Sunday | 12 October, 2008
CIO
Doing Your Sums on . . . Build, Buy or Rent
You’re trying to build a world-class IT team, but everyone’s going after the same talent pool. What mix works best? Should you grow your own, draft your players or barter your way to the line-up you want to field?
Sue Bushell 05 November, 2007 13:32:30
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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 work
    When 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
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    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?
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    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
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    Toxic Mix or Bit of a Mixed Blessing? 31 December, 2007 10:36:30

    “Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog . . . ” The inter-generational office brew of Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y may not be quite as odious as that of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but even so it makes “for a charm of powerful trouble”
    "Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog . . . " The inter-generational office brew of Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y may not be quite as odious as that of the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but even so it makes "for a charm of powerful trouble"
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    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.
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    New 'virtual IT job' could be very real 05 November, 2007 11:28:45

    Virtualisation trend spawns new IT professional
    Now that companies have mastered the virtualization of server operations, vendors are increasingly selling the idea of virtualizing the entire data center. The idea of enabling the dynamic management of servers, storage and network devices through a single "fabric" places new virtualization offerings firmly in the realm of becoming a data center platform. That platform may spawn a new IT position for a person who would supervise the management of the virtual layer of server, network and storage infrastructures.
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    Red Hat exec: Open Source is mature, disruptive and innovative 24 October, 2007 08:54:53

    Craig Nielsen was one of eight speakers at the WA open source symposium earlier this month. He talks about where the industry stands and where it is rapidly heading.
    Open source is disruptive, it develops rapidly, is adopted quickly, and it efficiently meets market needs while enabling new market capabilities. These were some of the statements made at an open source symposium held in Western Australia (WA) earlier this month.
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    SOA, meet SOI 23 October, 2007 12:45:55

    SOI is the basis for greater IT automation, says the Open Group, an open standards consortium working to define a reference framework and maturity model for SOI.
    Flexibility is the hallmark of a service-oriented architecture, in which reusable application components can be shared across an enterprise and assembled in a loosely coupled way. In the data center, however, SOA technology's flexibility translates into unpredictability - a trait that is incompatible with traditional infrastructure technologies.
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    How SOA could change the way you buy electricity 23 October, 2007 12:17:33

    Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richmond, Washington, decided to find out, with IBM as a partner.
    What if IT could be used to eliminate the US West Coast's notorious rolling blackouts or huge regional power outages like those experienced by the Northeast and Midwest in 2003?
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    Forget the iPhone, all phones should be 'unlocked' 22 October, 2007 09:09:13

    Don't mock iPhone users because their phones are locked; yours is probably locked, too
    Apple's iPhone hasn't made an obvious dent in the market share of either handset competitors or carriers that compete with AT&T. But it has hit those other companies with something else unexpected -- and unwelcome: The iPhone has sharply raised consumer awareness about the issue of locked mobile phones.
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CIOs should never forget that while new technologies have a maturity cycle, the maturity cycle for human beings in IT is even longer

Even with the global war for talent continuing to escalate and with no sign of hostilities easing any time soon, software giant SAS Institute is determined to do as much as it conceivably can internally.

CIOs should never forget that while new technologies have a maturity cycle, the maturity cycle for human beings in IT is even longer

While other organizations struggle with decisions over whether to build, buy or rent talent, SAS - recognized in both the US and Europe as one of the 10 best places to work - lives by the words of founder and CEO Dr Jim Goodnight: "If you treat employees as if they make a difference to the company, they will make a difference to the company." That attitude even extends to the people who do the landscaping and housekeeping.

SAS CIO Suzanne Gordon says even the IT group, which does occasionally hire consultants on a special needs basis, never resorts to outsourcing. And those consultants it does bring in are almost always project managers, and when they work out, SAS does everything it can to put them on staff. "The reason we do that is because we have found over the years that you really don't know if you've got a good project manager until they've managed a project," Gordon says. "So we hire through a contracting firm and then if they work out we like to keep them . . . and if they don't we've only wasted a little bit of time. When we have a good contractor start, we treat them pretty much like a regular employee."

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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.
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    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

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    Data-center security tools to not overlook 10 October, 2008 11:37:00

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    IBM, Secret Service, others study identity/cybercrime issues 09 October, 2008 10:09:00

    Center for Applied Identity Management Research organization teams experts in criminal justice, financial crime, biometrics, cybercrime and cyberdefense, data protection, homeland security and national defense.
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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
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