Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

IT departments are not behind the times when it comes to their technology, but if they carry on as they are, complexity could stop them growing, the founder and principal analyst of ZK Research has said.

Speaking at Cisco Live in Milan today, Zeus Kerravala, a former network engineer, said he was insulted when the media claimed IT had fallen behind in enterprises. He countered that the departments were “smarter than ever”.

However, Kerravala admitted the increased intricacies within the environment were threatening to hold up further progression.

“Over the years, businesses want to move faster, be more agile and respond to competitive pressure faster,” Kerravala said.

“So what IT has done is introduce a whole host of new technologies that allow companies to do that: virtual platforms, cloud platforms, wireless networks, bringing in consumer devices, pushing things to the cloud, bringing them back to on premise, making them hybrid, making them converge etc.”

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A recent Gartner study predicts that by 2015, 25 percent of large global organizations will appoint a Chief Digital Officer (CDO). In a time where there is a lot of technology analyst talk about the relevance of the CIO and Enterprise IT, Mike Kail, CIO of Netflix offers a refreshing perspective. In his opinion, there has never been a better time for IT to fix its reputation in the industry and move from being the blockers in an organization to being the enablers. IT has an opportunity to show that they can deploy great technology that is accessible anywhere leveraging cloud computing, SaaS and mobility, and providing analytics to the teams that need it.

Netflix is an amazing company that is growing rapidly with 1 in 4 Americans subscribing and 33 percent of all home broadband internet traffic in the U.S. generated by Netflix video. But Kail, who embodies pragmatic optimism and a can-do attitude, does not view this rapid growth as a strain but as an opportunity. To deal with the challenges of the transformation IT, Kail advices CIOs to not be driven by fear but rather to embrace this opportunity to create a new reputation for IT.

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How weird will the enterprise become in the cloud? Pretty weird, by the sound of some of the discussions taking place today.

We all know that the cloud will be extremely disruptive for existing data infrastructure. Concepts like the all-virtual, all-cloud data center were considered distant possibilities just a few short years ago, but now seem to be looming on the horizon as organizations seek to cut costs and increase data agility.

But even these notions of an ethereal data environment floating around the cybersphere are starting to look quaint compared to the ideas that some forward thinkers are coming up with now.

5 Pitfalls and 5 Payoffs of Conducting Your Business Processes in the Cloud
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Take, for example, IO CEO George Slessman’s recent presentation at the Open Compute Project Summit last week, which he delivered via his cell phone. In it, he described the data center as an API in which software-based infrastructure is provisioned, deployed and decommissioned at the drop of a hat, tailored almost exclusively to the needs of the moment. To prove his point, he showed how to set up a fully functioning virtual instance, again from his phone, using physical resources located miles away—all in about three minutes. Clearly, the provider who maintains this physical infrastructure will have to worry about hardware/software integration, network configurations and the like, but the vast majority of knowledge workers will never see this side of things, nor will they understand a world in which the resources needed to do their jobs simply aren’t available.

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DEL MAR, Calif. — Nobody likes to talk about the danger of their jobs evolving into something they do not like, least of all highly compensated enterprise C-suite executives. But a group of Fortune 500 CIOs did just that several days ago.

The occasion was the second, and possibly annual, The Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference, held at The Grand Del Mar resort near San Diego, Calif. About 120 CIOs were in attendance for the one-day meetup that featured several open sessions and cloistered private meetings that enabled the CIOs to speak freely among themselves. Privacy, one of the true conundrums in today’s IT world, was a key request by the attendees: Guards stood outside the meeting room entrances. The open sessions, which provided plenty of insight in their own regard, were observed by a small group of journalists.

Go here to see the agenda and a list of those who attended. Speakers included Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil, Intel Chief Economist and Manager of Market Sizing and Forecasting Paul Thomas, VMware CEO and former Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger, and several other highly recognizable IT stars.

If there was one key takeaway from this daylong get-together on the Southern California coast, it was this: CIOs need to start thinking more like CFOs, or else they will slowly forfeit their power to other colleagues.

All the trends we see in IT business evolution ultimately end up as real tasks on the CIO’s desk. Some of the more recent developments, such as BYOD and BYOC (bring your own device and cloud), consumerization, and gamification, have caused even more headaches than usual for these often-embattled professionals.

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I’ve noticed lately that my mind has been wandering a lot so I wanted to see how attention works and how to manage it better.

It turns out a lot of us have wandering minds and struggle to stay focused. In fact, when we’re reading, our minds typically wander anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time. Voluntarily keeping our attention on one thing continuously can take a lot of effort, so it’s not surprising that I struggle with this sometimes.

Luckily, there are ways to keep our attention spans from burning out, once we understanding how they work.

The two brain systems that control your attention

Our brain is split into two systems, according to Daniel Kahneman. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he calls these System 1 and System 2 (to get a full understanding of how these work, I’d highly recommend reading his book. I can only explain them briefly here, and there’s a lot more that goes into how our brains do the things they do!).

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CIO’s are tasked with the challenge of determining the best way to store massive amounts of data in a safe, easy-to-access, cost-effective manner. Organizations can choose to purchase and deploy on-premises enterprise storage systems, store their data with an external cloud computing service, or they can form hybrid models by combining to two.

In this post, we’ve put our focus on cloud computing and compiled 20 statistics that every CIO should look to store in their memory for future reference or for ground to stand on when bringing a cloud proposal to the rest of their executive teams.

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Digital media and technology are ubiquitous today, which means we are presented with an inexhaustible series of messages and opportunities to be entertained and informed. The resulting state of information intensity is generally considered to be a major benefit of living in our age, and to some extent even necessary to modern life. This being the case, what are the ways that we actually use this technology? At a high level, there are three broad categories of intention behind our use of technology, and they are not all good for us.

Distraction

A common use for media and technology is to distract ourselves from the present moment. In an uncertain world, the chance to be distracted from our worries and the pressures of life is often welcome. Media and technology can provide us with a temporary escape from reality, but like with addictive drugs, the pressing concerns of life don’t disappear — though when we are distracted with Twitter or Netflix they may fade into the unnoticed background for a while. Distraction (and remedy to boredom) is perhaps the worst use of technology because we pay for it with our most valuable asset –time– and we get little of value in the exchange. An example of this negative outcome from technology is Internet AddictionDisorder (IAD), recognized by the Chinese government as a major threat to its youth population. On a smaller scale, how many of us are guilty of spending time in essentially pointless browsing of the limitless possibilities of the Internet, or of compulsively checking Facebook and email? Is the compounded effect (and opportunity cost) of this pattern of behavior really in our best interest?

More of the Forbes article by Kevin Ready

It was a privilege and an honor for me to have the opportunity to interview John Hagel, who brings 30 years of experience of working at the intersection of business strategy and technology. As a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, Hagel is the co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, where he is helping to identify emerging business opportunities and persuade CEO’s to put them on their agenda. Hagel frequently blogs about business and technology strategy.

Deloitte’s Center for the Edge considers the digital technology infrastructure to be one of the core forces which is getting exponentially better every year. But Hagel says there is a “delicious paradox” being that the very same technologies that bring awesome opportunities and new possibilities, at same time bring mounting performance pressures, accelerating change and growing uncertainty. He calls this the “dark side of technology” and it has real implications for businesses that have been built around the notion of predictability, standardization and tight integration to remove inefficiencies.

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The other day, I received the nicest note from Ivan Lazarov, Chief Architect – Enterprise Business Solutions at Intuit. Ivan wrote, “I recently read your book The CIO Paradox and a lot of what you wrote resonated with me. I even took the list of CIO paradox statements and with very little modification translated them to Enterprise Architecture Paradox statements.”

I really liked Ivan’s translation of the CIO Paradox into an EA Paradox, so I thought I would share it with all of you. Note: Ivan’s changes from the original CIO Paradox are in italics.

The Enterprise Architecture Paradox

• Your Role

–You were hired to be strategic, but spend a lot of your time on operational issues and convincing operationally focused folks that they don’t want to “just plug the hole for right now.”

–You are the steward of risk mitigation and cost containment, yet you are expected to innovate and encourage engineers to experiment with multiple offshoots of existing capabilities, because otherwise they cannot get their modifications in the roadmap fast enough. Then you are accountable for the proliferation mess, the cost of running it and the consolidation roadmap “ASAP.”

More of the CIO.com article by Martha Heller

What’s worse than having a CEO and board of directors grill you about your disaster recovery plan? Well, not having a good answer for every question, especially if they’re asking after the worst has happened, as opposed to before. Given that the future of your organization (not to mention your career) is at stake here, we’re presenting the following 10 questions that every CIO should be ready to address about the company disaster plan. Compiled by Janco Associates, the questions cover everything from data and application protection to business continuity to recovery-plan personnel to testing procedures. It’s all part of Janco’s e-book, Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template, which is available here.

More of the CIO Insight Slideshow by Dennis McAfferty