Getting CIO and CEO to see eye to eye
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The top techie, says Forrester's George Colony, must be a teacher to help the business execs make needed leaps of innovation.
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An Interview With Universal Display President and COO Steve Abramson.
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Ask any corporate executive the secret to success and there's a good chance you'll hear that the management team must work on the same goals using the same assumptions and facts -- with transparency to the CEO and board. Yet most companies don't work that way, setting the stage for missed opportunities, hidden problems, and political gaming that uses siloed data and its analysis as a departmental weapon rather than as an enterprise asset.
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Company is working on flexible display technologies.
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If you think of your business as a car and your IT infrastructure as the road it travels on, then your business processes are the tires that let the car move along the road. What we are seeing now, at an ever increasing rate, is CFOs asking CIOs to kick the tires and check the air pressure. Analogies aside, CFOs want CIOs to get more involved in process design across the company.
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Pouring fuel on the debate over whether IT provides a competitive advantage to corporations, a pair of prominent industry observers Monday offered starkly different views of the role computer technology can play in transforming business strategy.
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(InfoWorld) - Two of three companies aim to grow faster than their markets this year, making it more important than ever for chief information officers to shift their priorities to encompass business objectives, according to a survey from Gartner. CIOs who do that will differentiate themselves, and their enterprise IT departments, and be leaders in an emerging trend where they and their employees have more business skills and acumen, said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. Gartner has surveyed CIOs for the annual study since 2002. More than 1,400 CIOs were queried worldwide. Gartner has identified four strategies that CIOs should pursue: technical excellence; enterprise agility; information effectiveness; and innovation. The third strategy involves using analytics and applying information to how business decisions are made, rather than how information is moved around a company's computer systems. Companies that "look at [information] as a resource as opposed to an asset to be managed had significantly better performance," McDonald said. Interestingly, the survey found that 86 percent of respondents identify innovation as critical to success, but only 26 percent said that innovation processes are sufficient to achieve goals. Although a corporate environment or culture that does not encourage innovation was flagged as the number-one roadblock, the survey found that among those who said that innovation processes are sufficient, corporate culture wasn't mentioned. Rather, those companies approach innovation as a "structured process" that generates results. Those enterprises also have "technology effectiveness," with IT departments that operate at "a service level" but keep costs under control. As for budgets, the survey found that IT departments on average will have more money for the fourth year in a row, but just 3 percent more on average and 3.4 percent among U.S. companies whose CIOs were surveyed. That's not much and points to the need to "do more with what you've got" as opposed to doing more with less, McDonald said. Along those lines, successful CIOs understand that "business knowledge has to become the highest common denominator across the IT shop." That presents a challenge for some companies where the IT department focus is more on technical expertise. "My coder should know how my company makes money regardless of the work they do," McDonald said. Ensuring that means that "you have to change the source of new recruits." More than 70 percent of CIOs anticipate they will hire new employees from IT shops at other companies rather than "tapping into the reservoir of talent within their own businesses." Recruiting from other IT departments means you wind up with "more of the same rather than someone who is different," he said. CIOs also need to focus on training for employees they already have, to help them develop heightened business acumen. That could include something as simple and inexpensive as brown-bag lunch sessions, McDonald said. Overall, Gartner finds that CIOs need to focus on "the next big round number" and develop a vision for 2010. The last such focus was in 2000 when "everybody was kind of willing to celebrate, but they were celebrating and laying out grand strategies with an eye over their shoulders because they weren't sure if their systems were going to collapse," he said. CIOs who don't look to 2010 and communicate a vision for their departments will find that others do that for them, McDonald said.
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Customers share what's working for them, and analysts weigh in about best practices.
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Executive sees opportunities despite recent challenges to its position from Microsoft and Oracle.
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After years of hearing that investing in IT was a smart strategic plan, business executives seem to have gotten the message, according to a new Gartner CIO survey released today -- but only when the dollars are going to technology efforts that have visible benefits for the bottom line, primarily externally facing initiatives involving customers or partners.The good news is that, despite the softening economy, IT budgets are going up 3.3 percent across the nearly 1,500 companies that Gartner surveyed. The data that matters for IT execs: Budgets for companies focused on bottom-line-oriented efforts are increasing 4.9 percent, said Mark McDonald, a Gartner Group vice president. Those organizations whose IT strategy involves only an efficiency focus will typically see budget increases of just 1.7 percent.The survey shows that a sea change has occurred in IT priorities, McDonald noted. The top three priorities in 2008 are improving business processes, attracting and retaining new customers, and creating new products and services. The sea change is the third priority, which was the No. 10 priority in 2007. Gone from the top three is reducing enterprise costs, which has slipped to No. 5. The decline of cost-cutting as a priority and the rise of innovation show the sea change that has occurred, McDonald says.But IT managers hoping for a return to the 1990s glory days of annual budget increases of 15-plus percent will be disappointed, McDonald said. In that era, IT budgets were driven by technology initiatives done almost for their own sake, as businesses both experimented with the new Internet and began to use technology widely within their walls. "Today, it's more about specific business needs," he said, "We're seeing strategies well grounded in business operations changes, not chasing a fad."And it's not CIOs driving the budget growth; it's the C-suite executives who now finally see IT as a business enabler, McDonald added. If anything, CIOs who promote IT as a force for business change were typically dismissed as self-interested. He noted, "Calling attention to yourself is never very positive."Although there is a mounting possibility that the U.S. economy may be entering a recession, McDonald doesn't believe IT will see its budgets slashed, as happened in the 2000-2001 recession. That recession came after years of unbridled IT spending whose specific business benefits were often unclear. The more moderate budget growth predicted for 2008 won't give businesses the same easy cuts they had then, he noted. "If you cut IT's budget by 10 percent, you might just see a 0.2 percent effect on the whole budget," McDonald explained, "You can get more bang for your buck by lowering [overall] operations costs through investing in better IT." That's why businesses are looking to increase IT spending for bottom-line-oriented initiatives, he said.
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What can manufacturers do to make devices more accessible to the blind?.
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The new CEO may want to shed non-strategic parts of the business.
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Fast company It&#146;s a familiar tension in business. Business people think designers are mere stylists; designers think business people are Neanderthals who forfeit quality for profit. That&#146;s because traditional business runs on logic that is inductive (using observation to prove something works) and deductive (using principles to prove that something must be). But designers rely on abductive reasoning. Huh? It&#146;s ...
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Can't these guys make it easier to understand what the company is really worth?
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CEO Benioff &amp; Co. are more of a &quot;disruptive force&quot; in the software industry than ever before. By Tony Kontzer. Salesforce.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
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By Krell, Eric  IN THE BUSINESS WORLD, TECHNOLOGY MATTERS-EVEN IF SOME HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL THOUGHT LEADERS MIGHT SAY, OR WRITE, OTHERWISE.