IT Governance

CIO Insight – Two-Speed IT: Juggling Competing Agendas

With the ever-increasing interest in technology solutions, IT’s stakeholders are giving them two competing demands:
1. Produce new innovative, strategic technology-based capabilities.
2. Do so with reduced resources.

How can IT leaders step up to the plate and juggle these seemingly competing agendas: to meet the business’ demands for increased innovation, including new digital systems and services, all while cutting costs and slashing budgets?

One popular solution has emerged within IT thought leadership. Often called “two-speed IT,” this idea proposes that the IT organization does not attempt to resolve the tension between these two ideas. Instead, IT lumps all of its technology into one of two broad buckets: operational technology and innovative technology. Do this, and operations won’t slow down innovation, and expensive innovation investments won’t inflate operations’ budgets.

More of the CIO Insight article from Lee Reese

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
20
Jul 17

HBR – The Board Directors You Need for a Digital Transformation

When the term digital transformation was first bandied about by consultants and business publications, its implications were more about keeping up and catching up than true transformation. Additionally, at first it was only applied to large, traditional organizations struggling, or experimenting, in an increasingly digital economy. But true digital transformation requires so much more. As evidenced by the recent Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods, we’re living in a new world.

Early transformation efforts were focused on initiatives: e-commerce, sensors/internet of things, applications, client and customer experience, and so on. Increasingly, our clients are coming to us as they realize that in order for these disparate initiatives to thrive, they need to undergo an end-to-end transformation, the success of which demands dramatic operational, structural, and cultural shifts.

More of the HBR post from Tuck Rickards and Rhys Grossman

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
17
Jul 17

IT Business Edge – Multi-Cloud Software: Trading One Dependency for Another?

Having a multi-cloud strategy these days is like having a multi-server strategy in ages past: Why trust your workloads to a single point of failure when you can move them about at will?

But while distributing resources over multiple points fosters redundancy and eliminates vendor lock-in on one level, the enterprise should be aware that this invariable pushes these same risks to another.

It’s no surprise that upwards of 85 percent of organizations have implemented a multi-cloud strategy by now, says Datacenter Journal’s Kevin Liebl. Following major outages at AWS and Azure earlier this year, the vulnerabilities of placing all data in one basket have become clear. Using multiple clouds provides clear advantages for disaster recovery, data migration, workload optimization, and a host of other functions.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
12
Jul 17

Arthur Cole – When the Cloud Becomes Just Normal Infrastructure

Strange as it may seem, the cloud only holds about a fifth of the total enterprise workload, which means there is still time for the enterprise to suddenly decide that the risks are not worth the rewards and start pulling data and applications back to legacy infrastructure.

Unlikely as this is, it nonetheless points out the fact that there are still many unknowns when it comes to the cloud, particularly its ability to provide the lion’s share of data infrastructure in ways that are both cheaper and more amenable to enterprise objectives.

According to Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak, the cloud is nearing an inflection point at which it should start to show accelerated growth into the next decade.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
11
Jul 17

Data Center Knowledge – How to End On-Call IT Burnout and Post-Traumatic Alert Fatigue

In so many ways IT operations has developed a military-style culture. If IT ops teams are not fighting fires they’re triaging application casualties. Tech engineers are the troubleshooters and problems solvers who hunker down in command centers and war rooms.

For the battle weary on-call staff who are regularly dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, having to constantly deal with flaky infrastructure and poorly designed applications carries a heavy personal toll. So, what are the signs an IT organization is engaged in bad on-call practices? Three obvious ones to consider include:

Support teams are overloaded – Any talk of continuous delivery counts for squat if systems are badly designed, hurriedly released and poorly tested.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Peter Waterhouse

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
07
Jul 17

Continuity Central – Organizational risks that you should definitely be acting on

It is easy for organizations to feel overwhelmed by the number and scale of the risks that are faced; but often the perception of the potential harm engendered by various risks is exaggerated. In this article Chris Butler lists the real risks that every organization needs to consider.

Did you know the world’s most dangerous animal is not a shark, or a bear, but is in fact a mosquito? What’s certain is that human perception of risk is notoriously flawed; often, the events that concern and outrage us the most are the least likely to happen.

From political and economic tremors to cyber threats, 2017 represents another minefield of risks for businesses. For organizations, forging a deepened understanding of both threats and risk factors is crucial for remaining robust, resilient, and most of all, ahead of the competition. Part of this involves separating the myths from reality. So, what then are the real risks to business today?

TechTarget – Avoid steep network integration costs in multicloud

While a VPN is useful for multicloud networks, IT teams still need to be careful to avoid high traffic charges, as applications move from one provider to another.

One of the most important — and most complex — concepts in multicloud is network integration between public cloud providers. This model facilitates cross-cloud load balancing and failover but, without careful planning, can also lead to hefty network integration costs.

Nearly all enterprises have a virtual private network (VPN) that connects their sites, users, applications and data center resources. When they adopt cloud computing, they often expect to use that VPN to connect their public cloud resources as well. Many cloud providers have features to facilitate this, and even when they don’t, it’s usually possible to build VPN support into application images hosted in the cloud.

More of the TechTarget article from Tom Nolle

CIO Strategy / Cloud infrastructure / Internet of Things / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
05
Jul 17

IT Business Edge – Over 70 Percent of IoT Efforts Are Failing: The Fix Seems Surprisingly Easy

Cisco is generally credited with driving the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), even though it was Carnegie Mellon back in 1982 that first conceptualized the idea. I’m still at Cisco’s big analyst event this week and was fascinated by a survey shared on stage. Apparently, 74 percent of the survey’s respondents have indicated that their IoT efforts have been going really badly, either not finishing or not finishing within expectations. In addition, these same folks are indicating that about half their time is spent on troubleshooting problems. Cisco connects the latter to complexity. Given that there really is nothing as complex as a typical IoT effort, I see the two stats as related and suggest that IoT efforts are poorly planned, which is why they aren’t completing as expected and likely adding to the complexity problems overwhelming IT organizations.

Now, Cisco is positioning its Network Intuitive efforts at this problem and certainly massive automation can reduce the amount of work, particularly with regard to often repetitive troubleshooting efforts. However, with the IoT in particular, really understanding the problem you are trying to solve and simplifying the effort at the front end would likely have an even bigger initial positive impact.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Rob Enderle

Brain / CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Governance / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
Jun 17

HBR – A Little Competition Could Improve Your HR, IT, and Legal Departments

I think we can all agree that corporate functions tend to be a locus of frustration for pretty much all employees — except, of course, the ones from the function that is the object of the frustration in question. If you have ever thought to yourself “Doesn’t legal understand that we are going to lose this deal if they don’t sign off soon?” or “Why is HR’s answer always Our rules don’t allow that?” you are not alone.

Recent McKinsey research showed that senior executives have a low level of satisfaction (an average of only 30%) in their corporate functions across the board. McKinsey’s recommendations are all sensible, such as: “Create incentives for functional leaders to contain costs, instead of allocating costs that business units can’t change.” This issue has long been a bugbear for me. Despite chronically low satisfaction and lots of intelligent prescriptions like this, the problem by all accounts seems to be getting worse, not better.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Roger L Martin

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
15
Jun 17

Continuity Central – Why business continuity managers need to trust ‘gut feel’

Agree or disagree?

Sometimes as a business continuity manager you have a feeling that a certain decision is the wrong one, despite qualitative and quantitative evidence pointing to the contrary. Dominic Irvine explains how research is starting to support the reliability of trusting your gut feeling…

Qualitative and quantitative evidence is sometimes used as a weapon to force decisions through when not everyone involved is convinced; in the face of charts, spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks, gut feel seems like a poor response, and yet what we are learning from research into exertion and fatigue, is that it is one of the most useful tools in our armoury of tests.

After the First World War, much work was done to find a way to measure fatigue but it was deemed such a subjective concept as to be impossible to develop any meaningful way of objectively measuring it. It was not possible to fathom out the complex interaction between emotional, physical and mental aspects of fatigue in a way that could be reliably and accurately counted. And yet, we all know the feeling of being fatigued and how tired we are.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.