CIO Strategy

CIO Strategy / IT Strategy — Comments Off
20
Dec 16

Baseline – IT Skills Gap Burdens Staff and Management

IT skills gaps may be the biggest single problem facing mid-sized IT organizations today. More and better technologies amplify the problem. How does your organization address the skills gap?

Today’s business and IT environments are faced with a formidable array of labor challenges. One of the biggest is coping with ongoing and worsening skill and knowledge shortages. Not only do these gaps create more work for employees—often resulting in stress and burnout—but they also impact operational efficiency and bottom-line results. “Exploring the IT Skills Gap,” a recent survey of more than 300 IT leaders by IT staffing firm TEKsystems, examined the current state of project-based IT staffing and workforce planning.

Among other things, it found that hiring has become far more difficult over the last five years, and finding contingent workers has also become more challenging. As a result, organizations are suffering negative consequences as a result of the current environment. “It’s clear that workforce planning often occurs as an afterthought compared to other areas of planning for IT projects and initiatives,” said Jason Hayman, TEKsystems research manager.

More of the Baseline Magazine slide show from Samuel Greengard

Data Center Knowledge – TSO Logic: Cloud Migration Offers Instant Savings

Need help doing the math to see if your in-house virtual machines would be cheaper to operate in the cloud? If so, contact me.

Nearly half (45 percent) of on-premise virtualized operating system instances could run more economically in the cloud, for a 43 percent annual savings, according to research released this week by infrastructure optimization company TSO Logic. The research makes starkly clear the cost of legacy hardware, and the savings potential of cloud migration.

More than one in four OS instances are over-provisioned, the company says, and migrating them to an appropriate sized cloud instance would reduce their cost by 36 percent.

Drawn from an algorithmic analysis of anonymized data from TSO Logic’s North American customers, the research also showed that of 10,000 physical servers, 25 percent are at least 3-years-old. The same workload as done on Generation-5 servers could now be done on 30 percent less Generation-9 servers, based only on processor gains, the company says.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Chris Burt

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
Dec 16

Arthur Cole – What’s Up with Digital Transformation?

Practical article from Arthur Cole on how digital transformation is different than what we’ve been doing for 40 years in IT.

Some enterprise executives may rightly be confused by the whole concept of “digital transformation.” Digital technology has been a common facet of the enterprise for decades, so what exactly is being transformed?

In a nutshell, the difference this time is that rather than using digital technology to support and streamline existing business processes like sales, support and customer relations, the processes themselves are becoming digitized into services. So instead of using data infrastructure to make it easier to sell, say, cars, a digitally transformed business incorporates service-level functionality into the car itself, along with all the support systems that contribute to the manufacture, sale and ongoing support of the car.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
15
Dec 16

ComputerWeekly – IT Priorities 2017: What will IT decision-makers be focusing on?

Each year, TechTarget looks at how CIOs and senior IT decision-makers will be investing in IT in the 12 months ahead

Budgets for staff and on-premise servers are falling as CIOs focus on cloud computing, according to the TechTarget’s IT Priorities 2017 survey.

Most of the 353 people surveyed said their IT budgets would remain the same. Only 17% said their budget would increase by more than 10%, 16% said their budget would increase by 5% to 10%, and 9% said their budget would decrease.

The survey found that most of the budget increases would be invested in cloud services (43%), software (43%) and disaster recover (30%).

More of the ComputerWeekly post from Cliff Saran

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Strategy / Uncategorized — Comments Off
13
Dec 16

Harvard Business Review – How Loss Aversion and Conformity Threaten Organizational Change

To achieve true transformational change, CEOs must have more than a strategic plan. To effect actual change, they need to understand how biases — their own, and their employees’ — can shape behaviors and decisions, and prevent them from achieving what they set out to achieve.

CEOs need to be especially aware of how the subtle forces of bias can operate in our subconscious and influence our choices. Let’s take a look at the two I see most often: loss aversion and conformity.

Loss Aversion
Picture a management team, composed of highly accomplished individuals with long tenures at the company, gathering at the annual planning meeting. The CEO has been in place for five years, business performance has been strong and Wall Street has rewarded shareholders handsomely.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Sean Ryan

CIO Strategy / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
12
Dec 16

CIO Insight – What CIOs Must Do to Retain Skilled IT Employees

This problem seems to be universal. How are you dealing with retention?

The majority of CIOs surveyed said they are concerned about retaining current IT staff over the next 12 months, according to a recent survey from Robert Half Technology. Many of these executives said their operations would be adversely impacted if a valued team member left without notice. To avoid this, and to strengthen staff engagement and retention, CIOs are regularly checking in with employees to make sure they’re satisfied with their job. They’re also getting proactive about career guidance and development, while regularly benchmarking salary and benefits to ensure they’re staying competitive. (Despite such efforts, however, relatively few CIOs have come up with a formal retention strategy.) Of course, regardless of how hard CIOs try to keep IT staffers, some of them will leave. So technology leaders often turn to project and contractual workers to fill in the gaps—possibly finding promising new talent for more permanent hiring arrangements

More of the CIO Insight slide show from Dennis McCafferty

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
08
Dec 16

ComputerWeekly – Future of the server operating system

We look at the evolution of the server operating system, and how the next generation is moving into the cloud

Microsoft’s new Windows Server 2016 operating system (OS) is just being launched. Linux is celebrating its 25th birthday. IBM has its mainframe operating system and its Power operating system, Oracle has Solaris – and that is just a few of the OSs that still abound in the market. But what is the role of an OS in the modern world?

Going back to the early days of servers, the stack required to get a computer up and running was pretty simple – a basic input/output system (BIOS) to get the hardware started, followed by an operating system to provision basic services, followed by an application to carry out the actual work.

More of the Computerweekly article from Clive Longbottom

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
07
Dec 16

Baseline – Why IT Pros Feel Unprepared for Disasters

While most C-level executives feel their organization is “very prepared” for a potential systems-crashing disaster, IT professionals sharply disagree, according to a recent survey from Evolve IP. The “2016 Evolve IP Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Survey” report indicates that a significant number of companies have suffered from a major incident that required disaster recovery (DR) over the past year—sometimes resulting in six-figure losses. Many tech employees indicate that a lack of DR budgeting leaves them unprepared for disruptions caused by hardware failures, server issues, power outages, environmental events, human error and targeted cyber-attacks. And a great many organizations still rely on old-school recovery methods such as backup tapes, instead of newer cloud-based solutions.

There is, however, notable interest in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), despite the fact that only about half of C-level executives have heard of this term. “The lack of DR education at the executive level—and the likely related lack of budget—poses a real risk to today’s businesses,” according to the report. “These factors are further exacerbated by a dramatic increase in targeted attacks, continued reliance on aging tape backups, as well as internal hardware that remains highly susceptible to failure.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
06
Dec 16

Fast Company – These Companies Are Vacuuming Up Everybody Else’s Tech Talent

This is happening all over, not just in Silicon Valley. How will your organization meet the challenge of attracting and retaining high end IT infrastructure talent?

Want to know just how much or how well a given company is innovating? Take a look at the talent it attracts—or loses. These days, acquiring and hanging onto top-notch tech talent isn’t easy.

Plenty of companies are fooling themselves that they’re keeping their digital skills current simply by changing job titles and adding roles that include the term “digital.” The number of professionals on LinkedIn calling themselves “chief digital officer” grew from 965 in 2015 to 3,255 in 2016—a 237% increase.

That semantic shift conceals a stark reality: A select handful of companies—those that have always lived and breathed digital technology (not to be confused with those other “digital natives”)—are sucking up top-notch tech talent, leaving everyone else to pick over the scraps.

THE INVISIBLE (WORKING) HAND
Some things remain true that have long been so. According to our research here at L2, it’s clear that a solid brand makes a company beautiful to strangers. If your company has a reputation as a tech innovator, tech talent will come a-knocking.

More of the Fast Company article from Maureen Mullen

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
05
Dec 16

Harvard Business Review – Digital Leadership Is Not an Optional Part of Being a CEO

Being a CEO is harder than ever. The rapid pace of change in business and technology means that more and more companies will find themselves being disrupted. In fact, our latest research with MIT, in which we interviewed more than 1,000 CEOs (from 131 countries and 27 industries, in organizations of varying sizes), shows that 90% of executives believe their businesses are being disrupted or reinvented by digital business models, and 70% believe they do not have the right skills, leader, or operating structure to adapt. It’s not a good position to be in.

What’s a CEO to do? Should you hire a chief digital officer? Should you replace your executives with leaders from internet companies? Should you force everyone to learn about mobile computing and digital business models?

While these are all sound ideas, our research shows that something more fundamental is at play. Companies that rapidly adapt to digital business models don’t just “do digital”; they “act digital.” In other words, they practice an entirely new model of management. And their CEOs are leading the charge.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Josh Bersin

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.