Strategic communications: From self-delusion to listening carefully
Conventional wisdom and research studies both say that communication is necessary to gain successful project outcomes. However, some (too many) executives use their public relations and communications departments as a megaphone to broadcast one-way directives in the name of “dialog.” This behavior represents self-delusion and not genuine communication. Image credit: iStockphoto A Project Management Institute [...]
Has the Time Come for Cloud Insurance?
In the enterprise market much of the adoption for public cloud IaaS services so far has been driven by innovators and early adopters. One of the defining characteristics of these early adopters is their willingness to accept and manage risk. These risks can come in many forms, including technological, organizational, operational and financial. Financial risk [...]
Why "Enterprise SaaS" may soon be a misnomer
One of the most exciting developments to hit the enterprise software world in decades was the rise of SaaS. Companies like Salesforce.com blazed a trail that built enormous amounts of wealth and improved the lives of end-users. Prior to SaaS, most enterprise software was sold based on perpetual licenses, to CIOs and IT departments, with [...]
The Prophecy of Meraki
I like to prognosticate around the end of the year, but sometimes the signs (omens) just can’t wait. I am referring of course to the Prophecy of Meraki, or Cisco’s Wi-Fi from the clouds. I’ve always liked Meraki, I think the concept makes a lot of sense. But it’s over. Meraki is unlikely to see 2015. [...]
The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application
A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply [...]
Unsupervised Machine Learning, Most Promising Ingredient Of Big Data
Orange (France Telecom), one of the largest mobile operators in the world, issued a challenge “Data for Development” by releasing a dataset of their subscribers in Ivory Coast. The dataset contained 2.5 billion records, calls and text messages exchanged between 5 million anonymous users in Ivory Coast, Africa. Various researchers got access to this dataset [...]
Structuring and Building Enterprise Collaboration Teams
In developing enterprise collaboration teams it is common to find that some employees are more involved than others. David Straus developed a concept called “rings of involvement” that applies to how involved relevant stakeholders are in collaboration. That concept inspired the chart shown below and I talk about it in much greater depth in my book, The Collaborative Organization. [...]
Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem
While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”). API First – The move to the [...]
You Can’t Automate Your Way to the Cloud
When racing to execute a ‘cloud’ strategy, it can be very tempting for IT organizations to try and automate their way to the cloud. A key benefit of the cloud is operational efficiency. We know that humans are error prone and costly, which makes automation such an enticing solution. Add to this the fact that [...]
What Makes Cloud Transformation So Hard?
Transformation is not a new concept, and has been around a long time before cloud and big data. It has always been a pretty nebulous term, but generally has referred to the fundamental reinvention or redesign of a business or function. From an enterprise-wide perspective this typically has meant redefining everything from target markets, products [...]
Enterprise Collaboration Technology Deployment Scenarios
I’m seeing a few trends around how organizations are deploying enterprise collaboration platforms. Typically one of four paths are taken which are: a unified solution, multiple solutions (not connected), an aggregator solution, or multiple solutions which are integrated together. These are explained in more detail in the table below. What is it Pros Cons When [...]
Intel CIO presents the path to #Rockstar IT
Most CIOs focus on buying technology and making it work in the enterprise. Although technology is the foundation of IT buying tools, delivering projects, and preventing system downtime do not create CIO greatness. More important than “feeds and speeds” is the CIO’s ability to drive strategic business goals such as increasing revenue, enabling innovation, and [...]
Justifying Big Data Investment
Traditionally companies invest into software that has been proven to meet their needs and has a clear ROI. This model falls apart when disruptive technology such as Big Data comes around. Most CIOs have started to hear about Big Data and based on their…
CxO Talk: Trust, engagement, and influence for the CIO
Every week, I host CxO Talk with friend and colleague Vala Afshar. Episode 8 is a conversation with author and entrepreneur, Mark Fidelman, who is an expert on how companies can use social media to boost relationships with buyers. The entire video conversation is embedded at the bottom of this post. The conversation got me [...]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
