
Authoritative.
Strategic.

A CIO can neither be pro- nor anti-outsourcing. Instead, he or she must ensure the outsourcing option is a tool upon which to call as the appropriate situation arises.
Even for organizations with a stellar full-time IT staff, situations often arise where temporary outside help is needed. A big Web project might demand a few extra programmers to meet a tough deadline, for example, or a rollout of tools to support a sales force bent on capturing a broader market may require expertise not available in-house.
International medical vendor Mediq was expanding in a big way by acquisition and needed a standard email platform across its business, but the project's cost and the complexity of doing it alone was so daunting that the company called on outside help that costs it less in the long run.
IT outsourcing has always been a double-edged sword for CIOs. What starts out as a cure for IT's ills always seems to cause more headaches down the road.
Consumers Energy has hired an outsourcer to take over some of its day-to-day IT operations, and it hopes the move will allow its own data center workers to focus on projects that directly impact its bottom line.
It's been more than three years since HP acquired IT services provider EDS, and the long-term direction of its bigger - if not better - outsourcing business is no more clear than it was on the day the deal closed.
IT as we know it is over.
Two weeks ago, the CIO of Texas penned a seven-page letter outlining the chronic failures of the state's nearly four-year outsourcing relationship - a deal the Texas governor had briefly suspended in 2008 citing service delivery problems that he said put the state's agencies in danger.
The outlook for the IT outsourcing market is not unlike the outlook for the economy as a whole: It's "unusually uncertain," to use U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's words.
Aspects of cloud computing have been available to-and rejected by-IT outsourcing customers for years, from hosted applications to on-demand hardware support. But as the breadth of the cloud has expanded to include a growing number of software-, platforms- and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings that can be quickly deployed as needed with low management overhead and little vendor interaction, the temptation to move away from traditional IT services provisioning is mounting.
The enterprise computing landscape has changed dramatically. Virtualisation, outsourcing, SaaS, and cloud computing are creating fundamental changes, and ushering in an era in which enterprises distribute increasingly critical IT assets and applications across multiple service providers.This paper explores today’s computing trends and their monitoring implications in detail. In addition, it reveals how a new monitoring paradigm architecture, that uniquely addresses the monitoring realities of today’s and tomorrow’s enterprises—whether they rely on internal platforms, external service providers, or a combination of both.
This is the conclusion of a study for the R otterdam U niversity carried out by J onathan B roer in the summer of 2008, ordered by BPM and E ...
Developed by the CIO executive Council, Pathways is a unique, flexible, self-managed, self-paced 12-month CIO designed and delivered ...