CIO Talk Network Podcast

Middle management plays an important part in the way IT is delivered. They are the lieutenants who help realize the strategies created by the IT leaders while dealing with demanding technology workers. They also have an invaluable knowledge of business as well as how things get done. What are organizations doing to get the most out of the IT middle management? Guest 1: Dawn C. Meyerriecks, SVP, St...

We always advocate employee retention and attempt to reduce employee turnover since there are significant costs attached to it. However, employee turnover may not be all that bad. Continuous infusion of fresh blood, great talent, and employees who hit the ground running may be a better idea vs. continuous training of your "loyal" employees. What can IT leadership do to foster an environment that a...

IT chargebacks promise better control of IT spending by making users more conscious about their IT resource requests since it means they will end up paying for those resources. But what works, in theory, has turned out to be a nightmare in practice. Given that the idea has real merit, how can chargebacks be best implemented to get a real handle on IT costs? Guest 1: B. Lee Jones, Chief Information...

IT can be used to make an organization more competitive which requires redesign of existing business processes as well as design new processes. However, we need people to buy into these ideas. Thus, as IT leaders, we need to be change agents. Guest 1: John F. Schindler Title: Chief Information Officer, L.D. Kichler Co. Guest 2: Dave Kamath Title: Chief Information Officer, IDEX Corporation For mor...

Delivering IT faster, cheaper, and better may have become the mantra for most organizations. However, this may not be the best choice in all cases. What if the executive management gives you a free hand to spend the required amount of money and take the necessary amount of time to deliver the right solution? Guest: Andres Carvallo, Chief Information Officer, Austin Energy Guest Bio: https://www.ci...

Sizing an IT Project in terms scope, effort, and cost is usually done using templates following a few ground rules. Do we factor in complexity? Is it the same for every project or for that matter every organization? Can we attribute the high failure rate of IT projects to this oversight? Guest 1: Paul C. Tinnirello, Executive Vice President and CIO, Information Services Division, A.M. Best Company...

IT Leaders today are inundated with research data promising an unprecedented insight into trends and issues and help them manage their goals better. How much of this data is actually useful? How do research firms decide on the research initiatives? How well are IT leaders able to leverage the available date to formulate effective strategies? Guest 1: Alex Adamopoulos, Senior Analyst, Data Manageme...

Project success requires a combination of product success and project management success. We usually ask "was your project a success?" Instead we should be asking "how successful was your project?". With different stakeholders using different measures, achieving complete satisfaction becomes a nearly impossible task. While we put a lot of effort in ensuring successful delivery of end product, what...

Software companies now release thousands of patches every year. To make the process efficient, organizations using the software are deploying patch management software as an efficient and automated way to manage and deploy these patches. However, this alone won't provide a complete solution. Organizations need to combine automation with an effort to get a better handle on their rather chaotic comp...

Enterprise portals are rapidly being adopted to address the information and application access requirements of an organization. A large percentage of such deployments are not delivering results or are facing adoption issues. What is going wrong here? Guest 1: Lac Tran Title: Chief Information Officer, Rush University Medical Center Guest 2: Mike Gotta Title: Principal Analyst, Burton Group For mor...

Having been burnt by high failure rates using outsourcing, IT leaders are looking for options. Root cause analysis has determined that beyond money there needs to be a little more skin in the game, for an alliance to be successful. Is this highly collaborative, risk-sharing approach, also known as IT Co-sourcing, going to help increase the success rate? Guest 1: Mark Griesbaum, EVP, Chief Informat...

President Bush recently announced The American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) to encourage American innovation and strengthen this nation's ability To compete In the global economy. This is an ambitious and multifaceted initiative. How is it going to impact the business and community in United States and other parts of the world? Guest 1: Ed Lazowska, Bill and Melinda Gates Chair, Computer Scien...

What if we had a complete visibility to customer's values, their key issues, their thought process, their decision making approach, and their overall buying behaviors? Can we safely say "deploy Business Intelligence and CRM systems" is the answer? What if we had a complete visibility to customer's values, their key issues, their thought process, their decision making approach, and their overall bu...

A well defined IT delivery process minimizes risk and increases rate of success and requires appropriate time and effort for checks and balances. Meanwhile, IT is also supposed to facilitate quick business change thus help develop an "agile" enterprise. How do we eat the cake and have it too? Guest: Mike Kistner, CIO, Pegasus Solutions (Ex-CIO, Best Western) Guest Bio: https://www.ciotalknetwork.c...

Today's CIO needs to deal with more than just IT. Ideal CIO is one who leverages his/her resources and skills to get the job done while dealing with ever-increasing pressure of delivering more with less. Are resourceful CIOs born with the talent or is it an acquired skill? Guest 1: Kevin Molloy, CIO, Vancouver Airport Guest Bio: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/contributor/kevin-molloy/ Guest 2: Bru...

Whether it is related to reporting regulatory compliance, agreeing to hide or delete digital information that may divulge a mis-conduct, blowing whistle against an IT system that may be causing damage to your organization or its customers; it is the duty of IT leadership and the team to maintain and demonstrate a high level of ethics. Is that truly happening? Guest 1: Peter Madsen, Executive Direc...

How well can you prepare for the worst and deal with the aftermath? From normalcy, to chaos, to revival; the unfortunate event in New Orleans will have lessons to teach to the IT leaders of the world. Guest 1: Ray Johnson, Vice President and CIO, Entergy Guest Bio: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/contributor/ray-johnson/ Guest 2: Richard Morrey, Chief Technology Officer, ACCELA Guest Bio: https://w...

Legacy systems play such a critical role in IT infrastructure; yet seem to drain precious resources. Today's CIO is challenged with achieving a balance between managing short-term issues of cost and complexity, while at the same time investing in the future. Whether legacy systems should be replaced or should have their life extended? Guest 1: Will Weider, CIO, Affinity Health System Guest Bio: ht...

Today's IT environment is a mixed bag of legacy systems, hosted applications, and enterprise software with their own authentication and authorization mechanisms. What if there was one logon id and password per user for all applications. Even better, what if the management of user privileges are centralized and automated. It sure is possible but comes with a hefty price tag and inherent complexity....

The world today is experiencing an unprecedented growth in data and information generated by multiple disparate sources. Linking to this data is also being made easy by leveraging SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). Access to the data anytime and anywhere is also possible through wireless technology. Are we making the best use of this opportunity? What impact does this data/information deluge hav...

In today's world, most organizations have some sort of contingency plan in order to deal with business disruptions. Beyond just maintaining a warm or hot site, there are other IT management challenges that need to be thought through in the event of a natural disaster. How many organizations actually prepare for complete destruction of facilities, equipment, and inability to work in the same geogra...

Getting on board Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) bandwagon may seem as simple as creating a few web services. But, there is more involved. Are all components of your IT organization ready for it? Guest 1: Dave Hollander, CTO, Contivo, Inc. Guest Bio: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/contributor/dave-hollander/ Guest 2: Ronald Schmelzer, Senior Analyst and founder, ZapThink Guest Bio: https://www...

ITIL is a set of best practices for IT governance first developed by British Government 20 years ago. With CMM and CoBIT already in place, what incremental benefits does ITIL provide? Guest: Malcolm Fry Title: Member, ITIL Advisory Group and Independent Executive Advisor, BMC Software For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/it-infrastructure-library-itil-is-it-a-silver...

Supply Chain management (SCM) has significantly benefited from IT. Once the required level of optimization is achieved, does it make sense to keep investing where the incremental benefits are minimal? Is there an out of the box thinking required to take SCM to the next level? Guest: Mike Hugos, CIO, Large, Center for Systems Innovation Guest Bio: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/contributor/mike-hug...

The VoIP wave promises great features along with significant savings. Once the adoption reaches critical mass, will it offer the same advantages over Baby Bells? What are the implementation and maintenance challenges? Guest 1: Michael Palmer, EVP Supply Chain Management and CIO, Allied Office Products Guest Bio: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/contributor/michael-palmer/ Guest 2: Brian Barker, VP o...