Indulge me for a moment. I want to talk about something that we all recoil from, something we think has been done to death. I want to talk about the future of the CIO. I'm sorry but there are things going on that really open up a need to consider this question again. I was with a group of senior [
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As Gavin left our meeting last night he said, with enthusiasm, ‘I didn’t know that BI could be so exciting’. He had attended a lively discussion about Business Intelligence in Utilities Companies led by Alexandra Gillies of Bord Gáis Energy based in Dublin. We had people who had gone partly down the road of BI and others who were just [
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I’m sitting here in sunny London (yes it really does shine here!) looking at the CIO Action Plan for 2011 that we produced as a result of last year’s Annual conference. The topic was Business as Unusual and we collated all of the great ideas from the conference into a series of questions that CIOs should ask themselves as they [
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In many ways, talent has always been – and will always be – a critical area. Take McKinsey’s seminal ‘War for Talent’ article, which 10 years ago was one of the first calls to arms for leaders in the talent area. But now, more than ever, it is important to take an all-encompassing approach to talent. And that approach needs [
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I am always taken with counter-trend ideas and wanted to share some thinking I have been developing during the past few months. We have matured beyond seeing outsourcing as the “silver bullet” that we – or at least our CEO and CFO colleagues – believe it to be. In my work with colleagues on our forthcoming outsourcing report, it is [
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Now here’s a thing I asked myself recently – what is a mainstream organisational and leadership development consultant doing working in a business with a heritage in networking?
At last Thursday night’s CIOnet event, we were joined by two guest speakers: Rob Gray, regional marketing manager at Google Enterprise; and Andrew Abboud, CIO at City University London. Over 40 CIO and IT leaders shared their experiences and had their questions answered on how to position themselves, and their organisations, to take advantage of social media. Andrew kicked off [
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Will Barnet and myself went to Dublin last Thursday…an interesting day to be in Dublin, but another subject, another blog. We hosted lunch for the members of CIO Connect and the subject was Enterprise Architecture but with a recognition of the current state of the economy. The role has really changed since the economic downturn. The EA role was an [
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One of the most important things we all need to do as CIOs is to increase significantly our focus on managing the show. By managing the show, I mean paying attention to the impression that you, and your teams, create for IT and for your organisation as a whole.
There was a time, in the good old days, when a CIO didn’t have to worry about contracts – boring things that the lawyers or the purchasing person takes care of. Not anymore. The implication of a failed contract can be a loss of reputation of all parties and perhaps an expensive, long winded and debilitating legal case, where all [
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Many of our organisations are going to scramble to get the best second half they can, in what might be difficult or at least uncertain circumstances. How are we going to help them to achieve the best that they can?
One of the talents that doesn’t fall naturally to IT people, that of ‘selling a solution’ to the business. Like a great meat pie, it contains lots of good and worthy content. The issues are understood, the solutions are solid and they are immensely ‘doable’. But…and there is a but, depending on the audience, this great strategy may not have the impact that the CIO wants it to have.
