Leadership/Management

In today's world of mobile technology, where you can do everything from unlock your car door to tracking the real-time location of your children from your mobile device, it's not unreasonable for consumers to expect their phones to help manage most aspects of their lives.  Managing their money is no exception. 

Today, everyone and everything exists in a complex global web of interconnected technologies that effortlessly span oceans and the highest mountains. This interconnection allows massive amounts of information of all sorts to flow from person to person, organization to organization, over vast distances in the blink of an eye, regardless of barriers whether natural, or mere lines drawn on a map. The sheer size of this web that includes every business, every service, every government - local or national and its military, every academic or financial institution, every family and citizen connected around the clock, for work, learning, and play, 24/7, boggles the imagination.

The end of the year is always a time for retrospection, introspection, and speculation. Retrospectively, back in 2009, CIO Talk Radio looked at: Priorities for a CIO's 2010 Agenda? At that time, the economy was supposed to be coming out of the "Great Recession" that had started in 2007. Today, a little over a year later and about to begin 2012, we find that businesses and IT organizations are still feeling the after effects of that downturn. Will that improve? Politicos in the US and Europe are continuing to squabble over government debt. And yet we know that Technology will continue to evolve, global competition will force change, and IT will pursue new ways to provide value to business and innovate.

I am an ardent believer that your user community should be self-sufficient with the task of training and supporting employees on business application software and related operational processes. While IT is typically responsible for providing training services on the initial rollout of enterprise systems, it is best to equip your end user community with eLearning and instructor-led learning aids to help them be self-sufficient. This practice allows you to keep your IT staffing and travel costs low while ensuring end users are educated on business software and processes. That being said, I am not suggesting that you don’t offer a Help Desk to support end users. Although, you should try and limit the reasons users contact the Help Desk to real technical issues and reduce the number of tickets relating to questions on system use and business processes.

Covering the length and breadth universe so to speak, we sought insights from 3 distinguished CIO’s, asking them to look at their agendas for the coming year. Each was from a different business vertical.  NASA, a government agency born out of the cold war competition with the old soviet Union, embodies our national aspirations. NASA has a thoughtful CIO in Linda Cureton, whose IT is charged with facilitating a grand mission. Ameristar Casinos has a strong CIO in Sheleen Quish, who heads both HR and IT, managing people, processes, and technology for an organization in the business of creating an experience for its guests. Guess? is a retail chain whose IT is headed by Mike Relich, a CIO on the cutting edge of an IT that embraces social media and mobility as communication and marketing tools.