CIO Talk Radio Blog

Now that the post CES hype has dropped to normal levels, it’s time for a little reflection.  I used to love to go to COMDEX!  Does everyone remember COMDEX?  For those that might not remember it was a show just like CES, but was more dealer and corporate focused vs. being consumer focused.  It was held in Las Vegas each November from 1979 to 2003, and at the time one of the largest trade shows in the world. 

"The new normal has become the now normal." The historical review of yearlong metrics and benchmarks is dying. The new metrics are about "What do we need to do about that ...blinking red light right now." (Michel Janssen, CRO, the Hackett Group) "The idea of the new is really important. Things are happening so fast that relying on year old numbers is not doing it. The more you can get ... these things in real time, even if not a perfect real time, the better you are, and "whether or not you have the perfect bench mark if you have a metric that works, you can trend that over time and looking at the trends can be very valuable. ...If it is a metric that works for you and you are measuring yourself against yourself that is a believable trend."  (George Westerman, Research Scientist at the CISR, MIT, SLOAN School)

Change is a given. Change brings uncertainty and opportunity. ...And, change is coming to the C-suite world of IT leadership. According to Thornton May, Traditional measures of IT are "broken." IT is more and more, becoming a team sport. There is a "trifecta" of CFO's, CMO's, and CIO.s coming together to make IT happen, almost in spite of the fact that companies have generally invested almost nothing in developing the executive potential of their IT leadership... the onus of learning the necessary leadership skills having been left on the individual who was expected to self-educate.... So great IT leaders, "Value Artists," have had to evolve through experience... the IT leader of the future will, for one thing at least, be defined by narrative (noted futurist, Thornton May).

What ever happened to the Ayn Randian idea that individualism was the basis of everything productive as opposed to the mediocrity of the collective? Well, after the dot-com bust, everyone and their business executives and product marketers discovered the benefits and advantages of getting everyone involved and connected as a community of participants, whether it's business partners and stakeholders sharing BI and making collaborative decisions, or fans and end users tweeting cheers and jeers and pressing "LIKE" on FaceBook. Today, the collaborative tools and benefits of Web 2.0 are changing how the world does business and uses technology, mostly for the better.

Which mobile gadgets are the favorite productivity tools of your enterprise's employees?  How many different platforms and different wireless networks are involved?  The widespread work use of smartphones, tablets, or other unified communications-enabled devices has essentially eliminated any barriers to 24/7 connectivity. Workers can video chat, IM and make VoIP calls from anywhere in the world. But the security challenges are enormous. These devices and the enterprise mobility software that they use, present unique security challenges as compared to traditional data security. Cloud computing offers flexible ways to deal with wireless LAN technologies across many sites, but comes with a host of security concerns of its own. The explosive growth of various devices is also a problem.