There’s a guy named Joe. He has a son. The son is in his early 20s and unmarried. One evening after dinner, the father and son have a conversation.

“Son, I want you to marry a girl of my choice.”

“C’mon Dad,” says the boy, “I want to choose my own bride.”

“Yes, but the girl is Bill Gates’ daughter,” says Joe

Says the son, “Well, in that case… ”

The next morning, Joe gets a call through to Bill Gates.

“I have a husband for your daughter,” says Joe

“But my daughter is too young to marry,” says Bill, startled.

“Yes,” says Joe, “but this young man is a vice-president of the World Bank.”

“Ah, in that case… ”

That afternoon, Joe goes to see the president of the World Bank.

Joe steps into his office and says, “I have a young man to be recommended as a vice-president.”

Says the World Bank president, “But I already have more vice-presidents than I need.”

“Perhaps,” says Joe, “but this young man is Bill Gates’s son-in-law.”

“Ah,” says the President, “in that case… ”

And that, my friends, is how business is done!

Bain & Company surveyed 359 U.S. companies and found that 60% say IT has become an obstacle to growth! Their computer systems have become too complex and do not provide the expected results. The report reveals four factors that largely contribute to the perception by executives that IT is a bottleneck to growth in their companies:

1. Poor business alignment - two-thirds of senior business executives strongly agreed or agreed that IT didn’t understand their business needs or their companies failed to adequately coordinate business and IT changes;
2. Weak value delivery - 67 percent of respondents strongly agreed or agreed that existing IT was underexploited or systems didn’t deliver promised capabilities;
3. Capability sourcing gaps - one-third of respondents strongly agreed or agreed that there was a lack of IT or vendor skills;
4. Ineffective complexity management - nearly half of respondents strongly agreed or agreed that their complex legacy systems lacked the flexibility to stay current with business needs.

Read more at Bain In The News

Nearly 60 percent of people with managerial jobs planned to stay in touch with the office during their vacations this year, according to a survey by the American Management Association. Only 31 percent of managers were taking off more than one week at a time.

Simply Better is *Yet Another Marketing Book to add to the enormous collection of marketing books available at stores and libraries. This book follows the findings of many books preceding it, namely, “listen to your customers and deliver what they need.” The authors come from European academia, so I question how much real-world insight they could have. But the book is an interesting read, with some real-world examples. There’s an “Idea Check” at the end of each chapter which provides a review of what you just read and a list of important points to remember. This book may just be “simply better” than the rest.

Looks like a few marketing/technology missteps has brought Toys “R” Us to the end. A Lesson from Toys “Were” Us: Use Tech to Personalize provides an interesting analysis from eWeek writer Evan Schuman.

When Toys “Were” Us announced that it was going to abandon the toy business, the toy chain was widely seen as another victim of Wal-Mart. But the truth is, the move stemmed from the company’s own inability to use technology to get closer to customers.

I liked those giraffe commercials they ran last year. Not that they got me into the store, but they were entertaining. Make sure you check out some of the rebuttals at the end of the article.

Last summer there was an explosive article in the Harvard Business Review IT Doesn’t Matter by Nicholas Carr, on how IT may go the way of the railroads. So what should companies do? From a practical standpoint, the most important lesson to be learned may be this: When a resource becomes essential to competition but inconsequential to strategy, the risks it creates become more important than the advantages it provides.

Well, Bloor Research in Performance Management and why IT doesn’t matter states the problem is in converting strategic thinking into tactical action.

So, the core question is whether senior executives are any good at developing corporate strategy? All the evidence suggests that, with only a few exceptions, they are not.

In the long run, though, the greatest IT risk facing most companies is more prosaic than a catastrophe. It is, simply, overspending. Studies of corporate IT spending consistently show that greater expenditures rarely translate into superior financial results. In fact, the opposite is usually true. Organizations have a perverted thinking that if they have “the latest and the greatest” software and hardware, they are on the leading edge of IT strategy. Wrong!

You IT guys can read that lingo. This summer has dunked me into several Windows 2003, Exchange 2003 and Office 2003 projects. Undertaking any IT project is fraught with risks and requires a combined understanding from both the technology as well as the business perspective. That’s where Value Management comes in.

One project combined all those technologies plus more. Although the work tasks are now in process, the planning started about 10 months ago. I first thought the greatest difficulty was going to be working around all the users. That’s right: NO downtime. But Microsoft had that figured out already with plenty of wizards to help anyone through an upgrade and migration. No the biggest issue we came up against was Linux.

You see all those old PCs and servers that could no longer run Windows, still have a lot of umph for Linux. And yes the latest round of software does work better together, but there’s plenty of potholes and dangerous curves ahead. My ugliest issue was booting Linux terminal machines using an IP address from Windows DHCP and pulling down a Linux kernel via Linux tftpboot. Sorry for all the lingo, but I’m putting together a whitepaper and am hoping to have it ready by the end of the project (some time in September.) That’s on the technical side.

Our greatest achievement though is on the business side. Boy did the client save money! The final figures aren’t in, but I estimate we achieved a 50% savings from a total Microsoft solution. The old hardware has at least another 3-4 years of life and everyone is getting their work done. Now there’s a reason for celebration.

A “namesake” article in the latest issue of CIO magazine, about the value created by projects: Don’t Stop Thinking About the Value.

CIOs know that project implementation success rates are woefully low. So once a project comes in on time and under budget, CIOs think they’ve won the battle and can move on. Wrong. Here are some strategies for wresting value from systems long after they’ve gone live.