Our Blogs – For CIOs by CIOs

By Rocky Vienna
Principal

According to the U.S. government, up to 40% of businesses fail to reopen following a disaster. Recent natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy have underscored the need for Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) planning. Here's what you need to know.

Before we delve into the components of BC planning, let's clearly define the difference between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. Disaster Recovery refers to the IT plan that assumes that an event (usually physical in nature, such as an earthquake or fire) has occurred, resulting in significant disruption to business computer systems. A Business Continuity Plan is the set of business procedures that enable business organizations to respond to an event that has disabled the company's business systems in part or in whole. Some events, such as the sudden loss of a key service vendor or supplier, do not require DR but still need to be considered for BC.

By Steven McIntosh

As a senior IT executive I've reached the point in my career where I feel it's important to take the time to give back to others that are just coming up the IT ladder. If you're at a similar point in your career, you probably feel the same way, too. So the questions become: How do you mentor IT professionals? What are the most important things to impart when mentoring IT professionals?

While individual needs will differ, I believe that the following three items should always be on the list:

By David Haedtler
Principal

I've seen it happen many times in the IT world. There's a project to implement a supposedly simple software upgrade, such as Microsoft Office, and the IT people only see it as a technical change. Sure, the screen will be a little different on the new version than on the old, but who cares? It's still Office. They'll get used to it.

Then changes are made, the migration is completed and everything goes to hell in a hand basket. As it turns out, lots of people – including some very important people within the organization – did care about a particular menu or command that no longer exists. And lots of people are moaning and groaning about their decreased productivity because the new system is so confusing and different.

By Mark Tonnesen
Associate

If you're a CIO you've probably heard the question before, usually asked by your company's CEO, finance executives or operations leaders: "What's the value of IT?" And chances are the people asking this question have expected a metrics-based answer involving a close look at the percentage of revenue spent on technology, the number of projects delivered, the percentage of on-time and on-budget deliveries, etc.

Stop Asking the Wrong Question

As far as I'm concerned, though, "what's the value of IT" is the wrong question to ask and the wrong way to look at IT's true value. Here's why.

By Zeesham Kazmi
Associate

Chances are not a single day passes where you don't hear of some new advancement in the cloud. Cloud is a topic of strategy discussions in board meetings, and it impacts your family's connectivity at home. Unfortunately, there's still a huge FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) factor about cloud computing. In fact, a great deal of immobilizing FUD is portrayed regarding the security, legal and risk functions of the cloud; much of which is based on myths. Many CIOs also have questions about the cloud's costs and potential savings (including the human resources savings factor), as well as how moving to the cloud can impact the transformation of their organization.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

The Path to Becoming a CIO

If you want to be a CFO there's a fairly prescriptive list of things that you need to do to rise through the corporate ranks. For example, most CFOs start their careers working for one of the major accounting firms. They have CPAs. They understand general accounting, taxation, transactions, how to deal with board members and banks, and so forth.

But if you want to be a CIO there is nothing that remotely approaches a prescriptive list of what you need to do to get there. There's no special curriculum and no widely-accepted "must have" certification.

Getting a new project started on the right road from the beginning is critical to making sure you actually get to the right destination.

The scope and pace of change in Information Technology organizations can be overwhelming. Organizations that are doing things in the “same old way” are, by definition, rapidly becoming out-of-date and risk being ineffective

Several alternatives exist as to the method and location for performing business processes. Subject to certain constraints, these processes may be located anywhere in the world, and can be performed internally by the company or by other organizations ...