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CIO Insight – The Essential Requirements of a Digital CIO

Here’s another excellent Dennis McCafferty slide deck on the modern CIO.

CIOs are becoming more central to overall business strategy, and a full arsenal of soft and hard skills are needed to meet the challenge.

What’s the difference between “yesterday’s CIO” and the modern-day digital one? Digital CIOs maintain a higher profile in the corporate board room, where board members have raised their expectations of IT performance and the delivery of new, business-benefiting innovation, according to a recent survey from BT. The resulting “The BT CIO Report 2016: The Digital CIO” also indicates that, given these challenges, board members increasingly recognize that today’s CIOs must be more creative than in the past. Indeed, in assessing the “must have” qualities of digital CIOs, survey respondents were most likely to cite the need to work in a flexible manner with new business models and remaining open to new ideas/solutions, along with “soft skills” such as effectively responding to feedback and looking at situations from different perspectives. However, even with these shifting needs, CIOs still spend more time maintaining IT systems rather than looking for new solutions, but that balance appears to be reversing. “Digital transformation is under discussion at the board level, in IT and operational teams, in every organization and in every industry,” according to the report. “That’s exactly how it should be (because) the scope of what is digitally possible is uncertain

More of the CIO Insight post from Dennis McCafferty

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03
May 16

Continuity Central – The top mistakes that businesses make in a disaster

When the unexpected happens to a business, delayed action – or the wrong action – can cause as much harm as the initial incident itself. That’s the message of John Bresland, former board member and chairman of the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board , who will be a keynote presenter at the 2016 World Conference on Disaster Management, to be held June 7th-8th at The International Centre in Toronto.

“The last thing you want to do is be taken by surprise,” says Bresland, who now consults large organizations on chemical process safety. “There are practical steps every business should take to effectively learn, communicate and plan for future disasters to which the organization may be vulnerable.”

Bresland cites the following as the five top mistakes businesses make when preparing to respond to, mitigate and move forward from disaster:

Failing to define worst-case scenarios

What might be considered a relatively small incident can quickly become a very expensive one if a company fails to look beyond the immediate safety issues and consider business impacts. For example, even a small event like a fire can lead to significant loss of production and profits long after the fire is extinguished. “Ask yourself what’s the worst possible scenario and prepare for that,” advises Bresland.

TechTarget – AWS, partners’ balancing act weighs on users, too

AWS partners are a critical part of the growing ecosystem, but the choice between third-party services and the waiting game for native tooling can create problems for users.

There’s a constant balancing act between Amazon and its AWS partners over how best to fill the gaps in its cloud platform — and that creates a set of dilemmas for customers, too.

Amazon has put considerable effort in recent years into expanding its ecosystem, with more than 2,400 AWS partners in technology and consulting. At the same time, it’s constantly churning out improvements to its cloud platform, adding hundreds of upgrades and new services every year. Those parallel efforts can create a strain as both sides try to fill the gaps. For customers, the uncertainty around the ever-changing ecosystem can mean tough decisions for their own environment.

Amazon releases the minimal viable product and iterates from there to add more features, so the challenge often becomes deciding to wait for those additions or go third-party, said Theo Kim, vice president, technical operations and security at Jobvite, Inc., a recruiting software company in San Mateo, Calif. Kim used the example of Web Application Firewall from Amazon which he said has a great price point, but Jobvite is holding out for an expected version that supports Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

More of the TechTarget article from Trevor Jones

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29
Apr 16

CIO Insight – Why Simplifying Data is Complicated Business

Just 27% of survey respondents rate their satisfaction level for their organization’s current data capabilities as “high.”

In assessing big data capabilities, only a minority of CIOs and other tech and business leaders give their organizations high marks, according to a recent survey from Snowflake Computing. The report, titled “Overcoming the Reality Gap of Big Data,” reveals that data must get to analysts faster. In addition, survey respondents indicate that they’d like to simplify their data pipeline, while bringing down the cost of deploying, managing and tuning data tools. Those solutions could use some updating: While most survey respondents consider themselves firmly planted in the digital age, the vast majority of organizations still cling to “old school” tools—such as spreadsheets—to perform analytics tasks. “The rush to take advantage of new data capabilities has been likened to a 21st century gold rush,” according to the report. “According to some reports, investment in analytics is outpacing other IT areas.

More of the CIO Insight post from Dennis McCafferty

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28
Apr 16

Continuity Central – The benefits of moving business critical to the cloud

The key difference is the way in which cloud allows these problems to be mitigated, resolved, and avoided in future.

Core enterprise applications such as ERP are not as readily moved off-site as other applications – but they’re propelling a new wave of cloud adoption. Andres Richter explains why organizations should consider making the switch.

Modern enterprise management software has come a long way from its industrial routes in providing procurement and manufacturing functionalities. Responding to changes in the technology landscape such as mobility, big data analytics and cloud computing, the software has had no choice but to evolve. Employees now require instant information at their fingertips, wherever they are, from any device. Unsurprisingly, core business functions of modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) such as financials, operations, HR and analytics require the same, consumerized flexibility offered by a plethora of non-business critical cloud-based applications. But it’s only the CIOs committed to future proofing their IT who have spotted this opportunity and have made the move from on-premise to a cloud-only or an integrated approach.

While vendors look at ways to disrupt the market, the challenge of convincing ‘stick in the mud’ IT decision makers that business continuity can be maintained during the transition to cloud ERP and beyond remains: but we are seeing an increase. Panorama Consulting’s ERP Report 2016 sees 27 percent of businesses adopting cloud ERP, a rise from 11 percent in the previous year. In our experience, more than 20 percent of current customers at Priority Software are already in the cloud. The take-up is particularly high in industries such as digital media, professional services and business services.

Wall Street Journal – Big Firms Focus Tighter IT Spending on Cloud: J.P. Morgan Chase

Budget pressures have large firms focusing technology spending on cloud services, leaving some IT vendors behind – and Wall Street analysts are taking notice.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., in a report released Thursday, said big companies are shifting more workloads to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Amazon.com’s AWS cloud services, while keeping IT budgets tight.

The accelerated move to the cloud, and in particular the rapid rise of Amazon’s AWS cloud service among large corporations, signals a “changing of the guard” in enterprise IT, suggesting that “threats to traditional, on-premise IT infrastructure vendors are serious,” the report said.

It said Microsoft still holds a commanding lead in the IT market for large businesses, but AWS, which has long been popular with smaller firms, is making significant inroads.

The findings are based on a survey of 207 CIOs with an average annual IT budget per firm of $600 million, together representing some $126 billion in enterprise IT spending every year.

Despite their size, IT budgets at these firms are set to grow this year by only 2.8%, compared to more typical annual growth rates of 3% to 4%, the report said. At the largest firms – those with annual IT budgets of more than $2 billion – spending is expected to growth by less than 1%.

Both Gartner Inc.IT +0.33% and International Data Corp. have reported similar slowdowns this year in enterprise IT spending.

Fast Company – The Real Reason Women Are Leaving STEM Jobs

A recent report revealed a surprising gender gap: women job hop more than men and it’s getting more pronounced. While the analysts at LinkedIn who did the study said that further research was needed to determine why (it’s not about balancing family and work, as most of the job hoppers weren’t parents yet) the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) may have a clue.

In the first gender-based study of its kind conducted in the STEM space in the U.S., the data revealed women leaving jobs was the result of multiple factors beyond sexual harassment that the survey “Elephant in the Valley” found rampant among established working women at tech companies in Silicon Valley.

SWE’s Corporate Partnership Council’s study found that there are gender differences in workplace priorities, particularly as companies that are meeting female hiring goals are unable to retain them—especially five to eight years after they started.

More of the Fast Company article from Lydia Dishman

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20
Apr 16

TechTarget – Google cloud outage highlights more than just networking failure

Google Cloud Platform went dark this week in one of the most widespread outages to ever hit a major public cloud, but the lack of outcry illustrates one of the constant knocks on the platform.

Users in all regions lost connection to Google Compute Engine for 18 minutes shortly after 7 p.m. PT on Monday, April 11. The Google cloud outage was tied to a networking failure and resulted in a black eye for a vendor trying to shed an image that it can’t compete for enterprise customers.

Networking appears to be the Achilles’ heel for Google, as problems with that layer have been a common theme in most of its cloud outages, said Lydia Leong, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. What’s different this time is that it didn’t just affect one availability zone, but all regions.

“What’s important is customers expect multiple availability zones as reasonable protection from failure,” Leong said.

More of the TechTarget post from Trevor Jones

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19
Apr 16

Continuity Central – Dealing with the risk of DDoS ransom attacks

We are all familiar with the disruptive consequences of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack when a website is forced offline because it has been swamped with massive levels of traffic from multiple sources. The cost in terms of lost business to companies while their website is offline can be significant.

Cyber criminals are now taking the process a step further by tying ransom demands to their DDoS attacks, threatening to keep company websites permanently offline until they pay up. In effect, DDoS attacks are coming with an invoice attached.

What are DDoS ransom attacks?

Given the stakes, it makes sense for organizations to try and learn as much as they can about DDoS ransom demands: what do they look like, how can businesses work out if their site is at genuine risk and how can they protect their online presence?

Potential DDoS attacks, usually by criminal groups, start with a test attack on a website or service. The preferred method is to send increasing levels of traffic to the site to ascertain whether it could be vulnerable to an attack. Sometimes, the site can be knocked out with a small attack (from 1-2Gb of bandwidth) or it may require a much larger scale onslaught (from 10-100Gb), depending on the robustness of the security technology the service provider hosting the site has in place.

More of the Continuity Central post from Jake Madders

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14
Apr 16

HBR – Which industries are the most digital and why?

When business leaders talk about going digital, many are uncertain about what that means beyond buying the latest IT system. Companies do need assets like computers, servers, networks, and software, but those purchases are just the start. Digital leaders stand out from their competitors in two ways: how they put digital to work, especially in engaging with clients and suppliers, and how intensively their employees use digital tools in every aspect of their daily activities.

Recent research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) looked at the state of digitization in sectors across the U.S. economy and found a large and growing gap between sectors, and between companies within those sectors. The most digital companies see outsized growth in productivity and profit margins. But what are the key attributes of a digital leader? And how can companies benchmark themselves against competitors? We looked at 27 indicators that fall into three broad categories: digital assets, digital usage, and digital workers. Our research shows that the latter two categories make the crucial difference.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Prashant Gandhi, Somesh Khanna, and Sree Ramaswamy

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.