Getting IT on the Right Side of Value

by Marcos Jimenez, CEO of Softtek USA & Canada Today, it’s not just the Microsofts, Oracles, or IBMs of the world that are software companies; businesses in every industry are becoming increasingly dependent on their software investments to generate revenues. Media companies now have a wide range of digital distribution capabilities, not only through services…

IT Risks Are Manageable

by Ed Airey of Micro Focus The enterprise ecosystem is changing at an unprecedented rate and though helpful in adapting to this change, technology is also making it difficult to keep up with the myriad threats to your IT organization. So where do you begin? Try looking at the areas of IT that are at…

3 Reasons to Get IT out of the IT Dept.

A fellow professional recently shared this conversation with me: “Recently, an HR director I work with stopped me in the hallway and asked, ‘Have you had to get new shoes since you started with [our company]?’ I first thought this guy was giving me grief that my shoes needed to be shined or that he…

4 Proven Strategies to Move from Capex to Opex

My first column talked about why CFOs want to shift more IT costs from large capital expenditures (capex) to ongoing operational expenses (opex). Practically speaking, this means swapping IT asset ownership with monthly rental payments. Costs, as a result, become more affordable, predictable, and aligned with the sales rhythm of your business. That’s soothing to…

IT Value and Business Value are One and the Same

On this past Friday I had the good fortune of spending the afternoon at a big local CIO event called TechTomorrow hosted by TechColumbus. Of the 350 or so attendees, it appeared that most of them stayed for the afternoon’s main session: the CIO Value Forum. As you can infer the main topic was value….

Finding the Missing Link between IT and the Enterprise

Given the current economic environment, IT professionals need to look beyond the historical boundaries of what their responsibilities are and be more oriented to what is truly of interest to their customers. If the current thinking in your organization has applications, infrastructure, storage and other technology components as key elements for interacting with your customers,…

Is Your Organization Ready for the Cloud?

It’s nearly impossible to pick up a technology magazine or sit through a strategy meeting without encountering a reference to what some consider the next and greatest wave in enterprise computing – the cloud. Cloud is a fitting term for something so shrouded in mystery and hard to grasp. We’re not helped by the plethora…

IT Leadership – The Dual Role of Today’s CIO

There is a question about the evolving role of the CIO that is making the rounds on the blogs. Essentially the question is this ― What do you consider the role of the CIO to be? Is it focusing on creating value through technology or running an efficient IT shop? From where I sit as…

Cloudy (Computing) Days are Coming

There are a few coalescing trends that will make the next few years very interesting. One trend is demographic: there is a new generation of folks coming into management that is very comfortable with technology since they have never known a world without it. The members of this group view technology as a given. Like…

How to Assign Value to an IT Service

IT organizations have come a long way from the days when they declared victory because of an SLA around frame relay throughput. Or have they? While many SLAs, OLAs, and other contractual agreements have indeed become more application-oriented and are moving from raw availability to performance and even more complex user experience criteria, meaningfully assigning…