IT Leadership

Forrester – Forrester Future Fitness: The Big Picture View

This week, we launch a completely new tool to get you from where you are to where you want to go. The tool is called Forrester Future Fitness. It’s an atypical tool for Forrester, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Or maybe, transformative times call for transformative measures.

Note: Want to read the in-depth, article-length version of this post that provides more detail and food for thought? Download the article here, or keep reading below to get to the brass tacks.

The timing is apt. Today we kick off our Consumer Marketing 2019 Forum in NYC. The room is packed and energetic, and in conversations with our clients here, about two-thirds of them tell us they are going through some kind of digital transformation. Some are leading it, others are trying to support it, but they’re all trying to change. In a private council meeting ahead of the event yesterday, we sat in a room with about 50 CMOs and senior marketing leaders to discuss what obstacles they face. The concerns run the gamut, from lack of executive commitment to lack of clarity on what the vision is — something as simple as “What do we want our customers to get out of this transformation?” isn’t being asked as often or insistently as it should be.

More of the Forrester post from James L. McQuivey

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Leadership / Risk Management / Technical Debt — Comments Off
18
Mar 19

InformationWeek – Should You Declare Bankruptcy on Your Technical Debt?

Technical debt is a hidden cost that robs your business of its ability to be nimble and make needed changes for your customers
Decision-makers, it’s high time we wake up to the real cost of technical debt. Financial debt is a burden that’s familiar to many people, but for businesses, especially retailers, that burden takes on an additional form: technical debt.

For companies building their businesses on outdated platforms, technical debt is what’s keeping them from evolving to meet the demands of today’s increasingly mobile consumer. According to a study by Accenture, 85% of executives believe that their legacy platforms are hindering their ability to move to a more digital model.

Executives and IT teams often put software migration on the backburner, choosing instead to focus on the kind of projects that result in more immediate monetary returns. Yet the longer technical debt is allowed to accrue, the costlier it becomes. Should your IT department stick with its broken platforms, just to avoid the overhaul, or is it time to pull the plug?

More of the InformationWeek post from Sara Hicks

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
14
Mar 19

FastCompany – A new generation of young managers is reshaping how we work

No matter where you look, so much rapid change is happening that even how companies manage their talent strategy is shifting. Gone are the days of HR managing workforce planning with an Excel spreadsheet. To remain not only competitive but relevant, more companies are turning to detailed workforce plans, and younger generations of managers are much more likely to be putting these plans in place. As they do, and as they ascend to more senior roles, they’re reshaping the future of work.

More than half of younger generation managers polled see future workforce planning as a “top priority” for their departments–nearly three times more than their baby boomer counterparts, according to my company Upwork’s 2019 Future Workforce Report.

More of the Fast Company post from Stephanie Kasriel

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / IT Leadership / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
13
Mar 19

InformationWeek – CIO Survey Shows Shifts in IT Leadership Role

CIOs have made headway towards a more strategic position in the organization, but challenges remain on the road to digital.
It wasn’t too long ago when many IT organizations were still considered to be just keep-the-lights-on cost centers within the enterprise. But thanks to a lot of effort on the part of technology leadership inside enterprise organizations, that seems to be changing. These days CIOs and IT organizations have shifted to contributing strategic value to the technology within the company, even if the business itself is sometimes still slow to recognize it.

That shift is evident in a new CIO survey and report from Grant Thornton, a tax, audit, and advisory services firm. National managing principal for Enterprise Technology Strategy and Innovation at Grant Thornton, LaVerne H. Council, told InformationWeek in an interview that IT has been working to become more than just a cost center. IT needs to move into a critical new role in the age of digital — from cost center to trust center.

More of the InformationWeek article from Jessica Davis

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01
Mar 19

Forrester – The Search For US Tech Talent Will Get Harder And More Costly In 2019

Forrester has just published our forecast for US tech employment and compensation (see “2019 US Tech Talent Market Outlook”). It has some foreboding news for CIOs and for tech vendors: Tech talent will be harder to find and more expensive over the next two years.

The good news is that the supply of tech workers has largely kept up with demand — annual wage growth for tech workers has generally hovered between 2.0% and 2.5% since 2015. But the current data available for 2018 suggests that wage growth is starting to accelerate. This acceleration poses a special threat to CIOs, who could find themselves paying premiums for certain tech roles in high demand.

Here’s a summary of our forecast for the US tech labor market over the next two years:

Tech employment growth will slow to 1.7% in 2019 before recovering to 2.4% in 2020. The growth of tech employment, as estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Occupational Employment Statistics (OES), has grown by rates slightly above 2% over the past two years.

More of the Forrester post from Andrew Bartels

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27
Feb 19

ZDNet – IT strategy: How to keep your best staff happy and motivated

Attracting staff is one thing, keeping them happy is another thing altogether. While career promotions and wage increases can go a long way to ensuring your workers stay motivated, IT professionals will quickly become bored if their roles aren’t fulfilling.

With demand for skilled technology workers higher than ever before, businesses must work hard to ensure they retain their top talent. High turnover of staff is expensive, can rob projects of expertise just when they need it, and can hurt morale.

So, how can CIOs keep their workers happy and eager? ZDNet speak to the experts and finds out their best-practice tips for keeping staff motivated.

TALK ABOUT THE BENEFITS OF CHANGE
Julie Dodd, director of digital transformation and communication at Parkinson’s UK, admits she wishes she had the “magic answer” to the question of how to keep people motivated. “It’s a challenge — especially for charities, where financial reward isn’t going to be the answer,” she says.

More of the ZDNet article from Mark Samuels

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Security — Comments Off
26
Feb 19

CTOVision – The Average Ransomware Payment Is Rising

The average ransomware payment is growing as criminals become more sophisticated in their attacks, according to a report released by ransomware incident response company Coveware. According to Coveware’s Q4 2018 Global Ransomware Marketplace Report, the average ransom increased by 13% to $6733 in Q4 2018 compared to Q3’s $5973.

Future of CIO – Running Indispensable IT: How to Scrutinize IT Effort via the Business Lens?

It has become more obvious that information is the real source of business innovation. IT will continue to be a critical department.

IT is one of the most invaluable assets of the business besides people, IT is also perhaps one of the most expensive investments in modern organizations today. Many IT organizations are at the cross-road, either keep providing commodity IT service as a business support center – becoming irrelevant, or contribute to the top line business growth by leveraging technology as a means to an end. How can contemporary CIOs put “Chief Investment Officer,” hat on, scrutinize IT effort from the business lens and make the IT organization indispensable?

IT investment in the business can often become the decisive factor to run a high-performance organization with a long-term perspective: IT investment is usually costly. Considering many companies across sectors making a huge investment in sophisticated information & technology tools are greatly wasted because the appropriate processes to leverage those tools are not implemented or adopted smoothly. More often than not, IT can lift or break the business in a shorter time spectrum.

More of the Future of CIO post from Pearl Zhu

Cloud infrastructure / IT Leadership / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
14
Jan 19

CloudTech – How the ‘severe’ cloud skills gap will impact on company culture

Another day, another story focused around cloud skillsets – or lack of them. A new survey from artificial intelligence platform provider OpsRamp has found the vast majority of respondents continue to struggle finding the right talent for cloud environments.

The research, which was conducted at Gartner’s Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies conference, found 94% of the 124 respondents were having a ‘somewhat difficult’ time finding candidates with the right technology and business skills to drive digital innovation. Nine out of 10 hiring managers polled said the digital skills gap was either ‘somewhat big’, ‘quite big’, or ‘huge.’

The survey findings appear in a report which focuses on how the battle for cloud talent has become well and truly joined. With the ominous subtitle of ‘from a cloud-native skills gap to a full-blown crisis’, there are plenty of warnings in place.

More of the CloudTech post from James Bourne

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08
Jan 19

Continuity Central – Gartner highlights ‘digital twins’ as an emerging organizational resilience tool

In its latest ‘Hype Cycle for IT in GCC’ Gartner identifies various technologies that will reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years. Of these one in particular – ‘digital twins’ – has strong potential for assisting organizations improve their organizational resilience.

Gartner says that a digital twin is a virtual representation of a real object that is designed to optimize the operation of assets. The primary short-term use is to lower maintenance costs and increase asset uptime.

Digital twins use artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside other techniques to create digital avatars that change and develop alongside the physical aspect being modelled. They can be used to harden existing systems and design new, more resilient, ones; they can also be used to identify hidden vulnerabilities.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.