Lessons That CIOs Can Learn From The Energy Business

As a CIO you are going to want to learn from what other CIOs are doing. What this means is that you are going to have to keep your eyes open and look around at different industries to find CIOs who are both facing and solving challenges that you may one day have to face … Read more

4 Ways That CIOs Can Start To Make Better Decisions

An important part of the job of being a CIO is the ability to make good decisions. Lots of good decisions. In fact, the ability to make more good decisions than bad decisions is arguably what allows a CIO to keep his / her job. Now the only problem is that it’s really, really hard … Read more

Faux Market Secrets: How CIOs Capture Innovation

So picture this: you’re a CIO and you desperately want to be seen by the rest of the C-level executives as something more than a simple cost center. What to do? If only there was some way that you could tap into all of that incredible creative energy that we all know lives in the … Read more

First-Mover Advantage: Complex-Event Processing Is What CIOs Need

The job of  a CIO and the IT department is to equip the rest of the company to move faster and do more. One of the ways that a CIO can do this is by staying on top of new and emerging technologies (ex. unified communications). If such technologies can be implemented in a useful … Read more

Why Don’t IT Alliances Work Out?

You would think that the more alliances that your company / IT department makes with other firms, then the better that they would become at making them. After all, practice makes perfect – doesn’t it? It turns out that this is not always the case. Koen Heimeriks has spent time studying 200 firms that had … Read more

Alignment 101: How To Do It

Achieving alignment between the business side of the house and IT is one of those things that everyone likes to talk about when they are putting together the goals for the upcoming year, and then nothing ever seems to get done about it. A survey that was done by the consulting firm Bain & Co. … Read more

Just What Is This “Alignment” Thing?

Once upon a time the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said that pornography is hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.” In the world of IT it would appear as though alignment with the business side of the house is a lot like pornography in this sense – it’s hard to … Read more

Is IT Alignment Sooo 2008?

Is it possible that the holy grail of IT, getting our act together with the rest of the business, is no longer what we should be working on? A survey that was done by the consulting firm Bain & Co. sure seems to be saying this. Before anyone goes crazy on me, let’s first make … Read more

Secrets Revealed: How To Get The Most From Your IT $$$

Every firm spends loads of money on IT, why do only some (Walmart, FedEx) get a clear advantage from the money that they spend? A team of researchers lead by Dr. Gautam Ray talked with 104 insurance firms in order to get to the bottom of this question. Here’s what they found: the key to … Read more