Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
This series of five articles takes a closer look at software development, the reasons for failure and how to avoid them. The previous article in this series dealt with the importance of project requirements. Once you have that nailed down, it is time to select the development methodology. While there are many different methods to…
Editor’s Note: Ms. Hathaway has not been named to a permanent post. Placed in charge by the Obama administration of a 60-day review of the federal government’s cyber security initiatives on Feb. 9, her official title for the review period is Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils. This…
This series of five articles takes a closer look at software development, the reasons for failure and how to avoid them. It takes years to build a reputation. It takes only one failure to ruin it—even if it was someone else’s fault. Take Edsel Ford. He was president of Ford for 24 years, directed the…
In these dark economic times, an emerging product category is one bright ray of hope, particularly if you are looking for ways to quickly improve customer service or beef up your compliance or security. The category is a relatively new field: real-time business process monitoring. Think of it as a “sniffer for business events” as…
When VF Corp’s Martin Schneider took over as the company’s first global CIO in 2006, he wouldn’t say VF’s IT department was in disarray, but it certainly wasn’t the IT department the company needed. VF, the parent company of such familiar brands as Lee and Wrangler jeans, The North Face outerwear, Majestic (major league baseball…
The future of IT is not in building and maintaining technology, but in the application of technology in solving business problems. This new IT organization should not be focused on maintaining a technology infrastructure, but in using IT as a value-added tool to enhance the operation of the business. Making the switch to concentrating on…
As U.S. retailers continue to march on bankruptcy courts en mass, a few global players are banking their bets offshore. Although the Timberland brand is well-known in the U.S., most of the company’s current sales are in Europe and Asia. While those economies are suffering along with the U.S., IT has given Timberland the means…
As one analyst covering the tech industry commented to me, cloud computing, or “the cloud”, seems to have risen on the hype curve at an amazing speed. A few months back the term hardly but now every technical analyst, journal, vendor and conference seems to be abuzz about it. Given all this hype, it is…
In a perfect world, the implementation of a service oriented architecture (SOA) in your organization will help better align IT services with those day-to-day business processes in which your colleagues, customers, and partners engage. Yet, in order to reap the promise of SOA, the prudent CIO must wrangle both organizational and technology oriented challenges—keeping an…
Nearly every CIO is squeezed between the urgent need to increase IT adoption vs. staving off rogue staffers hot after their favorite device or software. In this regard, the CIO both giveth and taketh away. But nowhere is that squeeze harder or more brutal than at the helm of high tech companies where staffers often…