Get Better

Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off
03
Apr 14

ZDNet – The new CIO mandate

Keeping up with the relentless pace of technology advancement has become one of the top challenges for organizations as they seek to modernize and adapt to today’s digital marketplaces. Perhaps foremost on the hot seat these days is the Chief Information Officer (CIO). That IT leadership role has been under growing tension between two implacable forces: 1) applying the latest technology innovations to the business and 2) maintaining infrastructure and keeping existing IT systems running smoothly.

The argument has long been made that the top technology leader in most enterprises has a fundamental conflict between keeping the lights on and pushing the business towards more comprehensive digital transformation. The lines of business in most enterprises, for their part, seem less and less content to wait for the CIO to take a more proactive role.

In fact, these days it’s often regional departments and far-flung divisions that are shifting companies into fast-moving and vital areas like market-facing mobile applications, cross-channel CRM, digital marketing, open APIs, online communities, and other high-visibility emerging business technologies. CIOs seem content to take on areas closer to their core competencies in large, centralized systems such as big data, ERP upgrades, and cloud/virtualization.

The data tells a similar story, with a new Forrester study noting that in a major demographic shift, a minority of IT projects will be led by the IT department for the average firm for the first time in history by next year.

Information Age – 5 tips for getting out of the server room and into the boardroom

‘That sounds like a big ask of the humble IT manager, but the majority of them already feel up to the task’

It’s not just sitcoms like The IT Crowd that put technology experts in a world of their own: IT managers need to break out of the perception that their place is in the server room but not the board room.

To do so, they’ll need to translate their deep knowledge of technical systems and processes into insights that business people can understand. They’ll also have the power (and responsibility) to defuse technology hype and define targets for their co-workers that are most relevant to business success.

That sounds like a big ask of the humble IT manager, but the majority of them already feel up to the task. In SolarWinds’ New IT Survey released just last week, 97% of IT professionals surveyed said they feel at least quite confident in providing advice on critical business decisions – and almost half said they were completely confident that they could do so. Yet although it found that almost every IT professional has delivered this guidance and counsel at one time or another, 6 in 10 only get the chance to do so occasionally or rarely.

This suggests that businesses have yet to fully tap into the diverse technical expertise that their IT managers can bring to the boardroom table. IT professionals, however, can quite easily make their potential decision-making value known – all they have to do is align what they know with what the business wants and needs.

CiteWorld – The battle for cloud infrastructure supremacy rages on

There is a two-pronged battle going on today for the soul of the cloud. It involves a struggle for cloud infrastructure supremacy and control of the network pipes, and it involves many of the biggest names in tech, from old (IBM, Microsoft) to new (Amazon, Google). As organizations move more data center infrastructure to the cloud, the results of these battles will have a profound impact on your business.

Like every other technology battle we have witnessed over the last 25 years — whether it was AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy in the early early ’90s; Netscape versus Internet Explorer in the browser wars in the early days of the Web; or the ongoing client computing platform battle among Apple, Microsoft and Google — the story is the same. We have several dominant players trying to be the one company.

For now, Amazon maintains a sizable lead in the cloud infrastructure business. In fact, some have suggested that Rackspace, unable to compete, could be a takeover target soon.

But Amazon can’t rest easy. Last year IBM bought SoftLayer, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider that gives it serious chops, so much so it actually landed in second place in revenues behind AWS with 7% of the market, based on numbers provided by Synergy research group. Even if you lump IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) numbers together, Amazon appears to have a sizable lead despite its lack of PaaS offerings.

High Scalability – The “Four Hamiltons” Framework for Mitigating Faults in the Cloud: Avoid it, Mask it, Bound it, Fix it Fast

This is a guest post by Patrick Eaton, Software Engineer and Distributed Systems Architect at Stackdriver.

Stackdriver provides intelligent monitoring-as-a-service for cloud hosted applications. Behind this easy-to-use service is a large distributed system for collecting and storing metrics and events, monitoring and alerting on them, analyzing them, and serving up all the results in a web UI. Because we ourselves run in the cloud (mostly on AWS), we spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with faults in the cloud. We have developed a framework for thinking about fault mitigation for large, cloud-hosted systems. We endearingly call this framework the “Four Hamiltons” because it is inspired by an article from James Hamilton, the Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services.

The article that led to this framework is called “The Power Failure Seen Around the World”. Hamilton analyzes the causes of the power outage that affected Super Bowl XLVII in early 2013. In the article, Hamilton writes:

As when looking at any system faults, the tools we have to mitigate the impact are: 1) avoid the fault entirely, 2) protect against the fault with redundancy, 3) minimize the impact of the fault through small fault zones, and 4) minimize the impact through fast recovery.

Buffer – What Would Happen If You improved Everything by 1%: The Science of Marginal Gains

In 2010, Dave Brailsford faced a tough job.

No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky (Great Britain’s professional cycling team), that’s what Brailsford was asked to do.

His approach was simple.

Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as the “1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1 percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.

They started by optimizing the things you might expect: the nutrition of riders, their weekly training program, the ergonomics of the bike seat, and the weight of the tires.

But Brailsford and his team didn’t stop there. They searched for 1 percent improvements in tiny areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else: discovering the pillow that offered the best sleep and taking it with them to hotels, testing for the most effective type of massage gel, and teaching riders the best way to wash their hands to avoid infection. They searched for 1 percent improvements everywhere.

LifeHacker – The Ways Your Brain Tricks You Into Doing Things You Shouldn’t Do

We often discuss how your brain can trick you and, by proxy, how you can hack your brain, but there are a few things our minds are very good at tricking us into that we should be aware of. This video from the folks at DNews is a crash course in three of them: Sunk cost, optimism bias, and confirmation bias.

The video’s about three minutes long, but it serves as a great crash course for some of the nastier things our brains are hard-wired to do, even if we think we have the willpower to do something differently. For example, the sunk cost fallacy is that thing that makes us prioritize what we’ve lost over what we could possibly gain—leading us to keep eating when we’re full, justify poor buying decisions, or make us keep watching a TV show that we say we hate. The video also tackles the topic of optimism bias, or our natural tendency to believe that bad things just won’t happen to us, even if we’re the ones engaging in behaviors that are bad for us. Of course, optimism bias is a good and a bad thing, and helps us strive to better, greater things.

BetaBeat – Forget Productivity Apps: What Time Do You Wake Up?

Joel is one of the most productive people I know and he has a secret that all of us can use to become more productive.

Like most of us, Joel has a lot on his plate. He’s the father of two kindergarten-aged children. Both he and his wife work full-time demanding jobs. That’s more than enough for most people but not for him. On the side he’s a budding author and a voracious reader. He also plays in a garage band and always makes time for his friends.

Within five minutes of meeting him for the first time and discovering all that he fits into the same 24 hours we all have, people inevitably ask “How do you fit it all in? What’s your secret?”

“There is no secret,” he tells them. “I just get up earlier than everyone else.”

Say what?

Most of us are at our peak in the mornings. Not only do we think better in the wee hours of the morning but, because everyone else is still sleeping, we’re able to focus on what we want to do rather than what we have to do. We’re more creative and more productive.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.