IT Staff Retention

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

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
02
Oct 18

CIO.com – Why IT-business alignment still fails

With the push for digital transformation, relations between business and IT seemed to be improving, then they took a left turn. Here’s what’s worth addressing to improve alignment in your organization.

Do your company’s IT leaders and top business executives have the same understanding of IT’s role within the organization? Back in 2012, researchers at Capgemini asked this question of more than 1,300 senior executives. Sixty-five percent of them answered yes.

Perhaps a number closer to 100 percent would have been ideal, but the fact that nearly two thirds of companies surveyed believed business and IT were on the same page was very good news. It represented enormous and hard-won progress from the bad old days when business executives saw technology professionals as pointy-headed geeks, and technology professionals saw business executives as soulless and money-obsessed.

More of the CIO.com post from Minda Zetlin

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01
Oct 18

InformationWeek – How to Drill DevOps into Your Organizational Culture

Establishing the right culture will get your DevOps initiative off on the right foot.
These days, software applications are not your classic installable Windows apps, but instead exist in the cloud, delivered on the Internet and offered as a service to end users. This has ushered in the era of modern, web-based apps that require seamless internal operations throughout development, testing and quality assurance in order to deliver an experience that satisfies (and even goes beyond) user expectation for reliability, uptime, and quality.

This paradigm shift has resulted in the rise of DevOps, and launched initiatives that reframe the way developers and engineers work on a day-to-day basis. Enterprises must innovate smarter and adapt faster to outpace competitors and scale the business. DevOps strategies not only support technological advancements that benefit the consumer, but set benchmarks for entire industries.

More of the InformationWeek article from Christian Beedgen

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / DevOps / Digital Transformation / IaaS / Internet of Things / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
28
Sep 18

CIO.com – 8 CIO archetypes: What kind of IT leader are you?

From order taker to business leader, CIO responsibilities vary widely. Learn what role you currently play and how to break that mold in service of improved business value and career growth.

Global business disruption is quickening the evolutionary timeline of the CIO role. Market dynamicsare forcing IT leaders to extend beyond taking orders and delivering sustainable IT systems to massaging digital strategies and driving business outcomes.

More of the CIO.com slideshow from Clint Bouton

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08
Jun 18

CIO.com – 8 IT management productivity killers

From neglecting to prioritize key strategic initiatives to failing to adjust project estimates, weak IT management practices are threatening IT’s ability to get the job done.

There are two types of productivity killers in the modern workplace: small distractions that sap your focus and big productivity killers that push you into applying time and effort in all the wrong places. Like it or not, weak IT management practices are what cause the more significant productivity killers.

Following is a look at eight such practices that are derailing your IT department — and how to adjust for success.

1. Neglecting to prioritize strategic projects
IT has to put out fires on occasion. When the online banking servers go down, it’s an emergency. But panic situations tend to be rare. Instead, the steady stream of ad hoc questions and change requests from users are the more significant problem. Making users happy is a worthy goal, but you can easily fall victim to short-term thinking.

More of the CIO.com article from Bruce Harpham

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07
Jun 18

InformationWeek – Why IT Costs Keep Rising (and How to Resist the Climb)

It will take a multi-pronged approach for IT organizations to stop the escalation of IT costs.

IT departments have gone through several fundamental changes over the past couple of decades. Today’s technology seems space-aged compared to what was available just 10 years ago, and IT professionals everywhere are just trying to keep up.

Many businesses are seeing their IT expenses, or costs, rise. They’re being forced to invest more in their technological infrastructure and, in many cases, the growing demand of superior technology is driving budgets through the roof. IT costs are expected to maintain this upward trajectory for years to come, and for businesses with already-tight budgets, this seems like an insurmountable challenge.

So why is it that IT costs keep climbing, and what can you do to resist those increases?

More of the InformationWeek article from Larry Alton

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13
Apr 18

ZDNet – As cloud adoption soars, cloud architect becomes a top career choice

Could you imagine 15 years ago telling your colleagues, or your college career officer, that you wanted to someday be a ‘cloud architect?’

Make room, enterprise architects, data architects and systems architects. There’s a new architect in town, the “cloud architect,” and his or her role is to make sure clouds are staying in formation.

That’s the gist of a survey of 997 technology professionals conducted by RightScale, which documents a shifting role for IT managers and professionals in the emerging cloud-centric enterprise.

The role of cloud architect is on the rise, the survey shows. This year, the survey finds 61 percent of architects identify themselves as cloud architects, an increase from 56 percent in 2017. The percentage of architects identifying themselves as “IT architects” has decreased to 31 percent in 2018 from 35 percent in 2017.

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

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12
Apr 18

Forbes – Is It Time For A Technology Haircut?: The Lasting Value Of Pruning Your IT Landscape

What doesn’t make sense? Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon all prune their massive technology portfolios more than you do.

I’ve been studying this issue for a while and have recorded my latest thinking about why you should be pruning your portfolio in detail on EarlyAdopter.com in this article: “Numerify: Using Systems of Intelligence for IT Pruning” The article also explains how to use a system of intelligence, essentially advanced BI applied to IT, to provide detailed information about all aspects of IT to help with pruning.

While that article explains the details, in this space I’d like to take a closer look at the benefits of pruning.

The two main benefits are:
1. Increasing the pace and amount of resources truly freed up to support innovation.
2. Reducing staffing costs related to keeping the lights on.

The first benefit related to innovation comes from the fact that a well-executed pruning program not only retires systems that are providing low value, but also makes operations more efficient in general. Pruning leads to understanding. Understanding leads to optimization, which if meaningful, should mean that your systems become easier to run and change.

More of the Forbes article from Dan Woods

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11
Apr 18

Future of CIO – The Digital CIO as the Gap Minding Role

CIOs are the gap-minding role as IT is in the unique position to oversee underlying business functions and structures. IT leaders have to look things from all different angles.

Nowadays, information is permeating into every corner of the business and technology is often the disruptive force of digitalization. The CIO is not a static management role, but a dynamic leadership role due to the changing nature of technology and overwhelming growth of information. Especially now more and more enterprises are leveraging IT for revenue-generating initiatives. The IT leader of the future and the exemplars of today must move away from pure IT manager, and become a trustful business partner and an insightful strategist to bridge the gap between IT and business, and between the industrial age and the digital era, The important component of IT leadership success has to do with the definition or scope of the role that the CIO is playing and the profundity of IT leadership influence.

More of the Future of CIO post from Pearl Zhu

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09
Apr 18

CIO.com – Q&A Conagra CIO: In IT, our job is to remove the friction

Mindy Simon, CIO of Conagra Brands, focuses on being digital with her business partners, not doing digital to them.

Digital is more than marketing at Conagra, the $8 billion global food manufacturer whose brands include Orville Redenbacher’s, Reddi-Wip, and Peter Pan peanut butter. As CIO Mindy Simon discusses in our Q&A, digital is variable infrastructure, shorter technology lifespans, and knowing all about the consumer.

What does “digital” mean to Conagra Brands?
Simon: To Conagra, digital is technology-enabled innovation and transformation — from delivering to consumers who shop digitally to our cloud enabled infrastructure, and everything in between.

Digital is marketing in the right place, time, and context for the consumer, whether that’s social, email, or some other channel. We need to be on the digital shelf and meet consumers wherever they are.

More of the CIO.com article from Marthe Heller

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.