I met with a Global 100 company CIO last week and I think his comments were right on track with what other CIOs I have met with in 2007. 

He said "I did the math and IT spent 1,000,000 hours on projects last year.  The #1 thing we can do is to improve project productivity and insure consistency in our delivery".

Sure they have a new global sourcing strategy, an enormous effort to identify people by role (not title), and bleeding edge new technologies to absorb.

At the end of the day, it comes down to project management competencies, lifecycle/workflow optimization, enabling tools, and resource capacity planning.

These are consistent themes that all CIOs are facing regardless of whether you are a CIO in the Fortune 500 or the Fortune 5,000,000. 

Sadly, the enterprise mid-office suites and ERP vendors keep stuffing more and more complex and unusable features into already bloated products to drive more upgrades that IT organizations won't use.

Until the mantra becomes simple, sensible, supportable IT and CIOs expand their technology partner search beyond Microsoft,  their ERP (or worse what the analysts spoon feed them), I have little confidence that things will improve in this decade for many CIOs.

Virtually yours,
Nick Matteucci, MBA

Author: Nick Matteucci is a co-founder of VCSonline.com a web 2.0 project management software company headquartered in St. Louis Missouri. Mr. Matteucci is also an active board member and the Chief Technology Officer for the PMI ISSIG. When not obsessing over virtual project management best practices Mr. Matteucci enjoys spending time with his wife and three small children. He also enjoys travel, running, and all things automotive.

Bookmark this post: