IT Strategy

WSJ – Only 19% of CIOs at Top U.S. Firms are Women: Study

Less than a fifth of chief information officers at top U.S. companies are women, according to a report by executive-search firm Korn/Ferry International.

Across all industry sectors, women accounted for just 19% of CIOs at the top 1,000 firms by revenue, the report said.

That outpaces the number of women who are chief executive or chief financial officers at these firms, but falls behind those who are chief marketing or human resources officers.

All told, women accounted for just 24% of all c-suite executives.

By industry, women were most likely to be the top IT managers at firms in the energy sector, where 35% of CIOs were women, followed by the life sciences at 22% and the consumer and industrial sectors, both at 18%.

Just 11% of CIOs at these firms in the technology sector were women, the report said.

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Angus Loten

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19
Aug 16

WSJ – Failures Like the Delta Outage Are a Fact of Digital Business

Customers are still feeling the fallout from computer problems at Delta Air Lines Inc. that began with an electrical outage in the dark hours of Monday morning. Flight cancellations grew throughout the day to about 1,000 and Delta continued to cancel flights Tuesday – 680 as of 5:15 p.m. ET – as it tried to restore normal operations.

“Following the power loss, some critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to Delta’s backup systems,” the company said in a statement. Delta hasn’t gone into detail about which systems didn’t perform as expected or why. Airline reservations, maintenance and operations systems are notoriously complex, made all the more so by layers of technology integrated after years of mergers and acquisitions.

Other industries deal with such complexity but none more publicly than airlines, says Allan Frank, co-founder and chief IT strategist at The Hackett Group, which advises large companies on technology best practices. You have “multiple systems from multiple companies over a period of years, he says. “A glitch can take down the whole house… In the end, people are stuck at airports and there’s a direct, emotional impact.”

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Kim S. Nash

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18
Aug 16

CIO Insight – Are IT Teams Relevant in an As-a-Service World?

A study revealed business leaders question the relevancy of IT in a world brimming with cloud services that are available on demand, anytime and on any device.

The road to enterprise innovation is always paved with good intentions. However, for many CIOs and their organizations, the compass too often points in the wrong direction.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emerging as-a-service world. According to a recent Accenture study, IT Is Dead. Long Live IT!, six out of 10 respondents claim that IT does not have a significant influence on their choice of an as-a-service provider, with 77 percent stating that the IT organization lacks the skill sets for an as-a-service world. The research also found that 70 percent of business and IT leaders do not involve internal IT until after the as-a-service option has been selected.

This raises a key question: how relevant is IT in an as-a-service world brimming with cloud services that are available on demand, anytime and on any device?

More of the CIO Insight post from Samuel Greengard

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17
Aug 16

Baseline – CIOs Are Confident Their Staff Can Meet Challenges

With tech departments now expected to make valuable contributions to business strategies while continuing to satisfy nuts-and-bolts operational IT needs, CIOs and other tech leaders expressed considerable confidence in their staff’s ability to successfully tackle these challenges, according to a recent survey from TEKsystems. The resulting midyear “Reality Check” report indicates that both tech budgets and full-time staffing are increasing. Hopefully, such organizational investments will put IT in a better position to pursue new initiatives—an area in which survey respondents express a comparative lack of confidence. Meanwhile, organizations continue to struggle to hire qualified IT talent, especially for roles such as architect, programmer, developer, project manager and software engineer. “If IT leaders aren’t experiencing these trends yet, they should be on the lookout for how they could affect their organizational needs,” said Jason Hayman, research manager for TEKsystems.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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16
Aug 16

ZDNet – The 7 Attributes of a Comprehensive Cloud Strategy

Whether or not these seven topics comprise a comprehensive cloud strategy, they are all topics that IT professionals should understand as cloud computing becomes more integrated into the business.

We believe a pragmatic cloud strategy will work best, based on your own unique landscape and requirements. Working every day with customers and partners in co-innovation, we quickly realized that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

There is a lot of hot air involved in cloud discussions – and a lot of foggy principles. I happen to believe that a pragmatic cloud strategy will work best, based on your own unique landscape and requirements. Working every day with customers and partners in co-innovation, we quickly realized that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Here are my TOP 7 attributes of a comprehensive cloud strategy that need to be addressed when you discuss Cloud computing in your company – even more so if you discuss with vendors and partners. We found this framework helps to start a meaningful discussion and get everybody aligned – demystifying the cloud and leaving out the hype.

#1 Software as a Service (SaaS)

If we need to take a focus here when we talk about SaaS, it will be the user experience. Cloud solutions start with engaging the end user more than other solutions. Not because they are SaaS, because they can and they are innovating faster and responding to trends like mobility, social, collaboration, etc. Developing or consuming cloud solutions you will most often be the first using the latest and greatest available technology.

More of the ZDNet article from Sven Denecken

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11
Aug 16

Baseline – Keeping Up With Digital Disruption

Key takeaway – The reality is that clouds and IoT technologies are now synonymous with digital innovation and change. Without them, it’s impossible to take various processes and workflows to a higher level and achieve performance and cost gains that are now critical for success.

Only a quarter of companies surveyed are investing in the cloud, and a fifth are focusing on the IoT. As a result, many of them are at risk of being disrupted.

The pace of digital change is clearly accelerating. For business and IT executives, all of this translates into huge challenges—but also enormous opportunities. Individuals who can innovate, disrupt and reinvent businesses and industries will emerge as the leaders in the new economy.

A recently released technology adoption report from TD Bank includes a number of technology trends. It recently surveyed CEOs, CFOs and company founders at the Bloomberg Breakaway Summit in New York City and found that:

More of the Baseline article from Samuel Greengard

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10
Aug 16

ZDNet – Half of all cloud services outside of IT departments, but IT is getting wiser

A new study from the esteemed Ponemon Institute says we still aren’t doing nearly enough to protect enterprises in the cloud.

For starters, the survey of 3,476 IT and IT security practitioners, commissioned by Gemalto, a digital security vendor, finds that half of all cloud services and corporate data stored in cloud are not controlled by IT departments. So, there’s a lot of cloud activity among business units that’s potentially not vetted or governed.

However, IT departments are getting a better handle on things, the survey also shows. Fifty-four percent of respondents are “confident” that the IT organization knows all cloud computing applications, platform or infrastructure services in use – a nine percent increase from a similar survey from 2014.

The survey doesn’t spell out how and why IT is getting a better grip on shadow cloud adoption. It may be assumed that there are more policies in place and greater communication and collaboration on best practices. IT may be getting more active in its evolving role as cloud broker or service provider to the enterprise, providing catalogs or directories of vetted services available to business users.

More of the ZDNet post from Joe McKendrick

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08
Aug 16

IT Business Edge – Tread Carefully into the Mission-Critical Cloud

The initial phase of the cloud transition is nearly done, with more than three-quarters of enterprises pushing at least a portion of their workload to public infrastructure.

As expected, however, most of this is non-critical data and applications and is largely limited to storage and backup services rather than production workloads. So it stands to reason that the next leg of the cloud journey will involve mission-critical workloads – the stuff that sets the corporate suite’s hair on fire if it should cease to function for any reason.

This is why the growth of cloud computing is likely to slow down some as we approach the next decade. It’s not that the enterprise is growing tired of the cloud or is starting to see more of its flaws (yes, the cloud does have flaws), but that future deployments will have to be handled with more care as the stakes get higher. Not only will cloud services have to be more resilient going forward, but they will be increasingly optimized from the ground up to suit highly targeted processes, which takes time and coordination between users and providers.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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03
Aug 16

ZDNet – Today’s cloud computing projects are missing something – a strategy

Everyone at some level is exploring or considering public cloud options for a range of functions — from automating IT functions to enhancing business processes.

The survey of 500 executives, published by Softchoice, finds a lack of strategic thinking when it comes to cloud implementations. A majority, 54 percent, report their teams struggle to form an effective cloud strategy, and 52 percent lack a formalized cloud strategy altogether.

Having a cloud strategy makes a big difference, the survey suggests. Compared to IT leaders with no public cloud strategy in place, those with a formal strategy are less likely to grapple with cloud skills gaps, the cloud procurement model, and cloud budgeting. Fifty-eight percent of companies without strategies have experienced cloud failures, compared to only 22 percent of strategy-minded organizations. Seventy-five percent say they are struggling to find the right skills, for example — compared to 41 percent of those with strategies. At the same time, while 70 percent of companies without strategies ran over budget, only 52 percent of those with strategies have had such issues. If anything, transitioning to public cloud is a slow-moving process for most businesses. A new survey of 500 IT and business executives finds 61 percent “still experimenting with or making limited use of public cloud”.

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

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02
Aug 16

The Server Side – Managed services model addresses cloud-based analysis paralysis

It can be a tad disconcerting when a popular trend pushes its way through the industry and you and your organization are yet to jump on the bandwagon. For enterprises that haven’t yet moved their applications onto the Azure, Google or Amazon cloud, it would be understandable for managers and C-level executives to be questioning both why it hasn’t happened yet and when it actually will. But according to Jordan Jacobs, vice president of products at SingleHop, the Azure, Amazon and Google cloud models are being oversold, and for many core business functions, a managed services approach to application hosting is often a better model.

Public clouds vs. managed services model

“The thing that wows a lot of people is the market share discrepancy between public clouds and managed services, especially when compared to the press each one gets,” said Jacobs. “Amazon, Azure and Google get all of the press, but they’re actually only about a third of the managed services and managed hosting market.”

Unfortunately, the love affair the press is having with the dominant cloud providers is causing a great deal of consternation with decision makers. On the one hand, decision makers feel that they need to catch up with the latest trend; on the other hand, they are having a hard time rationalizing, in terms of cost efficiencies, security, and business benefits, the porting of their core business applications into the public cloud. It’s creating a sort of analysis paralysis, where decision makers are unsure of whether using the public cloud is the right move, whether the managed services model makes more sense or if they should just keep everything on premises.

More of The Server Side post from Cameron McKenzie

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.