Opinions
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Process Trip 04 February, 2008 13:07:03
Why Maritz Travel revamped key business processes — and how business and IT came together to make it workWhen Rich Phillips became COO OF Maritz Travel about two and-a-half years ago, he sat down and took a hard look at the big industry picture - +
Ticked Off at Tick the Box Mentality 04 February, 2008 13:01:15
Does your executive search firm know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients?Does your executive search firm know its MIS managers from its elbow? Does it even know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients? - +
How to Get Real About Strategic Planning 04 February, 2008 12:50:59
Everyone agrees that having a strategic plan for IT is a good thing but most CIOs approach the process with fear and loathing. In fact, the majority of CIOs (and the enterprises they work for) are faking it when it comes to strategic planning. Isn't it time we all got real?Oh, it must be nice to be the CIO of a FedEx or a GE or a Credit Suisse. Places where IT and the business are so tightly aligned you can barely tell the two apart. Where corporate leaders understand that IT is a strategic asset and support it as such - +
Strategies for Dealing With IT Complexity 24 December, 2007 10:30:47
Every innovation, every business process improvement, comes with an IT complexity tax that must be paid by CIOs in time, money and sweat. Here are strategies to mitigate the increasing complexity of IT as it enables new business.Every innovation, every business process improvement, comes with an IT complexity tax that must be paid by CIOs in time, money and sweat. Here are strategies to mitigate the increasing complexity of IT as it enables new business. - +
9 Paths to Higher Performance 10 December, 2007 14:09:23
When an organization brings together talented people in a creative, collaborative environment it fosters a culture of high performance, which in turn leads to superior business resultsLike high-achieving individuals, some organizations seem to have the Midas touch. Virtually every initiative they touch earns them gold and even those that fail never seem to cost them much of anything at all
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IT's identity crisis 01 September, 2006 12:15:04
Don Dargel has been working in IT since he was a teenager and now, at age 37, he wants out so badly he's willing to join the National Guard to get extra money so he can go back to college. And yes, he's aware there's a war on.
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CIOs may think that backlogs are their biggest pain point. But the real cause of IT failure is mismanaged expectations.
Usefully interpreting surveys about CIOs is a bit like veterinary medicine: While the howls of animal pain reveal something is amiss, the patients can't articulate the details. You have to probe carefully to learn more even though it hurts.
Pain is surely evident in "The State of the CIO 2006" survey, but the devil is truly in the details. The unhappiness that immediately captured attention was embedded in these results: The backlog of projects/requests is the number-one hurdle to effectiveness for CIOs, followed by inadequate budgets and a shortage of time for strategic thinking and planning. Unknown and unrealistic expectations from the business, if combined, would displace backlog as the top factor.
This is going to hurt: Who are we kidding? Where do CIOs think these backlogs come from? The backlog fairy? But wait, there's more! What do CIOs claim is their number-two hurdle in the effectiveness rankings? Inadequate budgets and a shortage of time for strategic thinking and planning.
Excuse me, but if you don't have enough time or money to plan, strategize or prioritize, just what the heck do you think will happen to all those project requests? My bet is that you'll get - yes! - a backlog. A big backlog. A messy backlog. The kind of backlog an unseasoned CIO might describe as the biggest hurdle to his effectiveness.
Backlogs are clearly symptoms, not causes of ineffectiveness. To wit: I'm in excruciating pain because my leg is broken. However, I still have a race to run. Believe it or not, my number-one hurdle to running fast isn't the excruciating pain, it's that my leg is broken! You would (rightly) think me a fool if I claimed I'd run marathons like an Olympic Kenyan if only I could tough it out or creatively sedate myself. Nonsense. CIOs have backlog pain because their budget and planning processes are broken.
That the surveyed CIOs declare backlogs as their number-one reason for ineffectiveness displays a professional predilection to treat symptoms rather than causes. Not good. If I were a CEO, CFO or COO, I'd think twice about retaining CIOs who prioritized managerial time and budgets that way.
The Expectations Trap
To underscore this blooming confusion around cause and effect management, let's dig a little deeper into the survey results. Here's an intriguing finding: Unknown and unrealistic expectations from the business, if combined, would displace backlog as the top factor. Now we're getting somewhere useful. Maybe backlogs aren't just symptoms of paltry budgets and a poverty of time. Maybe - just maybe - the better explanation for our backlogs and our awful feelings of ineffectiveness is our unhappy perception that the businesspeople we work with either don't know what they want and need or have fantastical notions of what's genuinely possible.
But this begs a truly profound question: Where do those unknown and unrealistic expectations come from? Do we not know what the business expects because we didn't ask? Or because we didn't understand the business issues well enough to understand what the request really entailed? Were we, to quote US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, impaled by "unknown unknown" expectations? Or did we fail as CIOs to ask the kind of questions that would allow us to successfully identify and manage a "known unknown"?
What's responsible for all those unrealistic expectations? Is it those vendors who've circumvented us? Those Business Week and Fortune cover stories celebrating infinitely free bandwidth and open source? Or might those unrealistic expectations come from "stretch goals" in project scheduling intended to spur productivity but that instead guarantee late delivery? Or maybe these unrealistic expectations come from the promise (made by vendors and CIOs) that outsourcing mission-critical software development overseas will yield savings of 60 cents on the dollar over in-house development?
2008 CIO Summit
19th August, 2008 Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney Developed in partnership with CIO Magazine, IDC, INTEP and the CIO Executive Council.
The world of the CIO is extremely complex and diverse. Multiple priorities demand attention and decisions are needed instantly. Individual teams need to be driven towards common goals, and businesses strive to become more mobile, agile and responsive. For CIOs, the challenge never ends.
Every year the CIO Summit identifies what is top of mind for CIOs across Australia and New Zealand, and offers insight for CIO benchmarking and vendor strategic planning alike.
Recent IDC research shows that over 59% of CIO's believe that 'to achieve their business strategies, technology should be used more aggressively than today.'
Join us on August 19th to discover how this is possible with the latest technologies including Virtualisation, Web 2.0, IP Surveillance and Software as a Service (Saas).
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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II 05 October, 2007 06:00:00
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #78: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires 28 September, 2007 17:34:25
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #77: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part III 21 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part three in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #76: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part II 14 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part two in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #75: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part I 07 September, 2007 07:00:05
Part one in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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'I have a lost laptop horror story for you' 30 June, 2008 10:08:14
The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow...The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow: Russ Jones tells a tale of woe that isn't particularly dramatic -- or rare -- and yet it's exactly the kind of story that worries me enough to ignore my better judgment and buy identity-theft protection from my insurance provider. - +
SQL attacks lobs onto pro tennis site 02 July, 2008 11:52:19
Wimbledon perfect time for crook's criminal racket.Visitors to the Association of Tennis Professionals Web site have potentially been infected with spyware after apparent lax security allowed a malicious script to be injected across its pages. - +
Hacking tools: A new version of BackTrack helps ethical hackers 30 June, 2008 10:57:21
BackTrack is the quickest way to get access to hundreds of (legal) hacking toolsVersion 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools. - +
Japanese military loses data again 02 July, 2008 08:17:21
Japan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data on joint US-Japan military exerciseJapan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data pertaining to a joint US-Japan military exercise last year, the Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. - +
ACLU, EFF sue US gov't over mobile phone tracking 03 July, 2008 08:37:23
Two civil liberties groups sue the US Department of Justice over mobile phone trackingThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are asking a federal court to order the US Department of Justice to turn over records about the agency's tracking of mobile phone users.
Ballarat Grammar Improves Student Access to Computer Based Learning with HP ProCurve 04 July, 2008 16:49:00
Media release: 40 Per Cent of Australian Businesses Do Not Validate Their Data 04 July, 2008 10:29:00
Kaseya helps turbo charge BlueFire’s service delivery model 03 July, 2008 17:23:00
Computershare Selects Symantec for Data Loss Prevention Globally 03 July, 2008 14:52:00
DST International moves to new Shanghai office 03 July, 2008 13:21:00
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Application Modernization: Preserving Your Organization’s DNA
Modernization has once again attained buzz-word status. But like any other term with billions of dollars swimming around it, modernization has taken on some unexpected connotations. Read on to discover how to embrace modernization in your organization successfully.
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