IT Strategy

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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10
Apr 18

CIO.com – To manage GDPR data risk, pay attention to your service level agreements

Your technology suppliers provide a pipe, platform or other web-based application to enable their clients to do business over the Internet. Unless the client has stipulated their security requirements, the supplier is likely to only provide a basic security configuration to ensure they meet their availability obligations.

To be ‘enterprising’ is to be eager to undertake or to attempt. To show initiative and be resourceful. These are leadership traits, so to be enterprising is to lead. ‘Analytics’ is how we use data to inform decision making, in the context of achieving business objectives. These are management practices, so analytics is about management.

‘Enterprising analytics’ is about being creative, resourceful and adventurous with decision making to achieve business objectives. It is about the set of leadership and management practices that need to be in place for an organization to make the most of its analytics investment.

More of the CIO.com article from Rohan Light, CIO

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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

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06
Apr 18

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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03
Apr 18

CIO.com – IT governance critical as cloud adoption soars to 96 percent in 2018

With 81 percent of enterprises operating multi-cloud landscapes and 26 percent spending over $6 million annually on public cloud infrastructure, staying on top has never been harder.

In 2018, cloud computing went mainstream. Virtually all organizations (96 percent) use it in one way or another. However, studies show that as users gain cloud maturity, they tend to move from hybrid cloud scenarios – which comprise both private and public clouds – toward multi-cloud landscapes spread across a multitude of service providers. Indeed, according to Rightscale’s 2018 State of the Cloud Report, 81 percent of enterprises already have a multi-cloud strategy in place.

The Rightscale report highlights that many more enterprises view public cloud adoption as their top priority, up from 29 percent in 2017 to 38 percent in 2018. Hybrid cloud has decreased as a priority, declining from 50 percent in 2017 to 45 percent in 2018.

More of the CIO.com article from Marc Wilczek

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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

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.