InBrief: The Role of Architecture

What It Is: Architecture provides the structure, standards, and framework for how technology strategy should be manifested and governed, including its alignment to business strategy, capabilities, and priorities. It should ideally be aligned at every level, from the enterprise to individual delivery projects

Why It Matters: Technology is a significant enabler and competitive differentiator in most organizations. Architecture provides a mental model and structure to ensure that technology delivery is aligned to overall strategies that create value. Having a lack of architecture discipline is like building a house without a blueprint… it will cost more to build, not be structurally sound, and expensive to maintain

Key Dimensions

Operating Model – How you organize around and enable the capability
Enable Innovation – How you allow for rapid experimentation and introduction of capabilities
Accelerating Outcomes – How you promote speed-to-market through structured delivery
Optimizing Value/Cost – How you manage complexity, minimize waste, and modernize
Inspiring Practitioners – How you identify skills, motivate, enable, and retain a diverse workforce
Performing in Production – How you promote ongoing reliability, performance, and security

Operating Model

Design the model to provide both enterprise oversight and integrated support with delivery
Ensure there is two-way collaboration, so delivery informs strategy and standards and vice versa
Foster a “healthy” tension between doing things “rapidly” and doing things “right”

Innovate

Identify and thoughtfully evaluate emerging technologies that can provide new capabilities that promote competitive advantage
Engage in experimentation to ensure new capabilities can be productionized and scaled

Accelerate

Develop standards, promote reuse, avoid silos, and reduce complexity to enable rapid delivery
Ensure governance processes promote engagement while not gating or limiting delivery efficacy

Optimize

Identify approaches to enable simplification and modernization to promote cost efficiency
Support benchmarking where appropriate to ensure cost and quality of service is competitive

Inspire

Inform talent strategy ensuring the right skills to support ongoing innovation and modernization
Provide growth paths to enable fair and thoughtful movement across roles in the organization

Perform

Integrate cyber security throughout delivery processes and ensure integrated monitoring for reliability and performance in production, across hosted and cloud-based environments

For Additional Information: Enterprise Architecture in an Adaptive World, InBrief: The Intelligent Enterprise 2.0, The Future of IT

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 02/12/2026

InBrief: Transformation

What It Is: Transformation is the process of reshaping a way of working in the interest of achieving a significant and measurable impact in business results

Why It Matters: When faced with changing market conditions, competitive threats, technology advancements, etc., it is critical for organizations to reinvent themselves. This typically involves changes to process, organization, and technology and doing so in a thoughtful manner is critically important

Critical Dimensions

A Compelling Vision – The desired future state should be clear enough to create emotional investment and the commitment required to overcome the inertia that naturally resists change
Clear Business Outcomes –There should be tangible goals established (along with key financial and operating metrics) to inform prioritization and guide critical decisions throughout execution
Courageous, Committed Leadership – Transformation efforts are complex and require resilience, decisiveness, persistence, and determination to work through adversity along the way
A Supportive Culture – The environment and culture within an organization will have an impact on the degree of change that is possible to achieve overall and the rate at which it can be done
A Thoughtful Approach – It is tempting in larger programs to initiate too much work, too quickly, causing significant disruption and suboptimal results (or even programs to fail overall). Given that a lot of learnings tend to occur in terms of processes, standards, and governance in initial delivery efforts, it is often the case that incubating large programs with a smaller, expert team and extending and scaling afterward is a more effective way to build momentum and reduce risk
Results-Orientation – Another problem in large transformation efforts is taking on too much, too early in terms of scope that can substantially defer any benefit realization, by comparison with a consistent, incremental delivery environment that is both predictable and repeatable over time
Adaptability and Agility – Transformation efforts are messy, involve complexity, and typically run into a host of issues throughout execution. It is critical to maintain a high level of transparency into ongoing work, have an active and engaged governance process, and to make decisions efficiently and thoughtfully as they are needed during execution. Roadmaps produced at the start of large programs rarely remain unchanged for very long, and it’s important that every inflection point is taken as an opportunity to learn, improve, and respond versus react
Patience and Discipline – Sustainable change takes time. While it’s possible to force a level of change in the short-term and achieve incremental benefits, systemic and holistic changes to the way an organization operates take time. Managing the process in a disciplined way both helps achieve overall results faster as well as mitigate risk

For Additional Information: The Seeds of Transformation, The Criticality of Culture, On “Delivering at Speed”

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 01/28/2026

InBrief: Consulting vs GenAI

What It Is: Companies lean on consulting organizations to bring capabilities to bear in the interest of solving problems. GenAI has caused disruption in how organizations are thinking about that relationship

Why It Matters: Organizations want to spend money effectively in the interest of fostering innovation, creating competitive advantage, and generating value. The relatively low cost and speed with which one can write prompts and obtain rapid, well-formed responses challenges many aspects of the time and cost involved in traditional consulting efforts, which is the focus of this article

Where GenAI is Helpful

It’s important to acknowledge that leveraging AI can be a relatively easy and highly effective way to quickly surface content that is informative and pertinent to a given subject or request

Some Additional Considerations, however… in favor of Consultants

If every complex business problem was as simple as reading a book, that book would’ve been written (many have, in fact), everyone would read it, and achieved peak effectiveness already. Except, that’s not the case. We don’t operate in a perfect world of theoretical norms. Real life involves context and specifics, including the dynamics, idiosyncrasies, and people that are part of organizations. Part of the role consultants play is to translate and apply conceptual ideals to real-world environments, and that’s one of the ways that they create value for their clients
Part of what you buy with consulting is also institutional knowledge that comes from experience working in a given industry, access to other organizations and the ways they operate, etc., that is not “publicly available”. With the advent of AI, there will be a rise in proprietary data providers that cover gaps in what is available in the public domain, but if you are contracting to access those additional insights, you’re essentially still paying someone for outside perspective
Business challenges are complex, have multiple dimensions, and your priorities play a significant role in what you ultimately achieve. Part of the value consultants provide is not just providing a laundry list of things to do or concepts to consider, but a thoughtful list of priorities and way to navigate complex situations with your organization’s realities and your environment in mind
Another reason organizations look to consultants is to help foster and promote innovation. Innovation, by definition, is not “best practice”. It exists in the white space between what is and what could be, and that is not something that can be harvested from a knowledge base, no matter how quickly you can access it, or how well-formed it appears on a screen. It is a creative act in itself, and having someone help facilitate that process can create substantial value
To the extent that a consultancy is providing experience on something that is outside of an organization’s core competency, understanding the quality of what comes from an AI-only solution could be difficult to impossible. If that inquiry is critical to your business, the next question is whether you want to place a bet without understanding whether the answer is based in fact or potential “hallucinations” and the degree to which it is comprehensive at all
While it is not always the nature of consulting, having an unbiased perspective can be extremely valuable. The result of an AI inquiry can be based on the nature of the prompt that was written and what the tool knows about that requestor themself. Strategy consultants are meant to eliminate a level of confirmation bias that could limit the potential of what is possible
Finally, while we may trust technology to varying degrees in every day life, there is something to be said with the level of trust it takes to rely on it without a level of objective and authoritative support. Prompting can lead to continually refined results, but there is also value and a benefit to having conversation, a true understanding of needs, and the comfort that comes with actual human interaction and discourse and a solution that is right for “you”.

For Additional Information: Courageous Leadership, Relentless Innovation, and Pushing the Envelope

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 01/22/2026

InBrief: CIO and CTO Roles

What It Is: Technology organizations are sometimes led through a combination of CIO and CTO roles, working towards a shared vision, each having a clear focus in the interest of promoting IT excellence

Why It Matters: Technology continues to advance at a rate, particularly with the introduction of AI, that exceeds many organizations ability to respond effectively. Having the right leadership in place to develop strategy, consider longer-term implications of decisions made in ongoing delivery, and govern execution can be key to avoiding technical debt, while promoting delivery excellence over time

Five Types of CTOs

Technology Strategist – This is the most common modern orientation, focused on enablement, simplification, optimization, and capability delivery
Mistitled CIO – This occurs when the CTO actually has all the typical CIO responsibilities and they are fulfilling that role in every way, leading IT, setting direction, etc. without the CIO title
Futurist – This occurs where the CTO plays a more directional, but not action-oriented role, focused on white/position papers, and ideation
Infrastructure Lead – This is the historical role of a CTO, focused more on hosting, networking, reliability, performance, and operations with the CIO covering applications and data
Lead Designer / Senior Developer – This generally the case in start-up/smaller scale product environments, where the CTO leads the product design and helps code the solution

High-Level Differences

CIO focuses on the “what”, obtains business alignment and identifies capabilities, along with desired technology capabilities, focuses on the customer and providing vision and direction
CTO focuses on the “how”, understands desired business capabilities, determines how to provide technical capabilities and deliver on commitments, partnering with the broader team
Both roles participate in governance, CIO provides and aligns business priorities, CTO provides and aligns technical priorities in support of the CIO

When It Makes Sense to Have a CTO in Addition to a CIO

There is sufficient time required working with business partners that additional support is needed to define and evolve the technology strategy and work actively with delivery leaders
There is considerable complexity in the technology footprint, a high degree of transformation, or substantial integration required across ongoing delivery where having the CIO focused in the weeds of execution could result in underserving the business team and executive leadership
There is a need to move multiple levers (cloud platform migration, modernization, core platform implementation, AI integration, etc.) that a level of dedicated focus and oversight is needed to work through the risks and impacts of various strategies to define the best technology solution
When the scale of the organization in people, internally, externally, including customers, suppliers, and partners exceeds one person’s ability to manage relationships effectively
Where the CIO has a business background and it is helpful to supplement their capabilities with a more technology-focused leader overall

Benefits of Having a “Healthy Tension”

There can be a natural tension created when there is a separation of roles, because a CIO generally is incented to deliver new business capabilities at speed and the CTO should be incented to do things “right” to minimize long-term cost of ownership, managing technical debt, promoting standards and governance, and improving predictability of the delivery environment
Business delivery will generally be top priority, but having a CTO can mitigate the impact of tradeoffs made during delivery, particularly in large programs, where consequences are higher

The Downside:

There is incremental cost associated with adding leadership roles, there can be confusion across the broader IT leadership if roles and responsibilities aren’t clear, and a strong CIO/CTO partnership is important to making the role effective in practice
That being said, the value to any organization with a relatively large technology footprint would likely far exceed the cost of having a CTO focused on managing complexity and optimizing cost

The Difference Between CTO and Chief Architect

The CTO is the keeper of the overall technology strategy, apps, data, infrastructure, security integration with all of the above (working with the CISO), inclusive of the delivery environment
A “Chief Architect” tends to be more narrowly focused on application and data architecture strategy, but with awareness on how to incorporate cloud and platform strategy as well
A Chief Architect could be a role reporting to the CTO, depending on the scale of the organization, focused more on defining, modernizing, or rationalizing the enterprise ecosystem of connected components, acting more like a designer than a strategist, where a CTO without this role would generally do both at the enterprise level

For Additional Information: InBrief: IT Excellence, Fast and Cheap, Isn’t Good

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 01/17/2026

InBrief: IT Operations

What It Is: IT Operations provides “IT for IT”, the infrastructure to track, monitor, and manage operating performance across various dimensions, depending on the scale and complexity of the organization

Why It Matters: The more an IT organization scales in headcount and complexity, the more important it becomes to have a way to benchmark performance and enable operational excellence

Key Concepts

IT Ops is a support organization meant to promote effectiveness, not create bureaucracy
Ops should be centralized regardless of the IT operating model (functional, product-based, etc.)
For large-scale organizations, a federated IT Ops model is preferable for overall org effectiveness

Key Dimensions

Transparency

Without visibility, it is nearly impossible to promote excellence and operational improvement
Focus should be on critical, minimum metrics that enable governance and benchmarking
Metrics can span from a leadership IT scorecard to portfolio and delivery metrics

Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management

IT Ops doesn’t need to provide PMO services, but it should ensure they exist and are effective
Compliance capabilities can be everything from regulatory and SOX to cyber security and audit

Portfolio Management

IT Ops may not provide the services, but should ensure that transparency and governance exist
Capabilities can span demand generation and prioritization to monitoring and value realization

Workforce and Sourcing Strategy

IT Ops should monitor internal/external performance, utilization, and workforce composition

Financial Management

IT Ops should help benchmark value/cost across IT at a service level and identify improvements

Continuous Improvement

IT Ops should identify and track operational excellence opportunities on an ongoing basis
Part of ongoing improvement should be reviewing and ensuring efficacy of IT services overall

For Additional Information: On Health and Transparency, Making Governance Work, Creating Value Through Strategy, Optimizing the Value of IT, On Managing Customer Relationships

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

– CJG 12/15/2025

InBrief: IT Portfolio Management

What It Is: IT Portfolio Management is the process whereby technology investments are prioritized, managed, and governed (from demand management through delivery) on an ongoing basis, in the interest of enabling business strategy, maximizing return, minimizing risk, and providing security and compliance.

Why It Matters: Organizations don’t have unlimited capacity in terms of people, funding, ability to adopt new solutions, etc. and ensuring investments is essential to maximizing value in relation to spend

Overall Concepts

Portfolio management is about leadership and business partnership first, and process second
Portfolio reviews should produce schedule changes, delivery engagement, or risk management
Understanding total cost of ownership and effective resource management are critical input
Performing named resource planning versus role-based is important for critical roles

Transparency and Governance

Provide visibility into demand, scope, value, complexity, critical resource needs
Monitor ongoing delivery to proactively address risk and maintain and adjust release calendar
Evaluate and report on value realization, adjust metrics on new demand to improve efficacy

Portfolio Allocation

Typically includes: Innovation, Business Projects, Modernization, Security, Compliance, Operate
Prioritization model balance local versus global efforts, short- and long-term value

Release Management

Have a structured release approach with deployment windows to reduce risk and ease adoption
Frontload the first half of the year to avoid excess resource availability issues near the holidays
Separate major and minor releases, maintenance, and experiments into defined release slots

Change Management

Manage a global view of deployments to avoid schedule conflicts and manage end user change
Maintain an end-user view of technology and consider integration to avoid being project-centric

Tools

Portfolio management tools should enable and support the process, never become the focus
Gather only critical data that is actionable, or it is administrative overhead and likely wasteful

For Additional Information: Thoughts on Portfolio Management, Fast and Cheap, Isn’t Good, Creating Value Through Strategy, Optimizing the Value of IT, On Managing Customer Relationships

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 12/10/2025

InBrief: Developing IT Strategy

What It Is: An overall IT Strategy sets direction for an organization, providing a framework for the services IT provides, along with key dimensions and objectives, with flexibility to evolve over time

Why It Matters: With the ever-increasing demand for innovation in a competitive, but cost-conscious environment, a thoughtful strategy accelerates results, reduces cost and risk, and enables sustainability

Key Concepts

Technology strategy always needs to be rooted in a business-enabling approach
It is tempting to over-index on one dimension (e.g., cost management) and sacrifice capability
Excellence in IT is rooted in having business aligned objectives, with a disciplined approach
This model is organized around five key dimensions, which should be defined and prioritized
A simple IT scorecard could be created using how business partners evaluate each dimension
This article focuses on delivering IT objectives, IT Excellence focuses on “how to operate” in IT

Key Dimensions

Innovate – Promote Competitive Advantage

Map to business goals, establish a disciplined innovation process aligned to architecture strategy
Metrics: Increased competitive capabilities, Improved customer satisfaction (int/ext)

Accelerate – Deliver with Quality and Speed

Optimize investments, promote quality / standards / reuse, facilitate continuous improvement
Metrics: Reduced time-to-market, increased on-time delivery, increased quality

Optimize – Deliver at the Right Cost of Service

Reduce complexity, optimize costs, continually modernize, leverage workforce strategy
Metrics: Increased value/cost ratio, reduced technical debt, reduced complexity

Inspire – Promote Sustainable Productivity and Engagement

Promote a healthy culture, develop employees, enable collaboration, provide transparency
Metrics: Low voluntary attrition, high average utilization, high employee satisfaction

Perform – Ensure Production Security, Reliability, and Performance

Monitor and invest in production health, establish “zero trust”, manage critical vulnerabilities
Metrics: High availability, low unplanned outages, zero security incidents

For Additional Information: Creating Value Through Strategy, Enterprise Architecture in an Adaptive World

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 11/25/2025

InBrief: IT Excellence

What It Is: Excellence is core to creating sustainable value through technology in any organization

Why It Matters: Technology advances so rapidly that most organizations can’t keep up. The balance of agility and discipline, speed and quality are essential to optimizing the value of IT at the right cost

Key Dimensions

Courageous Leadership

Excellence requires tenacity, agility, flexibility, risk appetite, humility, and discipline
Given leadership sets the tone and direction for everything else, this is critical to get right
Need to be an advocate, champion, and business partner, knowing when to say “no” if needed

Transformative Culture

Remaining competitive in a continually evolving world requires a culture that enables change
Culture is expressed in what people see as much or more than anything they hear in speeches
Core values need to be consistently demonstrated from leaders to individual contributors

Relentless Innovation

Consider what happens in the technology strategy if core solutions are obsolete in 18-24 months
Make disciplined innovation part of the ongoing portfolio strategy to maintain competitive edge
Plan for “urban” renewal so there is minimal need for large scale, disruptive modernization

Operating with Agility

Establish strong business partnerships to respond to changes in portfolio composition/priorities
Create a minimally invasive, highly transparent operating infrastructure to drive efficiencies
Leverage workforce and sourcing strategy to provide the right capabilities at the right cost

Framework-Centric Design

Leverage enterprise architecture to establish a connected enterprise of intelligent ecosystems
Develop standards to enable ongoing integration of best-of-breed technology capabilities
Integrate artificial intelligence in thoughtful ways that scale and provide sustainable value

Delivering at Speed

Create a disciplined and repeatable environment for delivering solutions that can scale
Design with architecture, quality, and security in mind, not as an afterthought
Understand that total cost of ownership is as important as speed-to-market most of the time

For Additional Information: Excellence By Design, Why Excellence Matters, The Seeds of Transformation

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 11/21/2025

InBrief: Workforce and Sourcing Strategy

What It Is: Workforce and Sourcing Strategy is the long-term approach that an organization uses to provide the necessary skills, internal and external, to enable capabilities to deliver on business commitments and support the current and future technology footprint

Why It Matters: Having a deliberate and thoughtful strategy not only creates an agile and responsive workforce to meet ongoing and variable business demand, but also does so at the right cost. Where a defined strategy is not in place and being governed, there is very likely cost optimization opportunity

Key Concepts

Business and technology needs fluctuate. A strategy helps mitigate the cost impact of change
Leverage a competency model internally and externally to benchmark roles, capacity, and costs
Generally speaking, it’s better to align variable capacity to areas of variable demand
Benchmark internal cost of service against best-in-class providers, make adjustments as needed
Understand that not everything needs differentiated service, keep the lights on is valid in cases
Invest in areas where technology creates competitive advantage and IP, outsource elsewhere
Actively manage and govern talent development and performance to optimize productivity
Never assume HC = FTE. Used named resources for capacity planning of critical roles vs FTEs
Source where technology is emerging and immature to facilitate experiments and early learning
It is a reasonable strategy to engage partners in simplification efforts through mutual incentives
Never assume shifting sourcing to captives for arbitrage benefits is a 1:1 FTE exchange, it isn’t
Be mindful in how you manage overall tenure. Motivated inexperience introduces risk and cost
Leverage role-based capacity agreements to shift contract labor costs to a defined model
Scrutinize contracting heavily to avoid inflated cost. Convert or hire longer-term needs
Establish consistent contract language that aligns to service delivery roles and expectations
Define primary and secondary partners for individual sourcing needs, manage them consistently
Negotiate aggressively but fairly, “partnerships” produce more value than a “vendor” mentality
Benchmark and leverage consistent performance metrics across internal and external partners
Apply vendor management and governance processes to captives the same as external partners

Approach

Understand Current State – Benchmarking capacity by role across sources of staff, including cost
Determine What You Need – Evaluate business and industry trends, do the same for technology
Define Sourcing Approach – Identify critical skills to retain and source, and where to get them
Refine Talent Strategy – Clarify gaps between current and future IT staffing, skills and capacity
Develop Transition Plan – Plan change to talent pool and make explicit sourcing decisions
Manage Transition – Define metrics, establish vendor management processes, govern change

For Additional Information: Workforce and Sourcing Strategy – Overview

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 11/05/2025

InBrief: The Intelligent Enterprise 2.0

What It Is: With the advent of AI, the question is how to integrate it effectively at an enterprise level. The long-term view should be a synthesis of applications, AI, and data, working in harmony, providing integrated capabilities that maximize effectiveness and productivity for the end users of technology

Why It Matters: Much like the .com era, there are lofty expectations of what AI can deliver without a fundamental strategy for how those capabilities will be integrated and leveraged at scale. Selecting the right approach that balances tactical gains with strategic infrastructure will be critical to optimizing and delivering differentiated value rapidly and consistently in a highly competitive business environment

Key Concepts

AI is a capability, not an end in itself. User-centered design is more important than ever
Resist the temptation to treat AI as a one-off and integrate it with existing portfolio processes
The end goal is to expose and harness all of an organization’s capabilities in a consistent way
Agentic solutions will become much more mainstream, along with orchestration of processes
The more agentic solutions become standard, the less application-specific front ends are needed
Natural language input will become common to reduce manual entry in various processes
We will shift from content via LLMs to optimizing processes and transactions via causal models
AI should help personalize solutions, reduce complexity, and improve productivity
Only a limited number of sidecar applications can be deployed before overwhelming end users
The less standardized the environment is, the longer it will take to achieve enterprise AI benefits
As with any transformation, don’t try to boil the ocean, have a strategy and migrate over time

Approach

Ensure architecture governance is in place quickly to avoid accruing significant technical debt
Design towards an enterprise architecture framework to enable rapid scaling and deployment
Migrate towards domain-based ecosystems to facilitate evolution and rapid scaling of capability
Enable rapid, disciplined, and governed experiments to explore tools and solution approaches
Place heavy emphasis on integration standards as a means to deploy new AI services with speed
Develop a conceptual “template” for how AI capabilities will be integrated to facilitate reuse
Organize AI services into insights (inform), agents (assist), and experts (benchmark, train, act)
Separate internal from package-provided AI services to provide agility and manage overall costs
Evaluate internal and external solutions by their ability to integrate services and enable agents
Reinforce data management and data governance processes to enable quality insights
Define roles and expectations for those in the organization who develop, use, and manage AI

For Additional Information: Part 1: The Cost of Complexity, Part 2: A Framework for the Future, Part 3: Integrating Artificial Intelligence, Part 4: Evolving Applications, Part 5: Deconstructing Data-Centricity, Part 6: Managing Transition, Part 7: IT Organizational Implications

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 11/03/2025