Does Legacy Organizational Design Threaten to Leave Your Cloud Computing Initiative Up in Smoke? Public, private and hybrid clouds present tremendous opportunity for organizations to reduce costs, lower their carbon footprints and enable more fluid responses to the competing demands for information technology resources. Unfortunately, legacy organizational design may hamstring progress.

Project Planning in Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures. Early involvement of the IT organization in the due diligence that precedes corporate mergers, acquisitions and divestitures is one of the strongest predictors of success. This article examines a planning approach that has garnered praise from clients during successful mergers in the retail and financial services industries.

IT as a Strategic Driver in the Public Sector. With a few notable exceptions, technology issues in the public sector are not substantially different than those in any other large multinational enterprise. Nonetheless, the public sector appears to have three problems (and one superb opportunity) that distinguish it from most other organizations. Technology can enable change through authenticity, connectivity, visibility and availability.

Automating Billing with Perl and the Google Docs API. On a recent project, a client wanted weekly billings to track project expenses. I tracked the information in a Google Spreadsheet, but didn't want to prepare a time sheet each week, so I automated the process with a few common tools.

ICT's Future Requires You to Tear Down Walls. A network organizational structure enables BMW (for instance) to focus on design while a partner hydroforms vehicle chassis, or casts engine blocks. This article argues that advances in technology have enabled a similar structure within enterprise ICT groups, offers practical advice on navigating the transition, and describes resulting enhancements to organizational performance.

Kick Your Excel Habit. Consultants use Excel for nearly everything, including things for which it's not best suited. A new feature from Google Docs can help you kick the Excel habit, liberate you from the monotony of collating and enable you to focus on delivering high-value services to your clients.

Servers Without Hypervisors Are Missing Something. A lot of ink has been spilled about the benefits of virtualization, yet penetration rates are still perplexingly low. Vendors continue to focus on benefits, but their audience is already convinced. Instead, vendors should spend more time articulating just how clients can realize the benefits. This paper offers three ways to unlock the power of virtualization.

Enterprise Mobility. Many companies invest heavily developing web-based solutions that permit users to access important information. And then they go and screw things up by creating a solution that requires people to use a PC. Don't make your mobile workforce haul around a laptop in order to look up a customer's phone number. Instead, account for the unique persona of mobile users when you're designing solutions.

Electronic Social Networks. Electronic social networking platforms such as Facebook provide a mechanism that encourages the development of communities around shared interests and offers participants a low-involvement way to activate latent relationships among one-time associates:

Real-World Web Services. Watching people do the kind of mind-numbing work that computers were created to perform is agonizing. Recently, I spotted a colleague cutting and pasting text (participant data) from thousands of Excel spreadsheets into a master spreadsheet from which she'd assign participants to training facilities. Using Perl and the Google Maps API, I showed her a better way.

Free/Open Source Software. Open source solutions present business with opportunities and risks alike. While investigating open source solutions, firms would do well to identify the obligations they accept by using open source software. They should not be afraid to accept the license terms, but should do so knowingly. A point of view I wrote with David and Richard examines this topic. Another paper titled The New Open Source looks at more recent events in the space and the implications for organizations.

CRM & Project Management. I built a tool that's pretty useful for small businesses. The software was built to be generic and easily customizable for various organizations and implemented in ASP. If you're interested in a license, please contact me. It's free, but I like to keep track of who is using it and make sure it's set up right for your team.