IT has to be the tail - and the business or mission is the dog that wags that tail. But that doesn't mean there aren't IT disciplines and technologies that drive new opportunities for the business. Find the right leverage points for working IT into your business or mission strategies without "wagging the dog."
Programming
IT Project Management and Implementation
Strict adherence to the PMBOK gets you quite a ways down the path of good management. But by the time a disrupting event pulls your CPI or SPI out of whack, it's usually too late to recover. Earned Value measures are the lagging indicators of project success. Use Issues Management as the leading indicators and uncover the "gotchas" before they get your project team.
It's not unique, but it's often forgotten, that process definition has to be built in a hierarchy. Order-to-cash has the component entities of "Customer Orders" moving through the sales cycle, but also the composite entity "Sales" being accumulated. Likewise with "Maintenance Orders" moving through Service-Request-to-Repair, there is also a composite "Maintenance Backlog" that needs to go to Plan-to-Build, and a "Maintenance History" that needs to go to Engineering's Concept-to-Product processes. Using process hierarchies allows for composite data structures and metrics to be applied to process definitions.
Architecture and BPR
Modelling and Simulation
Logistics
Operations Research
What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets done. But what are the important measures for your mission? Does stockage effectiveness really correlate with aircraft availability? Or is customer wait time statistically more relevant? Find the right measures that tie to your processes to get your desired performance. And then apply SPC and SQC to measure over time - it's averages and the trends that are most important.
In today's Internet of Things it's still important to manage "things." From strategic sourcing to advanced planning and scheduling for manufacturing, or from PLM to MRO, logistics processes still rival in complexity anything that the President's tax advisors can come up with! Find the critical success factors for your logistics transformations.
Yeah, call me old-fashioned, but I just can't spell modelling with one 'l'. But whether it's discrete or continuous, static or dynamic, stochastic or deterministic, the right model can be the right tool. From Business Case Analyses to discrete event simulations, use the rigor of formal simulation tools to inform decision-making.
IT Strategy
I maintain my "technical chops" in programming and am available for small or large projects. SAP's ABAP, Java, C, and html - all technologies I can exploit for simple or complex programming tasks.
Writing a winning proposal is not the same as writing The Great American Novel. You want the most easily scored, compliant, and compelling response. From bursting an RFP to storyboarding a response to final technical edits, there is a discipline to bid and proposal management that has to be engaged for a successful submission. Even then you lose more than you win, but at least you know you're in the game and competitive.