Image Credit

CIO's Need To Learn How To Use Wikis

One of the biggest challenges that you are going to be facing when you become a CIO is managing an IT workforce that is made up of multiple generations. Each has its own set of views and skills, and yet you have to somehow come up with ways that they can work together. How hard could that be?

Can’t We All Just Work Together?

An IT department is made up a whole bunch of different types of workers. The reason that you’ll have such a challenge in getting them to work together is that they all see the world differently.

In order for your IT department to be successful, they are going to have to be able to successfully complete large IT projects. The secret to doing this type of work well is to engage in what the experts call “task sharing”. This is no more complicated than taking a single large task and breaking it up into a series of smaller tasks.

IT teams that can do this have the ability to solve very large problems by working together. The ones who can’t are the ones who exceed schedules and blow through budgets.

Welcome To The World Of Wikinomics

The term “wikinomics” was coined by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams in their book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”. They point out that for the first time ever, technology, demographics, and global economics have come together to make change and innovation easier than ever.

The use of Internet based tools like wikis finally has provided CIOs with the tools that they need in order to get their IT teams to do the one thing that will make them more successful: exchange information. No matter what generation a given worker is, the use of web-based communication tools is the common factor that will allow them to both send and receive the information that they will need to do better work

What All Of This Means For You

As CIO you will be faced with many challenges. Potentially the greatest of these will be finding a way to get your entire IT team to work together as a single smooth flowing unit.

The arrival of web based collaboration tools such as wikis may be the silver bullet that you need. All of  a sudden it has become very easy for everyone in an IT department to both send and receive knowledge.

Just having the tools to exchange information is not enough. As CIO you are going to have to find ways to motivate your teams to use  the tools that are available. That’s why being a CIO is such a tough job!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: If you provided your IT team with a Wiki, do you think that they would actually use it or would you end up having to bribe them to use it?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just imagine that amazing moment in the future when you finally become the CIO! Now imagine yourself all alone – none of the other “C” level executives want to play with you. What’s going on here?

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Anthony Williams, Don Tapscott, Internet based tools, multiple generations, task sharing, web-based communication tools, wiki, wikinomics

Image Credit

Twitter Seems To Be A Tool That Comes With No Instructions

When you become CIO you will have a number of tools available to you that CIOs never had in the past. #1 on this list is, of course, Twitter. However, wait a minute, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Sounds like you need to figure this out before you become CIO and make a mistake…

What Does Twitter Mean To A CIO?

Ultimately everything that a CIO does needs to be about finding ways to create more business for the company. That brings up the interesting question about Twitter: is this a good place for the company to be looking for customers?

While that question may currently have no clear answer, the one thing that nobody can argue with is the simple fact that Twitter is currently growing like a weed. Although different people come up with different numbers, everyone agrees that Twitter currently has between 18 – 23 million users. No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of your potential customers!

So why are people using this service that restricts you to sending short 140 character bursts of text messages? A recent survey of Twitter users revealed that 42% of Twitter users use it to communicate (“tweet”) in order to connect with friends. 14% do it in order to have more interaction and access to their favorite companies, and 13% are doing it in order to be able to connect with service providers.

While this all sounds wonderful, it turns out that most of the companies that are already using Twitter really have no idea how to make the most of this new resource. It’s almost like when the Internet first showed up – everyone is once again going through a learning process.

Ways That A CIO Can Use Twitter

As a CIO, just saying “we’re going to use Twitter” is not enough, you need to come up with a concrete plan for how your firm can use Twitter in order to have a direct impact on developing more sales leads or even generating revenue. The good news here is that as you develop a Twitter plan for your company, you can be using Twitter because as many companies have found out there is very little risk to using this tool.

The computer company Dell is a clear leader in the field of companies that have found a way to maximize the value of Twitter. They have generated $3M from their Twitter activities since 2007. What Dell has been doing is using Twitter to post coupons and spread the word about new Dell products.

Other firms that are using Twitter view it as being an amplifier for their other marketing activities. This allows them to extend their reach and get more bang for their marketing buck.

There appears to be two different paths for a company to follow when they are using Twitter. One is to use it as another way to communicate what the corporate voice is saying. The other is to use it as a means to create a personal bond with their potential customers. Both ways work, you just need to make up your mind, pick one, and stick with it.

What All This Means For You

CIOs will always be facing the challenge of evaluating and deciding if a new tool should be used by the company. The sudden arrival and the overnight popularity of Twitter is a clear example of such a CIO opportunity.

Twitter has been adopted by a huge number of users who probably include both your existing and potential customers. It’s clear that the real question isn’t IF you should use Twitter, but rather HOW you should use it going forward.

Coming up with a clear Twitter strategy should be your first step: are you simply going to amplify what you are already telling your customers or are you going to try to connect with them on a deeper level? Once you’ve made this decision, you’ll have to devote the IT resources to making it happen on a consistent basis. Nobody ever said that being CIO was going to be easy, but maybe this will give you something to tweet about…

Do you thing that CIOs should use Twitter as part of a company’s communication program or should they stay away from it?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO things are going to be different aren’t they? You’ll be one of those CIOs that has the respect of both their peers in the company and in their industry, right?

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: connect with friends, connect with service providers, Dell, direct impact on developing sales leads, first experience with the web, generating revenue, more access, tweet, tweeting, Twitter, very little downside

What Is The Web 3.0 And Are CIOs Going To Be Ready?

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. CIOs have been slow to take advantage of all that the Web 2.0 had to offer, will they lag behind again when the Web 3.0 shows up?

What Was Web 2.0?

Before we run off and start making predictions about the future of the Internet, maybe it would be a good idea to take just a moment and make sure that we are all on the same page as to just exactly what the Web 2.0 is /was.

When the web first showed up (Web 1.0), everyone rushed out and created static web pages. That was a great start, but it got a bit boring because nothing changed without a great deal of effort. Web 2.0 extended what we had by adding blogging, Wikipedia, social networking (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and even microblogging (Twitter). This changed everything because all of a sudden things could be easily changed – and they were!

What Is Web 3.0 Going To Be?

So what’s next I can hear CIOs and soon-to-be CIOs asking. Dr. Jim Hendler at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been spending some time thinking about this and he’s come up with some interesting ideas. Dr. Hendler points out that it appears to all be based on Tim Berners-Lee’s (you know, the guy who invented the Web) vision of a semantic web.

In this next iteration of the web, what we’re going to see is more and more complex mashups of data from different applications being used to deliver data in more useful ways. Dr. Hendler believes that the read-write abilities of Web 2.0 applications will be used to build Web 3.0 applications that operate at the data, not the application level.

What’s Going To Make The Web 3.0 Happen?

Before the Web 3.0 can show up, a few critical pieces need to drop into place. Ultimately, what needs to happen is that it has to become easier to integrate web data resources. Here are the emerging technologies that are going to allow this to happen:

• Resource Description Framework (RDF): provides a means to link data from multiple different websites or databases. Uses the SQL-like SPARQL query language.

• Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): We already have these – this is how you merge and map data that is found in different locations on the web.

• Web Ontology Language (OWL): allows relationships to be inferred between data that is stored in different parts of the same application.

Final Thoughts

Rare are the times that CIOs actually have a chance to get in front of a significant change before it happens. Right now they have such a chance – Web 3.0 is not here yet, but it’s getting ready to arrive.

Spending time now to understand what business problems could be solved or solved better if you had a better description of the data that is available on the web is a necessary first step. Assigning staff to learn and become experts on the new Web 3.0 technologies early on will allow CIOs to have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

What is the level of adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in  your department currently? Is anyone currently studying the new technologies that Web 3.0 will be built on? Have you created a planning committee to study how Web 3.0 abilities can be used to help your business? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Politics is a fascinating subject and I’m sure that we all have our own opinions about the events that are currently unfolding over in Iran regarding their recent elections. However, this posting isn’t about the elections or who won. Rather it’s about the amazing flow of information that happened even in a heavily restricted / controlled environment. We live in the 21st Century and this unfolding story holds many lessons for modern CIOs…

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business, CIO, Facebook, IT, Jim Hendler, LinkedIn, mashups, MySpace, OWL, RDF, Resource Description Framework, Tim Berners-Lee, Twitter, Uniform Resource Identifiers, URI, web, web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0, Web Ontology Language, Wikipedia

CIOs Need To Get To Know Complex-Event Processing

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 way BEFORE the company’s competitors can do the same, then the CIO will have done his/her job. Complex-Event Processing looks like it may be another one of those technologies.

What Is “Complex-Event Processing”?

In business, knowledge is power and power is profit. Every business has multiple streams of information flowing into it at all times. Information on sales, inventory, returns, web site clicks, weather conditions, bank balances, etc.

For years firms have been processing these information streams individually and in near-real-time. These are the core business applications that produce the reports that get sent to senior management each night for them to review the next day. This is better than nothing, but it’s not quite enough.

Neal Leavitt writing in the IEEE’s Computer magazine points out that today’s traditional databases are not up to the task of analyzing continuous streams of business data in real-time searching for complex events (events that require more than one data stream to detect).

What is now arriving on the IT scene are general-purpose platforms that provide an IT department with enough processing horsepower to analyze real-time business information simultaneously across multiple business applications.

What’s It Good For?

Complex-event processing gives a firm the ability to spot interconnected business trends and patterns in real-time and then combine this information into complex events that can trigger alerts that can be sent to people in the company.

Complex events can include such things as determining when to trade stocks, detecting fraud as it is happening, spotting inventory issues before they become a problem, network status monitoring, etc.

Are There Any Risks?

Of course – this is cutting edge technology, there are always risks with this stuff. The current limitations to this type of technology include:

• Lack Of Standards: specifically for the event-pattern detection and rule-based languages for different vendor’s products.
• Education: this is new technology and businesses don’t fully understand what the products can do nor all of the situations in which they can be applied.
• Missing Benchmarks: No standardized benchmarks currently exist so it’s difficult to compare products.

Final Thoughts

Every great business break-through starts with a dream. What could your firm do if you could analyze all of your business data streams in real-time? If the benefit is compelling enough, then perhaps it’s time to start looking into how you could apply complex-event processing to as a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Additional Resources

If you’re interested, here are links to several vendors who have products in the complex-event processing. I have no relationship with any of them so there is no order to the list:

• Truviso
• RTM Realtime Monitoring
• Agent Logic
• Aleri

Questions For You

Does your firm have multiple streams of real time data flowing into it? What do you do with these streams today?  What kind of delay is there from when the data arrives to when staff can take action on it? What could you do with the ability to analyze this data in real-time? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you could be running the IT department for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to IT staff problems…

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Agent Logic, Aleri, business, business information, business opportunity, business software, CIO, complex-event processing, information technology, IT, IT projects, knowledge, metrics, Neal Leavitt, Realtime Monitoring, report, reports, RTM, Truviso

Apple Is Starting To Play A Bigger Role In Every IT Department - Are You Ready?

In the world of IT we deal with lots of different questions: what project to take on, how best to align with the business, how to improve processes. One thing that we don’t really spend much time thinking about is if our applications should run on Microsoft or Apple platforms. Hmm, has Apple missed the boat here?

I bring this up as a discussion point because, let’s face it, Apple makes some fantastic products. Starting with the Mac, they went on to produce the PowerBook, the Newton (come on, you remember that one), the iPod, the iPhone, etc. However, they’ve never really been a platform company.

I’m playing games with words here and perhaps I should better explain myself. Michael Cusumano over at the Communications of the ACM gave this some thought awhile back and I think that he was on to something. He defined a platform as being something that had open interfaces and for which further development was encouraged and licensed. Apple doesn’t do this.

From an IT perspective, this causes a number of problems. There’s no question that Apple products are “sexy” and easy to use. However, since there is all too often only one source for features and applications, an ecosystem comparable to that which developed around Microsoft products never arose.

No big deal you say – Apple products are only found in graphic design shops and educational environments. Well, up until the iPhone came out I would have agreed with you. However, the runaway success of the iPhone and the demand for iPhone apps from the Apple store is starting to make it look like a dominate mobile computing platform.

As more and more of your staff start showing up sporting Apple iPhones, you are going to start to feel pressure to come up with ways to iPhone enable your IT department’s apps. This can be done, it’s just that you’ll find that it’s not as easy as connecting a Microsoft PC to your network.

Times are changing and Apple still makes great products. However, since they are not in the business of making platforms you’ve got your work cut out for you…

Do you already have Apple products that people are trying to hook into your network? Have you started to support these products? Does your staff have iPhones? Do they want to use these iPhones to access your network? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2009. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, business, business process, business software, information technology, iPhone, iPod, IT, Mac, Microsoft, Newton, platform, PowerBook, product

Q: What’s wrong with IT departments today?

A: They don’t look or act like any other department in the rest of the company.

One glaring example of this rears its ugly head when business users ask for company information and the IT team responds with a discussion about the technology that either interconnects it or simply collects it. It turns out that there is a big difference between information (a.k.a. knowledge) and data. IT departments do a great job of collecting a lot of data; however, that’s not what anyone wants. What everyone wants is information – what you get when you process data. Somehow we need to come up with a way to get IT departments to shift their focus from gathering more data to providing more information services that will help the business do better.

Three professors, Arik Ragowsky, Paul Licker, and David Gefen have spent some time studying this issue and asking question such as what is the real job of a CIO? It turns out that a CIO should be spending his/her time managing the information that the company depends on in order to be successful in its business. What this means is that CIOs have to find a way to change their thinking and move away from worrying about how to deliver more data and start to think about how to provide more information services.

How did IT end up being a plumber and not an architect? Back in the old days (1960′s), all computers were mainframes and business folks had no idea how they did what they did. However, they appreciated what the Information Systems (IS) department produced and were more than willing to pay for them to keep doing it. When PCs arrived in the early 80′s, suddenly everyone knew more about how computers worked. IS was renamed to Information Technology (IT) and the IT folks started to focus more on the technology and less on the information that the technology was delivering. Vendors helped things along by starting to sell directly to end users. This is when things got all messed up!

Who’s to blame for the current situation? Well, we IT departments have more than our fair share to bear. All too often we interact with business customers using technology terms. When we do this we are seen as the “geeks” that we really are instead of business partners. What we should be doing is talking business with the business folks and reserving our technology discussions for when we are back within the IT department and talking with our teammates.

Final thought: hide the technology and the data from the business customers. Instead, talk with them about information systems and the types of information that they need in order to help the company be successful.

Tags: data, information, technologies, CIO, business

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2008. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years:

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

What caught my attention were items 1-4. I think that Gartner got it right this time around. Muticore servers and virtualization will mean that firms will need fewer boxes and apps can be easily moved from box to box (and right out the door to an outsourced data center). Workplace social networks and cloud computing means that the need for a centralized IT department will go away. Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm’s apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes. Oh, oh — can you hear your job going away?

What does this all mean, and more importantly what should a successful IT staffer (or CIO) do today? The key to your future success is to understand how IT is going to change and what you need to do to change with it. IT is going to become much more about information and how it can be used to help the business grow and prosper. This IT function is going to leave the IT department as we know it today and will migrate into the business unit itself. What this means to you is that you need to know what your firm does, and even more importantly, how it does it. The next question will be what information is needed by the business units to improve how they do their work. This is what tomorrow’s IT staff will provide. Thanks Gartner for the peek into the future!

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Successful CIO, 2008. | Permalink | 25 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: