Dr. Jim Anderson tackles the question that all CIO’s are asking: just exactly what is “cloud computing”?
Dr. Anderson identifies the 4 different flavors of cloud computing that are available and points out how a CIO would go about using each one of them.
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Companies are all asking themselves one question: what’s it going to take to be successful? It turns out that a lot of the techniques that worked in the past won’t work anymore – lowering prices, etc. Going forward, the only thing that a modern company can complete on is their business processes. It turns out that the CIO plays a very big role in making a company’s processes the best that they can be…
Dr. Thomas Davenport has spent time studying how firms compete. What he has discovered is that the most successful companies have started to use analytics to move ahead of the pack.
Unlike in the past, these successful firms are using analytics across the entire firm – not just in one area. In order to do this, their IT departments are being asked to play a role that they’ve never had to do before. CIOs that are going to be successful in the future have got to understand what is going to be asked of them so that they can provide the company with the analytics support that it’s going to need.
The new use of analytics requires that the IT department be able to support the modeling and optimization that the firm will be doing. This requires building very large warehouses of data and then using it to dive deeper than just calculating average order size or average revenue per employee. Instead, now firms are going to want to know things like who their most profitable customer is, who has the most long-term profit potential, and who is most likely to cancel their account.
So what does a CIO need to do in order to create an IT department that will be able to support the company’s growing need for the answers that only analytics can produce? Simple, there are four steps that every CIO must take:
CIOs will play a significant role in their company’s success going forward. Optimizing business process through the use of analytics is going to be required by every company and the IT department is going to be responsible for supporting these analytics staff and tools.
The company is going to have to change the way that they do business in order to take advantage of the new analytics. These changes are going to impact the company’s focus, its culture, its staff, and its technology.
The CIO will be required to restructure the IT department. The new focus will be on processing the large quantities of information that have been collected and creating results. CIOs who are able to understand the changes that will be required and implement them will be the ones that will lead their companies to success.
- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that the analytics experts should be part of the IT department or should they be somewhere else?
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It turns out that there are 3 different reasons why a CIO can end up making a bad decision. We’re going to take a look at each of these hidden decision making traps and show you how to identify them and, even more importantly, how to avoid them…
When you become CIO, how are you going to get your seat at the company’s strategy planning table? All too often today’s CIOs are basically second class citizens in the company’s C-suites. Something’s gotta change…
Thomas Davenport is a really smart guy who has written a book called
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Sure we’ve all heard the term, but what does it really mean to use analytics? Davenport says that firms that do this are using numbers to both outthink and to outexecute their competition. Hmm, that sure sounds like something that a CIO would want to be a part of…
Successful?
The companies that are using analytics to become successful are the well-known names that we’re all familiar with: Amazon, FedEx, Capital One, and Hannah’s Casinos to name a few. Davenport has studied these firms and he says that they are all doing four things that are allowing them to dominate their markets:
Sure the use of analytics requires a CIO to set up the IT infrastructure that is needed to crunch the numbers that the company collects as a part of doing business. However, even more is going to be required in order to remain competitive tomorrow.
Forward looking firms realize that unstructured data such as blogs and wikis are where additional golden information now lies. The CIOs at those firms are busy creating the tools that will be needed to go out and mine the Internet in order to get the feedback that they’ll be needing in order to remain competitive.
When you become CIO, you’re going to have to find ways to make the company more competitive if you want to be part of the company’s strategy team. This means that you’re going to have to start using analytics.
Using the four techniques that we outlined will be a good place to start to use analytics. However, as time progresses you’re also going to have to develop new tools in order to get additional inputs for your analytical engines.
CIOs that can find ways to turn mountains of data into actionable intelligence are the ones that will be best positioned to become successful and to help their companies become market leaders.
- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills
Question For You: What kind of IT staff do you think a CIO will need to hire in order to be able to start to make the best use of analytics?
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!
If for some reason, a company’s critical applications stop running, run incorrectly, or divulge private data to bad guys, there’s a good chance that the company is going to quickly have a new CIO. If only there was some way to make software more reliable so that CIO’s could spend their time focusing on the things that really matter…
By Dr. Jim Anderson
CIOs Need To Make Sure That Cloud Computing Is Not Just A Fad
Does anyone besides me remember the big Furby craze that swept the U.S. in the early ’90′s? People went crazy for these little plush dolls and they started collecting them in hopes that they would one day be valuable. Well, that never happened and a lot of people got stuck with expensive toys that they couldn’t get rid of. Is is possible that the current cloud computing craze in IT could be another Furby fad that will fade away?
If a CIO can move beyond the hype, he/she needs to spend some time doing their homework in order to find out what kind of services a cloud could offer that their company could make use of. Neal Leavitt has spent some time studying cloud computing and has boiled cloud services down into four types of services:
The Forrester research company has done some investigating and they now claim that most company’s data centers are using less than 50% of their total capacity. Despite the hype that is currently surrounding cloud computing, Leavitt has uncovered three very good reasons for looking into having your firm start to use cloud computing:
It is all too easy for CIOs who are adverse to change to look at the current excitement over cloud computing and decide that it is yet another fad that will fade away in time. The reality is that cloud computing provides several different types of services that are useful to any IT department. This can’t be ignored.
Additionally, successfully adding cloud computing resources to the company’s existing IT infrastructure will mean that a CIOs will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.
How much of your existing IT infrastructure do you think that your firm is currently using – more or less than 50%? Which of the four types of cloud computing services would have the most immediate value to your company? Why? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
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Cloud computing is all the rage these days and everyone who is anyone is making plans to implement at least some flavor of it as soon as possible. It turns out that the decision to go with a cloud computing solution for your IT department might not be as simple as some would lead you to believe. There are challenges to successfully using a cloud and we need to talk about them…
CIOs Need To Understand Cloud Computing
One of the great things about working in the IT field is that whenever things start to get boring, we have the ability to create new buzzwords and make things interesting all over again. The arrival of “Cloud Computing” on the scene a couple of years ago showed that this cycle has not gone away. Maybe it would be worthwhile to take a step back and make sure that we’re all on the same page here – what is cloud computing and why should anyone care?
Neal Leavitt has spent some time studying cloud computing and has some thoughts for us. A quick definition of just what cloud computing is might be a good place for us to start. In olden days (3 years ago), if you wanted to run an application you pretty much had to go out, buy a server, plug it in, load up the software, connect it to a network and then you were in business. Cloud computing changes all of that.
Now all you have to do is set up an account with a company who has already done all of the above steps. You can then load your application onto their server(s) using the Internet to reach these servers and ta-da you are in business.
There are three main “flavors” of cloud computing that users are employing currently:
The list of cloud computing service providers is long and seems to be getting longer every day. Here’s a partial list with a number of names that you’ll probably recognize…
Ok, so clearly this is not the final thought on Cloud Computing. I’ve got a lot more to cover with you, but this is a good place to quit for now. Cloud Computing was treated as a bit of a novelty when it first showed up. I mean, who would trust unreliable links to remote computers to run critical corporate apps?
Times have changed and the economics of Cloud Computing have also changed to make this a more attractive option. Every CIO needs to be thinking about how his / her IT shop is using computing resources right now and what role Cloud Computing could play in the future. Addressing this issue this will mean that CIOs will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.
Have you spent any time thinking about using Cloud Computing yet? How long until you run out of room to add more servers to your company’s infrastructure? Have you calculated the total cost of ownership for the servers that you do have? Are your applications too critical to trust to a cloud? 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.
Does anyone besides me remember the big Furby craze that swept the U.S. in the early ’90′s? People went crazy for these little plush dolls and they started collecting them in hopes that they would one day be valuable. Well, that never happened and a lot of people got stuck with expensive toys that they couldn’t get rid of. Is is possible that the current cloud computing craze in IT could be another Furby fad that will fade away?
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