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: Digital Manufacturing

What It Is: Manufacturing continues to move rapidly down a continuum from the highly manual to the digital, from disconnected, asynchronous activities to integrated, orchestrated actions, across an ever-expanding and diverse set of components

Why It Matters: Defining a holistic strategy that enables agility and flexibility, that provides structure without limiting innovation, can be a highly complex activity, but one that is well worth the investment given the right strategy can unlock value in multiple ways (production capacity, productivity, improved quality and safety, etc.), particularly in situations where there is a diverse footprint in place

Key Concepts

Design with a framework in mind, that is intended to connect, monitor, track, orchestrate, and optimize performance within and across digital facilities
Establish data ownership, data management, and data governance to enable long-term value
Think of individual facilities as having varied configurations of logically common components
Manage individual components so that they can be relatively commoditized and replaced easily
Understand that the goal is to optimize the overall system, harmonizing workers and equipment
Design the framework to enable adding individual components rapidly, with minimal disruption
Leverage the framework to create an environment that can simulate changes pre-deployment
Define strategies to insulate legacy equipment so that it integrates the same as modern assets
Work with OEMs to facilitate transition between bolt-on analytics to intelligent equipment
Integrate AR where it provides incremental value without adding complexity / distraction
Reduce complexity with AI, enabling operators to be more productive, effective, and safe
Integrate learning and development content dynamically based on operator experience

Approach

Provide required internal/external connectivity, infrastructure, and monitoring across locations
Identify connected components across facilities by function (equipment, devices, sensors, etc.)
Define relevant personas and capabilities to enable digital workers (shop floor to facility leaders)
Architect the environment to treat individual components as actors in a connected ecosystem
Identify integration standards and relevant characteristics per component to enable analytics
Design facility data solutions to allow for structured and unstructured data aligned to the cloud
Establish an infrastructure for orchestration that can coordinate activity across connected actors
Gather, analyze, and optimize processes given performance data and operating characteristics
Analyze observations centrally to leverage insights and opportunities across similar facilities
Extend the boundaries of orchestration incorporate customers, suppliers, and partners

For Additional Information: Transforming Manufacturing

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 11/19/2025

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

InBrief: IT Value/Cost Optimization

What It Is: IT Value/Cost Optimization is the process of adjusting IT spend relative to the value being created through IT services in the interest of finding the optimal balance for an organization

Why It Matters: When organizations face financial challenges, there is often a desire to reduce expense. The challenge is that the activity is often managed as a cost cutting exercise focused on direct labor, without regard to other, less disruptive opportunities that exist if a more holistic approach was taken

Key Concepts

Optimization should be a continual activity. Doing it periodically increases negative impacts
The activity requires a clear understanding of costs (direct and indirect) and value being created
Where spending isn’t governed, it is likely inflated and suboptimized
The scale and complexity of a technology footprint has a direct relationship to labor cost
Direct labor should be the last lever adjusted. It represents the potential to create value
Every $1MM you save in other ways is 8 headcounts (@$125k) you could have to perform work
If you can eliminate >5% of your workforce for performance, you aren’t managing it effectively
In the event labor ever becomes “numbers on a spreadsheet”, ask someone else to manage cost
In my experience, people would take other levers more seriously if their headcount was in play

Approach

IT Operations – Provide critical, minimum data to enable benchmarking and governance
Portfolio Management – Ensure effective prioritization, slotting, and resource utilization
Release Strategy – Have a disciplined to minimize operating disruptions and optimize utilization
Enterprise Architecture – Establish a capability to develop blueprints, simplify, and standardize
Applications – Rationalize on an ongoing basis to manage costs and promote speed-to-market
Data – Promote interoperability, minimize data movement, and avoid monolithic solutions
Artificial Intelligence – Establish a disciplined and governed process for AI introduction and use
Technologies – Minimize duplication and manage end-of-life to avoid disruptive costs
Infrastructure – Unless there is a legal or compliance-related reason, shift to external providers
Cloud – Develop a FinOps capability to review and adjust resource consumption to avoid waste
Licensing – Establish an ongoing process to review, optimize, and manage license transitions
Modernization – Actively modernize solutions to avoid episodic efforts that increase costs
Services – Define a workforce and sourcing strategy, govern relationships, negotiate effectively
Labor – Establish a competency model, manage utilization effectively, handle underperformance

For Additional Information: Optimizing the Value 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 10/30/2025

InBrief: Application Rationalization

What It Is: App Rationalization is the process of reducing redundancies that exist in an application portfolio in the interest of reducing complexity, cost of ownership, and improving speed-to-market.

Why It Matters: Organizations typically spend anywhere between 50-80% of their IT budget maintaining and supporting systems in place. That limits investment in innovation and competitive advantage.

Key Concepts

Understand that rationalization is more about change management than technology
Ensure there are healthy relationships in place and strong leadership support for the work
Focus in on critical areas of the portfolio that drive cost. Don’t boil the ocean
Don’t worry about creating the perfect infrastructure day one. Clean that up along the way
Start with how your business operates and simplify and standardize processes first
Align your future blueprint as cleanly to your desired operating footprint as possible
Consider your Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud, and security strategies in the future vision
Simplification can come through reducing both unique applications and instances of applications
Address how systems will be supported and enhanced moving forward in your design
Explicitly include milestones for decommissioning in your roadmap. Don’t let that go undone
Expect the work to continually evolve and adapt. Plan for change and adjust responsively
Include rationalization as part of your ongoing portfolio strategy so it’s not a one-time event

Approach

Align – Obtain organizational support critical to defining vision, scope, and facilitating change
Understand – Gather an understanding of the current state and alignment to operations
Evaluate – Leverage something like the Gartner TIME model to evaluate portfolio quality and fit
Strategize – Develop a future state blueprint, CBA, and proposed changes to the environment
Socialize – Obtain feedback, iterate, clarify the vision, and finalize the initial roadmap
Mobilize – Launch first wave of delivery, realign ongoing work as required
Execute – Deliver on 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals, governing and adjusting the approach as you go

For Additional Information: Part 1: Managing the Intangibles, Part 2: Laying the Foundation, Part 3: Executing the Process

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

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more? Please leave a comment and contact info. I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 10/29/2025