CIO Strategy

Bi-Modal IT / CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off on CIO Insight – A Practical Alternative to Two-Speed IT (Part 2)
04
Aug 17

CIO Insight – A Practical Alternative to Two-Speed IT (Part 2)

In part one of this series, we explored a pair of competing requests many modern IT leaders receive from their stakeholders:

We investigated one “buzzwordy” solution—two-speed IT—and how implementing this solution often creates more problems than it solves. We proposed an alternate five-step framework for handling these requests. In steps one and two of this framework, we revealed how the above two competing requests are old problems, best solved with an old, proven solution—and not buzzwords.

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In part two of this series, we will walk you through the remaining steps in our practical framework and lead you down a path toward implementing this proven solution: the technology lifecycle.

Step 3: Think technology lifecycle, not “innovation” vs. “operations.”

To better understand why the good-on-paper “two-speed IT” approach often produces problems when implemented in the real world, look at Gartner’s two speeds (or modes) in which they shoehorn all technology systems and services:

Mode 1: Development projects related to core system maintenance, stability or efficiency. These require highly specialized programmers and traditional, slow-moving development cycles. There is little need for business involvement.

Mode 2: Development projects that help innovate or differentiate the business. These require a high degree of business involvement, fast turnaround and frequent updates. Mode 2 requires a rapid path (or IT fast lane) to transform business ideas into applications.

More of the CIO Insight post from Lee Reese

Bi-Modal IT / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on CIO Insight – Two-Speed IT: Juggling Competing Agendas (Part 1)
03
Aug 17

CIO Insight – Two-Speed IT: Juggling Competing Agendas (Part 1)

How can IT leaders juggle seemingly competing agendas: to meet the business’ demands for increased innovation, while cutting costs and slashing budgets?

With the ever-increasing interest in technology solutions, IT’s stakeholders are giving them two competing demands:
1. Produce new innovative, strategic technology-based capabilities.
2. Do so with reduced resources.

How can IT leaders step up to the plate and juggle these seemingly competing agendas: to meet the business’ demands for increased innovation, including new digital systems and services, all while cutting costs and slashing budgets?

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One popular solution has emerged within IT thought leadership. Often called “two-speed IT,” this idea proposes that the IT organization does not attempt to resolve the tension between these two ideas. Instead, IT lumps all of its technology into one of two broad buckets: operational technology and innovative technology. Do this, and operations won’t slow down innovation, and expensive innovation investments won’t inflate operations’ budgets.

More of the CIO Insight post from Lee Reese

Brain / CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off on HBR – Research: Being in a Group Makes Us Less Likely to Fact-Check
01
Aug 17

HBR – Research: Being in a Group Makes Us Less Likely to Fact-Check

Since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, concerns over the circulation of “fake” news and other unverified digital content have intensified. As people have grown to rely on social media as a news source, there has been considerable debate about its role in aiding the spread of misinformation. Much recent attention has centered around putting fact-checking filters in place, as false claims often persist in the public consciousness even after they are corrected.

We set out to test how the context in which we process information affects our willingness to verify ambiguous claims. Results across eight experiments reveal that people fact-check less often when they evaluate statements in a collective setting (e.g., in a group or on social media) than when they do so alone. Simply perceiving that others are present appeared to reduce participants’ vigilance when processing information, resulting in lower levels of fact-checking.

Our experiments surveyed over 2,200 U.S. adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The general paradigm went as follows: As part of a study about “modes of communication on the internet,” respondents logged onto a simulated website and evaluated a series of statements.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Rachel Meng, Youjung Jun, and Gita V. Johar

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Strategy — Comments Off on ZDNet – Overspending in the cloud: lessons learned
26
Jul 17

ZDNet – Overspending in the cloud: lessons learned

One of the reasons virtualization (the precursor to cloud computing) gained popularity in the early 2000s is that companies had too many servers running at low utilization. The prevailing wisdom was that every box needed a backup and under-utilization was better than maxing out compute capacity and risking overload.

The vast amounts of energy and money wasted on maintaining all this hardware finally led businesses to datacenter consolidation via virtual machines, and those virtual machines began migrating off-premises to various clouds.

The problem is, old habits die hard. And the same kinds of server sprawl that plagued physical datacenters 15 years ago are now appearing in cloud deployments, too.

More of the ZDNet article from Michael Steinhart

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Strategy / Technical Debt — Comments Off on IT Business Edge – AMD and Intel Declare War on the Data Center: Why This Is a Good Thing
25
Jul 17

IT Business Edge – AMD and Intel Declare War on the Data Center: Why This Is a Good Thing

This month, anything that doesn’t have me looking up to see if North Korea has lobbed a missile at the West Coast is a positive event. But this week, Intel responded to AMD’s Epyc launch with an epic launch of its own: the Purley version of its Xeon processor architecture. It clearly has come to play hard ball. Years ago, because things tended to be more generic, the processor played a far bigger role in servers and workstations. Today, a server can rely more heavily on the GPU than the CPU, can bottleneck on memory, storage, or internal transport rather than the processor more often, and just as often, must be purpose-built for whatever task it is being positioned in.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Rob Enderle

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / Get Better / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on CIO Insight – Digital Transformation Is in Chaos
24
Jul 17

CIO Insight – Digital Transformation Is in Chaos

Digital transformation has stalled due to a misalignment between its definition and meaning, delayed ROI, complexity and resistance to new ways of working.

A new survey finds a “widespread stall” in digital transformation efforts, suggesting that its leadership is in crisis. Half of senior executives polled said their company is not successfully executing 50 percent of its strategies, according to the new report from Wipro Digital, “A Crisis in Digital Transformation.” While most executives believe the company is clear on the definition of digital transformation, an obstacle to success is the lack of alignment on what exactly digital transformation means. “Digital transformation efforts are coming up short on intended ROI, in part because digital transformation is as much a leadership issue as it is a strategy, technology, culture and talent issue,” said Rajan Kohli, senior vice president and global head, Wipro Digital.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Karen Frenkel

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on CIO Insight – Two-Speed IT: Juggling Competing Agendas
21
Jul 17

CIO Insight – Two-Speed IT: Juggling Competing Agendas

With the ever-increasing interest in technology solutions, IT’s stakeholders are giving them two competing demands:
1. Produce new innovative, strategic technology-based capabilities.
2. Do so with reduced resources.

How can IT leaders step up to the plate and juggle these seemingly competing agendas: to meet the business’ demands for increased innovation, including new digital systems and services, all while cutting costs and slashing budgets?

One popular solution has emerged within IT thought leadership. Often called “two-speed IT,” this idea proposes that the IT organization does not attempt to resolve the tension between these two ideas. Instead, IT lumps all of its technology into one of two broad buckets: operational technology and innovative technology. Do this, and operations won’t slow down innovation, and expensive innovation investments won’t inflate operations’ budgets.

More of the CIO Insight article from Lee Reese

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on HBR – The Board Directors You Need for a Digital Transformation
20
Jul 17

HBR – The Board Directors You Need for a Digital Transformation

When the term digital transformation was first bandied about by consultants and business publications, its implications were more about keeping up and catching up than true transformation. Additionally, at first it was only applied to large, traditional organizations struggling, or experimenting, in an increasingly digital economy. But true digital transformation requires so much more. As evidenced by the recent Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods, we’re living in a new world.

Early transformation efforts were focused on initiatives: e-commerce, sensors/internet of things, applications, client and customer experience, and so on. Increasingly, our clients are coming to us as they realize that in order for these disparate initiatives to thrive, they need to undergo an end-to-end transformation, the success of which demands dramatic operational, structural, and cultural shifts.

More of the HBR post from Tuck Rickards and Rhys Grossman

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on IT Business Edge – Multi-Cloud Software: Trading One Dependency for Another?
17
Jul 17

IT Business Edge – Multi-Cloud Software: Trading One Dependency for Another?

Having a multi-cloud strategy these days is like having a multi-server strategy in ages past: Why trust your workloads to a single point of failure when you can move them about at will?

But while distributing resources over multiple points fosters redundancy and eliminates vendor lock-in on one level, the enterprise should be aware that this invariable pushes these same risks to another.

It’s no surprise that upwards of 85 percent of organizations have implemented a multi-cloud strategy by now, says Datacenter Journal’s Kevin Liebl. Following major outages at AWS and Azure earlier this year, the vulnerabilities of placing all data in one basket have become clear. Using multiple clouds provides clear advantages for disaster recovery, data migration, workload optimization, and a host of other functions.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Arthur Cole – When the Cloud Becomes Just Normal Infrastructure
12
Jul 17

Arthur Cole – When the Cloud Becomes Just Normal Infrastructure

Strange as it may seem, the cloud only holds about a fifth of the total enterprise workload, which means there is still time for the enterprise to suddenly decide that the risks are not worth the rewards and start pulling data and applications back to legacy infrastructure.

Unlikely as this is, it nonetheless points out the fact that there are still many unknowns when it comes to the cloud, particularly its ability to provide the lion’s share of data infrastructure in ways that are both cheaper and more amenable to enterprise objectives.

According to Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak, the cloud is nearing an inflection point at which it should start to show accelerated growth into the next decade.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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