Is your enterprise getting the IT it deserves? [Video]

Understanding and aligning the tribes of the digital economy is a key CIO capability — especially when it comes to allocating scarce IT resources for maximum business value.

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I used to tell anybody who would listen: “Organizations get the technology they deserve.”

In doing so I was trying to establish a direct causal relationship between actions and outcomes. I wholeheartedly believe that enterprises that fail to put in the hard work associated with identifying, procuring, installing, operating, maintaining, and ultimately retiring systems will predictably fail to deliver full value on their IT investment.  

CIOs have long recognized that IT expertise, resource, and effort is finite and has to be distributed. I recently discovered that what we in IT call governance has been labeled and studied as “deservingness” — who gets what and why — by social policy wonks, philosophers, political scientists, and medical ethicists. (See Eric M. Uslaner, Chapter 9 “Deservingness,” National Identity and Partisan Polarization…