Planning for 2008

We've started planning for 2008 by putting together a quick list of projects that me and my staff have been thinking about over the past several months. For me, I started building my 2008 list shortly after I submitted my 2007 list into the budget process. There's a lot we want to do for next year and, knowing we won't be able to do it all, it's going to be tough to prioritize the list.

Some of the projects are what you would consider the more, pure-play IT projects and some are what we would consider to be more along the lines of business-technology projects. Clearly, there's a big difference in how we define business value in a server consolidation project or a major upgrade to a line-of-business application. And, it's tough to convince business leaders that we need to spend a bunch of money on things no one will ever see...things that just work in the background.

Ideally, I would like to run a bunch of these projects through our newly formed IT Governance Committee but I'm just not sure we're a mature enough group to get through these in a timely manner. I suspect the best we'll be able to do is some good work around prioritizing the list of approved projects once they are approved by the Board. Again, ideally, I would like to get to the point where our IT Governance Committee is actually proving or disproving the value of these requested projects.