Tag: Risk

It’s the job of senior enterprise leaders to ensure that their organizations are ready for the future. Unfortunately the future is unclear to us—all the more so in this era of rapid change, uncertainty, and complexity. As with the weather, we can foresee the near future with some certainty, but as we look further ahead, […]

There’s something problematic about planning for resilience. On the one hand, we know it’s necessary. If the COVID pandemic taught us nothing else, we learned that unexpected major disruptions can and will occur. And those disruptions will involve not just technology but, in some cases, business processes, personnel, communication, and even the fundamental market characteristics […]

How do you know whether you’re successful in your cloud journey and your digital transformation? Or, when you’re planning your digital initiative, what benefits should you expect and how will you see them reflected in the company’s performance? Given the uncertainty and change in today’s business environment, it’s sometimes hard to find a stable baseline […]

Governance must balance two objectives: it must control, and at the same time it must enable.

Sometimes I think IT leaders are missing a key point in the way they speak to their non-technology counterparts. Case in point: we keep saying things like, “The company has to be more comfortable taking risks,” or “We have to fail fast,” or “We need to be less risk-averse.” I can guarantee that none of […]

It’s no surprise that organizations are worried about becoming locked in to their cloud provider. After all, the history of IT is full of examples of vendors taking advantage of high switching costs to impose restrictive licensing terms and to increase prices. But I think that the cloud is different—and in fact, is making it […]

In an earlier post, I talked about how risk decisions are often compromised by the status quo bias. In this post, I would like to present an alternative way to think about risk—a way that fits well with today’s business practices. To be precise, I want to try to demonstrate that risk in a business […]

I remember an incident from my previous CIO role. A number of us were in a meeting discussing the severe problems we were having with the performance of a large contractor. At one point, someone suggested that we start a new RFP (request for proposal) process to replace the contractor. “Too risky,” said one of […]