IT Governance

HBR – 7 Questions to Ask Before Your Next Digital Transformation

Although digital investment is almost unquestionably the right course of action for most firms, organizations still struggle to create the desired results. Estimates of digital transformation failures range from 66% to 84%. Such a high failure rate isn’t surprising, as leaders are trying to create entirely new competencies and wedge them into an organization with strong legacy cultures and operating models.

While most executives are pros at managing change, digital transformation is a much deeper change than the usual process or system update. Of course, digital technology can be used to improve or augment existing ways of operating, but it also opens entirely new ways of doing business based on digital networks like Uber, Airbnb, Yelp, and the Apple Developer Network — which is where a great deal of the digital value resides.

So as you navigate your own digital transformation, we recommend beginning with a few questions that go deeper than “what talent do you need” or “how much money will you spend” and probe broader organizational readiness.

More of the Harvard Business Review post from Barry Libert, Megan Beck, and Yoram (Jerry) Wind

Bi-Modal IT / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
25
Aug 16

The Register – Capacity planning in an age of agile and on – demand IT

Have we all been caught asleep at the capacity planning wheel? Business users today want, and expect new IT services to be delivered in the blink of an eye, the necessary resources provisioned instantly, and changes made “on demand”. But such IT flexibility requires that physical resources, server, storage and networking are ready to be allocated when required. The need for capacity planning has never been greater, yet a recent survey tells us that few organisations have the capabilities they need.

Furthermore, ‘overprovision and forget’ remains a common approach that elevates IT procurement and operational costs at a time when money is tight.

Business services at risk

Every organisation relies on instant availability to a wide range of IT services, from relatively predictable essential everyday functionality provided by key business applications to customer facing systems whose usage may be highly variable. In some environments, such as development and test systems, they also have to operate on a more ad hoc basis with unpredictable resource requirements. For some IT solutions, such as DR, the hope is that the resources required will never be used, but the potential impact of them kicking in needs to be accounted for.

More of The Register article from Tony Lock

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24
Aug 16

CIO Insight – CIOs and Their Salaries

These CIOs bring in seven-figure salaries as they lead their companies in an era when tech and business units must emerge as collaborative partners.

As a CIO, you probably consider yourself well-compensated. (Or at least we hope so.) But have you ever wondered what the elite of the elite make? If so, you’ll want to check out this list of the 10 highest-paid CIOs, as recently published by Janco. Gender-wise, it’s a pretty diverse list, with women accounting for half of the positions—including the top two slots and three of the top five. The CIOs also bring to the table a diversity of work and life experiences, including those related to community outreach, national policy, business leadership, tech design and the military. Collectively, they are leading their companies in an era when tech and business units must emerge as collaborative partners, navigating disruptive trends related to the cloud, mobility, Internet of things and even wearable tech. Indeed, one CIO describes this period as a “tipping point” and another in even more apocalyptic terms.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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22
Aug 16

WSJ – Only 19% of CIOs at Top U.S. Firms are Women: Study

Less than a fifth of chief information officers at top U.S. companies are women, according to a report by executive-search firm Korn/Ferry International.

Across all industry sectors, women accounted for just 19% of CIOs at the top 1,000 firms by revenue, the report said.

That outpaces the number of women who are chief executive or chief financial officers at these firms, but falls behind those who are chief marketing or human resources officers.

All told, women accounted for just 24% of all c-suite executives.

By industry, women were most likely to be the top IT managers at firms in the energy sector, where 35% of CIOs were women, followed by the life sciences at 22% and the consumer and industrial sectors, both at 18%.

Just 11% of CIOs at these firms in the technology sector were women, the report said.

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Angus Loten

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19
Aug 16

WSJ – Failures Like the Delta Outage Are a Fact of Digital Business

Customers are still feeling the fallout from computer problems at Delta Air Lines Inc. that began with an electrical outage in the dark hours of Monday morning. Flight cancellations grew throughout the day to about 1,000 and Delta continued to cancel flights Tuesday – 680 as of 5:15 p.m. ET – as it tried to restore normal operations.

“Following the power loss, some critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to Delta’s backup systems,” the company said in a statement. Delta hasn’t gone into detail about which systems didn’t perform as expected or why. Airline reservations, maintenance and operations systems are notoriously complex, made all the more so by layers of technology integrated after years of mergers and acquisitions.

Other industries deal with such complexity but none more publicly than airlines, says Allan Frank, co-founder and chief IT strategist at The Hackett Group, which advises large companies on technology best practices. You have “multiple systems from multiple companies over a period of years, he says. “A glitch can take down the whole house… In the end, people are stuck at airports and there’s a direct, emotional impact.”

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Kim S. Nash

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18
Aug 16

CIO Insight – Are IT Teams Relevant in an As-a-Service World?

A study revealed business leaders question the relevancy of IT in a world brimming with cloud services that are available on demand, anytime and on any device.

The road to enterprise innovation is always paved with good intentions. However, for many CIOs and their organizations, the compass too often points in the wrong direction.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emerging as-a-service world. According to a recent Accenture study, IT Is Dead. Long Live IT!, six out of 10 respondents claim that IT does not have a significant influence on their choice of an as-a-service provider, with 77 percent stating that the IT organization lacks the skill sets for an as-a-service world. The research also found that 70 percent of business and IT leaders do not involve internal IT until after the as-a-service option has been selected.

This raises a key question: how relevant is IT in an as-a-service world brimming with cloud services that are available on demand, anytime and on any device?

More of the CIO Insight post from Samuel Greengard

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17
Aug 16

Baseline – CIOs Are Confident Their Staff Can Meet Challenges

With tech departments now expected to make valuable contributions to business strategies while continuing to satisfy nuts-and-bolts operational IT needs, CIOs and other tech leaders expressed considerable confidence in their staff’s ability to successfully tackle these challenges, according to a recent survey from TEKsystems. The resulting midyear “Reality Check” report indicates that both tech budgets and full-time staffing are increasing. Hopefully, such organizational investments will put IT in a better position to pursue new initiatives—an area in which survey respondents express a comparative lack of confidence. Meanwhile, organizations continue to struggle to hire qualified IT talent, especially for roles such as architect, programmer, developer, project manager and software engineer. “If IT leaders aren’t experiencing these trends yet, they should be on the lookout for how they could affect their organizational needs,” said Jason Hayman, research manager for TEKsystems.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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11
Aug 16

Baseline – Keeping Up With Digital Disruption

Key takeaway – The reality is that clouds and IoT technologies are now synonymous with digital innovation and change. Without them, it’s impossible to take various processes and workflows to a higher level and achieve performance and cost gains that are now critical for success.

Only a quarter of companies surveyed are investing in the cloud, and a fifth are focusing on the IoT. As a result, many of them are at risk of being disrupted.

The pace of digital change is clearly accelerating. For business and IT executives, all of this translates into huge challenges—but also enormous opportunities. Individuals who can innovate, disrupt and reinvent businesses and industries will emerge as the leaders in the new economy.

A recently released technology adoption report from TD Bank includes a number of technology trends. It recently surveyed CEOs, CFOs and company founders at the Bloomberg Breakaway Summit in New York City and found that:

More of the Baseline article from Samuel Greengard

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10
Aug 16

ZDNet – Half of all cloud services outside of IT departments, but IT is getting wiser

A new study from the esteemed Ponemon Institute says we still aren’t doing nearly enough to protect enterprises in the cloud.

For starters, the survey of 3,476 IT and IT security practitioners, commissioned by Gemalto, a digital security vendor, finds that half of all cloud services and corporate data stored in cloud are not controlled by IT departments. So, there’s a lot of cloud activity among business units that’s potentially not vetted or governed.

However, IT departments are getting a better handle on things, the survey also shows. Fifty-four percent of respondents are “confident” that the IT organization knows all cloud computing applications, platform or infrastructure services in use – a nine percent increase from a similar survey from 2014.

The survey doesn’t spell out how and why IT is getting a better grip on shadow cloud adoption. It may be assumed that there are more policies in place and greater communication and collaboration on best practices. IT may be getting more active in its evolving role as cloud broker or service provider to the enterprise, providing catalogs or directories of vetted services available to business users.

More of the ZDNet post from Joe McKendrick

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03
Aug 16

ZDNet – Today’s cloud computing projects are missing something – a strategy

Everyone at some level is exploring or considering public cloud options for a range of functions — from automating IT functions to enhancing business processes.

The survey of 500 executives, published by Softchoice, finds a lack of strategic thinking when it comes to cloud implementations. A majority, 54 percent, report their teams struggle to form an effective cloud strategy, and 52 percent lack a formalized cloud strategy altogether.

Having a cloud strategy makes a big difference, the survey suggests. Compared to IT leaders with no public cloud strategy in place, those with a formal strategy are less likely to grapple with cloud skills gaps, the cloud procurement model, and cloud budgeting. Fifty-eight percent of companies without strategies have experienced cloud failures, compared to only 22 percent of strategy-minded organizations. Seventy-five percent say they are struggling to find the right skills, for example — compared to 41 percent of those with strategies. At the same time, while 70 percent of companies without strategies ran over budget, only 52 percent of those with strategies have had such issues. If anything, transitioning to public cloud is a slow-moving process for most businesses. A new survey of 500 IT and business executives finds 61 percent “still experimenting with or making limited use of public cloud”.

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.