IT Strategy

IT Business Edge – Whistleblower Advises IT Pros on How to Handle Corporate Malfeasance

Michael G. Winston’s name will probably forever be linked to the Great Recession of the late 2000s, but in a good way: He’s the whistleblower who dared to take on the subprime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. So what better person to ask about blowing the whistle as an IT pro?

Now a leadership consultant and author of the book, “World-Class Performance,” Winston has become something of a folk hero in the recession’s aftermath, never shying away from speaking out on corporate malfeasance. In a recent interview, I presented a hypothetical scenario to him in which a newly hired network engineer learns that the IT organization is engaged in an effort, initiated by the CEO, to hack into the networks of the company’s competitors, and he’s expected to go along with it. What should the network engineer do?

More of the IT Business Edge article from Don Tennant

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10
Jan 17

WSJ – How to calculate technical debt

To inform non-IT executives of the specific costs and risks posed by aging infrastructure and applications, CIOs are beginning to quantify their IT organizations’ technical debt.

As business leaders have grown more involved in IT investment decisions, many CIOs have found it increasingly difficult to obtain funding for infrastructure and application maintenance. Consequently, some CIOs are turning to the concept of technical debt to bolster their business cases for IT maintenance investments.

Technical debt refers to the accumulated costs and long-term consequences of using poor coding techniques, making quality/time trade-offs, delaying routine maintenance, and employing other suboptimal IT practices in the enterprise. Those kinds of quick fixes may lower costs in the short term or keep software development and implementation projects on schedule, but they can also cause serious problems down the road if left unaddressed. Specifically, they may lead to application outages, security vulnerabilities, and increased maintenance costs.

While the concept of technical debt was originally coined to address quick and dirty coding practices, it is now being applied to other IT disciplines including infrastructure, architecture, integration, and processes, according to Mike Habeck, a director with Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Technology Strategy & Architecture practice.

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Deloitte

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09
Jan 17

CIO.com – 5 lessons in reducing IT complexity

It’s an adage as old as time (or at least as old as the invention of the personal computer): Technology is destined to cycle constantly between complexity and simplicity.

Remember the hassle of attaching peripherals in the days before USB ports? Remember the anguish of developing applications for competing OS interfaces before HTML? We fixed those problems, and look at that, we’ve moved on to others.

“Complexity grows over time,” says Bryson Koehler, chief information and technology officer (CITO) of The Weather Company in Atlanta. “Systems are built to do one thing, and then they’re modified, morphed and bastardised to do things they were never meant to do.”

Complexity also occurs when technologies overlap one another – “when you add new stuff but keep the old instead of getting rid of it,” says Dee Burger, North America CEO of Capgemini Consulting.

More of the CIO.com post from Howard Baldwin

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06
Jan 17

HBR – 4 Assumptions About Risk You Shouldn’t Be Making

Are you being honest with yourself and your company about risk? If doing nothing leads to decline, projects with marginal projections actually are better alternatives than inaction.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” The line is instantly recognizable as the conclusion of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. And, the misunderstood poem helps to highlight how innovation-seeking executives need to reframe the word risk.

Most readers assume Frost’s poem is hopeful, describing the value of the rugged individualism that has long served as an American hallmark. However, a measured reading shows a wistful tone that borders on regret (“I shall be telling this with a sigh”), with critics arguing that the poem’s key message is how we rationalize bad decisions after the fact.

Similarly, when the word risk comes out of an executive’s mouth, it’s usually accompanied by one of four mistakes:

More of the Harvard Business Review post from Scott Anthony

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05
Jan 17

Continuity Central – Survey finds that US companies are struggling with remote and branch office IT disaster recovery

Riverbed Technology has published the results of a survey that looks at the challenges that organizations are facing when managing IT at remote and branch offices. The survey asked IT professionals about the various challenges they face in provisioning and managing remote and branch offices (ROBOs) and found supporting ‘the IT edge’ was expensive, resource-intensive and full of potential data security risks.

ROBO IT continues to be provisioned and managed largely as it has been for the past 20 years, with distributed IT spread out across potentially hundreds of remote and branch locations. However, this approach can bring data risk and operational penalties to companies at an extremely high cost, and in today’s increasingly distributed enterprise with a primary focus on data and security, past approaches may not be ideal for business success. Given the various challenges associated with managing remote sites, organizations have their hands full in supporting the edge.

IT Business Edge – Eliminate Technical Debt to Enable a Nimble IT Organization

The problem of technical debt is pervasive. And it’s not always easy to clearly identify the long-term problems that come with accepting technical debt. Here’s a practical look at some of the costs and implications. What is your organization doing to address your technical debt problem?

In the wake of economic volatility over the past decade, corporations have accumulated technical debt due to cost cutting and underinvestment in technology. In many companies, the result is often a patchwork of software fixes and inefficiencies across applications, architectures, and infrastructure that stifle agility.

Meanwhile, the business expects IT to keep pace with the change that digital disruption requires. In order to do so, CIOs must pay down the accumulated technical debt to regain strategic relevance while playing the role for which IT is best suited: guiding technology decisions to help the organization maximize the value of new technologies.

In this sldieshow, Mazen Baroudi, Accenture Strategy’s North America lead for Technology Strategy, outlines the areas where management needs to look to identify sources of technical debt. Mazen closes with three steps IT organizations should take to pay down their technical debt on their journey to becoming more nimble and responsive to the company’s technology needs and ultimately its business.

Informatica – What is an Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model?

Enterprise IT is in a state of constant evolution. As a result, business processes and technologies become increasingly more difficult to change and more costly to keep up-to-date. The solution to this predicament is an Enterprise Architecture (EA) process that can provide a framework for an optimized IT portfolio. IT Optimization strategy should be based on a comprehensive set of architectural principles which ensure consistency and make IT more responsive, efficient, and economical.
The rationalization, standardization, and consolidation process helps organizations understand their current EA maturity level and move forward on the appropriate roadmap. As they undertake the IT Optimization journey, the IT architecture matures through several stages, leveraging IT Optimization Architecture Principles to attain each level of maturity.

Multiple Levels of Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model

Level 1: The first step involves helping a company develop its architecture vision and operating model, with attention to cost, globalization, investiture, or whatever is driving the company strategically.

GigaOM – The enterprise CIO is moving to a consumption-first paradigm

Take yourself back a couple of decades and the IT industry looked very different than it does today. Back then the number of solution choices was relatively limited and only available to those with the finances to afford it. Many of the core services had to be built from the ground up. Why? There simply wasn’t the volume or maturity of the IT marketplace for core services. Today, that picture is very different!

For example, consider email. Back in 1995, Microsoft Exchange was just a fledgling product that was less than two years old. The dominant email solutions were cc:Mail (acquired by Lotus in 1991), Lotus Notes (acquired by IBM in 1995) along with a myriad of mainframe, mini and UNIX-based mail servers.

Every enterprise had to setup and manage their individual email environment. Solutions like Google Apps and Microsoft 365 simply did not exist. There was no real alternative…except for outsourcing.

More of the GigaOM post from Tim Crawford

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29
Dec 16

Information Age – IT can make or break the success of a deal

This article is a couple of years old, but the topic of IT agility is more important than ever in the merger and acquisition space.

Businesses are increasingly under pressure to deliver value to stakeholders, particularly when undertaking bold initiatives such as mergers, acquisitions or asset disposals. This is the case not only for corporate acquirers but also for private equity (PE) firms, whose strategy is leaning toward add on acquisitions as a means of growing their portfolio companies.

Among the fundamental change brought on by mergers and acquisitions (M&A), management teams often require significant effort in restructuring or streamlining operations of acquired businesses to deliver success in the absence of financial engineering. But given the challenging success rate of M&A activity delivering realised value to organisations in the short and medium term how can those parties involve in M&A actually deliver realised value?

More of the Information Age article from Tony Qui

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23
Dec 16

CIO Insight – How Data Growth Complicates Compliance

Focusing on a compliance approach that incorporates communications, collaboration, file sharing and storage can help to meet compliance regulations.

Regulatory compliance and eDiscovery now rate among the highest essential IT and business priorities for any organization, regardless of size or industry. What’s more, the complexity of managing this task is growing—and it’s heaping greater pressure on IT departments.

A new report from Archive 360 and Osterman Research, Best Practices for eDiscovery and Regulatory Compliance in Office 365, offers insight into this space—along with the growing use of Office 365 to manage the task.

According to the report, data growth is at the heart of the challenge. It’s surging at an annual rate of about 18 percent and there’s no end in sight. Further complicating things, much of this data is unstructured. In some cases, this “dark data” streaming in from e-mail, social media, wikis, blogs and SMS/text messages becomes invisible and, as a result, inaccessible.

In many cases, backup sets create problems for the eDiscovery process, particularly when they are stored on tape or on disk; eDiscovery is overly broad; organizations often fail to retain Electronically Stored Information (ESI), which can lead to serious sanctions; and organizations often fail to capture appropriate materials during the eDiscovery process.

More of the CIO Insight article from Samuel Greengard

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.