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You can't be a buddy and be a boss

When I’m working with new CIOs I often run into the buddy / boss problem. It’s perfectly understandable that any person newly placed into a CIO position would like to establish a positive relationship with the people in the IT department that they are managing. This is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for a CIO to go too far – you can be a boss, but you can’t be a buddy.

Pick One: Buddy Or Boss

How did you ever learn to be a boss? There is no real definition of information technology management that you can look up in order to get management tips. I’m going to go so far as to guess that you never took any courses on the subject. Rather, you went to work and you had bosses. You watched what they did and saw what kind of results they got. When you got promoted, you did your level best to be like the bosses that you had that got things done.

This is all well and good; however, the world moves on. The new management philosophy tells us that as bosses we need to “connect” with our staff in part to keep them from leaving. Exactly what this means or how best to do it is not terribly well defined.

All too often what I see new CIOs doing is starting out small and going out to happy hours and such events with their IT team. This then leads to other activities and eventually real friendships can develop with some of your staff. This is when problems start to pop up.

As the head of the IT department, your staff works for you. What this means is that at work you have a very clearly defined relationship. When you start to develop personal friendships outside of work, these relationships can start to blur the work relationships.

What happens is that your new friends stop taking what you say at work with the proper amount of seriousness. They forget that indeed they do need to do what you tell them to do – it’s not a request from a friend that they are receiving, but rather a command from their boss. The difference may be subtle, but it’s very, very important that they understand it.

Too Much Information

Along the same lines, the issue of how much of your personal life you should share with your staff is another difficult issue that we all need to deal with. You don’t want to be seen as being cold and aloof, but how much is too much?

One of the key realizations that I’ve seen CIOs struggle with is the simple fact that any personal information that you share with any of your staff will undoubtedly end up getting repeated. Before you share it, you need to determine what the long term cost of making that information public will be.

Trivial things like the fact that you own a dog are probably ok to share with staff. The fact that you got arrested as a youth for drunken driving is probably not. The litmus test that seems to work the best in these situations is to ask yourself if you saw that the front-page story in the New York Times was the information that you are about to share with a staff member, how would your mother feel? If there is any doubt on your part, then keep your mouth shut!

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs get way too much contradictory information when it come how best to manage a team of IT professionals. Gone are the days of aloof, remote bosses. CIOs are expected to connect with their IT department and to bond with their employees. The importance of information technology is such that CIOs do need to find ways to connect with their staff.

However, it’s all too easy for a CIO to take this employee bonding stuff too far. You won’t be able to effectively manage your staff if you become their “buddy”. Instead you need to maintain a professional distance between yourself and everyone else. This idea means that you shouldn’t end up sharing too much of your personal information with the people who work for you.

Nobody ever said that in the IT sector that this leadership thing was going to be easy. CIOs need to keep in mind the role that they play in the company that they work for and what this means for the relationships that they will establish. Remember, be a boss, not a buddy!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: If you make a mistake and become too friendly with one of your employees, what’s the best way to correct the situation?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s time for that IT worker to go. As CIO, one of the most painful decisions that you are ever going to have to make is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is this a tough call for you to make, if you have any sensitivity at all then you realize that it’s going to rough on them no matter how you go about doing this. Considering how important this is the IT department and to both of you, perhaps we should spend a few moments talking about the right way to go about doing this part of your job…

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Dr. Jim Anderson has been asked to deliver two speeches at the 16th Annual Pink Conference. The role that Blue Elephant Consulting plays in the IT industry has been recognized as being a thought leader and the organizers of the Pink Conference have asked Dr. Anderson to share some of his insights with the conference attendees. Dr. Anderson will be delivering two speeches at the conference in Las Vegas on Monday, February 20th.

The first speech that Dr. Anderson will be giving will be giving is titled “The Secret To Knowing Where You Are Going“. In this speech Dr. Anderson will be discussing the Balanced Scorecard management technique and showing the audience how it can be applied to an IT department.

Dr. Anderson’s goal will be to build a complete IT balanced scorecard during his presentation. He’ll also be showing how a single balanced scorecard can be used to monitor a department’s performance, communicate it’s strategy, and even ensure the proper execution of its strategy.

Dr. Anderson’s second speech is called “Secrets For Getting Them To Listen“. In this speech Dr. Anderson will be covering the common mistakes that IT professionals make when they are asked to deliver a presentation.

It’s not that they don’t know the material, rather it’s how they create their presentation and how they deliver it. Dr. Anderson will address both of these issues by using his presentation to create a complete IT presentation the correct way. He’ll introduce and use the Blue Elephant Presentation System to create an effective presentation that the audience will be talking about long after the presentation is over.

You are invited to join Dr. Anderson and attend both of his presentations — all you have to do is sign up for the 16th Annual Pink Conference. Here’s the link and I hope to see you there!

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If you really want to become or remain a CIO, the question comes up as to if you need to go on and get an advanced degree. We’ve all heard a great deal about getting an MBA, but would a specialized Master’s degree do just as well?

Dr. Anderson looks into exactly what goes into a specialty Master’s degree and way you might want to consider getting one. There are some disadvantages and Dr. Anderson lists all of them.

Get a free subscription to The Accidental Successful CIO newsletter by visiting the sign-up page at: http://goo.gl/NOfh2

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The spark of innovation is already in your IT department, you just need to let it spread

If Steve Jobs was still with us, do you think that he might be willing to come and work in your IT department? He was supposed to be a jerk, but man can he bring some innovation to the table. CIOs who want to foster more innovation in their IT departments probably couldn’t get Steve to sign up with their IT team; however, I’ve got three suggestions that just might light the spark of innovation within your IT department.

Ask And You Shall Receive

So why isn’t there more innovation going on in your IT department? Based on how much time CIOs spend talking about innovation, you’d almost think that it was a part of the definition of information technology. One reason is that innovation isn’t happening is because you may be looking for it in the wrong places. The companies in the IT sector that are the most innovative know that the best ideas can come from anywhere in the organization.

The problem is that all too often IT employees feel that they have too little opportunity to provide input to improve the way that things are being done. Confirmation of this has been revealed by studies that show that the average U.S. employee’s ideas are implemented once every six years! It should be pretty obvious that innovative companies are the ones who spend more time implementing more of their employee’s ideas.

As CIO you need to clearly communicate to everyone in the IT department that you value their ideas and that you want them to suggest them. You’ll have to take the extra step and show them that their ideas are being implemented in order to get them to make more suggestions.

You Gotta Make Time

Just exactly when do you think that your IT staff will be coming up with these innovative ideas? If they are working non-stop from the moment that they arrive at work until the time that they leave, you won’t be getting the innovative ideas from them that your IT department so desperately needs.

This is exactly the kind of issue that only a CIO can step in and solve. You are going to have to very clearly communicate just how important you view innovation as being. After you do that, you’re going to have to put your money where your mouth is.

As CIO you are going to have to carve out time during the work week that your IT department employees can use to work on creative ideas. Clearly not all of these ideas are going to result in something that will benefit the company. However, the bet is that enough of them will so that it will make it all worthwhile.

It’s All About Execution

As CIO you might think that the most difficult part of the innovation process is coming up with the new idea. You’d be wrong. It turns out that where we all seem to struggle the most is in executing the ideas. Once again, this is where the CIO can step in and make things happen.

As CIO you need to establish a clear process that the IT department can use in order to prioritize ideas that IT staff are creating, assign resources to the most promising new ideas, and then find ways to test the ideas.

Finding ways to do all of these steps quickly and cheaply means that your IT department will be able to run more experiments and that means that you’ll be able to reject the ideas that don’t pan out and keep the ones that provide the greatest benefits.

What All Of This Means For You

We all like to talk about the importance of information technology, but in reality, innovation is the thing that allows an IT department to continue to improve. A part of every CIOs job is to find ways that will allow his or her IT department to do a better job of innovating more.

It’s not easy to do all of the things that an IT department has to do and be innovative. This is where the CIO comes in. You are going to need to ask your staff for their inputs on how to do things better. Even more important, you are going to have to take action when they provide their inputs.

In order to allow innovation to occur, you need to allow workers to make time for it. This may take time from other IT projects, but it will be well worth it. Once they’ve shared their ideas with you, it becomes your job to the hard work: executing on their ideas.

CIOs who learn how to collect innovative ideas and then turn them into IT department improvements will have found the secret to running a successful IT department. Nobody ever said that this was going to be easy. However, learn to do it right and some of that Steve Jobs magic just might show up in your IT department.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How much time each week should you allow your staff to spend being innovative?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When I’m working with new CIOs I often run into the buddy / boss problem. It’s perfectly understandable that any person newly placed into a CIO position would like to establish a positive relationship with the people in the IT department that they are managing. This is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for a CIO to go too far – you can be a boss, but you can’t be a buddy.

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CIOs Need To Be Careful Who They Decide To Fight

Isn’t a global recession just great? For CIOs it has been: it pretty much got rid of one of their biggest headaches – having their star talent leave. Now that things are improving, a new challenge is starting to show up for CIOs: how to turn their Generation X workers into the IT leaders that the company is going to need for tomorrow…

Why Things Will Be Different When The X-Men Are In Charge

Tamara Erickson has been studying the differences between the Baby Boomer generation (those people who were born just after World War II ended) and the Generation X (born between 1961 – 1981). It turns out that there are a lot of differences here.

One of the key things that will separate today’s Boomer CIOs from the Gen-X CIOs are the conditions under which they grew up. Erickson points out that because there were so many Boomers moving through the system at the same time, they quickly learned that they needed to compete for everything. Limited openings and opportunities meant that Boomers had to always be striving to be seen as being the best so that they’d get picked for the next opportunity.

Gen-Xers had a different experience. As they were growing up, a great deal of corporate restructuring was occurring. Even if they weren’t working then, their parents and the parents of their friends were. This gave them a front row to watch the impacts that layoffs had on both individuals and their families. This has resulted in Gen-X managers not viewing their current employer as being their final destination. They realize that at any time the company could decide that they are expendable.

How X-Men View The World

In order to be able to grow and cultivate the next generation of CIOs from the ranks of Gen-X leaders, today’s CIOs are going to have to develop an understanding of how this generation sees the world. It is much different from the way that that the boomers see things.

The Generation X leaders are harboring a great deal of resentment towards their Baby Boomer colleagues. One of the main reasons for this hostility is simply because there are so many Baby Boomers – they seem to be occupying all of the good jobs. Couple this with the recent global recession that caused many Boomers to put off retiring and you have a powder keg situation on your hands.

In a somewhat amusing turn of events, the Generation X group of managers also resent the next generation of workers – the twenty-something’s that are entering the workplace now. However, the boomers don’t seem to have the same issues – the boomers and the new workers have an almost parent – child type of relationship that the Generation Xers don’t seem to be able to take advantage of.

This all leads to the current situation that CIOs now find themselves in. Generation X managers are feeling frustrated about where they stand in the organization and what their future prospects are. This frustration is leading them to think about the one thing that a CIO doesn’t want them to think about – leaving. Finding ways to retain the next generation of IT leaders needs to be a CIO’s top job in the upcoming years.

What All Of This Means For You

For the past twenty years, the Boomer generation has been running IT departments. As the global economy starts to pick up and the Boomers start to approach retirement age, we’re going to see a dramatic change occurring in the CIO ranks. The Generation X workers will be taking over.

The Generation X leaders grew up in a different world and experienced different things than the Boomers did. Their view of their relationship with the company is very different than that of the Boomers. They realize that they are viewed as being replaceable and so they always feel that they can leave this job and find another, better one. IT departments are going to have to adjust to having a new management style running the show.

The changes that are coming as Generation X managers take over IT departments are going to fundamentally reshape both what an IT department does and how it does it. CIOs need to see these changes coming and they need to be taking steps right now to prepare the IT department for them.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think any sort of special hand-off is going to be required between Boomer CIOs and Generation X CIOs?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If Steve Jobs was still with us, do you think that he might be willing to come and work in your IT department? He was supposed to be a jerk, but man can he bring some innovation to the table. CIOs who want to foster more innovation in their IT departments probably couldn’t get Steve to sign up with their IT team; however, I’ve got three suggestions that just might light the spark of innovation within your IT department.

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Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Cloud computing has almost become a part of the definition of information technology. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how a CIO can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

How Much Will This Save Me?

A lot of the excitement about cloud computing comes from the simple fact that most CIOs view the cloud as a way to reduce the cost of running an IT department. However, before visions of cash savings start dancing in your head, you need to answer some questions first.

Roger Cheng over at the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at where the expenses in running an IT department come from. What he’s discovered is that servers run about $2000 – $6,000. This capital expense can be avoided if instead of buying more servers a CIO simply subscribes to more cloud computing resources when it’s time to expand the company’s IT infrastructure.

In addition to saving on buying more servers, there are potentially other savings that a CIO can realize by moving to the cloud. Buying more servers would require more IT staff to act as systems administrators – no servers means no hiring of additional administrators.

Are Cloud Services Reliable Enough?

It seems as though every other month or so there is another story in the paper about some cloud provider having an outage. One time it’s Amazon, the next it’s Google. Given the importance of information technology, as a CIO you need to be asking yourself if this cloud computing stuff is really reliable enough for you to be trusting your company’s IT infrastructure to.

It turns out that the analysts have taken a look at the overall reliability of the clouds that are being provided and they are as, if not more, reliable than most company’s IT infrastructure. One reason for this is that providing a cloud is all that the providers do and so they hire and staff in order to ensure the reliability of their product.

What Don’t I Know About Clouds?

The wise CIO knows to ask “what don’t I know enough to ask about?” One key issue has to do with your company’s most precious asset – its corporate data. When you move this data to a cloud, you are asking another company to take care of it. Are you comfortable doing this?

Is your company really going to save money by moving to the cloud? Not every company will – it all depends on how your IT department is set up now and what it’s going to look like in the future. You have other options for saving money – virtualizing the servers that you have today is one way to accomplish this.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing is all the rage these days in the IT sector. CIOs are getting more and more pressure to introduce cloud computing into their IT departments. Before they take this step, they need to get some questions answered.

The promise of cloud computing is that it will save the IT department money. Do you know where these savings will come from? How does the reliability of the cloud compare to your IT department’s current level of reliability? Finally, what other options besides cloud computing do you have for boosting your IT department’s performance?

Cloud computing appears to be here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that every CIO should race out and jump into the cloud today. Take your time and get the answers to the important questions and your next step will become clear to you.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that the company’s finance department should be involved in determining if the savings of moving into the cloud would be worth the effort?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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When your IT employees aren’t complaining, that means that you’re doing a good job as CIO, right? Actually, it turns out that the answer is no.

Dr. Anderson identifies why having quiet employees may be a bad thing for CIOs. He identifies who in your IT department is going to speak up first and who isn’t . Finally, Dr. Anderson shares his tips for how a CIO can get his or her employees to start talking to you!

Get a free subscription to The Accidental Successful CIO newsletter by visiting the sign-up page at: http://goo.gl/NOfh2

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They start out fine, but the ending is never pretty…

It seems as though at least once a year CIOs get a bee in their bonnet and decide that the company’s IT department needs to knuckle down and improve its processes. This means that it’s time to implement one of those far-reaching process improvement programs. Oh, oh. No matter if it’s Six Sigma or some other flavor-of-the-week program, they all seem to end up the same way – having no lasting impact. Let’s take a look and see why this happens…

Process Improvement Programs Don’t Work

This type of discussion always seems to get off to a good start if I can share some interesting statistics with you. How about this one: 60% of all corporate Six Sigma programs fail to deliver the expected results. Ouch!

Clearly something has gone horribly wrong here. Those of us who work in IT know exactly what is going on. We’ve seen those big process improvement programs get announced with all sorts of excitement and then they always just seem to end up fading away.

When you’re CIO, this can’t happen. Your career is based on what kind of results you can deliver, and a successful process improvement program can be a big part of this. Let’s take a closer look and maybe we can find out where things are going off track.

Phase 1: The Good

Man, these big IT programs always seem to start on such a positive note. Everybody’s happy to be selected to be on the team and they are all committed to achieving the goal. Those teams are no small thing either – they can easily have 10-18 people on them because of course you want to have a representative from every possible impacted area.

Since the CIO has launched the program; the program has the attention and the support from the senior IT folks. This means that the low-level managers are clearly communicating to their folks who are involved in the project that working on the project is a top priority.

What’s even better than the launch, is what happens when the team reaches a goal – the CIO throws a party! Everyone celebrates the success and the people on the team get some sort of recognition and a reward. Everyone is happy.

Phase 2: The Bad

Time marches on. After the initial success, the process improvement program continues on. The problem is that it’s been going on for so long that now folks start to get distracted. Other tasks start to creep in around the edges and steal their time away.

The outside experts who were brought in to help the time implement the Six Sigma or whatever program now move on to other things. The team keeps moving on, but their way forward is no longer clear.

Managers are no longer so open to having their team members spend so much time on this other project. Instead, they start pushing to have their staff complete their “day job” before they spend time on the “special project”.

Phase 3: The Ugly

This is where it all falls apart. Basically what happens is that the folks who are working on the process improvement teams just stop doing the work. They no longer care about the program because it really has no bearing on their annual performance appraisal. Therefore they make the conscious decision to focus on what matters, their real job, and start to ignore the process improvement project.

What’s interesting is that this project failure is often hidden from the CIO. What happens is that the folks who are doing the reporting start to focus on the one or two teams who are actually able to keep moving forward, even if it’s just a bit, and they don’t report on the teams that aren’t making any progress.

Because they also start to report on what teams say that they are going to do in the future, this obscures what is really going on right now – nothing. This always eventually comes to the surface, but by then the damage is done and the CIO’s process improvement program has failed.

What All Of This Means For You

The very definition of information technology is that it’s a department built on processes. When CIOs decide that those processes need to be improved, they like to kick off a big process improvement program.

However, all too often in the IT sector these programs end up producing no long-term positive results. The reasons are many: over time there is less and less expert assistance, existing job responsibilities start to take over, and lack of senior IT management involvement all work to shift focus away from the project.

The importance of information technology means that IT processes really do need to be improved. CIOs can make sure that the time and effort that is poured into these process improvement programs yield results. Making expert resources available for longer times, making process improvement results a part of everyone’s performance appraisal, limiting team size, and ensuring IT executive involvement will all work to make your next IT process improvement program a success.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How long do you think an IT process improvement program should go on?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Cloud computing has almost become a part of the definition of information technology. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how a CIO can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

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CIOs need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

So there I was the other day talking with one of my CIO customers and I was going on and on about how they could introduce cloud computing into their IT department. I had been working with this client for several years and we know each other very well so he felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence.

He said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

Say Hello To Cloud Services

So why are CIOs (and everyone else) struggling to get their hands around just exactly what cloud computing is? I believe that the cause of the confusion is simply that there are a bunch of different things that have been lumped together and are now being called “cloud computing”.

Let’s start with the most basic form: subscription services. In the old days, when an IT department purchased some software disks would arrive in the mail, get installed on servers, and you’d be up and running. That’s not the way that it works when you are using the cloud.

When you are using cloud computing, instead of having to physically touch hardware and software in order use an application, now all you have to do is to subscribe to it and you can access it over the Internet. No disks, no servers. Great examples of these types of subscription services include Google’s Gmail email service and Salesforce.com’s CRM application.

This is where things can start to get confusing. There’s more to cloud computing than just subscribing to someone else’s application. The company applications that are currently running on servers located in your data center can be moved “into the cloud”. What this means is that you can use servers and storage systems that are remotely located in a cloud provider’s data center to run your company’s applications. You would access your applications and data via your Internet connection.

How Much Is All Of This Going To Cost Me?

The fact that cloud computing is even an option is pretty cool. However, just being a shiny new technology is not enough – there has to be a solid business reason for moving your IT operations into the cloud.

Let’s take a look at costs. First, if you choose to not take advantage of cloud computing then you are still going to have IT costs — these costs come along with the very definition of information technology. In order to stand up new IT applications (and expand what you already have in order to meet growing user demand) you are going to have to buy and install more servers. As long as you are getting more servers, you’ll also have to get more storage. All of these new boxes will need to be maintained and so you’ll need to hire more staff to administer them.

In order to avoid these upfront IT costs, CIOs can make use of the cloud. If you are going to make use of cloud computing’s application subscription services, you need to be ready to pay per user, per month. Salesforce.com charges between $5-$25 per user per month. Google’s office suite of applications costs $50/user per year.

If you choose to run your existing IT applications in the cloud, then you’ll end up paying for how much computing horsepower and storage you use. One cloud computing firm charges six cents per processor per hour of usage.

Oh, and one more item. The way that you’ll connect to your applications in the cloud will be via your Internet connection. Given the importance of information technology, this connection that used to be important will have just become vital. This means that you’ll need to get a larger bandwidth connection and you’ll probably need to invest in a redundant connection in case your primary connection goes down.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing seems to have shown up almost overnight. CIOs might have initially thought that it was another one of the seemingly countless IT fads that have come along in the past few years and shrugged it off. However, for some compelling financial reasons, it’s starting to look like it’s taken hold in the IT sector and is here to stay.

Some of the reasons that cloud computing has caused so much confusion among CIOs is because it is so many different things. In its simplest form, cloud computing is a subscription service where software is delivered over the web. One step beyond this is using remotely located computing power (servers and storage) to execute company IT applications which are then accessed via the web.

All of this functionality comes at a cost, of course. CIOs can avoid the upfront costs of having to purchase IT hardware in order to launch a new application by using the same resources located in a cloud. However, they need to do some investigations in order to make sure that they’ll be comfortable with having their data and applications being stored someplace else.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that CIOs should insist that their applications and data be stored in their own country?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It seems as though at least once a year CIOs get a bee in their bonnet and decide that the company’s IT department needs to knuckle down and improve its processes. This means that it’s time to implement one of those far-reaching process improvement programs. Oh, oh. No matter if it’s Six Sigma or some other flavor-of-the-week program, they all seem to end up the same way – having no lasting impact. Let’s take a look and see why this happens…

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2. Let’s Go Shopping: What A CIO Needs From Cloud Computing Ok, admit it – cloud computing is here to stay....
3. Video: CIO Cloud Computing 101: Problems With Clouds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3X7mmKfGQY   Dr. Jim Anderson explains the issues that CIOs...

Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas season week is a great week for you – I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume after the holidays…

Everyone seems to celebrate something different this week, but I’m hoping that no matter how you choose to spend your time, you will enjoy yourself. The world can wait, let’s spend time with friends and family and we’ll get back to the madness when the new year begins…

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk again next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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3. It’s Memorial Day – Take The Week Off! In the U.S. it’s the week of the Memorial Day...