Technical Debt

InformationWeek – Should You Declare Bankruptcy on Your Technical Debt?

Technical debt is a hidden cost that robs your business of its ability to be nimble and make needed changes for your customers
Decision-makers, it’s high time we wake up to the real cost of technical debt. Financial debt is a burden that’s familiar to many people, but for businesses, especially retailers, that burden takes on an additional form: technical debt.

For companies building their businesses on outdated platforms, technical debt is what’s keeping them from evolving to meet the demands of today’s increasingly mobile consumer. According to a study by Accenture, 85% of executives believe that their legacy platforms are hindering their ability to move to a more digital model.

Executives and IT teams often put software migration on the backburner, choosing instead to focus on the kind of projects that result in more immediate monetary returns. Yet the longer technical debt is allowed to accrue, the costlier it becomes. Should your IT department stick with its broken platforms, just to avoid the overhaul, or is it time to pull the plug?

More of the InformationWeek post from Sara Hicks

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Data center compliance / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy / Technical Debt / Virtualization — Comments Off
16
Nov 18

ZDNet – Eight signs you could be automating more of your data center

From Doug – These same reasons may be used to consider outsourcing your data center infrastructure to an enterprise cloud provider.

Organizations with existing data centers can save time and money by adopting automation tools for data center management. Here are eight signs you can do more to lighten your day-to-day workload.

As commodity server hardware becomes more powerful, infrastructure cost (in raw performance terms, such as IOPS per dollar) continues to plummet. As a result, it has become substantially cheaper to largely automate the software side of data center administration. In essence, the era of coffee-fueled IT staff spending their days pushing around electrons in order to keep the lights on at a given organization has ended, as data centers can be automated to manage computational, storage, and networking resources, as well as programmatically handle software lifecycle management and security patches.

More of the ZDNet post from James Sanders

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Disaster Recovery / IT Strategy / Risk Management / Technical Debt — Comments Off
24
Oct 18

Continuity Central – Why disaster recovery should become a thing of the past

For businesses today, regardless of industry, the outage of a key IT system ranks among the most serious technology challenges they can face. In fact, the Business Continuity Institute’s 2018 Horizon Scan Report estimates that unplanned outages are the third biggest risk to businesses globally. Beyond the financial ramifications of downtime, the long-term reputational consequences are significant as customer confidence is dented. Rebuilding trust after a major IT failure can be a multi-year process.

In the 1970s when data center / centre managers first came into being, they began to understand how dependent on computers their organizations would soon become. With that in mind they instigated the notion of disaster recovery – an insurance should one or more applications, storage components, databases or network elements go offline.

More of the Continuity Central post from Patrick Smith

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.

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 / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy / Shadow IT / Technical Debt — Comments Off
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

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy / Technical Debt — Comments Off
06
Jun 18

WSJ – Cloud, Not Tax Cuts, Drives IT Spending: Survey

Corporate information-technology budgets are expected to inch up over last year, as large firms continue to shift more workloads to the cloud, according to Morgan Stanley.

Despite recent federal tax cuts aimed at boosting corporate spending, most chief information officers say their IT spending plans haven’t changed, the bank said in a report Wednesday.

The results are based on a survey of 75 U.S. and 25 European CIOs at companies in a range of industries, most with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The survey was conducted online and by phone between February and March.

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Angus Loten

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy / Technical Debt / Virtualization — Comments Off
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

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Strategy / Shadow IT / Technical Debt — Comments Off
28
Mar 18

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

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

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.