IT Leadership

CIO.com – Shadow IT: the CIO’s perspective

Here’s a must-read for organizations dealing with rogue or shadow IT.

Should CIOs fear or endorse shadow IT? The CIO’s perspective may surprise you.

CIOs have many reactions to shadow IT. Some complain that IT is generally measured as a success only by delivering something the business wants. However, IT organizations can get caught up in just doing cost control, security and overarching governance.

With this context, CIOs say, it’s important to realize that shadow IT is not the problem. Instead, it is a symptom, real or perceived, that IT is not delivering what the business needs. While some CIOs suggest that if you have shadow IT, it means IT isn’t doing its job.

More of the CIO.com article from Myles F. Suer

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Security / Risk Management — Comments Off
22
Oct 18

Information Week – Why IT Should Care About Legal Holds

When it’s time to preserve company data and communications relating to pending legal matters, the IT and legal groups have to work together.
When litigation looms, a corporation has a duty to identify and preserve relevant documents and other data that may be important to the legal matter. The goal is to avoid the intentional or inadvertent destruction of relevant evidence that might be used at trial. This process is called a “legal hold.”

While a legal hold sounds like it falls squarely into the realm of the legal department, lawyers rely heavily on IT to execute many of the activities associated with a legal hold. This puts a burden on IT and can put legal, IT or the organization at risk if legal obligations aren’t met

More of the Information Week article from John Tredennick

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / DevOps / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
19
Oct 18

CloudTech – How multi-cloud business models will shape the future

Architects of the future build optimal businesses. In an automated, security conscious world, organisations must rethink their cloud strategies, embed security into application development, and embrace new work practices to stay relevant. Now is the time to plan your journey.

Shaping the future
Experts agree that, over the next five years, the multi-cloud world will be the playground for innovation, allowing organisations to launch new services and enhance advanced technologies.

A recent Foresight Factory report entitled, The Future of the Multi-Cloud (FOMC) sponsored by F5, reveals how the pace of digital transformation is already dramatically disrupting existing business models.

More of the Cloud Computing News article from Tristan Liverpool

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
Oct 18

CIO.com – The CIO as storyteller

Effective communication across the enterprise requires a renewed focus on capturing an audience. Tech leaders from California State University, QEP Resources, and Arup share how they handle the challenge.

Communication is the bedrock of all social behavior. And multilingual communication — what linguists call code-switching — is the human norm. The British Council, the United Kingdom’s international cultural arm, has referred to recent surveys indicating that the majority of humanity is multilingual. The Linguistic Society of America reports that there are upwards of 6,000 languages worldwide, and humans have worked hard to accommodate this diversity. In Novi Sad, Serbia, for example, the sign to the mayor’s office is in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn.

More of the CIO.com article from Brendan McGowan

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Staff Retention / Technical Debt — Comments Off
15
Oct 18

Continuity Central – Gartner Emerging Risks Report highlights the rise of talent shortage as a top concern

Gartner’s quarterly Emerging Risks Report has found that talent shortage has joined privacy regulation and cloud computing as the top three business risks that organizations are concerned about.

In a time of historically low unemployment where the supply of available workers is much lower than usual, organizations are struggling to find and retain the talent that they need to meet their strategic objectives.

At No. 3, behind accelerating privacy regulation and cloud computing, this is the first time talent shortage was named a top business risk in Gartner’s quarterly Emerging Risks Report. Cloud computing, which was ranked the No. 1 risk in 2Q18, remains a concern. Cybersecurity disclosure and the artificial intelligence (AI)/robotics skills gap round out the top five concerns among executives surveyed.

Fast Company – Why you need to make your team uncomfortable from time to time

It’s crucial to have a sense of community in the workplace, but too much comfort can hinder progress.

People get comfortable with where they sit, what projects they work on, and what teams they are responsible for. For leaders, no‑drama days where everyone does their thing without any complaints or conflict feel great–so they assume that a calm, hassle-free existence is the one that produces the best work. As a result, they optimize for a steady state, where there are no surprises and people do as they’re told.

More of the Fast Company article from Scott Belsky

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
10
Oct 18

CIO.com – Making IT processes effective for the digital age

Does how IT runs itself matter to their firm’s digital transformation plan?

I have spent a lot of time in the #CIOChat discussing digital transformation. But can the IT organizational design and IT internal business processes impede digital transformation? Can IT, itself, become an obstacle to responding to the waves of digital disruption that are coming? This is the question that I recently asked CIOs.

Do IT processes get in the way?
CIOs say that poor processes and organizational misalignment can get in the way. They say both represent barriers to success when transformational work is built upon them. This, of course, is frequently the case and may explain why so many digital transformations fail.

More of the CIO.com article from Myles F Suer

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Leadership / IT Strategy — Comments Off
09
Oct 18

ZDNet – Five ways to talk about tech, without switching people off

Talking about why tech matters can be hard. Here are some tips on getting your message across.

From engineers to chief execs, from top suppliers to the smallest customers, the ability of a tech managers to speak clearly about their aims and challenges can often be key to the success of a technology strategy. So, how can CIOs improve how they communicate? Five digital leaders give their best-practice tips.

1. BUILD A CULTURAL AWARENESS OF DIGITAL CHANGE
Julie Dodd, director of digital transformation and communication at charity Parkinson’s UK, says everyone across the business must understand that successful IT-led change is about more than simply buying the right kit. Instead, transformation requires a cultural change and an awareness of how technology can be used to help the business meets its objectives quicker.

More of the ZDNet article from Mark Samuels

CIO Strategy / IT Leadership / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy / Technical Debt — Comments Off
04
Oct 18

CIO.com – What does it mean to be a transformational IT leader today?

As CIO, if you think your job is systems, think again.

Having now spent the last 12 months asking every CIO I know, “What does digital mean to your company?” I have some trends to report:

We used to use technology to run our businesses, now technology is our business.
We used to sell a product, now we sell data, or connectivity, or customer experience.
We used to know who our competitors were, now our competitors are coming at us from all sorts of new places.
Our company used to be all about manufacturing, or supply chain, or design, or R&D. Now we are all about the customer, and the customer wants access on her phone, her watch, her voice, and in her car

More of the CIO.com post from Martha Heller

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.