All Talk And No Action Does A CIO No Good

The IT department over at the Nasdaq stock exchange had a rough year in 2013. Their exchange, which is used by thousands of traders every day, suffered two debilitating outages. I can understand one outage, things happen. But two? Where was the CIO? Two Outages Too Many The Nasdaq is a stock market where traders … Read more

Questions About The Cloud That Every CIO Should Be Asking

I like clouds, you like clouds, everyone likes clouds. CIOs everywhere are getting inundated with cloud requests, cloud proposals, and cloud projects. However, committing your company’s IT assets to the cloud is a big deal considering the importance of information technology to the company. This sure seems like the kind of thing that you don’t … Read more

The Nasdaq Outage: Was It The CIO’s Fault?

Not sure if you’ve heard about this one, but on Thursday, August 22, 2013, the American Nasdaq stock exchange was shut down for three hours because of a communication problem. Investigators are still trying to understand exactly what happened; however, we should probably asking ourselves if this problem was caused by the Nasdaq’s CIO? The … Read more

HP Can’t Pay Its Salespeople – Another CIO Failure?

Being a salesperson is a hard job. More often than not they live from quarter to quarter and if you don’t make your numbers, then you end up getting shown to the door. Hewlett-Packard is a huge IT products and services company that lives and dies by the actions of its sales teams. Making sure … Read more

PayPal Outage Points To CIO Failure

The basic job of a CIO is to ensure that a company’s IT infrastructure operates smoothly and allows the company to conduct business. On Monday, August 3, 2009, PayPal’s CIO failed at this most basic of jobs. A quick check of PayPal’s senior management structure reveals that they don’t have a CIO position (which in … Read more

London Stock Exchange Glitch – Could Cloud Computing Have Saved The Day?

Just when you think that you have the worst job in IT, a story like this comes along! Last Monday the London Stock Exchange (LSE) experienced a full day outage. Traders who were ready to trade were unable to connect to one of the LSE’s main trading applications. No connect, no trading. If you’ll think … Read more

Netflix Shipping Problems: The IT Horror Story!

Just in case you haven’t heard the news, Netflix has basically shut down due to some mysterious internal problem that has halted their ability to ship DVDs. This is fascinating news – it’s similar to having FedEx announce that they had halted delivery of packages because they couldn’t figure out where they were supposed to … Read more