IT Professional's Guide to Budgeting and Cost Control

 

 
IT Professional's Guide to Budgeting and Cost Control
Publisher: TechRepublic
162 Pages; Metal Bound; plus CD ROM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Strategic Planning

• Defining the ideal IT organization
• The 'Big Rules' of IT architecture
• CIOs need to engineer the company's 'strategy machine' 
• Are your customers satisfied?
• Identifying core business processes is first step toward customer satisfaction 
• How to create an aligned enterprise
• Managing customer expectations is key to aligning IT with business 
• Why IT business alignment veers off track and how you can keep it on course 
• Portfolio management keeps IT aligned with business strategy 
  IT's responsiveness tied to agility 
• Position IT support as a business function
• What CIOs need to know about ISO 9000 standards

Business Intelligence

• The intelligent organization: An introduction to BI 
• Is your business intelligence suffering from the Information Paradox?
• Use this architecture to structure your business intelligence solutions
• Building the business intelligence solution: Back-room issues 
• Use BI tools to ease merger and acquisition IT integration issues
• Business intelligence tools are key to building profits 
• Use business intelligence to boost sales and profitability 
• Use business intelligence to dump bad customers and target promotions 

Finance

• Learning to speak the CFO's language can help ensure IT dollars are spent wisely 
• When it comes to IT investment, CIOs need to take the helm 
• Closer spending scrutiny isn't necessarily all bad for CIOs 
• IT managers should help develop capital budgets
• Stretch the tech budget with a think-tank approach 
• Use these tips to get your budgets approved
• An ROI primer: Learn the basics and the key shortcomings of this metric 
• Depreciating PCs: Learn why accounting methods make a difference 
  How to simplify environments and cut TCO

Project Management

• Effective project management efforts have business goals attached 
• How to accurately estimate and forecast in project management 
• Think long and hard before giving that 'ballpark estimate' 
• The best way to scrutinize a project budget 
• Solid best practices can thwart tech project chaos 
• Improve your development processes with the Capability Maturity Model
• Ten tips for successful capacity planning
• Evaluate these three factors to manage project risk 

Mergers and Acquisitions

• The art of technology due diligence
• Preparing for IT due diligence
• IT due diligence: The on-site discovery visit
• Write an effective IT due diligence report
• Three rules for successful staff assimilation in an acquisition 
• Strategy is critical for melding technology during acquisitions
• Measuring the results of an acquisition
• How to survive mergers and acquisitions 
• Lead your team through challenging adjustment to a merger
• Systems integration is key to the blended environment 

IT Management

• Identify your IT partners and then work on building their loyalty
• Have you 'Enron-proofed' your vendor relationships? 
• The four key elements in effective systems management
• Implement these disciplines for effective systems management
• How to measure system availability targets
• Implement problem management with these seven steps
• Think before you measure
• Real IT managers use real metrics 
• Improve your IT department's performance by calculating key equations
• Use these guidelines to measure the performance of IT
• Scorecards help keep the enterprise on strategy 
• Find a place in IT for marketing and take the burden of selling off IT
• Avoid the cost of IT management promotion failures 
• Getting the best resumes from HR requires a little elbow grease

Leadership

• Tough management decisions demand integrity
• Flexibility is the key to overcoming your ignorance 
• Give your managers a little extra room to do it their way 
• Your manager lacks vision—so what's the problem?
• Five rules for dealing with orders you don't agree with 
• Strategies for boosting communication with the CEO and fellow board members 
• These motivation methods counter retention and morale issues
• Chiefs' passion for technology drives business success
• What IT managers can learn from IBM’s Lou Gerstner