Well, it’s official. I’ve started a company.
It’s called PivotNine, and we’re going to make business better. Specifically, the business of IT.
If you’re a company director, executive, or senior manager, and you’re concerned that you’re not managing your IT as well as you could, you should call us.
We have a lot of work to do.
What brought this on?
I’ve spent the last decade or so contracting and consulting to a variety of companies, generally large or very large ones.
I started out technical, doing server admin, and gradually moved into design and implementation of projects, then architecture, strategy, and management.
About five or six years ago, I started getting less and less technical, and moving closer and closer to the business side of IT. Lately I’ve been spending most of my time explaining to managers how to achieve business outcomes, mostly through people and process change, not so much technology change.
I’ve found that there’s this massive gap between the ‘business’ side of companies, and the IT department. Neither side really seems to understand why the other side is there, which I find interesting. And they both think the other side speaks a different language.
It turns out I can speak both languages. I spend a lot of my time translating.
It turns out that business problems are a lot more interesting to me than technology problems, and there is a rich vein of business problems relating to IT to be mined.
So that’s what I’ve decided to focus on, and PivotNine is how I’ll do it.
So, what does this comany do, exactly?
We’re IT management consultants, so we do management consulting, but for IT. ;)
But that doesn’t mean anything, does it?
You’re right. It doesn’t. It’s fluffy language used by management consultants (see, told you we were!) in order to sound important.
We’re translators
What we really do is translation.
We talk to executives about what they want to achieve with IT, and then we translate it into language the IT group can understand.
More importantly, we translate what IT are saying into plain language so the business can tell whether the wool is being pulled over their eyes or not.
Most executives and directors don’t have an IT background, and the techno-babble that comes out of most IT departments is incredibly frustrating to them. It often seems as if the techos are from a different world.
I come from that world. I’m a native speaker, but I learned to be multi-lingual, so I can also speak Accountant, and Marketer, and Strategy. I speak Geek, but I also speak Biz.
Are you any good?
That’s a great question. We’ll get on well.
Yes.
But you need proof. So here are some of the things that I’ve done:
Now there were teams of people involved in these initiatives, and all of them deserve credit. My claim to fame is that I’m one of only a handful of people who was involved in all three of these. Four, if you count another recent client.
And each time, I was on the client side, not the vendor. I’m the only one who can claim that.
Both client and vendor were pretty happy with the results, as you can see from the following case studies that highlight the business benefits:
- http://www.netapp.com/us/library/analyst-reports/ar-suncorp-case-study.html [PDF]
- http://www.netapp.com/us/library/customer-stories/sensis.html [PDF]
Let’s talk
No doubt you have questions. Great. Let’s talk about them.
Email me at [email protected] and we can chat about how PivotNine can help you and your company.
Learn more about the company at our website: http://pivotnine.com
Or just leave a comment below.