Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
“Today, the IT infrastructure is the backbone and accelerator of a company’s business transformation,” explained Jean Cholka, CEO of the global IT services provider Freeborders. “Thereby, having the right leader in the IT organization in place is critical to a company’s success.” This transition in IT’s role was fueled by a number of converging storm…
In the quest to compete in a “new and improved” world, innovation became a catch-all term for anything that is different from that which came before. But change for change’s sake is not innovation and innovation, as new and shiny as it may be, is not the same thing as invention and invention is not…
Windows 7 launched roughly a year ago riding a wave of pent-up PC refresh demand and arriving just in time for the budding cloud craze. But now that companies have actually deployed Windows 7 and its much touted VDI, it’s time to evaluate actual performance against all the pre-sell promises. In our random poll of…
The Net neutrality debate boils down to an age-old argument: what constitutes a free market? Do those who have paid hard cash control that which they paid for? Or, should a free market ensure and enable competition in order to provoke innovation and lower prices for all? This is the essence of the Net neutrality…
The familiar refrain “reinvent yourself” has never been more sound for those in search of career advancement today. Fortunately for the CIO, reinvention is a relatively easy thing to do given the innovations IT wields every day. It’s a matter of looking at those technologies differently and seeing them as much as a means to…
While the cloud is taking the data center by storm few are noticing the thunderhead rolling in over mobile management. Perhaps since IT has successfully mastered mobile evolution to this point, it presumes “mobile-in-the-cloud” is just more of the same. To a degree, that presumption is understandable as the cloud does move smartphones closer to…
There may be much ado about smart grids these days but the upshot is there’s a lot left to do. Certainly the federal government is backing the effort whole-hog and major players of the Utilities Telecom Council (UTC) and Verizon-ilk are burning the midnight oil to bring home that bacon. That’s not to say that…
Nearly every CIO knows the build-a-business-case drill when it comes to validating a new tech buy. Few, however, are aware that they may need to build a business case to secure their job or to move ahead in a promotion. Many erroneously believe simply keeping IT running smoothly will win them recognition for a job…
Common wisdom has it that virtualization is the best course to improve scalability, continuity, performance, and resource efficiency on everything from desktop to servers to storage. In practice, however, that is easier said than done. Part of the difficulty lies in knowing where to start the process and how to contain the risk and where…
Mentors have taken on a new role in the CIO’s career building toolkit. Not so long ago mentorship was little more than a line-item on a resume; now it is a career lifeline. At first glance, this trend reversal from mentor to mentee appears to be a shocking affront to the old ‘don’t let them…