IT Staff Retention

ZDNet – CIO report card: IT must fix basic problems

New research shows that IT continues to struggle with completing basic operational activities to the satisfaction of end-users and business partners. CIOs should examine their departments carefully to see whether house-cleaning and improvements are needed.

An odd, yet interesting, research study from Nintex appeared last week. Titled Definitive Guide to America’s Most Broken Processes, the report asked 1,000 full-time employees to answer these questions:

What are the top broken corporate processes?
Who do employees blame for these broken functions?
How do broken processes impact employee performance and morale?
How can businesses improve internal functions?

More of the ZDNet article from Michael Krigsman

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05
Apr 18

Future of CIO – How to Handle The Buy-in Cycle of Change Management

A digital organization with strong change capability is an environment of growth and letting go, possibilities, chaos, solutions, innovation, and creativity.

Generally speaking, Change Management has very low percentage of success rate due to varying factors such as static mindsets, poor processes or bad timing, etc. The big “WHY” about change is always fundamental because change shouldn’t be for its own sake, it must have a clear business purpose or a progressive goal. From Change Management perspective, handling the buy-in cycle is an important step or the prerequisite for managing a successful change effort effortlessly.

More of Future of CIO post from Pearl Zhu

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04
Apr 18

InformationWeek – IT Leadership: Winning at What Cost?

A key challenge for business and IT leaders is establishing — and evolving — a company culture that balances the need for winning with playing by the rules.

“The victor is the king and the loser is the bandit” is a famous Chinese proverb. Machiavelli’s “The ends justify the means” encompasses the same spirit. In IT, bad behavior survives and thrives because leadership allows it. Some leaders simply look the other way or ignore the behavior because those individuals win or close business deals: In other words, get it done. Winning forgives all manners of sin. How do leaders maintain discipline to their core values while delivering wins?

Winning and sinning: the wrong kind of synergy

Companies establish and center their culture on a code of conduct that highlights their company’s values. Values start skewing when winning comes into play. All for-profit companies strive to make money, grow business, and put competitors out of business. That is the nature of the game.

More of the InformationWeek article from Kong Yang

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30
Mar 18

InformationWeek – How New Technologies Can Spell Disaster

IT compensation expert David Foote warns that outdated HR models threaten to destroy companies as they try to implement emerging IT concepts.

The warning stirs distant memories of the recessionary year 2008 and the Dotcom bust a few years earlier. So many companies, from startups to one-time Blue Chips, laid off thousands of workers or simply disappeared through bankruptcy or acquisition. Their IT teams, entrenched in dated technologies, went from unemployed to unemployable.

These weren’t layoffs of 10 people but 10,000 at a time. Picture 10,000 people, sort of like a small town, with everyone out of work. Could something similar happen in the near future? David Foote says that is a real possibility, but that there is an opportunity for companies and IT professionals to change their paths.

Foote, founder of IT workforce and compensation research firm Foote Partners, issued an analysis of the company’s Q4 2017 compensation data. On the positive side, the market value for more than 400 IT certifications rose for the first time in four quarters, growing by 0.3%, so that the average certification now represents a 7.6% premium on an IT pro’s base salary. Also on the positive side — for employees and the employers who have to recruit them — Foote says the market volatility that we have seen for many IT skills is calming down a bit.

More of the InformationWeek article from James M. Connolly

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02
Feb 18

CIO.com – The 12 biggest issues IT faces today

When CIOs aren’t being overwhelmed by data, they’re wondering who’s securing it. They’re dealing with the pressure of cutting costs while trying to stay nimble as they face difficulties with contractors and the challenges of moving data and services to the cloud. All the while, new threats emerge that require an evolving response.

From finding qualified IT pros to keeping them from jumping ship, a range of sticky technology and personnel issues are giving IT pros cold sweats.

With a host of new concerns in 2018 — and old standbys — where should CIOs be most focused? We’ve gathered insights from experts, the C-suite, recruiters, and those in the trenches to identify today’s top-of-mind concerns and how to deal with them.

More of the CIO.com article from Paul Heltzel

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28
Dec 17

ZDNet – IT jobs in 2020: Preparing for the next industrial revolution

As IT evolves in the direction of more cloud adoption, more automation, and more artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and analytics, it’s clear that the IT jobs landscape will change too. For example, tomorrow’s CIO is likely to become more of a broker and orchestrator of cloud services, juggling the strategic concerns of the C-suite with more tactical demands from business units, and less of an overseer of enterprise applications in on-premises data centres. Meanwhile, IT staff are likely to spend more time in DevOps teams, integrating multiple cloud services and residual on-premises applications, and enforcing cyber-security, and less time tending racks of servers running siloed client-server apps, or deploying and supporting endpoint devices.

Of course, some traditional IT jobs and tasks will remain, because revolutions don’t happen overnight and there will be good reasons for keeping some workloads running in on-premises data centres. But there’s no doubt which way the IT wind is blowing, across businesses of all sizes.

More of the ZDNet post from Charles McLellan

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26
Dec 17

IT Business Edge – Shifting the Focus from Infrastructure to Architecture

Technology will always play a central role in the enterprise data environment, but going forward the true challenge will not be finding and implementing the most cutting-edge systems but architecting available technologies in ways that support a successful business model.

This focus on architecture is in stark contrast to just a few years ago when the entire concept was on the wane. As KPMG noted in its latest study, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become one of the most in-demand skillsets of the year, up 26 percent compared to the year earlier, edging out functions like business process management and data analytics. While part of this surge in interest can be attributed to the growing complexity of the IT landscape, equally important is the way in which EA has evolved from simply wiring up infrastructure to integrating technology, applications, services and people under a common operational framework.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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04
Dec 17

The Register – Seek ‘passion’ and tech skills will follow, say recruiting security chiefs

Plugging the infosec skills gap with expensive consultants or by trying to hire already skilled people won’t fix recruitment headaches, Thom Langford, CISO at Publicis Groupe, insisted at the #IRISSCERT conference in Dublin this week.

He argued that the industry should be looking for “passionate people and inspire them”, rather than people with CVs ticking the appropriate boxes.

“I’m not asking for people to take chances, rather give people opportunities” by looking beyond qualifications and experience and thinking about potential.

“We need to stop looking only for round pegs to go into round holes,” Langford said, adding that those with an IT background pick things up more quickly.

More of The Register post from John Leyden

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28
Nov 17

ZDNet – Cloud computing: How to build a business case

Like any other major tech project, moving workloads into the cloud needs a solid business case — one that takes into account all the likely costs and benefits — before a company can decide whether it’s the correct move.

Cloud migration may be a tougher proposition than a standard IT project because companies have to consider a wider variety of issues — like what to do with all those servers, or even entire data centers, that may be made redundant by the move.

The business case should calculate the costs of migrating to the cloud — which include the cost of moving systems over, as well as the cost of running services in the cloud after migration — and then compare them to the costs of keeping systems in-house.

More of the ZDNet post from Steve Ranger

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.