April 20, 2008 | TrackBacks: (0)

The Purpose of IT

This past week, my wife was working on communicating with staff at a service organization by e-mail. Unfortunately for her and them, their IT is managed by draconian control freak IT people. This is evident in a number of aspects of their environment, not the least of which being that more than 50% of the organization's staff doesn't even use their e-mail system, instead, they use their own accounts on Gmail and Yahoo! and so on. By any measure, this is utter failure. We must ask the question, "Why?" You got a foreshadow of the reason in the first paragraph:... more

TAGS: None

April 17, 2008

Salesforce + Google > Microsoft?

This week's announcement that Salesforce and Google were joining forces had the webscape all atwitter. Seems that everyone wanted to talk about how they were going after Microsoft's desktop market share. When will these folks realize that they are missing the point? The various media wonks always like to proclaim the death of this or the triumph of that, but they are always wrong. People forget that in the hype of the moment -- to the detriment of the truth and business success. Remember when mainframes were going to die? Last time I checked, IBM was doing quite well in... more

TAGS: Emerging tech

April 02, 2008

MacBook Air is insecure

Late last week, a MacBook Air was cracked at the CanSecWest security conference as reported by Robert McMillen here in InfoWorld. The Web discussions about it show just how silly this whole security discussion has become. Some pundits delighted in the fact that Apple's premier laptop was the "first to fall" again this year. Others noted that many of those attacking the systems were using Macs to do so. Others notes that Vista fell second and Ubuntu Linux was not cracked during the event. From the perspective of a CIO who does the necessary analysis, none of these actually matter.... more

TAGS: Tech management

April 01, 2008

IT control freaks

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Ben Worthen writes, "Many IT groups have banned the iPhone from their workplaces, complaining that there is no way to force employees to protect their iPhones with passwords and that they can't erase sensitive corporate data from remote locations if the device is stolen or lost. Additionally, they say the iPhone doesn't support the software many businesses use and that it only works on one cellular carrier's network. "But keeping the iPhone out of the office may be a losing battle. As a result, some technology experts say the iPhone could... more

TAGS: Tech management

March 28, 2008

The life of a CIO

Since my last blog post here, I have been actively working through the daily life of a CIO for a couple of my clients. As I provide them the executive management and strategic technology guidance that they require of a CIO, I also live the challenges of that position. It's time, then, to give this blog a rebirth with an expansion of the original concept. Think of that expansion as, "What is the life of a CIO and how do you relate to it?" Ultimately, this blog is an opportunity to develop a comprehensive perspective on the business application of... more

TAGS: Tech management