Our services fall into five major groupings: strategic business planning and improvement, IT strategic planning, project services, CIO support, and in-house workshops:

Strategic business planning

Far too much business strategic "planning" consists of little more than throwing vague, high-level ideas at a flip-chart and seeing what sticks. At IT Catalysts, we promote a step-by-step chain of logic that begins with strategic intent and ends with a concrete roadmap that will carry you through the change. Here are the steps:

There's a lot behind each of these steps. If you'd like to discuss them further, please contact us. We'd be delighted to schedule a call.

IT strategic planning

IT strategy merges three sources that together shape IT's direction: Company strategy and what it will require of IT, improving any of the IT organization's capabilities that aren't what they need to be, and turning your vision of what IT needs to become into reality.

Here's what we do to support the process:

  • Assess the company strategy to determine the IT capabilities it demands.

  • Assess your company's effectiveness at making appropriate use of information technology.

  • Assess the effectiveness of your IT organization and recommend ways to improve it.

  • Conduct a "visioning exercise" with you and your leadership team.

  • Review your company's IT governance processes and recommend improvements and alternatives.

  • Collaboratively develop an integrated IT plan.

Behind our recommendations is our proprietary IT Organizational Performance Model - an interconnected view of the 150 factors that drive the effectiveness of information technology organizations. We use it to drill down from symptoms to root causes, and to connect root causes to one or more of the thirty "key leverage points" CIOs can directly influence.

If you'd like more information about how we can work with you, or are interested in learning more about our IT Organizational Performance Model and what it can do for you ... well, we'd like to provide it. Here's our contact form, so we can make it happen.

 

IT Cost Management

Right now, most CIOs are concerned about finding ways to reduce costs without destroying their ability to provide vital services.

We can help. The same tools and techniques we use to assess organizational effectiveness and plan strategy are ideally suited to developing:

  • Pain-free ways to reduce costs (we can usually find a few, just not as many as you would like).
  • Opportunities to address responsibilities more efficiently.
  • Improved governance, to engage the entire business in deciding what to keep and what to jettison.
In particular, IT Catalysts recognizes the importance of managing overhead and unit costs separately - that this makes the difference between cutting costs by harming delivery and cutting costs through improved effectiveness.

Project services

We wrote the book on project management. Okay, it was a short book (Bare Bones Project Management: What you can't not do, by Bob Lewis) but it's a book nonetheless, and it's earned a perfect 5 in its Amazon.com customer reviews. We can help you improve project results by:

  • Assessing your current project management practices and recommending improvements.
  • Providing project management training and coaching.
  • Providing business sponsor coaching and consulting.
  • Reviewing your current project status reporting and suggesting improvements.
And if you have a project that's in serious trouble, ask us about our Project Rescue Service. We will quickly:
  • Determine why the project has derailed.
  • Develop a "rescue roadmap" describing the steps necessary to salvage the effort.
  • Provide a dispassionate perspective on the relative risks of attempting the salvage or terminating the effort.
  • At your option, assist you during the salvage effort.

CIO support

As CIO, the help you need can't always be packaged in the form of formal assessments, strategies or other project-sized engagements.

Sometimes, you just need to talk things over with an informed, unbiased advisor. Or, you need someone from outside the organization to help convey a complex or difficult message to the executive team. Or, you need help to bring your own management team into alignment on a tough issue.

Or ...

Whatever kind of support you need, in whatever form or size of engagement, we're here to provide it, either on a schedule, or as the need arises.

Workshops

We provide three in-house workshops. The first two cover IT strategic planning and technical architecture management. The third -- our newest -- helps CIOs put the principles articulated in Bob Lewis's groundbreaking book, Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology, into practice.

All three are working sessions that will help you set direction and put a practical plan of action together that will start your organization moving in the right direction.

IT strategic planning workshop

If a full-blown IT strategic planning process is more than you can manage, we've organized a two day working session that guides you and your IT leadership team through the steps needed to create a clear IT strategy that establishes leadership goals, organizational priorities, and resource allocation.

The 2-Day IT Strategic Planning Workshop isn't a substitute for full-fledged IT strategic planning. But if your budget and schedule won't support a complete strategic plan and you aren't satisfied with the way you've been setting direction, this is an excellent solution.

It's also an excellent way to jump-start your IT strategic planning process by giving your leadership team a common framework for thinking about IT strategy and practical experience in its development.

Technical architecture management workshop

In just two days, you can take control of your technical architecture.

If you're looking for a comprehensive methodology you can use to generate an enterprise architecture and a services encyclopedia complete with fully developed use cases ... look elsewhere. We've seen too many instances of these turning into either one-time wastes of effort or ongoing white-paper factories.

In one day we can show you and your staff how to use IT Catalysts' proprietary technical architecture portfolio management tool, and will help you make a serious start documenting your architecture at all three layers: Applications, information, and platform.

Then we'll schedule a return visit after you've finished the documentation (a process that rarely requires more than a few staff-days of effort). We will facilitate a planning clinic, working with you to start the process of planning and managing your technology portfolio.

NEW! KJR Manifesto planning workshop

Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology is one of those rare books that is both visionary and pragmatic. It describes what might be described as a radically practical new thought process for both the purpose of corporate IT organizations and how to lead them so they achieve that purpose.

If you've read the Manifesto, have decided it describes what you want to accomplish, and are looking for more guidance on how to get there ... and help getting everyone behind the effort ... this one-day facilitated workshop is exactly what you need. It will help you and your leadership team decide where the best opportunities are to get things started, what will be needed to get them started, and what the rest of the roadmap should look like to transform, not just your IT organization, but how the entire enterprise thinks about information technology and the IT organization.