Steve Andriole

Enough. IT’s time for a revolution. We’re all tangled up in technologies, processes, standards, governance and deranged technology managers who report to paranoid business executives. God bless the entrepreneurs who keep creating new technology that – unfortunately – more often than not confuse those expected to exploit IT for business value. How about costs? While […]

I have a friend who has three rules of business: “people suck, people suck and people suck.” Sure, he’s a little paranoid but he’s also essentially correct (reminding us that paranoid people can have real enemies). Most of the problems we face as professional technologists are related to people and their personalities, biases and intellectual […]

If you’re new to technology management, much of what appears in this column will strike you as opinionated, cynical and arrogant. But if you’ve been at IT for a while now, you’ll see the contents as accumulated wisdom. I wrote this column for those who have been in the trenches for a long time, and […]

OK, so you’re feeling a little better these days since technology spending has stabilized somewhat (which means that the decreases are smaller then they’ve been). Your company seems to have a handle on what the “new” IT strategy should look like (mostly infrastructure projects, very few big strategic initiatives and very little training around emerging […]

There’s no reason to believe we know everything. Because we don’t. I’m disgusted with the not-invented-here syndrome and even angrier about companies that really believe that the competition is slow, stupid and lazy. Because we’re so good – and so smart, they’re so bad. Oh, and we dress better, too. The fact is that most […]

If I read another article about “the new CIO” or “CIOs in transition,” or “CIO challenges” I will volunteer to be water-boarded and tell everyone what I really think about stating the obvious. Here’s the drivel that comes out of the industry’s “press”: • CIOs should understand the business • CIOs should understand technology • […]

We tend to talk a lot about things long before we do them. We talk, and talk and talk. Then we talk some more. We subscribe to professional talkers like Gartner, Forrester, Cutter and IDC, among countless other sources of brilliance. We talked endlessly about eBusiness, supply chain management, business intelligence and digital security – […]

For lots of CIOs, infrastructure is the essence of their existence. Truth be told, they are Chief Infrastructure Officers. They spend their days and nights keeping the lights on and running the engine. And they do it well. The smart ones exploit commoditization trends, best practices and – especially these days – deep discounts in […]

Last month I argued for a technology two-step. I argued that we have the opportunity to have IT both ways, to have IT save money and make money. I also argued that the people who got us into the economic mess we’re in today handed us a crisis with which we must deal (as they […]

We find ourselves in a conundrum: just as technology hands us some powerful new opportunities, the financial markets constrain our ability to exploit them. What to do? Have IT both ways. Here’s the short list of how to exploit the trends defining the tech industry in 2009 – and beyond – and how to convince […]