CIO Strategy

The Register – Add ‘Bimodal IT’ to your buzzword bingo card: Faster… more stable… faster. But stable

Thanks to Gartner, we have a new buzzword: bimodal IT. It’s nothing special actually, just a new way to describe common sense, and the fact that the world – the IT world in this case – is not black or white.

In practice, in modern IT organisations it is better to find a way to integrate different environments instead of trying to square the circle all the time. This means that you can’t apply DevOps methodology to everything, nor can you deny its benefits if you want to deploy cloud-based applications efficiently. (Gartner discovers great truths sometimes, doesn’t it?)

But here is my question, “Does bimodal IT need separate infrastructures?”

Bimodal IT doesn’t mean two different infrastructures
In the past few weeks I published quite a few articles talking about Network, Storage, Scale-out, and Big Data infrastructures. Most of them address a common problem: how to build flexible and simple infrastructures that can serve legacy and cloud-like workloads at the same time.

From the storage standpoint, for example, I would say that a unified storage system is no longer synonymous with multi-protocol per se, but it’s much more important if it has the capability of serving as many workloads as possible at the same time. Like a bunch of Oracle databases, hundreds of VMs and thousands of container accessing shared volumes concurrently. The protocol used is just a consequence.

To pull it off, you absolutely need the right back-end architecture and, at the same time, APIs, configurability and tons of flexibility. Integration is another key part, and the storage system has to be integrated with all the different hypervisors, cloud platforms and now orchestration tools.

More of The Register post from Enrico Signoretti

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19
Feb 16

CIOInsight – A Hire Calling: How to Assemble an IT Dream Team

When interviewing IT job candidates, why simply fill vacancies when you can bring on a dream team of well-rounded players? By assessing candidates for strengths that extend far beyond a simple command of job description-based tech skills, you’ll recruit employees who can make meaningful, lasting impact throughout your entire organization. In the book, Hiring Greatness: How to Recruit Your Dream Team and Crush the Competition (Wiley/available now), authors David E. Perry and Mark J. Haluska reveal best practices—as well as pitfalls to avoid—in landing future stars who will unleash innovation while generating enviable ROI for your department.

More of the CIO Insight slide show from Dennis McCafferty

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10
Feb 16

CIOInsight – How to Embrace Rogue IT

Rogue IT is the foundation upon which innovation can be built. Rather than being restricted by traditional application and product development processes, non-IT teams can rapidly deploy solutions matching business requirements, thus accelerating new cost savings and resource efficiencies.

You might as well embrace rogue IT, or shadow IT, which will continue to grow in importance, and its impact will be felt globally, according to Tim Kelleher, vice president of IT Security Services at Century Link. Rogue IT might just lead to innovation and competitive advantage, he says. Employees increasingly will bypass corporate IT by subscribing to new collaboration, analytics or other cloud services to get work done, he says. Others will build homegrown applications via the cloud and other development platforms. This trend to remove power from corporate hands is enough to strike fear in any CIO because security risks and bandwidth restrictions can accompany each new project. On the other hand, “while the natural tendency is to limit unauthorized usage,” says Kelleher, “rogue IT can prove very useful to organizations today, driving new levels of innovation and productivity.

Wall Street Journal – CIOs Say Focus on Customer Is Paramount

We asked chief information officers how they expect their role to change in 2016 and beyond. They said the “seat at the table” discussion is over, and that the CIO exerts greater influence inside the C-suite as technology permeates every line of business.

Many CIOs said they now shape corporate strategy, not just support it. While they still have a mandate to improve operating performance, keep costs down and drive productivity using technology, they also guide product development and user experience design.

“Regardless of industry, CIOs will have more responsibility directly to the customer,” said Bill Bradley, CIO at CenturyLink Inc.

While in the past viewed as mostly a technical position, “the CIO…is now considered very valuable in the ability to bridge the gap between IT and internal and external customer needs,” said Erika Lance, CIO at Nationwide Title Clearing Inc.

The Register – After safe harbour: Navigating data sovereignty

Max Schrems has a lot to answer for. The Austrian is single-handedly responsible for bringing down a key transnational data agreement that has left cloud service providers scrabbling for legal counsel. This is either a good thing, if you’re a privacy activist concerned about intrusive US surveillance policies, or a confusing and worrying one, if you’re a provider or customer of cloud services.

Worried by the Edward Snowden revelations, Schrems questioned the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, on the basis that Facebook was collecting his data in Ireland and then moving it to the US for processing. The Irish DPC simply pointed to the Safe Harbour agreement and said that its hands were tied.

The case was bumped up to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which on October 16 ruled that Safe Harbour was illegal. Its rationale was that it enabled companies to share data for national security purposes but didn’t address whether the protections were strong enough.

More of The Register article from Danny Bradbury

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03
Feb 16

Baseline – Why IT Pros Give Tech Transformation a Weak Grade

Few front-line technology workers give their companies high marks for adapting to new, transformative tech, according to a recent survey from Business Performance Innovation (BPI) and Dimension Data. The resulting report, “Bringing Dexterity to IT Complexity: What’s Helping or Hindering IT Tech Professionals,” indicates that most organizations haven’t even begun to transform IT—or are just getting started. A major sore spot: A lack of collaboration and/or alignment with the business side, as most tech staffers said business teams wait too long to bring IT into critical planning processes. This, combined with a lack of funding and other resources, results in tech departments spending too much time on legacy maintenance and far too little on essential advances that bring value to the business. “Instead of ushering their companies into a new age of highly agile innovation, IT workers are hindered by a growing list of maintenance tasks, staff cutbacks and aging infrastructure,” according to the report.

More of the Baseline Magazine article from Dennis McCafferty

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02
Feb 16

Arthur Cole – Weighing the Pros and Cons of Commodity Infrastructure

Data infrastructure built on commodity hardware has a lot going for it: lower costs, higher flexibility, and the ability to rapidly scale to meet fluctuating workloads. But simply swapping out proprietary platforms for customizable software architectures is not the end of the story. A lot more must be considered before we even get close to the open, dynamic data environments that most organizations are striving for.

The leading example of commodity infrastructure is Facebook, which recently unveiled plans for yet another massive data center in Europe – this time in Clonee, Ireland. The facility will utilize the company’s Open Compute Project framework, which relies on advanced software architectures atop low-cost commodity hardware and is now available to the enterprise community at large in the form of a series of reference architectures that are free for the asking. The idea is that garden variety enterprises and cloud providers will build their own modular infrastructure to support the kinds of abstract, software-defined environments needed for Big Data, the Internet of Things and other emerging initiatives.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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27
Jan 16

Continuity Central – Six tips for successful IT continuity

Andrew Stuart offers some IT-focused experience-based business continuity tips :

1. Understand the threat landscape

Storms, ransomware viruses and fires are only some of many real threats for which all businesses should proactively prepare. Your IT department needs a full understanding of all of the threats likely to hit your building, communications room or servers in order to help prepare for the worst. This can be done by assessing risks based on the location and accessibility of your data centres / centers, as well as any malicious attacks that could occur. When planning to mitigate a disaster, treat every incident as unique: a local fire may affect one machine, whereas human error may lead to the deletion of entire servers.

2. Set goals for recovery

While some companies assume they are protected in the wake of a disaster if they duplicate their data, many learn the hard way that their backup stopped functioning during a disaster or their data is inaccessible afterwards. The IT team needs to define criteria for recovery time objectives (RTO), or how long your business can continue to run without access to your data, and recovery point objectives (RPO), which is the maximum age of data that will still be useful to back up. The IT team will also need to identify critical systems and prioritise recovery tasks.

More of the Continuity Central article from Andrew Stuart

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26
Jan 16

CustomerThink – We’ve always done it this way…

Does inertia matter more to you than delivering better services to your clients?

Something happened the other day that reminded me of a time when I was still new in this business. Yes, I didn’t have the 25+ years of experience as I do now but I still had enough under my belt to know what was going on and how to evaluate a department and its staff.

I had just started working as a banquet manager at another hotel and found that most of the waiters have been working there for around 7 years and some up to 15 years. After a few days of observation, I made a list of the things that I knew we can do better and planned the steps needed to make it happen. No big deal, I’ve done this many times before.

On the following week’s schedule I listed a date for a mandatory meeting/training class and prepared the topics I would discuss. The meeting day arrived and we all sat around a series of round tables and enjoyed the coffee, soda and bottled water I had prepared for them. Hey, if I force you to come in for a meeting, the least I can do is have some beverages prepared for you…right?

More of the CustomerThink post from Steve DiGioia

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.