Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

The Register – Why isn’t digital fixing the productivity puzzle?

Analysis Oh dear. If all this new technology is so amazing, why isn’t it translating into productivity gains?

The question has been bothering economists and policy-makers for almost a decade. Since the 2008 financial crisis, productivity in many major Western economies has been flat. A hefty new examination by McKinsey’s eponymous think tank the MGI offers a few reasons why – and explains why “digital” doesn’t seem to be helping.

The authors of Solving The Productivity Puzzle: the Role of Demand and the Promise of Digitisation at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) depart from the sunny forecasts typically made by “thinkfluencers” and tech hypesters.

More of The Register article from Andrew Orlowski

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behaviors exhibited by the majority of organizations including incomplete and untested disaster recovery plans and outdated technologies and methodologies.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

Data center compliance / IT Governance / IT Security — Comments Off
19
Feb 18

CIO.com – How to be compliant with data breach notification laws

As a CIO, the bucks stops with you for matters pertaining to data breaches and compliance towards subsequent notifications.

Most countries today have stringent laws governing data breach notifications. These laws mandate government, private organizations and individuals who conduct business in any form to disclose any breach of private, confidential customer information by unauthorized third parties.

The penalties for failure to disclose such breaches may be huge. A few years back in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed a penalty of close to $10 million against two telecom businesses for holding personally identifiable customer information without adequate security measures. In Australia, the Mandatory Data Breach Notification (MDBN) law stipulates a fine of up to AU$1.8 million on organizations and up to AU$260,000 on individuals who fail to notify customers in case of data breach. For what it’s worth, Australia sees one of the highest number of data breaches in all of APAC.

More of the CIO.com article from Chris Low

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 / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / Shadow IT — Comments Off
14
Feb 18

TechRepublic – How cloud computing surveys grossly underreport actual business adoption

According to RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud report, 66% of enterprises expect to spend at least 20% more on cloud this year. Ironically, those same expectations are almost certainly wildly off, as a whopping 97% admit to not being able to manage cloud costs. In other words, cloud is an even bigger deal than CIOs believe, because their developers keep pushing workloads into cloud providers.

Sending money to the clouds
It’s hard to turn off the flow of funds to the cloud—it’s simply too convenient. Polling close to 1,000 people, RightScale’s survey revealed that more than 25% of enterprises are now spending $6 million or more each year, with plans to grow that spending considerably in 2018:

More of the TechRepublic article from Matt Asay

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

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.