IT Strategy

Future of CIO – What are the Real Challenges of a CIO to Build a high-performing IT?

Information is permeating into every corner of the business, technology is often the driving force of digital disruptions. IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business changes. The business paradigm is shifting from the industrial era with the scarcity of knowledge to an information-abundant digital era. And therefore, the role of IT in the current business environment should reflect such a significant shift. However, many traditional IT organizations are overloaded and understaffed, running at the transactional role and still get stuck at the lower level of the organizational maturity. What are the real challenges of a CIO to build a high-performing and high-mature digital IT?

The main part of the IT budget is sunk in the existing IT-systems for keeping the light on: “Keeping the light on” is always fundamental for running IT smoothly.

More of the FutureOfCIO post from Pearl Zhu

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Strategy — Comments Off
27
Mar 18

CIO.com – HR: The CIO’s new best friend

The CIO agenda for 2018 is bigger and bolder than ever. Modernization. Automation. Transformation. Digitization. Acceleration. Innovation.

CIOs have to be bold — the landscape is littered with what were previously great companies that found themselves disrupted out of existence. You know their names, and so do the CIOs who are racing to ensure that their companies continue to separate themselves as disruptors, rather than the disrupted.

Having studied CIO-led transformations over the past three decades, we have identified a key differentiator found in the best IT transformations: a strong HR business partner. And we’re not talking about someone to just post your job listings. The best HR leaders show up not as reactive order takers, but as strategic partners and trusted advisors. These colleagues are like gold, but unfortunately there aren’t enough of them. Just in the past couple of weeks, we’ve heard CIOs lament:

More of the CIO.com post from Dan Roberts and Larry Wolff, CIO

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Strategy — Comments Off
23
Feb 18

Continuity Central – Less than half of North American companies tested their IT DR plans in the last year

The majority of businesses in North America are not fully prepared to handle a major disaster striking their IT, network and communications infrastructure according to a biennial technology survey conducted by Evolve IP. The survey of approximately 1,000 IT professionals and executives uncovered risky behaviors exhibited by the majority of organizations including incomplete and untested disaster recovery plans and outdated technologies and methodologies. The survey also identified three main characteristics of organizations that felt ‘very prepared’ to recover from a disaster.

Infoworld – SaaS-ifying your enterprise application? A quick-and-dirty guide

Many enterprises see a need to SaaS-enable applications, making them into a product for customers and partners. But most have no clue about what to do.

Lots of people called it SaaS-enablement, some call it SaaS-ification of software. Whatever you call it, more and more enterprises are looking to turn some enterprise application into a SaaS cloud application.

There are several reasons to SaaS-enable an internal application. Enterprises need to expose a software system to their partners and/or customers to better automate the business. Or, they are looking to monetize applications they view as having value to other companies.

Whatever the reasons, there are a few things to consider first. I call this the SaaS-ification reality check:

More of the Infoworld article from David Linthicum

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IaaS / IT Strategy — Comments Off
21
Feb 18

CIO.com – The truth about SaaS vendor management

everal years ago, Alan Hackney, former CIO of John Hancock and now Health Information Technology Officer for the State of Connecticut, told me that “CIOs were becoming the orchestrator of business services versus the builder of operational business services. Building stuff”, he said, “is now table stakes. Cloud and loosely oriented partnerships is bringing vendor management to the forefront.”

Given this, I wanted to hear from the CIOs in the #CIOChat about their perspectives on SaaS and SaaS vendor management. These CIOs were clear with me that they are moving their organizations to SaaS and public cloud slowly but surely. In general, they said there will be less on premise and more SaaS and public cloud. Most believe in the next three years that on premises will no longer dominant computing workloads.

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

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Strategy — Comments Off
20
Feb 18

CIO.com – IT-business alignment is out; anticipators are winning the day

One of the best articles I’ve seen this year on how IT can enable real transformation in the business.

Business leaders want IT to be more than strategic partners. The goal now is for IT leaders to actually drive business opportunities — to be innovative anticipators.

For years, IT leaders have been striving for one thing: “IT-business alignment,” in which IT serves the business not as a basic utility, but as a strategic partner. Although important, that is no longer the ultimate goal.

By the way, have you ever heard a CFO say, “I need to get finance aligned with the business”? Of course not! So, let’s stop talking about IT-business alignment and start talking about what the relationship really looks like.

Strategic partnership is just one admittedly advanced step on a larger continuum, and CIOs who have not figured that out already will be getting the message from their boards and CEOs — soon.

More of the CIO.com article from Dan Roberts and Larry Wolff

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
Feb 18

CIO.com – What should CIOs leading digital transformation focus on in year two and onward in the journey?

Year one of a digital transformation program has its challenges. To get a transformation started, CIOs must get an executive team to formulate a strategy, agree on the program’s leadership, and establish a budget. There needs to be agreement on a roadmap of initiatives that deliver improved customer experiences, empower the data driven organization, transition to more nimble technology platforms, prioritize opportunities to automate, and engage the workforce on driving change. To pull this off, many CIO are maturing agile processes, product management disciplines, data science skills, and other foundational practices that drive innovation, speed to market, and data driven insights.

As hard as year one is, year two and beyond has its own challenges. The initial excitement of transformation programs begins to wear off and the grind of execution starts to consume participants.

More of the CIO.com article from Isaac Sacolick

Bi-Modal IT / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy / Shadow IT / Technical Debt — Comments Off
15
Feb 18

InformationWeek – For IT in 2018, Think Change and Change Again

Even with the ongoing new developments in core technologies, IT organizations are facing dramatic changes in how they work in 2018 as they embrace new business concepts and strategies.

We just might be at a point where IT professionals — from the overworked help desk staffer up to the CIO in the fancy office — long for the good old days. You remember those days, when technology, that “T” in IT, ruled the day.

That was when the to-do list was filled with tasks such as configuring hardware, testing compatibility of software packages, upgrading databases, responding to “stupid user” complaints, and fighting to keep hackers out of a system. Even the move to the cloud often was a bits and bytes and connections challenge. Today, a whole new layer of IT complexity has landed on top of all those pure tech issues.

More of the Information Week article from James M. Connolly

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
14
Feb 18

CIO.com – The CIO with a digital business P&L

What is digital leadership? Ask a different CIO; get a different answer. Digital leadership can mean anything from developing products, to modernizing the stack, to changing the culture.

When I asked Justin Mennen, CIO and chief digital officer (CDO) of CompuCom, what digital leadership means to him, he told me about CompuCom’s new digital business unit, how he is elevating the digital experiences of his customers, and his P&L leadership role.

How do you define your role at CompuCom?
I function both as the CIO, leading our technology services organization, and as the CDO and leader of our CompuCom Digital business unit. We launched the new digital business in 2017 to help our customers drive innovation and digital transformation.

More of the CIO.com article from Martha Heller

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
13
Feb 18

Future of CIO – Three Overarching Management Approaches to Shape a High-Mature Digital Organization

The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary. It is not just about one-dimensional technology adoption, but a multi-dimensional expansion. It is certainly critical to put the stronger emphasis on empowering people, leveraging the source of knowledge, harnessing adaptation, fostering innovations, and taking an overarching management approach to shaping a high-mature digital organization.

The overarching Information management approach: The leading organizations across the industry sectors claim they are in the information management business because information potential directly impacts the business potential of the organization. The business insight captured via the abundance of information allows the business to capture growth opportunities as well as predict potential risks.Information is also one of the most time intensive pieces to the innovation puzzle. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. Therefore, Information Management is an overarching management discipline because Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, but if not properly managed, it becomes at worst case a liability and at best case an underutilized asset. IT should first work to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products and resources. The level of “silo” in many organizations remains far too high, IT has to break down silo to enable information flow frictionlessly and ensure that the right people can get the right information to make right decisions timely. Digital CIOs need to be able to break down organizational silos and take an overarching management approach to managing information for unleashing its full business potential.

More of the FutureofCIO post from Pearl Zhu

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.