Steve Andriole

I received a lot of emails about February’s column, “Can You Handle the Truth?” Seems that a lot of us think that the truth is, well, the truth — at least from the technology side of the house. But a healthy percentage of the communications were from the other side, the managers who use technology, […]

There’s a great scene in the movie “A Few Good Men” when Jack Nicholson tells Tom Cruise that he “can’t handle the truth.” What about us? Can we handle the truth? How honest are we about our ability to deal with the problems that have held business technology alignment back for decades? I was having […]

One snowy Sunday morning last month I spent some time — a lot of time, actually — on hold with and occasionally actually speaking to “technical support” representatives from Dell. (In fact, I wrote this entire column while on hold with Dell.) Six months ago I purchased a pretty spiffy Dell desktop to complement my […]

Last month I was invited to the Pentagon to talk about the adoption of new technology. It was part of the government’s effort to (once again) “transform” the way it does business. My role was to help them think about how to introduce new technology to old problems, processes and decision-makers. I agreed to go […]

Thin is beautiful — more so now than it was a decade ago. It was beautiful when it was a concept, and it’s even better now that it’s a reality. Let’s step way back. About 10 years ago, Larry Ellison appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss ”network computers.” This was when a lot […]

It’s time to plan your next move. While the technology industry still supports tons of people, spending and hiring trends don’t look all that robust. In fact, there are lots of senior technology professionals still looking for work. What’s going on? Is the demand for our services fading? Are we becoming obsolete? No, but there’s […]

I’ve written about outsourcing before. But since it’s growing at an incredible pace, I think we need to talk about it again — as honestly and realistically as possible. The appeal of outsourcing is still cost savings and, increasingly, discipline in the form of elegant software documentation and improved reliability (in the case of software […]

Let’s keep return-on-investment (ROI) and total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) in perspective. You cannot build a business with these hammers. Are they important? Yes. Insightful? Usually. But obsessive-compulsive TCO/ROI behavior is as unhealthy as obsessive-compulsive quality, learning or re-engineering behavior. Remember these? The ultimate argument for a technology initiative is made in the business case. But key to […]

Whatever happened to mentoring? I don’t mean the casual bonding that sometimes occurs between newer and older employees, but formal mentoring programs designed to accelerate the company knowledge acquisition and communication process. When new people come into an organization, they should be given a month to find a mentor to not only show them the […]

Lots of people I know strongly believe that business technology alignment depends almost completely on the quality and availability of the right people at the right time. Do you agree? Take a look at Figure 1 — an unbalanced scorecard. It’s a tool to help you profile your people according to their capability, energy, ambition […]