Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

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

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy / Shadow IT / Technical Debt — Comments Off
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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01
Feb 18

Computerworld – Office 365: A guide to the updates

Office 365 subscribers always have the latest version of Microsoft Office — currently Office 2016. They also get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office 2016 without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they’re available. We’re doing for you, so you don’t have to.

Following are key updates to Office 365 for Windows since Office 2016 was released in September 2015 — all the 2017 updates and the most important ones from 2016 and late 2015, with the latest releases shown first. We’ll add info about new updates as they’re rolled out.

Note: This story covers updates released to regular Office 365 for Windows subscribers. If you’re a member of Microsoft’s Office Insider preview program or want to get a sneak peek at upcoming features, see the company’s “What’s new for Office Insiders” page.

More of the Computerworld article from Preston Gralla

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31
Jan 18

Baseline – How Business Apps Drive the Digital Workplace

Business apps have emerged as essential in the digital workplace, according to a recent survey from VMware. The resulting report, “The Impact of the Digital Workforce: The New Equilibrium of the Digitally Transformed Enterprise,” indicates that these apps are significantly increasing productivity and efficiency among employees. They also serve as a great recruitment tool, as they foster an environment of optimal collaboration and decision-making that leads to inspired innovation. CIOs and other top IT managers, however, must do a better job of making the latest apps available in a “one-stop shop” manner, findings reveal. “(The) digital transformation — particularly through highly accessible employee-centric applications and productivity suites — is forcing management to adjust to a new equilibrium within the enterprise,” according to the report.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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29
Dec 17

IT Business Edge – Why I’ll Never Recommend AWS: The Danger of Draconian Policies in a Social World

Rob Enderle describes his first-hand experience on the risks of using a consumer-oriented business for mission critical systems.

One of the issues with having both a consumer-focused business and an enterprise business is that folks who deal with enterprise decisions during the day are consumers all the time. If you screw with someone on the consumer side, you’ll likely lose them on the enterprise side as well and vice versa. In addition, particularly with something like AWS, you expect the consumer business to use good customer retention and management skills. Well, after waking up recently to every one of my Echos, Kindles and Fire TVs being deregistered and not working, and being locked out of my account for daring to question a questionable Amazon charge, I wouldn’t touch an Amazon enterprise product with someone else’s 10-foot pole. And I think, had this happened to you, you’d feel the same.

Let me walk you through my experience.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Rob Enderle

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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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27
Dec 17

Continuity Central – A significant number of organizations do not know how much of their IT budget is being spent on IT resilience

Research from Databarracks, has revealed that 30 percent of organizations do not know how much of their IT budget is being spent on disaster recovery and backup services. This follows wider industry research finding that firms in Europe and North America spend seven percent of their IT budget on backup and disaster recovery.

Data from Databarracks’ annual Data Health Check survey revealed a number of insights into organizational attitudes and approaches towards IT resiliency, including:

25 percent do not know what percentage of their IT budget should be allocated for disaster recovery and business continuity;
Only 43 percent of organizations have tested their disaster recovery processes over the past 12 months;
29 percent of respondents answered “less than £1,000” when asked ‘how much annually does your organization spend on backup/DR solutions’.
Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks comments: “It’s often difficult for IT to secure investment for resiliency because it’s not seen as a particularly dynamic or sexy investment that will add value like a new customer-facing system. But we all know we need to invest in resilience to ensure our continued operation.”

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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01
Dec 17

CIO.com – Establishing business architecture standards: an industry imperative

Standards, based on the collective experiences of communities of practice, form the basis for advancing the maturity of a given discipline. As that discipline matures and the community of practice grows, standards serve as a critical foundation for enabling scalability and ensuring the integrity of the results.

Standards form the fundamental building blocks for a wide variety of fields. Accountants, manufacturers, engineers, software developers and a range of other professionals rely on standards. The constraints that standards may impose on some individuals are easily offset by the numerous advantages that they provide to consumers and practitioners. The same benefits of standardization also apply to the discipline of business architecture.

Benefits of standards adoption

When considering the impact of standards, we can look at the railway industry. Consider the discrepancies in railway track gauge size in the early 1800s. There were over a dozen gauge sizes used across the U.S.

More of the CIO.com post from Daniel Lambert

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.