CIO Strategy

Baseline – Why We Should Encourage More Women to Work in IT

A significantly larger number of women tech professionals than men believe that their gender is underrepresented in the IT industry, according to a recent survey from Harvey Nash, an IT recruiting, outsourcing/offshoring and executive search firm, and ARA, an organization that seeks to attract, retain and advance women in technology. The resulting report, “2017 Women in Technology: Overcoming Obstacles and Unlocking Potential,” indicates that much of the issue takes shape at an early age for future tech workers: More men than women said they first grew interested in IT as a potential career in elementary or middle school.

Men are also more likely to focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) classes in college. It should come as no surprise, then, that a majority of survey respondents feel that it’s key to encourage more girls to pursue tech subjects in school. “The visibility and value of a STEM education has skyrocketed in the last decade, but we’re not yet seeing the full impact translate to the IT workplace,” said Bob Miano, USA president and CEO of Harvey Nash.

The Register – Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old

Almost half of tech workers in the US, like Hollywood stars, live in constant fear that age will end their careers, according to a new poll.

Job website Indeed.com surveyed more than 1,000 employed tech workers and found that 43 per cent of respondents expressed concern about losing their job due to age. And 18 per cent said they worried about this “all the time.”

The survey falls short of a revelation. Rather, it’s a reaffirmation of an issue that has troubled tech employees for years and has prompted lawsuits such as the one brought by Robert Heath against Google in 2015, since joined by at least 269 aggrieved elders.

Heath’s lawsuit should not to be confused with the age discrimination lawsuit brought by Brian Reid that Google settled for an undisclosed sum in 2011.

More of The Register article from Thomas Claburn

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23
Oct 17

CIO Insight – Surprising Insights About Strategic IT Leadership

We wanted to give IT leaders a chance to explain what motivated them to want to become more strategic—beyond the fact that they’re being told they must do this.

“Why do you want to become a more strategic IT leader?”
“What is your biggest barrier to becoming more strategic?”
“How is strategy currently handled in your IT organization?”

Why?

Because IT leaders are constantly being told they must “become more strategic.” Often, this advice is given without much elaboration. It’s given as if “becoming more strategic” was a simple thing to do. And this guidance is given as if the benefits were so obvious.

After hearing this advice repeated again and again, we realized there was one set of voices missing from the conversation about strategic IT leadership … the voice of the IT leaders themselves.

More of the CIO Insight post from Marc J. Schiller

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06
Oct 17

SmartIT – A Complex but Solvable Puzzle: Service Level Agreements, Key Performance Indicators, & Critical Success Factors

Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

Knowing how to put the SLA, KPI, CSF puzzle together helps IT gain credibility and promote value in partnerships between IT and the business we serve. IT struggles to communicate, let alone justify costs and investments, and has a hard time communicating in terms that business understands. Something is lost in translation. IT services have been commoditized and marginalized, which further increases the challenges of getting funding, accelerating time to market, and delivering innovative products and services.

Harvard Business Review – We Shouldn’t Always Need a “Business Case” to Do the Right Thing

I’ve been a consultant for almost 20 years, advising companies on complex challenges in ethics, risk, and responsibility. Each year several clients raise the same issue: the need to get buy-in from a skeptical senior executive in order to demonstrate a concrete benefit that will follow a proposed investment in an ethical business initiative or function. The executive needs a business case. And so I get asked questions like “What evidence can I provide that doing the right thing will make or save a company money?” and “How can I persuade the organization that embracing integrity is a win-win?”

It’s a relief to have finally moved on from the era in which corporate responsibility meant feel-good philanthropic efforts divorced from an enterprise’s main activities. Happily fading from memory is the cliché that ethics and compliance teams effectively constitute a “business prevention department.”

More of the Harvard Business Review post from Alison Taylor

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04
Oct 17

TechTarget – More users flub evals of colocation data center providers

Colocation data center buyers are needlessly captivated by impressive features at data centers that distract them from important decision-making information.

If enterprises want to make the right colocation decisions, they’ve got to ask better questions.

IT pros in search of a colocation data center for their IT gear today know what’s most important to them: price, physical security and uptime. But increasingly, enterprises ask vague, open-ended questions instead of pointed relevant questions to evaluate and choose a colocation data center provider.

Comparison of colocation data center capabilities is a boring problem solved with a simple recipe: Take the time to research and ask the most appropriate questions, said Peter Kraatz, the national portfolio director of consulting services at Datalink Corp., a data center services provider in Eden Prairie, Minn.

More of the TechTarget article from Robert Gates

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03
Oct 17

The Register – Cloud washes Dell off perch atop storage market

Backup appliance sales go off a cliff, traditional array vendors just aren’t growing

Sales of purpose-built backup appliances have dropped markedly, with year-on-year dips of 16.2 per cent by revenue and 14.9 per cent by capacity, according to analyst firm IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker for 2017’s second quarter.

IDC’s research manager for storage systems Liz Conner said: “The traditional backup market is declining as end users and vendors alike explore new technology.” She mentioned “cloud-based backup tiers, hybrid flash arrays, emphasis on replication and data recovery” as reasons for the market’s decline.

Here are the nasty numbers.

More of The Register article from Simon Sharwood

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29
Sep 17

Continuity Central – DNS attacks an increasing problem for public and education sector around the world

Councils, schools and government offices were among global public sector and education organizations hit badly by DNS attacks last year – with nearly half reporting dealing with the issue cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds.

One in five (19 percent) of public sector sites and 11 percent of education bodies affected by DNS attacks say sensitive information was stolen. A fifth (20 percent) of public sector and 12 percent of educational victims also think intellectual property data was lost, while 10 percent of schools and colleges affected say they needed to take more than one day to recover.

This is in the context of yearly average costs of DNS security breaches to be now running at £1.7m ($2.2m) for organizations globally, with malware (35 percent), DDoS (32 percent), Cache Poisoning (23 percent), DNS Tunnelling (22 percent) and Zero-Day Exploits (19 percent) as the main threats.

Harvard Business Review – How Does Blockchain Work?

Blockchain is an emerging technology that gets lots of press in the technology journals. Harvard Business Review put together this whiteboard session on the technology called “How Does Blockchain Work?”

Harvard Business Review video

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27
Sep 17

CIO Insight – Why IT Architectural Plans Often Get Derailed

The majority of organizations know that they need to do a better job of planning for IT infrastructure, software development, data needs and cyber-security. But surprisingly few of them actually take part in long-term, tech-focused architectural planning, according to a recent survey from CompTIA. The accompanying report, “Planning a Modern IT Architecture,” indicates that most companies assign these efforts on a shorter-term, year-to-year or project-to-project basis. Given the increased significance of digital transformation, it remains critical to pursue broad, comprehensive strategies through close collaboration with business departments. But, to do so, CIOs and their tech teams will have to overcome obstacles in the form of budget shortfalls and a failure to gain buy-in throughout the company.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.