Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

A key frustration of CIOs and IT managers is the inability to articulate risk to the organization’s senior managers and corporate decision-makers who may not have the technical background to fully appreciate the scope and breadth of weaknesses in their own data environments. Often, company decision-makers rely on IT leaders to set budgets, recommend operational solutions and generally “keep the lights on” without fully understanding the complexities surrounding any given project.

When a project is critical to the business, however, these IT leaders face tremendous pressure to deliver results to management.

Even more challenging is when a crisis occurs, and questions surface about what happened and how it occurred. In these situations, IT leaders often find themselves explaining complex problems to an unsympathetic audience.

The ability to uncover and correct weaknesses in a data environment may be less about what resources are available to the IT department and more about the willingness of the business to truly embrace good data governance. The fact is, poor data governance is generally not the result of some single breakdown attributable only to the IT department. Rather, it is often a failure of the business to support specific risk-mitigation measures and initiatives—both inside and outside of IT—that create an environment in which positive data governance can flourish.

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App stores are the mobile equivalent of desktop Web browsers in many ways. They are the predominant mechanism for delivering content and functionality in the mobile world. They provide much more control than traditional browsers and the direct ability for developers and administrators to deploy, monitor, manage and monetize apps and the content that passes through them. This, along with being end user-facing, has made them the cornerstone of the outside-in view for users and developers. Within the enterprise, they will soon be the final manifestation of application management and device management capabilities for end users and IT administrators, and become as ubiquitous as the intranet.

Let’s take a look at the outside-in view and the key characteristics of app stores so we can evaluate them for the enterprise.

User and Device Identity. One of the most important characteristics of app stores that differentiate them from regular Web browsers is the fact that app stores have identifiable users with strong identities. App stores play an integral role in the mobile ecosystem of devices, developers, publishers and end users by identifying the users they provide services to, blocking usage when required and ensuring security. In an enterprise, user identity elements span not just employees, but also partners, vendors and resellers so having the right level of access and functionality for each stakeholder is critical to its success.

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The cloud is cheaper than standard IT infrastructure. This has been a given for so long that hardly anyone questions its veracity. And after all, who would argue the cost advantages of leasing resources from an outside provider vs. building and maintaining complex internal infrastructure?

Well, some very bright minds in the IT industry are starting to do just that.

Rob Enderle, writing for CIO.com, for one, notes that speed and flexibility, while important, do not necessarily translate into lower costs. The hard truth, of course, is that spending on IT is dropping while spending on cloud services is increasing, but this has more to do with timing and availability rather than simple economics. Indeed, recent analyses show that once internal infrastructure begins deploying cloud services of its own, it can meet enterprise needs for about $100 per user while Amazon and other providers come in at around $200 per user when purchased individually or in small groups, as is the practice with many business units. And a proprietary platform like Oracle can run as much as $500 per user.

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One in every nine people on earth is an active Facebook user, and mankind created 1.9 trillion GB of data in 2013. The growth of social sites and the proliferation of information are two trends that Emerson Network Power captures in its “State of the Data Center 2013” infographic. These trends have a huge impact on the communications network, IT department and, most importantly, data centers.

In 2011, Emerson Network Power introduced our “State of the Data Center” infographic, a scan of major trends that affect data centers. We also researched the number of outages and the cost of downtime. This infographic provided a baseline for comparing future trends.

We recently completed “State of the Data Center 2013,” which we developed as an infographic that illustrates the facts of the year. To sum up the results in a few words, the global dependence on everything digital is pushing IT to the forefront of the organization. Data centers increasingly are relied upon in areas that were traditionally offline pursuits, and consumers have high expectations of speed and performance. I’ll share trends that support these findings, and I’ll also discuss a significant consequence of IT being in the spotlight.

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IT departments are not behind the times when it comes to their technology, but if they carry on as they are, complexity could stop them growing, the founder and principal analyst of ZK Research has said.

Speaking at Cisco Live in Milan today, Zeus Kerravala, a former network engineer, said he was insulted when the media claimed IT had fallen behind in enterprises. He countered that the departments were “smarter than ever”.

However, Kerravala admitted the increased intricacies within the environment were threatening to hold up further progression.

“Over the years, businesses want to move faster, be more agile and respond to competitive pressure faster,” Kerravala said.

“So what IT has done is introduce a whole host of new technologies that allow companies to do that: virtual platforms, cloud platforms, wireless networks, bringing in consumer devices, pushing things to the cloud, bringing them back to on premise, making them hybrid, making them converge etc.”

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A recent Gartner study predicts that by 2015, 25 percent of large global organizations will appoint a Chief Digital Officer (CDO). In a time where there is a lot of technology analyst talk about the relevance of the CIO and Enterprise IT, Mike Kail, CIO of Netflix offers a refreshing perspective. In his opinion, there has never been a better time for IT to fix its reputation in the industry and move from being the blockers in an organization to being the enablers. IT has an opportunity to show that they can deploy great technology that is accessible anywhere leveraging cloud computing, SaaS and mobility, and providing analytics to the teams that need it.

Netflix is an amazing company that is growing rapidly with 1 in 4 Americans subscribing and 33 percent of all home broadband internet traffic in the U.S. generated by Netflix video. But Kail, who embodies pragmatic optimism and a can-do attitude, does not view this rapid growth as a strain but as an opportunity. To deal with the challenges of the transformation IT, Kail advices CIOs to not be driven by fear but rather to embrace this opportunity to create a new reputation for IT.

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How weird will the enterprise become in the cloud? Pretty weird, by the sound of some of the discussions taking place today.

We all know that the cloud will be extremely disruptive for existing data infrastructure. Concepts like the all-virtual, all-cloud data center were considered distant possibilities just a few short years ago, but now seem to be looming on the horizon as organizations seek to cut costs and increase data agility.

But even these notions of an ethereal data environment floating around the cybersphere are starting to look quaint compared to the ideas that some forward thinkers are coming up with now.

5 Pitfalls and 5 Payoffs of Conducting Your Business Processes in the Cloud
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Take, for example, IO CEO George Slessman’s recent presentation at the Open Compute Project Summit last week, which he delivered via his cell phone. In it, he described the data center as an API in which software-based infrastructure is provisioned, deployed and decommissioned at the drop of a hat, tailored almost exclusively to the needs of the moment. To prove his point, he showed how to set up a fully functioning virtual instance, again from his phone, using physical resources located miles away—all in about three minutes. Clearly, the provider who maintains this physical infrastructure will have to worry about hardware/software integration, network configurations and the like, but the vast majority of knowledge workers will never see this side of things, nor will they understand a world in which the resources needed to do their jobs simply aren’t available.

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DEL MAR, Calif. — Nobody likes to talk about the danger of their jobs evolving into something they do not like, least of all highly compensated enterprise C-suite executives. But a group of Fortune 500 CIOs did just that several days ago.

The occasion was the second, and possibly annual, The Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference, held at The Grand Del Mar resort near San Diego, Calif. About 120 CIOs were in attendance for the one-day meetup that featured several open sessions and cloistered private meetings that enabled the CIOs to speak freely among themselves. Privacy, one of the true conundrums in today’s IT world, was a key request by the attendees: Guards stood outside the meeting room entrances. The open sessions, which provided plenty of insight in their own regard, were observed by a small group of journalists.

Go here to see the agenda and a list of those who attended. Speakers included Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil, Intel Chief Economist and Manager of Market Sizing and Forecasting Paul Thomas, VMware CEO and former Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger, and several other highly recognizable IT stars.

If there was one key takeaway from this daylong get-together on the Southern California coast, it was this: CIOs need to start thinking more like CFOs, or else they will slowly forfeit their power to other colleagues.

All the trends we see in IT business evolution ultimately end up as real tasks on the CIO’s desk. Some of the more recent developments, such as BYOD and BYOC (bring your own device and cloud), consumerization, and gamification, have caused even more headaches than usual for these often-embattled professionals.

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I’ve noticed lately that my mind has been wandering a lot so I wanted to see how attention works and how to manage it better.

It turns out a lot of us have wandering minds and struggle to stay focused. In fact, when we’re reading, our minds typically wander anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time. Voluntarily keeping our attention on one thing continuously can take a lot of effort, so it’s not surprising that I struggle with this sometimes.

Luckily, there are ways to keep our attention spans from burning out, once we understanding how they work.

The two brain systems that control your attention

Our brain is split into two systems, according to Daniel Kahneman. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he calls these System 1 and System 2 (to get a full understanding of how these work, I’d highly recommend reading his book. I can only explain them briefly here, and there’s a lot more that goes into how our brains do the things they do!).

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