At the CIO50 event Silicon.com asked a number of European CIO's "Whats the best thing about working in IT?". I always enjoy hearing enthusiasm from those with IT careers.
cio
How to come up with big ideas
Silicon.com: Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas and while those that are generated may not be all IT-related, it will do the CIO no harm to be seen to be leading on innovation.
I don't have the complete answer to this but I would like to throw out some thoughts about how to collect those new ideas:"
First U.S. Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra
The United States federal government finally appoints the country's first Chief Information Officer. For a bureaucracy that is having a difficult time handling a President that wants a computer in the Oval Office and a Blackberry in his hand, I'd say the new CIO has his work cut out for him.
The U.S. government's first CIO, Vivek Kundra, introduced himself today as someone who will act aggressively to change the federal government's use of IT by adopting consumer technology and ensuring that government data is open and accessible.
Kundra also wants to use technology such as cloud computing to attack the government's culture of big-contract boondoggles and its hiring of contractors who end up "on the payroll indefinitely."
More information about the new CIO in this ComputerWorld article.
CIO Insight: IT Security, Reconsidered
An excellent article at CIO Insight in their "Expert Voices" column concerning IT security. The article is titled, "IT Security, Reconsidered":
Business people know risk and return are opposite sides of the same coin; you can't have return without risk. So successful companies learn to analyze, accept and manage risk…most kinds of risk, anyway. When it comes to IT risk, organizations tend to focus on avoiding risk instead of managing it, by preventing intrusions and preparing to respond to catastrophic events. But instead of protecting companies, this approach to risk has blindsided IT to a long stream of IT disasters, from system meltdowns (Comair, Jet Blue) and stolen credit card data (TJX, CardSystems Solutions) to pilfered laptops (Veterans' Administration) and stolen data (U.S. Department of Transportation). Putting IT security back in the context of risk management has been the focus of George Westerman's work.This year at work I have spent close to half my time dealing with a lot of IT security. I have not only been kept busy with locking down the network but also with way too much paperwork certifying that our machines are secure. When you spend so much time making the paper pushers happy that you're following the latest policies it hard to actually really identify the true risks that don't show up on paper. More importantly, spending so much time on IT security not only locks out the would-be hackers but also locks your IT staff out from adding potential IT value to the operations. There has to be a balance somewhere...
Quoting IT: Partner to the business
"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes. Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."
-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.
Why open source attracts my attention
From CMS Report's very beginning, I had every intention to talk about not only those content management systems (CMS) that are open source, but also those CMS that are considered propriety systems. I personally don't have a problem seeing companies making profit for the products they develop and promote. Yet, if you look at the majority of posts I have written in the past year you'll find that about 95% of the articles center around open source CMS and not propriety systems. Part of the reason I don't talk much about propriety CMS is that I just don't have the same access to them as I do with open source software. However, a tiny article in one of the IT trade magazines reminded me another reason why I talk so much about open source software.
In ComputerWorld's February 12, 2007 issue there is a small article on page 8 titled, "There’s lots of Web 2.0 talk...but where’s the real action?" The article discusses how commercial Web sites are looking into AJAX and other Web 2.0 features, but never seem to go beyond the Web 1.0 search tools. Siderean Software Inc. believes they have the answer with their Seamark Navigator search software. Siderean claims that want separates Seamark Navigator apart from the rest of the the other search software is that it uses relational navigation as opposed to relying on keyword search or guided navigation. What caught my attention though was how ComputerWorld described the product.
In ComputerWorld's February 12, 2007 issue there is a small article on page 8 titled, "There’s lots of Web 2.0 talk...but where’s the real action?" The article discusses how commercial Web sites are looking into AJAX and other Web 2.0 features, but never seem to go beyond the Web 1.0 search tools. Siderean Software Inc. believes they have the answer with their Seamark Navigator search software. Siderean claims that want separates Seamark Navigator apart from the rest of the the other search software is that it uses relational navigation as opposed to relying on keyword search or guided navigation. What caught my attention though was how ComputerWorld described the product.
Quoting IT: Career Ladder
"Why have IT report to accounting? You show me a company where the CIO reports to the CFO, and I'll show you a company lagging in its industry in the use of technology."
Benjamin Salzmann, Acuity CEO, Quoted in "CIO to CEO: If You Want to Move Up", ComputerWorld, December 18, 2006
ComputerWorld: Why Don't More CIOs Become CEO?
"Opinion: Thornton A. May thinks the ingredients are in place for more CIOs to move into the top spot."
eWeek: Research - IT Generation Gap Overblown
"A new report from Forrester argues that the dismal accounts of a drained or poorly trained IT workforce are both irresponsible and inaccurate."
Baseline: How To Recruit and Retain I.T. talent.
"But where would we be without the information technology workers whose vision and drive made those technologies come to life within their corporations?
It's a question that chief information officers find themselves asking more often these days. Indeed, CIOs are staring at a future with an aging workforce, a shrinking number of computer science students and an intensifying competition for information technology talent."
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