81880115
submission
StewBeans writes:
Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive. A recruiter for Bay Area and Seattle tech companies said in a recent New York Times article about the cloud computing skill gap, “Someone working deep inside Amazon is getting five to 20 recruiting offers a day. Compensation has doubled in five years.” Beyond steep salary and benefits packages, the resources to train new IT talent is wasted if they jump ship for the next best offer. That's why some IT executives are focusing talent management inward and investing in their current employees who are loyal and eager to learn, adapt, and grow with their company. Curt Carver, CIO for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that this approach led him to do away with the 10-year IT org chart and remain more agile as technology needs change. He argues that 18-month org charts and constant training are the new reality for IT, providing this example: "If you go back a couple of years ago, we were heavily involved in the storage business. Now I can buy unlimited storage from the cloud. I don’t need a lot of people doing storage. In fact, I may only need one. Everybody else, I’m willing to retrain you, but you’re going to be doing mobile, or you’re going to be doing business intelligence, or you’re going to be helping our organizations do gap analysis."
81624153
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StewBeans writes:
David Bray, CIO of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, began a recent talk: "2013 was the year there was the same number of network devices on the face of the planet as there were humans — seven billion network devices on the face of the planet, seven billion humans. Now...we’re at 14 billion network devices on the face of the planet." This set the stage for a conversation on the future of technology that touched on everything from Moore's Law to the consumerization of technology, global connectivity, and mass personalization. Bray and co-presenter Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat, shared their predictions and insights into how all businesses will need to evolve and adapt to a future in which they have less control.
81463131
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StewBeans writes:
A recent poll of IT professionals found that DevOps adoption is on the rise, jumping from 66 to 74 percent adoption — 81 percent among enterprises. Despite this jump, more traditional enterprises are having a hard time getting DevOps right and often run into a number of problems, like lack of common tools, collaboration, or culture change. That's because to do it successfully, organizations have to change a deeply embedded mindset and processes that contradict what DevOps is. An article by Peter Buonora, enterprise architect for BJ's Wholesale Club, points out, "Compared to the traditional IT mindset, which is about trying to minimize change, question change, and manage it to a point where the number of overall changes is reduced and we lock down the environment, it’s not hard to see that the two approaches are on a collision course." He offers a few DevOps approaches for traditional enterprises, which include setting up a dedicated team to demonstrate business value, and bringing in new talent that have lived and breathed DevOps in a previous job.
80871469
submission
StewBeans writes:
In a recent article, Michael Tiemann, one of the world's first open source entrepreneurs and VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, highlights an example from the 1950s US Air Force where the "myth of the average resulted in a generation of planes that almost no pilots could reliably fly, and which killed as many as 17 pilots in a single day." He uses this example to argue that IT leaders who think that playing it safe means being as average as possible in order to avoid risks (i.e. "Buy what others are buying. Deploy what others are deploying. Manage what others are managing.") may be making IT procurement and strategy decisions based on flawed data. Instead, Tiemann says that IT leaders should understand elements of differentiation that are most valuable, and then adopt the standards that exploit them. "Don't aim for average: it may not exist. Aim for optimal, and use the power of open source to achieve what uniquely benefits your organization."
79206339
submission
StewBeans writes:
Typically it’s developers — not senior IT executives — who have been pushing their IT departments to adopt open source software, but the tide is beginning to turn. The Weather Company's CIO Bryson Koehler says that if IT decision makers are not bringing up open source solutions to business problems, they will start to lose credibility as leaders. He references recent moves from major players like Apple, Google and IBM as evidence of open source going mainstream, and he says as it continues to increase in importance, "companies that are still shying away from open are clearly being led by people who are probably not fully informed about the decisions they’re making." Koehler hypothesizes that as these leaders are replaced by more informed decision makers, "expect to see a continued rise in the use of open source technology solutions, especially in modularized ways so that it’s easier to replace one set of libraries or components in your stack with a new set as open source projects ebb and flow throughout their life cycles."
78860193
submission
StewBeans writes:
In this lighthearted article for the holiday, IT executives were asked, if they could invite any technologist living or deceased to their Thanksgiving dinner, who would they invite and why? One CTO said that he'd invite the CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels, so he could hear his thoughts on the future of cloud computing. Another would invite Ratan Tata, who he calls the "Bill Gates of India." Other responses range from early visionaries like Grace Hopper and Vint Cerf to the mysterious inventors/designers of the Roland TR-808.
78721161
submission
StewBeans writes:
Much has been discussed about the potential security risks of an Internet of Things future in which billions of devices and machines are all talking to each other automatically. But the IoT market is exploding at a breakneck pace, leaving all companies scrambling to figure out the security piece of the puzzle now, before it's too late. In fact, some experts believe this issue will be what separates the winners from the losers, as security concerns either stop companies from getting into the IoT market, or delay existing IoT projects and leave the door open to swifter competition. That's likely why, according to CIO Magazine's annual survey, CIOs are spending a third of their time on security. Adam Dennison from CIO said, "If IT leaders want to embrace the sexy, new technologies they are hearing about today—the SMAC stack, third platform, Internet of Things, etc—security is going to be upfront and at the center of the discussion."
78169317
submission
StewBeans writes:
The Wall Street Journal recently published a special report on the staggering growth of the hybrid cloud, citing research from multiple sources, including survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year. The article said that, "CIOs are demanding a way to combine the best of the cloud with their own localized data centers. Few companies or organizations are willing or able to move all of their IT to the public cloud." GE is apparently one of those few companies, because the CTO of Cloud for GE recently wrote that they are moving the vast bulk of their 9,000 applications into the public cloud. In the article, he explains how they came to this counterintuitive decision, their strategy for moving so many apps to the cloud, and why he's more optimistic about the public cloud versus hybrid or private.
78013527
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StewBeans writes:
Usually when an article references "what keeps IT leaders up at night," it's a chance to talk about "shadow IT," losing control of tech spending, hackers, or some other overly-hyped concept. Adam Dennison, publisher at IDG Enterprise, opposes this interview tactic and says that "reports of pain are greatly exaggerated." IT leaders don't mind shadow IT or sharing control of the IT budget (in fact, they want others in the business to have some skin in the game), and they understand that they are probably being hacked. What they DO care about is talent.
Dennison points out gaps in data, security, and app development, based on IDG's recent survey, and he says CIOs tell him that finding the right IT talent that is also able to articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very difficult. He says, "They worry that they can’t move fast enough to adopt the technology they need because the new IT talent doesn’t want to work on the old stuff, and the old talent doesn’t understand the new stuff."
77163551
submission
StewBeans writes:
The Mythical Man-Month is a 40-year old theory on software development that many believe still holds true today. It states: "A project that requires five team members to work for five months cannot be completed by a twenty-five person team in one month." Basically, adding manpower to a development project counterintuitively lowers productivity because it increases complexity. Citing the 2015 State of DevOps Report, Anders Wallgren from Electric Cloud says that microservices architecture is proving this decades-old theory wrong, but that there is still some hesitation among IT decision makers. He points out three rookie mistakes to avoid for IT organizations just starting to dip their toes into agile methodologies.
76889225
submission
StewBeans writes:
InfoWorld recently pointed out that the "architect" part of enterprise architect is a misnomer, because what they are building can't be a static, unmoving structure or it will fail. Businesses need to remain fluid and flexible as technology and consumer behaviors evolve, so modern enterprise architects must "develop frameworks with constant change as a first principle." The business value of these frameworks, however, is often called into question, and EAs have even been called the "Miltons" (as in Milton from Office Space) of the enterprise. If the field of enterprise architecture is changing to focus more on digital transformation, how does that compete with or compliment IT's role in the enterprise, which is also focused on digital transformation? The enterprise architect of BJ's Wholesale breaks down his responsibilities and addresses some myths about the EA role in this article.
76640423
submission
StewBeans writes:
Fortune 500 companies and longstanding corporate giants are losing to startups that are born digital because they can't keep up or they refuse to acknowledge the ways that technology is changing both business and consumer preferences. Getting "Ubered" is now one of the biggest threats to traditional IT departments as the growing number of unicorns like Airbnb, Spotify, Square, and others take over the economy and win the hearts and minds of increasingly mobile, always-on consumers. In this article, nine tech leaders from large companies talk about how they have had to change their approach in order to keep pace and avoid getting disrupted by the next big thing around the corner.
76596405
submission
StewBeans writes:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center is calling for calmer than normal storm activity this hurricane season, which runs through Nov. 30. But it's likely that data centers and IT companies in NYC are still taking disaster preparedness seriously. Three years ago, Hurricane Sandy devastated homes, businesses, transportation, and communication in New York, and taught many companies (the hard way) how to keep the lights on when the lights were literally off for weeks on end. Alphonzo Albright, former CIO of the Office of Information Technology in New York City, gives a behind-the-scenes account of what life and business were like in the dark, cold days following Hurricane Sandy in NYC. He also shares tips for other tech leaders to create their own Business Continuity Plan in case this year's storms take a turn for the worse.
75674669
submission
StewBeans writes:
Guaranteeing your personal privacy in an era when more and more devices are connecting our daily lives to the Internet is becoming increasingly difficult to do. David Bray, CIO of the FCC, emphasizes the exponential growth we are facing by comparing the Internet we know today to a beachball, and the Internet of Everything future to the Sun. Bray says, unless you plan to unplug from the Internet completely, every consumer needs to assume some responsibility for the security and overall health of the Internet of Everything. He says this might look similar to public health on the consumer side — the digital equivalent of hand washing — and involve an open, opt-in model for the rapid detection of abnormal trends across global organizations and networks.
