IT Organization - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Is D.C. the Next Great Tech Startup Hub?

  City officials and local tech entrepreneurs weigh efforts to transform the nation's capital into a haven for angel-backed, emerging tech ventures by pointing out the shifting dynamics of the model for funding startup tech ventures, with cloud computing, open source software and other industry trends lowering the cost of setting up a business, potentially diminishing the importance of the traditional venture capitalist. However, this is at odds with a city, that while trying to cultivate this tech hub, is also struggling to improve a public school system so as not to lose the middle-class.

• Can BYOD bury the hatchet between IT and business?

  BYOD can wreak havoc on the tenuous relationship between IT and the business. But networking giant Cisco, which has a sophisticated bring-your-own device (BYOD) plan for employees, is hoping more reasonable BYOD policies that permit personal cloud services will help bridge the gap.

• Doing reorganisation right

  When I interview candidates for positions I've been hired to fill, I typically ask them to whom they currently report. I cannot tell you how often they respond, "That depends, what day of the week is it?" IT professionals are as likely as anyone to invest a tremendous amount of meaning in their titles, their headcount and their reporting lines, and CIOs who reorganize too often (or poorly) are in danger of losing talent. The CIOs below have found ways around that.

• It's time to reinvent reinvention

  While working on more than $2 billion worth of reinvention projects in the past 15 years, I've often reflected on why large companies can be so good at running their organizations but struggle so much when it comes to changing them. Any way you slice it, reinvention is hard. It is difficult even when it's successful. And it hurts when projects stumble, spiral out of control, or crash and burn-which happens as much as 70 percent of the time.

• Why today's CIO must foster IT agility

  The job of the CIO is not what it used to be. No longer are well-run data centers and solid uptime metrics the measures of success - now CIOs run the business process and technology is the tool. The metric a company should use to measure the performance of its CIO these days is agility, and companies that don't-or that limit the ability of their CIOs to maximize agility-will struggle to compete in today's market.

• Why CIOs detest the phrase 'IT and the business'

  I know a lot of CIOs who detest the phrase "IT and the business," implying as it does that IT is a thing apart, a foreign particle in the company body. As someone who believes in the power of language, I'm with them. I cringe to think how often we fall victim to that polarizing phrase in the pages of CIO.

• Candid talk trumps the blame game

  Relationships between the CIO and business executives will inevitably become strained, with broken promises and eroding trust. So how do you keep them from going completely off the rails?

• What your Cloud consultant is trying to tell you

  Cloud consultants aren't that much different from the consulting and contracting firms that IT has used over the years. But the economics of cloud consulting are a whole bunch different from what the Big 5 firms were doing with SAP and Siebel. Thanks to the price points of cloud solutions (typically, a monthly fee) and the expectation of Web open systems (all I do is point and click, right?), behemoth consulting gigs are few and far between.

• Catching up with mobile security threats

  Development of enterprise mobile apps has been moving more slowly than development of consumer-facing apps, according to Gartner. One main reason is IT leaders' concerns about the security of mobile devices, which are often employees' personal devices, and are vulnerable to being lost, hacked or stolen. While there are plenty of established tools and practices for keeping Web visitors from straying (or hacking) into sensitive corporate data, managing security across a diverse set of mobile devices remains a challenge, IT experts say.

• Turning cool IT ideas into revenue

  "Follow the money" is classic advice for investigative journalists, auditors and entrepreneurs. But for CIOs? That doesn't quite compute. If anything, CIOs have a reputation for being risk-averse and hypercautious with corporate dollars-just ask any hot-eyed startup CEO who's ever pitched to one of you.

• The need for more than speed: CPU tips for PC buyers

  In the world of digital devices, more - whether it be megapixels or megahertz - was always better. Until it wasn't.

• It's time for CIOs to get in the game

  "I'm so done with alignment," declared the CIO pacing across the stage at our CIO Perspectives New York event a few weeks ago. "It's not even part of the conversation anymore. IT and the business are in this together. Period."

• 3 ways to get a bigger bang for your IT buck

  Getting maximum results from innovative IT investments is an art. Business users may need incentives to take advantage of new capabilities that wait to be exploited.

• IT-Business alignment a thing of the past

  How is your IT strategy developed? Most companies work tirelessly to make sure it directly aligns to the business strategy, but it's still a waterfall process: Decide on a business strategy, and then build a technology strategy to support it. In fact, according to Forrester data, more than two-thirds of IT leaders wait for business leaders to finalize their strategy before IT formulates its own.

• iPad 2: Jobs calls rivals copycats, dismisses tablet wars

  The iPad 2 is finally here (well, actually shipping March 11). The tech industry, which has been keeping a sharp eye on the rise of the disruptive tablet, as well as making smart predictions about the iPad 2 for months, was pretty much on the mark. The iPad 2 runs faster and sports two cameras.