Stories by Scott Stewart

According to MIT Sloan, the global customer relationship management (CRM) market exceeds $50 billion annually and yet consistently 55-75 per cent of implementations fail to meet the expectations of business stakeholders. There are case studies of successful CRM projects, but it raises the question of the validity of building silos of customer data in the belief that it adds intrinsic value to the enterprise balance sheet or the customer experience. Will emerging technologies change the way we think about managing customer relationships and interactions?

The first Federal CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra, has his work cut out for him. But as fellow CIO, Scott Stewart discovered, he has a plan.

The term ‘Cloud computing’ continues to receive a lot of attention from the media and within the IT industry there is perpetual debate on definitions and from vendors a relentless succession of press releases on their latest cloud offerings.

In the Harvard Business Review’s May 2003 edition, author Nicholas Carr created a long-running storm of controversy with the article ‘IT doesn’t matter’. It spawned a countless succession of articles in both industry and academic circles. About a year later he followed the article with a published book, Does IT Matter? in which he expanded and clarified further on his controversial themes.

Many new technologies have emerged in the world of IT but none is more confused and misunderstood than cloud computing. Here is another new technology paradigm that is crying out for a set of common standard definitions and a global consensus of understanding. Cloud computing represents perhaps the greatest fundamental shift in how we consume IT that you may see in your career and if you are a CIO who wants to survive, you need to be on the right side of the “I get it” ledger.

If they haven't already done so, it won't be long before most CIOs will be undertaking analysis of the potential financial benefits to their organizations of adopting a cloud computing strategy. You might think the discussion on cloud will focus on security and performance, but from first-hand experience the discussion will very quickly focus on the financials and the total cost of ownership.