Business models, computing paradigms, delivery expectations, customer satisfaction, and profitability are all in flux. The ability of IT talent at all organizational levels to understand business as it stands and how it will morph in the future while maintaining and improving service delivery is no small feat. Can we prepare our IT people proactively or is it going to be a catchup game? Will our efforts to manage the skills gap even be adequate? What are organizations doing or should be doing to manage the IT skills gap and sustain delivery for now and in the future?

Enterprises are expecting big results from Big Data. Mining Big Data sets (like web searches or twitter postings) is expected to help business managers leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and enhance productivity. Beyond the hassle of storage, how prepared are IT leaders, to fully exploit the potential of Big Data.

With the increasing strategic importance of IT, it would seem logical for IT leaders to focus attention on top line growth related initiatives. Meanwhile, workplace IT is a good candidate for outsourcing since doing so would free IT from the need to deal with provisioning, support calls, updates, and hardware refreshes. Certainly companies are ready to make this move. However, unaddressed questions such as “How much?”, “By whom?”, and “When?” may prevent companies from realizing the benefits. What can we learn from others who have done this successfully? With the advancement of technology, how far is this decision from becoming a no-brainer?

Often there is an implicit disconnect between the expectations and incentives set for business lines and those set for their IT counterparts. For example, business Line managers are expected to quickly spot new customer needs and adapt the processes needed to meet those needs. Meanwhile, the IT organization (and its CIO) is often assessed on efficiency metrics that may be internal to IT, including infrastructure spending and portfolio consolidation. As a result, Business Line managers may question the reasons behind any IT investments that don’t help them.

Would it be a good idea to let Business managers collaborate and drive IT investments and budgets? Wouldn’t this result in better alignment and fewer headaches for both business and IT?

In our mobile and interconnected world, we're constantly playing catch up with "what", "how much", and "where" as we try to meet the expectations of our customers who want it all yesterday. We may feel we're not "in control," but could IT change that? If so, how? For example, what if we were to create a dynamically scalable and extensible IT application and infrastructure portfolio where all costs are variable and all IT is provisioned "on demand" to meet this end? Would this be a good idea? Would it solve our problems?

Disruptive innovation is new tech that burns through the market place, displacing traditional technologies. It can be hard to recognize at first. Planned innovations are market oriented and entrepreneurial.  They require vision, discipline, and team building. Sustained innovation relies on the day-by-day, incremental innovations by employees in a system that tolerates risks, rewards creativity, and encourages open communication. Each of these ways of innovating has its own requirements as to leadership style, etc.

If IT is the common backbone across business units, how can a CIO help facilitate a framework to foster one or more of these types of innovation styles within one organization?  Can all 3 co-exist within ONE organization?

Organizations are under unrelenting pressure to grow, drive efficiency, and mitigate risks. Worsening the situation, the continual onslaught of changes in workplace trends and technologies has resulted in a complex and costly, high maintenance workplace.

As an answer, "Desktop as a Service" has emerged as part of an overall IT industrialization trend. DaaS promises cost savings, enables a high degree of consumerization/personalization, and transfers costs from CapEx to OpEx, while reducing or even eliminating the need for Workplace IT asset management. Can DaaS solve the challenges of an expensive, constantly changing, overly complex workplace as promised, or is this just hype? Is DaaS the Panacea we’ve all been waiting for?

We expect any career path to show increasing responsibility and acknowledgement by peers, but in a chaotic and uncertain business environment, careers can go wrong for any number of reasons. If adversity is a test of character, what about the trauma of losing one's title as CIO? When an IT leader falls from grace, how does he or she re-establish a career and regain lost ground?

We justify positive Return on Investment (ROI) for new IT initiatives to make a business case, but what are we doing about discovering and measuring negative Return on Unawareness (ROU) and Return on Negligence (RON)? After all, isn’t the net value IT brings based on the ROI - (ROU + RON) formula?