20 influential chief information officers
The CIO role has come under considerable scrutiny because enterprise technology is now more strategic than ever before. The shift toward strategic IT has happened with the growth of business models that rely on technology platforms. In summary, digital transformation has accelerated change in the CIO role from infrastructure provider to innovator. 20 Influential Chief […]
US federal CIO? ‘Someone from Google or Facebook will be eaten alive’
The selection of US Chief Information Officer must be an innovative Washington IT insider. Anyone else is doomed to fail.
Mission impossible? White House looks for new CIO
As President Obama seeks a new U.S. Chief Information Officer, it’s time to examine the opportunities and obstacles associated with this important role.
Business transformation and the digital CIO
Many innovative enterprises are evaluating how to take advantage of opportunities created by cloud, social, mobile, and data with analytics. The implications go far beyond technology into core activities related to business model, corporate culture, and interactions with customers. Many companies making these changes undertake shifts in organizational priorities, goals, and technology platforms. Taken as […]
CIO strategy workshop: Intel’s IT leadership and transformation pyramid
The days of pure infrastructure IT, in which the CIO is responsible for little more than feeds and speeds, are ending. The path of modern CIO success requires meeting expectations from the business while reducing costs and finding ways to drive innovation. Because these goals can be mutually exclusive, accomplishing all three together is a significant CIO challenge. During a CxOTalk conversation […]
McKinsey research: IT needs a kick in the keister
A new study from strategy consulting firm, McKinsey, shows “growing dissatisfaction” with IT performance, from both business users and within the ranks of IT itself. The study notes that almost one-third of IT respondents believe replacing their own leadership should be a top priority to improve IT performance. This data signals a growing crisis, in which […]
MIT CIO leadership awards now accepting applications
Everyone knows I am a strong advocate of Chief Information Officers. It’s a tough job fraught with pressure from management that demands simultaneous cost cutting and innovation along with increasingly sophisticated business requirements for technology-enabled transformation. Despite these challenges and many more, there are great CIOs using technology to drive significant and meaningful business improvements. […]
Cloud, DevOps and Herding Cats
The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is that year that enterprise IT finally “rolls up the sleeves” and gets serious about cloud adoption. But what does this really mean? Basically we’re seeing the era of cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts in the enterprise drawing to close, especially around IaaS and to a certain extent PaaS. CIOs […]
Can an 8-Person StartUp Sell to a CIO? Yes — If You Understand The Social Contract.
Recently Erick Schonfeld was kind enough to invite me to the DEMO conference to both serve as an Enterprise panel judge, and also to join a panel with 3 esteemed CIOs on how to Sell to Enterprise CIOs. I was the Start-Up Guy on the Panel. You can see the whole session below, with the […]
How ITaaS is Reviving the Service Catalog
The service catalog hasn’t exactly been one of the hotter topics in enterprise IT. Introduced as a IT service management best practice with ITIL v3, the general idea is that IT should provide a central list of services, SLAs, and prices along with service request processes. Users go to the service catalog, pick what they […]
BYOD: The new battleground for CIO value
Today’s business users expect instant access to all work-related services and data from their personal mobile devices, challenging IT to re-think long-held ideas about infrastructure, policies, and governance. Because bring-your-own-device (BYOD) reflects massive growth in the consumerization of IT, it has become the battleground on which Chief Information Officers must demonstrate value and relevancy. This […]
Rethinking IT Transformation for the Cloud
As cloud computing matures and success models emerge, enterprises are now getting serious about using cloud to drive IT transformation. JP Morgan Chase, Toyota, GE and other leading organizations are moving beyond incremental costs savings and are using cloud and next generation platforms to drive innovation, growth and competitive advantage. Unfortunately many CIOs and their […]
CxO Talk: Can a CIO and CMO be friends?
In episode four of CxO Talk, co-host Vala Afshar and I talk with Steve Mann, chief marketing officer (CMO) at LexisNexis, and Phil Komarny, chief information officer (CIO) at Seton Hill University. The discussion includes an insider’s look at the CIO and CMO roles, along with advice for technology vendors selling to senior executives. Steve […]
Marketing and IT tensions: ‘CxO Talk’ debuts today
A new breed of chief marketing officer seeks data-driven answers to tough challenges, such as establishing clear links between marketing spend, activities, and specific business outcomes. To meet these goals, marketers have taken over an increasing slice of the overall budget that enterprises allocate to technology. Not surprisingly, this trend corresponds to the growth of […]
Cloud research exposes gaps between CIOs and business leaders
We often hear that IT is not aligned with the business, which is a catchall concept loosely meaning that business leaders and IT folks do not understand each other’s goals. Although differences in perspective and goals between these groups do exist, the gaps are difficult to measure, quantify, or even describe precisely. Nonetheless, these differences […]
