BSM is Working

A new new Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) study has found that overall success rates for business service management (BSM) initiatives are high, with 89% of respondents indicating that their BSM initiatives met or exceeded expectations. The study also uncovered the top factors that helped these real-world organizations avoid failure and achieve success with their BSM…

Saving Money with Application and Service Consolidation

Organizations are waking up to the costs associated with operating and maintaining applications in production. And the Green IT movement is highlighting the environmental issues and hard accounting costs associated with the electricity consumption of data centers. While there are many vendors frothing at the opportunity to sell technical solutions, there are, in fact, many…

Flying High: How NetJets’ CIO Reshaped IT

So, you think your IT clients are demanding? Walk a day in Alan Cullop’s shoes and you will see the world from a whole new perspective. Cullop is the CIO of NetJets, a Warren Buffet-owned company that caters to the extremely rich and extremely demanding. First of all, if you’re part of Berkshire Hathaway (Buffet’s…

What the New U.S. CTO and CIO Should Consider

President Obama’s appointment of the first U.S. CIO and federal CTO on April 18, shows a significant shift in how the federal government is approaching technology. Achieving the goals of giving all Americans a voice and ensuring accountability for how the government spends money is a difficult and important task. These two new positions present…

“The Cloud”: Saving Grace or Empty Thunder?

In the groundswell of economic pressures, companies big and small are looking to the Cloud for relief. The buzz is everywhere: Cloud computing can cut costs, speed implementations, and scale quickly. The buzz, however, may be slightly off-the mark … at least in product pitches. “Just like SOA hype was vendor fueled and thus became…

Why Now is the Perfect Time for ITIL

With a global recession still in full swing, many wonder if it is the right time to invest in ITIL. The short answer is that you don’t have to invest in ITIL per se, but you should invest in what’s necessary for aligning with the business, controlling costs, improving quality, balancing resource allocations and doing…

SOA, Cloud and the Rise of the IT services-based Economy

An IT services-based economy offers consumers many alternatives and keeps prices low due to competition. In general, individual consumers benefit greatly from services-based economies. Consequently, SOA (services orientated architecture) and Cloud computing have been identified as IT innovations that will foster new markets and give rise to an IT services-based economy. But, when it comes…

It is Time to Think Beyond IT

More than ten years ago, EMA consultants assessed processes and technologies involved with monitoring and managing manufacturing floors, utilities, transportation fleets and other “business infrastructures” and came to the conclusion that great economies of scale could be achieved by consolidating these requirements. In other words, by leveraging IT capabilities for monitoring, instrumentation, asset planning, security,…

The Pros and Cons of SSD

Editor’s Note: See the updated version of this article to get the latest on SSD in the enterprise. Solid state disks (SSD) made a splash in consumer technology, now the technology looks set to dominate the enterprise storage market. “Get ready for a disruption in the storage ecosystem,” said Burton Group Analyst Gene Ruth. Given…

Innovating is Key in a Recession

I spent an interesting and enlighteningday last week attending a small, invite-only CIO conference at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of business. In attendance were about 25 CIOs and a few vendor-sponsors and guest lecturers. The theme was “Advancing Your Competitiveness In A Recessive Economy”. Well known IT Futurist and CIO Solutions Gallery co-founder…