unraveled a new disk-based archive array called the IBM Information Appliance that can scale to 300TB and offers retention rules and customized policies. The SAN Volume Controller storage virtualization appliance now supports solid state disk drives, greatly increasing the throughput of the device. IBM's new Smart Business Storage Cloud private cloud service uses commodity components such as x86 servers in IBM's BladeCenter rack, and a scaled-down version of the IBM's high-performance General Parallel File System to offer a preconfigured rack-mountable file-based cloud storage offering.

IBM plans to ship its Information Archive appliance that uses the XIV management software, its Enhanced Tamper Protection tool and IBM's BladeCenter seBrvers to offer users a pre-configured, rack-mountable disk-based archive system in the first quarter of 2010.

The world of 2.0

Social Networking as come of age with Web 2.0. There is no option but to embrace it with open arms since everyone needs to ride this wave if they are to survive in the World of 2.0.

Thought its opportune to share some notes on Web 2.0 as a platform since it is deffinitely an enabling platform for both individuals and enterprises alike in addressing their respective objectives whether it be social networking or leveraging on its capabilities to extend the boundaries of your enterprise to extend the business benefits of same.

Cloud Computing Options

As the discussion of Cloud Computing and the possibilities dawn to organizations, I thought it would be opportune to put on the table the spectrum of options which may open out to organizations at different stages of adoption of this emerging trend.

Private.Public.Hybrid are broadly the options.

Many would be confortable establising their own clouds within their data centers as proivate clouds and then slowly moving to Hybrid model where the web applications are hosted in the public cloud where as the rest would be in the private cloud. As the concept matures and concerns with regard to governance and security gets addressed we would see wide spread adoption of the public cloud.

The scale ultimately will drive the cost of the cloud down in enabling a wide-spread adoption like the Internet.

Framework to assess Organization's SOA maturity

The Open Group's SOA Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) provides organizations a framework to assess its SOA maturity level. The model consists of 7 levels of maturity and 7 dimensions of considerations that represent significant views of IT and Business capabilities.
This helps organizations to assess the current state and desired state of adoption of SOA.

IT intensity as a measure of IT enablement in organizations

IT intensity is a company's IT expense as a factor of its Operational expenses. A higher ITintensity would mean that businesses would be using IT innovatively in its value chain to drive its growth.

It's a good practice for organizations to benchmark their IT intensity with peers in the same industry segments with a view of establishing a competitive landscape vis-a-vis their objectives and KPIs.

Organizations who have low IT intensity will look to outsource IT for greater efficiency, availability, costs as well as thought leadership from the outsourced partner to leverage business benefits of IT.

Organizations who have high IT intensity will look to establishing a strong IT organization internally primarily to drive its business strategies since they see IT as a strategic business lever.

CIO: Chief Innovations Officer?

In today's context, CIO plays a pivotal role in providing stewardship for Businesses to leaverage business benefits through investments in innovative technologies. CIO's ability to lead innovations in and organizations is key for an organization stay competitive.......................read more on this @ http://www.mitcio.com/

Are you ready to embrace the Cloud ?

Cloud Computing is gathering momentum in SME as a cost effective way to host your applications. Is your organization ready to embrace that wave?

Some interesting views expressed at a panel discussion on Cloud Computing at the recently clocluded MIT Sloan's CIO Symposium 2009 @
http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/05/25/mit-sloan-cio-symposium-keynote-panel-part-four-cloud-computing/

Business/IT Alignment - How critical is it for the success of business?

This has been a hotly pursued topic and I have spoken in length on this subject at various forums and wish to share my views if anyone is interested.

You can also view one of my recent presentations at a CXO Summit in Colombo, Sri Lanka conducted by ISACA, Sri Lanka Chapter @ http://www.isaca.lk/node/59