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8 July 2009 • 7:00 am

Taking the Initiative on Initiatives

By Tenacious Tortoise

Expert facilitators of strategy and change programs understand that an important result of the process of strategic management is the concept of the initiative. We use the word initiative perhaps a bit too casually, for the concept of the initiative is the essential ingredient for accomplishing change. But, like many of the terms we use, the definition of an initiative is not self-evident, and means different things to different people.

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7 July 2009 • 7:00 am

Irrational IT Budgets

By Tenacious Tortoise

Does your enterprise have a single, all-encompassing budget for information technology spending? If so, I’d like to share with you an argument for an alternative approach to IT budgeting that I developed a few years ago.

Instead of one overall IT budget, imagine putting all IT expenditures into two buckets, mandated and discretionary. Mandated spending “keeps the lights on” to operate the business into the foreseeable future “as is,” without making strategic changes. Discretionary spending is simply how the enterprise chooses to invest to change its technology capabilities.
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