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Archives for April 2012

CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ

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Wow. Can the CIO escape the chief infrastructure officer corner? Or, has that ship sailed?

“New research suggests chief executives don’t consider CIOs of their companies as partners in managing either strategy or innovation. This data could go a long way towards explaining why so many CIO jobs are advertised as strategic, but end up being largely operational.

According to Gartner, which conducts an annual survey of CEO attitudes towards technology, only 4% of the chief executives of some of the world’s largest companies consider their CIOs as leaders of innovation management within their organizations, or as supporting them in making strategic changes to the business.

Mark Raskino, who conducted the survey, added that 35% of CEOs named the CFO as their main strategic partner in the company, but didn’t mention CFOs at all when it comes to managing innovation either. “In this world of digital disruption, this overall equation is almost a systemic map for creating a blind spot… Strategy and innovation are held separately, and the CIO is held nowhere near any of them,” he told CIO Journal.”

…

“It reflects the extent to which CIOs are under-appreciated by the rest of the executive suite, in large part because “too often, IT leaders see themselves, and CEOs see them, as custodians of the tools” used to drive innovation. High says CIOs can change this perception by leading conversations about how IT can support initiatives for human resources, legal and compliance and marketing departments.

Gartner surveyed 381 companies for this report, 16% of which generate revenues of $50 billion or more, 23% of which earn between $5 billion and $25 billion, and 36% of which earn between $1 billion and $5 billion. Seventy percent of respondents were CEOs, president or board members, and 30% were CFOs. More than half employed more than 10,000 workers.“

via CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ.

Another article on the survey result points to short CIO tenures as a detriment:

“CIOs are seen as employees that move from company to company, never rising to a more senior role and never staying longer than their next job offer, added Lopez.“

Regardless of the cause, the impact is significant. I’m not advocating that the “I” in CIO becomes “Innovation”, but in the now (and forever) digital business world, the CIO needs to press the innovation agenda. Directly, or via a strategic hire.

Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

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Via the open source monkeys, cloud developers everywhere will have an opportunity to learn how Netflix manages a spike laden business on Amazon’s cloud. In addition to the open source news, the article provides a nice overview of the business problem Netflix is solving, why they went cloud, how open source helps with recruiting talent, and profiles one of their big talents, Adrian Cockcroft.

An excerpt:

“Netflix is getting ready to unleash its Simian Army.

The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software — it calls the programs “monkeys” — that poke and prod its online applications and keep the website and its services humming along.

There’s a Chaos Monkey, a program that randomly kills virtual machines to make sure that small outages will not disrupt the overall system. They’ve got Security Monkey — it looks for configuration and security flaws — and Janitor Monkey, too: It looks for system resources that aren’t being used and shuts them down.

Over the next few months Netflix will release the source code for these programs and more, giving cloud developers a look at how it runs its services on Amazon’s cloud. The plan is “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year,” says Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix. “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.””

via Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Link Collection — April 15, 2012

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  • Crovitz: Complexity Is Bad for Your Health – WSJ.com

    It’ll be interesting to see if SCOTUS determines if (a) the complexity of the entire law makes it impossible to strike down the mandate; or (b) if the mandate is deemed unconstitutional, thus sinking the entire complicated law. 

    Is it too complex to fail? Or, too complex to stand?

    “The justices focused on the complexity of the law to debate what happens if they find some parts unconstitutional, such as the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance. Can the rest of it stay, or must it all fall, and the political branches start on health-care reform from scratch? And how could the court practically pick and choose, given the law’s great length and complexity?”

    “Perhaps ObamaCare will be remembered as the breaking point for top-down planning. There is not enough information available for the government to micromanage a system as complex as health care, which represents more than 15% of the economy. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote some 50 years ago about the “pretence of knowledge,” meaning the conceit that planners could know enough about complex markets to dictate how they operate. He warned against “the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess.”

    tags: complexity healthcare scotus

  • 5 ways to power the Internet of things — Cleantech News and Analysis

    “The Internet of Things could have a mind-boggling 24 billion devices connected by 2020 and that means there will be more than three times the amount of connected devices as people on the planet by that time. So, how will the world power all of these gadgets and machine-driven devices? The answer, beyond plugging all of those devices into the grid, will include farming tiny slices of power when available, from sources like the sun, vibrations, mechanical energy, heat and more.”

    tags: cleantech green internet-of-things

  • Business-Facing IT Jobs In Demand – The CIO Report – WSJ

    “…outsources what he calls “run-of-the-mill coding jobs” to India, said there are plenty of positions for enterprise architects, data integration architects, and business analysts. Such jobs include all of the” thinking work” that ends up in code and can’t be done offshore because it requires core understanding of each individual company, Leader said.

    Recent college graduates could fill core project management and business analyst positions in IT, he said. Leader himself hired project managers, an enterprise architect and business analysts. Many other jobs, including enterprise and integration architects, require strong skill sets that cannot be filled by students fresh out of college, forcing companies to compete for those applicants. “We cannot find people to fill these jobs,” Leader told CIO Journal.”

    tags: wsj entarch integration IT business_analysis

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Developing data literacy: Informed Skeptics & Big Judgment — Active Information

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“At this very moment, there’s an odds-on chance that someone in your organization is making a poor decision on the basis of information that was enormously expensive to collect.”

This week on Active Information, I highlight a report from the Corporate Executive Board on building organizational capability for Big Data.

My post focuses on human capability, which the Corporate Executive Board refers to as Big Judgment. The data literacy aspect is from a synopsis of Tiffany’s training program.

The post: Developing data literacy: Big Data requires inform… – Input Output.

Data-driven decision-making, not just for the business

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I was inspired to write the following active information post after a particularly painful conference call:

“That got me wondering, are we in IT so busy managing everyone else’s data, that we forget to use data for own decisions?”

via Enterprise Devs: don’t just manage data, use it – Input Output.

As March progressed, I found myself asking “What does the data tell us”?” in numerous design sessions.

It ended up being an extremely effective way to refocus otherwise circuitous conversations. Try it.

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

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