CIO Strategy

Future of CIO – Three Overarching Management Approaches to Shape a High-Mature Digital Organization

The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary. It is not just about one-dimensional technology adoption, but a multi-dimensional expansion. It is certainly critical to put the stronger emphasis on empowering people, leveraging the source of knowledge, harnessing adaptation, fostering innovations, and taking an overarching management approach to shaping a high-mature digital organization.

The overarching Information management approach: The leading organizations across the industry sectors claim they are in the information management business because information potential directly impacts the business potential of the organization. The business insight captured via the abundance of information allows the business to capture growth opportunities as well as predict potential risks.Information is also one of the most time intensive pieces to the innovation puzzle. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. Therefore, Information Management is an overarching management discipline because Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, but if not properly managed, it becomes at worst case a liability and at best case an underutilized asset. IT should first work to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products and resources. The level of “silo” in many organizations remains far too high, IT has to break down silo to enable information flow frictionlessly and ensure that the right people can get the right information to make right decisions timely. Digital CIOs need to be able to break down organizational silos and take an overarching management approach to managing information for unleashing its full business potential.

More of the FutureofCIO post from Pearl Zhu

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02
Feb 18

CIO.com – The 12 biggest issues IT faces today

When CIOs aren’t being overwhelmed by data, they’re wondering who’s securing it. They’re dealing with the pressure of cutting costs while trying to stay nimble as they face difficulties with contractors and the challenges of moving data and services to the cloud. All the while, new threats emerge that require an evolving response.

From finding qualified IT pros to keeping them from jumping ship, a range of sticky technology and personnel issues are giving IT pros cold sweats.

With a host of new concerns in 2018 — and old standbys — where should CIOs be most focused? We’ve gathered insights from experts, the C-suite, recruiters, and those in the trenches to identify today’s top-of-mind concerns and how to deal with them.

More of the CIO.com article from Paul Heltzel

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29
Dec 17

IT Business Edge – Why I’ll Never Recommend AWS: The Danger of Draconian Policies in a Social World

Rob Enderle describes his first-hand experience on the risks of using a consumer-oriented business for mission critical systems.

One of the issues with having both a consumer-focused business and an enterprise business is that folks who deal with enterprise decisions during the day are consumers all the time. If you screw with someone on the consumer side, you’ll likely lose them on the enterprise side as well and vice versa. In addition, particularly with something like AWS, you expect the consumer business to use good customer retention and management skills. Well, after waking up recently to every one of my Echos, Kindles and Fire TVs being deregistered and not working, and being locked out of my account for daring to question a questionable Amazon charge, I wouldn’t touch an Amazon enterprise product with someone else’s 10-foot pole. And I think, had this happened to you, you’d feel the same.

Let me walk you through my experience.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Rob Enderle

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28
Dec 17

ZDNet – IT jobs in 2020: Preparing for the next industrial revolution

As IT evolves in the direction of more cloud adoption, more automation, and more artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and analytics, it’s clear that the IT jobs landscape will change too. For example, tomorrow’s CIO is likely to become more of a broker and orchestrator of cloud services, juggling the strategic concerns of the C-suite with more tactical demands from business units, and less of an overseer of enterprise applications in on-premises data centres. Meanwhile, IT staff are likely to spend more time in DevOps teams, integrating multiple cloud services and residual on-premises applications, and enforcing cyber-security, and less time tending racks of servers running siloed client-server apps, or deploying and supporting endpoint devices.

Of course, some traditional IT jobs and tasks will remain, because revolutions don’t happen overnight and there will be good reasons for keeping some workloads running in on-premises data centres. But there’s no doubt which way the IT wind is blowing, across businesses of all sizes.

More of the ZDNet post from Charles McLellan

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26
Dec 17

IT Business Edge – Shifting the Focus from Infrastructure to Architecture

Technology will always play a central role in the enterprise data environment, but going forward the true challenge will not be finding and implementing the most cutting-edge systems but architecting available technologies in ways that support a successful business model.

This focus on architecture is in stark contrast to just a few years ago when the entire concept was on the wane. As KPMG noted in its latest study, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become one of the most in-demand skillsets of the year, up 26 percent compared to the year earlier, edging out functions like business process management and data analytics. While part of this surge in interest can be attributed to the growing complexity of the IT landscape, equally important is the way in which EA has evolved from simply wiring up infrastructure to integrating technology, applications, services and people under a common operational framework.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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04
Dec 17

The Register – Seek ‘passion’ and tech skills will follow, say recruiting security chiefs

Plugging the infosec skills gap with expensive consultants or by trying to hire already skilled people won’t fix recruitment headaches, Thom Langford, CISO at Publicis Groupe, insisted at the #IRISSCERT conference in Dublin this week.

He argued that the industry should be looking for “passionate people and inspire them”, rather than people with CVs ticking the appropriate boxes.

“I’m not asking for people to take chances, rather give people opportunities” by looking beyond qualifications and experience and thinking about potential.

“We need to stop looking only for round pegs to go into round holes,” Langford said, adding that those with an IT background pick things up more quickly.

More of The Register post from John Leyden

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01
Dec 17

CIO.com – Establishing business architecture standards: an industry imperative

Standards, based on the collective experiences of communities of practice, form the basis for advancing the maturity of a given discipline. As that discipline matures and the community of practice grows, standards serve as a critical foundation for enabling scalability and ensuring the integrity of the results.

Standards form the fundamental building blocks for a wide variety of fields. Accountants, manufacturers, engineers, software developers and a range of other professionals rely on standards. The constraints that standards may impose on some individuals are easily offset by the numerous advantages that they provide to consumers and practitioners. The same benefits of standardization also apply to the discipline of business architecture.

Benefits of standards adoption

When considering the impact of standards, we can look at the railway industry. Consider the discrepancies in railway track gauge size in the early 1800s. There were over a dozen gauge sizes used across the U.S.

More of the CIO.com post from Daniel Lambert

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30
Nov 17

Tech Pro Research – CIO roadmap: What’s next for hybrid cloud?

Companies that have implemented hybrid cloud strategies are seeing the benefits, from better ROI to faster digital transformation. But now they must look ahead to new stages of hybrid cloud execution.

In March 2016, IBM surveyed 500 IT decision makers who have implemented hybrid strategies. 26% of the respondents said that they are “gaining competitive advantage through hybrid cloud and are managing their environment in an integrated, comprehensive fashion for high visibility and control.” Of these organizations, 90% reported greater ROI, and 85% reported that a hybrid approach to cloud was “accelerating digital transformation in their organization.”

Hybrid cloud is attractive because it offers companies a middle ground between going “full cloud” and being entirely on premises. It saves money because companies can offload many of their non-mission critical systems to the cloud and avoid investing in new hardware, software, and infrastructure. A hybrid cloud strategy also gives companies the flexibility to maintain their own in-house systems under their own IT staff and governance standards, and even to turn some of these systems into private cloud environments that they themselves create and maintain.

More of the Tech Pro Research post from Mary Schacklett

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29
Nov 17

Continuity Central – Common trends and weaknesses in crisis preparedness and business resilience

Victoria Cross, managing partner, Instinctif Partners’ Business Resilience team, discusses the top trends which have emerged from the company’s CrisisOptic and RecallOptic online diagnostic and benchmarking tools over the past year.

In the year since the CrisisOptic and RecallOptic tools have been available, we have helped over 50 businesses and organizations to quantify their business resilience. Three areas have emerged as common weaknesses in crisis preparedness and business resilience strategies and the following article looks at these in turn:

Post-incident review is a weak area

A score of 100 percent is the highest that can be achieved in each category measured, with the Review category (conducting and learning from a post-incident review) being identified as the most common area of weakness. Many of the companies obtained a low score in this area, with some even scoring zero. The average score was 50.7 per cent.

Interestingly, although overall it might be expected that larger companies would generally score more highly, size has not proved a clear indicator of preparedness. In fact, we have seen both global brands and small manufacturers scoring zero in this category.

ZDNet – Cloud computing: How to build a business case

Like any other major tech project, moving workloads into the cloud needs a solid business case — one that takes into account all the likely costs and benefits — before a company can decide whether it’s the correct move.

Cloud migration may be a tougher proposition than a standard IT project because companies have to consider a wider variety of issues — like what to do with all those servers, or even entire data centers, that may be made redundant by the move.

The business case should calculate the costs of migrating to the cloud — which include the cost of moving systems over, as well as the cost of running services in the cloud after migration — and then compare them to the costs of keeping systems in-house.

More of the ZDNet post from Steve Ranger

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.