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Driving Innovation

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Cloud-based services create new opportunities for CIOs. But to benefit, IT leaders will need to play new roles in their organizations.

 

For CIOs, the availability of just about everything in IT as a service is a great opportunity. By leveraging shared, specialized and commodity services, CIOs can reduce costs and make IT more effective at its everyday tasks. Perhaps more important, the cloud-based service model enables CIOs to become more influential in driving business innovation. That’s due to the speed and efficiency with which the new services can be modeled, assembled, automated, assured and secured.

 

Everything as a Service is no panacea, however. We expect the typical enterprise to adopt a hybrid model for the next five years, where services will be delivered through a mix of on-premises IT and the cloud. But when the business requires a new application or capability, forward-thinking CIOs will increasingly favor the “as a service” model.

 

To succeed with cloud-based services, CIOs must become business managers, brokers of a supply chain of business-supporting services. While many IT departments aspire to this new role, few have reached it. Managing business services as a supply chain requires CIOs to pragmatically match service investments to business demand. The key is understanding how complementary subservices work in the aggregate, so they can be quickly and cost-effectively combined in a supply chain to solve business problems. Enterprises that consistently innovate through the application of IT are also good at the IT supply-chain work of evaluating, assembling, integrating and virtualizing cloud-based services within a secure, managed framework.

 

For example, consider the task of meeting a business need for a new e-commerce service. Rather than build a commerce system in-house, a CIO could link to an existing service and a payment system, and perhaps orchestrate between the two.

 

Also, as developers work to test the IT infrastructure and continually improve the e-commerce service, they may not always want to test using the live subservices. So CIOs will increasingly look to simulate parts of the service through virtualization in a cloud-based test environment prior to moving improvements to the production service.

 

Keep It Safe

Security also takes on new dimensions in such systems. In the past, CIOs emphasized securing the perimeter. While that is still important for both the enterprise and cloud providers, security of cloud-based services focuses more on data location and identity management. That is, you need to know where your data is, and how to control who can — and can’t — access it. Then, you need to enable authorized users to seamlessly traverse multiple services. Just because services reside outside the enterprise, users should not have to log on repeatedly.

 

The same logic applies to Service Level Management. The CIO is accountable for the performance and service-level characteristics of any service provided to the business. That’s true whether the service is delivered on-premises, from the cloud, or in some combination of the two. To hold cloud providers accountable for agreed-upon service and performance levels, management solutions are fundamental. Typically, such solutions start with the user. Namely, how does the user experience the service, which might be an aggregate of services contracted across the supply chain? From there, the CIO needs visibility down through the application, server and infrastructure to understand the factors that affect the user experience.

 

CIOs who adapt quickly to such changes, and who plan for and drive a cloud-based service model, will enjoy a competitive advantage. These CIOs will need to gain competencies in service sourcing, assembly, integration, virtualization, security, and vendor and Service Level Management. All these disciplines are essential to managing services as a supply chain and, ultimately, driving business innovation.

 

Peter Griffiths is EVP and Group Executive at CA Technologies.

 

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Off the Beaten Path — But Still on the Grid

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Want to vacation in the world’s most exotic locations, yet stay connected? Here’s how.

 

Thanks to today’s communications technology, you can now vacation almost anywhere on Earth while still remaining in touch with the office.

 

My job as a travel writer has taken me to 60 countries on seven continents, and I need to stay connected. So I’ve emailed from an Antarctic cruise ship via satellite uplink ... cadged Wi-Fi from a cybercafé on Easter Island ... sought a better signal atop Etruscan tombs in Italy ... Skyped from a hotel computer in the Panamanian jungle.

 

smarttravel_globe.jpgHow about you? Do the rain forests of Borneo beckon? At 130 million years old, they’re home to some 15,000 species of flowering plants and more than 600 different animals. Travel writer and ecologist Loren Bell visited recently. Though located eight hours by boat from the nearest Indonesian village, he emailed me while sitting beneath a tarp. “All you need is a semi-intelligent phone, a Bluetooth connection and a data plan,” he writes. “I haven’t hunted for Wi-Fi in years.”

 

Or how about Bhutan? This mountainous and mysterious Buddhist kingdom was closed off to outsiders until the 1970s, got its first TV set only in 1999, and is still famous for emphasizing Gross National Happiness over GNP. Yet an estimated 40 percent of the country now has Internet access.

 

Travel writer Lee Abbamonte recently fired up his laptop in the Paro, Bhutan, airport. Though he wanted only to type some notes for his blog, Abbamonte was surprised when a hotspot popped up. “I was shocked that they had Wi-Fi in the Himalayan Kingdom at all,” he says, “and especially that it was free and fast.”

 

How about vacationing in a cave? For thousands of years, people have gouged living spaces out of the volcanic rock of Cappadocia in central Turkey. Tom Brosnahan, a guidebook author, recently visited, staying at the Esbelli Evi House, a cave dwelling that has been turned into a boutique hotel. “It provides DSL-speed Wi-Fi, not to mention 500 channels of stereo music and satellite TV, in every cave room,” he reports.

 

Or consider Yap in Micronesia, where the residents, immune to many modern ways, still use currency made of stone (but substitute U.S. dollars for everyday transactions). Yet despite lying hundreds of miles from its nearest South Pacific neighbors, Yap is surprisingly well connected. Travel writer Edward Readicker-Henderson recently visited Yap, and he had no trouble getting online, thanks to Wi-Fi service in the Manta Ray Bay Resort. “I used Skype to call the States while looking out over the reef as a storm came in,” he says. “Women use their mobile phones in the grocery store — which wouldn’t be unusual, except that they’re wearing grass skirts.”

 

GET ONLINE ANYWHERE

Expensive: If cost is no object, rent a satellite phone. Suppliers include Telestial, Cellular Abroad and Mobal. These companies, along with others (such as XCom Global), also rent USB modems and portable hotspots with prepaid data plans, but these are not cheap, either.

Cheaper: Buy a prepaid plan with data from a local phone company abroad. Mobile shops are located at many airports, train stations and city centers. Then just swap out the SIM card in your unlocked, quad-band, GSM smartphone.

Cheapest: Use the Wi-Fi service or borrowed computers at hotels, coffee shops, pubs, cybercafés and public institutions (including libraries, airports and train stations). – R.B.

 

Reid Bramblett (ReidsGuides.com) has written more than 30 travel guidebooks.

 

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Staffing Up for the New IT

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We’ve all heard about the horsemen of the IT revolution that we're living — mobile, consumerization and cloud — and the changes these trends will demand of IT organizations to deliver their benefits. It seems that companies have to meet the insatiable demands (and desires) of business users and employees, as well as those of external customers. Compounding the pressure are the Millennials, or the Connected Generation (Gen C), and concerns about their presence in the workforce.

 

In my view, this demographic — combined with the new technologies they covet — will require huge changes inside the IT organization. The Gen C individual isn't just an IT customer, but an integral part of it. At a fundamental level, it means that how you engage in the business of IT itself has to change along with the services that you offer. In other words, you havetostart an IT revolution from inside the enterprise, starting with IT itself. Old ways won’t work with new generation staff, as this CA slidecast explains.

 

 

Supporting the Support Staff

Let's use a simple example: IT support. IT teams typically have some way to rotate engineers through an on-call schedule. It amazes me how many still rely on physically handing off a device — usually a BlackBerry and sometimes a pager — to the person who is on call. That engineer is supposed to walk around with this device, whose sole purpose is to act as the on-call "bat-phone," should he or she be needed. Consider how ridiculous this is in today’s consumer driven-IT environment. All Gen C employees in IT likely have their own smartphones, so why saddle them with a crusty BlackBerry just to "page" them? I bet this approach is mocked mercilessly internally and with outsiders, and it causes credibility problems for IT. (You want to avoid the perception of systems administrators shown below, after all!)

 

Clearly, IT should walk the walk and use consumer IT in its own shop before it can manage it throughout the organization. What happens when an IT team takes something simple in the everyday work process, such as updating a problem ticket, accessing a knowledge management system, approving a change or getting information from diagnostic tools, and puts a barrier between the engineers and the systems they need? Inefficiencies result. For instance, if access to your IT management tools requires calling the service desk or operations team, or else powering up a laptop, connecting to your corporate network VPN, and then launching a fat client to get a simple task done, you're guilty of making things unnecessarily difficult and inefficient. We all have our favorite productivity apps on our smartphones and tablets; why not use them on the job? Ease of access to IT tools is not something that’s nice to have; it's a Gen C expectation

 

If IT organizations don’t change the way they themselves operate, various staffing challenges and problems will result. Chief among these are an inability to attract and retain the best talent; IT people working around IT policies; and IT’s inability to fulfill the mission of supporting the business.

 

Many changes are not difficult to make, but they require you to commit to change and include younger workers in determining what parts of your IT processes are either broken or ripe for improvement. A simple formula to start with is:

  • keep your people connected, mobile and engaged with the end users they support;
  • offer them consumer-technology choices,
  • and above all, keep it simple.

 

Taking these steps may not solve all of your staffing issues, but these policies will help establish a credible IT organization that can attract and retain strong IT people.

 

 

 

 

 

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Additional reading and resources:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224568/How_mobile_BYOD_and_younger_workers_are_reinventing_IT

http://pcrsbdc.org/2012/10-tips-for-managing-multiple-generations-in-the-work-force-%E2%80%93-february-2012/

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/weinschenk/it-departments-plan-for-millennials/?cs=49821

http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/millennials/

http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=511647

Six Trends CIOs Must Track and Leverage

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The expectations placed on CIOs to be innovative have risen significantly at the same time that old notions about their role persist. While IT executives have been instrumental in many innovations that have helped firms advance in the turbulent economy, they are sometimes still seen as hindering innovation because of the costs and lethargy associated with data centers. Simply put, they are often unable to quickly integrate legacy systems or to implement new technology or business processes.

 

How can CIOs disprove the stereotype? New research being conducted at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School with IT executives both in Asia and the U.S. indicates that successful CIOs must be savvy in both technology and business. They must leverage technology solutions for cost reduction as well as generating revenue.

 

As discussed on a recent Pepperdine-sponsored panel, the business-savvy CIO will sustain the current IT infrastructure and portfolio, while attempting to invigorate the firm’s business operations with new or improved processes. Interestingly, my investigations have found that only when the CIO provides a sustained, consistent and uninterrupted technology service can innovation be considered within the organization. Not only can legacy systems be a good foundation, but we found that without an integrated and mature architecture and infrastructure, many innovation efforts have been short-lived.

 

Six Key Trends

Our full research will be released shortly but in the meantime I offer six key developments in the last decade that -- from a technology perspective -- have had an impact on how CIOs craft and develop their roles and responsibilities. These include:

 

  1. Portals or “Web front ends.” These portals, used as functional and content-aggregator tools, have allowed CIOs to temporarily piece together processes and data from legacy or siloed applications that had to be redesigned in the past. Instead of replacing entire back-end infrastructures and architectures, portals have enabled a quick and easy solution to data access problems. For example, the My Health Manager offered by Kaiser Permanente (aka “My Kaiser”) lets Kaiser Permanente patients easily access their own medical information from anywhere in the world via the Internet or on their mobile devices.
  2. The emergence of chief technology officers and enterprise architects has given the CIO more time to focus on the business. These IT executives are often responsible for managing the technology architecture and infrastructure planning, and operational responsibilities once assigned to the CIO. Some enterprises have positioned the technology role as either equivalent to or in direct support of the product/service innovation function.
  3. Social networking technologies. We’re well aware that consumer-based technologies are transforming how users access and disseminate information across multiple constituencies and platforms. Yet, these new open technologies—such as Facebook and many mobile apps -- have presented security risks to the corporation’s knowledge assets as well.
  4. Cloud computing offers a new alternative for mass collaboration and services. Corporate executives must now decide how to leverage and use pervasive Web-based technologies and adapt business processes across their constituent bases to accommodate these platforms.  
  5. Affordability. Doing work “better-faster-cheaper-NOW” has been a common topic of discussion among corporate executives tasked with driving the organization to do even more with less. The 2008 global financial crisis forced firms to cut IT budgets while still expecting the organization to use technology resources for competitive advantage. In 2012, speed-to-market is a benchmark for service delivery to the business.
  6. Real-time analytics capabilities. Firms are now demanding immediate access to current data to make real-time decisions. The ability to provide enterprises with real-time analytics is only one example of how CIOs are being held to a higher standard of service and a greater expectation of business responsiveness.

 

All of these opportunities for change — or failure — constitute the new landscape that business-savvy CIOs need to address and understand to move forward. CIOs can achieve these goals if they are just as business-savvy as (and sometimes, more savvy than) other members of the C-suite. Often, they must acquire new skills that include: Envisioning and understanding corporate strategy; change management; leadership; innovation (including leading improvements to the business operations and growing the business); process improvements; and an ability to manage the organization and talent. 

 

The good news is that it’s not necessary to discard all past practices; what’s needed is a mix of old and new techniques. Some of IT’s historical ability to create business value via the reduction or elimination of costs embedded within the organization is surely important, along with a huge dose of aiding the organization in increasing or generating new revenue.

 

 

Mark W.S. Chun is director of the Center for Applied Research at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School, as well as the Denney Academic Chair; editor In chief for the Graziadio Business Review, and associate professor of information systems.

World-Class IT in a Services World

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With Everything as a Service, CIOs need a new recipe for success, says consultant Peter High.

 

The trend toward Everything as a Service (XaaS) has CIOs scrambling to set the right strategy. To learn more about how CIOs will succeed in a services world, Contributing Editor Tom Farre spoke recently with Peter High, President of CIO advisory firm Metis Strategy and author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

 

In today’s enterprise, how can smart CIOs use XaaS to improve the IT infrastructure?

Traditional on-premises IT infrastructure is typically capital-intensive. The more of it you have to control and manage, the more difficult it is to keep current; and as demand changes, you can’t easily ratchet it up and back. But by leveraging a service-based model, you are better positioned with a variable cost structure. In tough economic times, your costs should more closely reflect the realities of the business environment.

 

But with IT and business services available directly from the cloud, how can CIOs ensure that business users won’t bypass IT?

When this happens, it’s often a sign that something is lacking. It could mean that IT isn’t delivering fast enough, or that IT is miscomprehending what the business needs.

 

Instead, the CIO and his or her team need to forge positive relationships with business executives, to bring the needs and concerns of the business into the open. Regardless of whether the IT department develops something or the business engages someone else to do so, it’s IT that will be responsible for maintaining and supporting the service — as well as ensuring that the overall infrastructure remains secure. When these kinds of relationships exist, then the business will be less inclined to work around IT and more inclined to engage IT whenever possible.

 

How about people? What impact will XaaS have on IT personnel?

One CIO I admire has embraced the service-based model. His insight: When IT managers are called to cut costs, all too often they first move to cut “muscle” — their people. It’s a reflection of on-premises infrastructure costs that are capitalized, amortized and therefore inflexible. By contrast, in the service-based model, utility pricing enables you to retain muscle for as long as possible. People are the foundation.

 

So in a world-class IT organization, what should this “muscle” be doing?

The whole idea is that you should constantly work to improve the IT department’s performance, delivering more value and always thinking about the future. Your infrastructure today is a collection of past decisions, all the things you’ve invested in. No doubt there are some things that shouldn’t be there.

 

If you create more of a service model, the collection of past decisions will become smaller, more manageable and more reliable. Your team will be freed to focus more of its attention on the future. You can’t do that if you’re always thinking about the past.

 

What else should CIOs know about world-class IT?

Project and portfolio management. It’s the engine through which new capabilities can be brought to bear. Only after you have solidified people, the infrastructure and the ability to deliver the right things in the manner in which they have been envisioned, can IT be in a position to partner with the business.

 

So how important are internal communications?

Success requires that the IT team communicate effectively with the rest of the organization, drawing out business needs and solving them with innovative new solutions.

 

Also, more of IT’s work is done in collaboration with vendor partners. IT must ensure that vendor partners are engaged appropriately, that the value they are to deliver is agreed upon up front, and that they are motivated to ultimately deliver that value.

 

 

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CIOs: Is There a CEO Role in Your Future?

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By Doug Bartholomew

 

 

CIOs who aspire to become CEO have an uphill road ahead, but by taking steps to expand their current role and exploiting new technologies they have a better chance than ever to attain their goal.

 

http://twimgs.com/designcentral/caseewebsite/headshots/lloyd_devaux_large.jpgAs someone who made the transition, Lloyd DeVaux says: “You have to take a broader view of the company” if you want to join the top executive ranks. DeVaux, Chief Operating Officer at BankAtlantic in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and former CIO for the bank and for Union Planters Bank in Memphis, Tenn., says that problem solving is key to advancement. “Whether you are CIO or COO, you have to go out looking for — and asking for — problems to solve. The CIO who wants to get ahead has to say, ‘I can solve that problem; give me the opportunity to solve that problem.’ You do this, and pretty soon you expand your world.”

 

And aspirations are high. More than half (54%) of the 685 global CIOs polled for a recent CA Technologies-sponsored report, "The Future Role of the CIO-Becoming the Boss",” aspire to senior management spots — including the chief executive’s office. (See related blog here.)

 

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To get there, “the CIO will have to move from being someone who delivers technology to someone who designs and structures new businesses and products,” observes Jacob Lamm, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at CA Technologies. “In the past, CIOs were seen as parts providers — as plumbers, electricians or other sub-contractors to use the home-building analogy — instead of as the architect or the general contractor of your house,” but the role of the CIO is changing, he says. 

 

http://twimgs.com/designcentral/caseewebsite/headshots/rich_pople_large.jpgThis shift is exciting but it presents challenges as well. While demands have always been great, “the requirements for successful CIOs are dramatically different than in the past,” says Rich Pople, Global IT Executive Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, a strategic consulting firm. “Those traits now include the ability to contribute to profitability, a strong sense of business savvy and the ability to address the technology implications of their business decisions”, he says. 

 

Own the Business Outcomes

With very few exceptions, most product and commercial decisions a business makes are affected by the IT infrastructure, Pople says. “In fact, most things that make up the heart of a business’s revenue have some IT embedded in them.” CIOs who want to climb the corporate ladder, therefore, should flaunt those business achievements to advance to higher C-level jobs, he adds. They “need to take ownership of business outcomes” that result from IT advances. Moreover, because IT is so critical to the business, IT execs can use these results as competitive assets for the business as well as for their own careers. (See related blog about why CEOs need to embrace IT here.)

 

For all the potential gains, the numbers show that CIOs have yet to start a serious march toward the chief executive position. Just four percent of current global CEOs have been promoted from CIO ranks — a figure that contrasts sharply with the 29 percent of CFOs or 23 percent of COOs who moved up the corporate ladder, the CA Technologies report found. In fact, 16 percent of CIOs believe there is prejudice against them being considered for the chief executive slot, and more than half (58%) say they are hampered by being viewed as technical specialists.

 

Among the notable exceptions are the CEOs and former CIOs, such as Chris Lofgren at Schneider National; Benjamin Salzmann at Acuity Insurance; and Donald Donahue at Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. CIO Steve Phillips was also recently promoted to Senior Vice President at Avnet Inc. Some others who have reached the top corporate echelons are: Phil Fasano, former CIO who advanced to Executive Vice President and CIO at Kaiser Permanente, and Dawn Lepore, former CIO at Charles Schwab, now CEO at drugstore.com.

 

Cloud as Catalyst

The report also found that the cloud acts as a catalyst for change because it enables entry to new overseas markets in hours; permits scaling up of resources to launch a new product in minutes, and slashes development time by days. This shift, most observers agree, affords a new and expanded opportunity for CIOs of forward-thinking organizations to build business strategy around technology instead of merely supporting strategy through IT.

 

“CIOs need to get ahead of this new trend,” Lamm suggests. “They need to recognize that their job is not to create everything in-house, but to leverage the cloud to bring more creativity and innovation to the business.”

 

BankAtlantic’s DeVaux also sees the cloud as a potential game-changer for CIOs seeking to rise to the top. “The cloud means it’s less about the internal IT shop,” he says, making “it possible for CIOs to start to take the company out of the IT business.”

 

“Although IT can enable business strategy, remember, the IT department is not in itself generally strategic unless you are in a technology business,” says DeVaux.

 

 

Outside Options

Of course, it sometimes helps to look for career advancement opportunities outside of your own organization, too. Organizational structures vary greatly, as does the role IT plays in the enterprise. So when DeVaux left his CIO position at Union Planters in 2001 for the CIO job at BankAtlantic, he saw the chance for greater opportunities. “Here at BankAtlantic I had the title of CIO but I had the head of IT and the heads of other non-IT departments reporting to me, so my role always was technology and operations.” Therefore, when he became COO, DeVaux passed the CIO title to his head of IT.

 

“At Union Planters, people saw me as the CIO, the tech guy,” DeVaux continues. “But BankAtlantic wanted me to come over as the CIO with the COO role available if I showed the capability.” Sometimes, he advises, you can only shed the CIO stereotype by going into a role that’s viewed as more related to the business. “You have to get that broader view,” even if it means leaving the company.

 

One way CIOs can prepare to take on a broader business assignment is to develop business skills outside of IT and the job, DeVaux says. Aspiring executives “certainly need something broader than technology,” he says. DeVaux believes that his MBA in finance and marketing as well as his nontechnical positions were big assets. So, too, is a Harvard Business School three-year executive program“that was all about running a business,” he says.

 

There’s no single way to the top, but it will take effort. “At the end of the day, this change in the role of the CIO looks like an evolution, but I think it’s more profound than that,” Pople says. In his view, even to stay where they are and be successful, CIOs need to be forward-thinking business leaders. “If you can’t step into the new world, you probably can’t stay where you are today,” Pople says, and it certainly will keep IT execs from reaching the top of the org chart.

 

 

 

ASK THE EXPERTS

 

Lloyd DeVaux, Chief Operating Officer, BankAtlantic

Lloyd joined BankAtlantic in May 2001 as EVP and CIO, and was promoted to Chief Operating Officer in March 2004. Prior to joining the bank, he was Senior EVP and CIO of $35 billion Union Planters Corp. He managed technology and operations encompassing eight divisions, six operations centers and 1,900 employees. Lloyd holds an MBA degree from Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College, Winter Park, Fla., and a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Buffalo. He serves on a number of boards, including Southern Florida Express Bankers’ Bankserv Inc., West Broward YMCA, and CBA/BAI Graduate School of Retail Bank Management.

 

Rich Pople, IT Executive Advisory Global Practice Leader, Hackett Group

Rich is the Principal-in-Charge of Global IT Transformation and Executive Advisory at the Hackett Group. His clients have included Marriott International, Cummins, Cardinal Health, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, JP Morgan, Goodyear and Vodafone. Rich has more than 20 years of consulting and executive experience in IT, strategy, finance and operations. He has worked with executives and CIOs to transform their organizations' performance through strategic deployment of technology, innovative organizational design and development of high-performing service-delivery models. As an executive, Rich has led business operations in both America and Europe. He also is a frequent speaker on creating high-performing IT organizations and has taught at Georgetown University.

 

Jacob Lamm, Executive VP of Strategy and Corporate Development, CA Technologies                 

In this role, Jacob is responsible for coordinating the company’s overall business strategy, as well as developing strategy for the selection, prioritization and execution of acquisitions. In addition, Jacob leads CA Technologies’ Business Incubation business units, which are charged with exploring opportunities to build businesses in new markets. He is also a member of the company's Executive Leadership Team, which defines and executes business and technical strategies.

Jacob has held various management positions since joining CA Technologies in 1998, including: EVP of the company's Governance Group, and EVP and General Manager of the Business Service Optimization business unit. He has more than 20 years of industry experience, covering a wide range of technologies and business applications.

He joined CA Technologies with its acquisition of Professional Help Desk (PHD), where he was co-founder and EVP and CTO. Under his leadership, PHD gained industry recognition as having a visionary service management solution.

Prior to founding PHD, Jacob served as a senior manager at Con Edison in New York, where he was responsible for integrating new technologies into the company’s business systems. A graduate of Brooklyn College, Jacob earned a degree in computer information science.

Creating a Culture of Innovation

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Every CIO should enable a culture that embraces innovation to build on the strength of today’s ever-changing enterprise.

 

We’re experiencing a rate of business change that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. Consider, for example, what the emergence of tablets and smartphones has meant to information access in the workplace. Or how cloud computing is transforming today’s technology environment. Not to mention the new meaning that social networking is giving to collaboration.

 

Many organizations are resistant to change, but chief information officers (CIOs) shouldn’t allow this to get in their way. Instead, those who embrace change will foster a culture of innovation that allows the enterprise to continually generate new ideas — and ideas that will leave their competitors in the dust.

 

This is especially true for large, established companies.  Many large companies are still doing things the way they’ve been doing them for years.  Bureaucratic inertia is a powerful force, and it can be difficult for managers to break away from the status quo. As a result, innovation may come only in periodic fits and starts. But real business success comes when companies are consistently innovative.  This happens when large enterprises create an environment where change and innovation are valued and rewarded, where employees are encouraged to take responsible risks.

 

“In large enterprises, CIOs and business leaders must proactively manage change while still protecting their core business interests. Essentially, these companies need a culture that encourages risk-taking without weakening the organization’s business model.”

 

Smaller companies generally have an easier time being nimble. Start-ups have their share of challenges, but it is definitely easier for them to adapt to market conditions and business demands. That’s because they tend to be simpler and more agile. It does not take much these days to get a company up and going when an opportunity hits. So smaller start-ups can hit the ground running.

 

But in large enterprises, CIOs and business leaders must proactively manage change while still protecting their core business interests. Essentially, these companies need a culture that encourages risk-taking without weakening the organization’s business model. Senior IT executives will ideally work in partnership with their business-line teams to develop and drive programs that encourage the development of new ideas.

 

At CA Technologies, we’re in the midst of a companywide initiative to drive change and deepen innovation throughout our business. This means looking at everything we do: which processes and procedures get in our way and slow us down, how we work with one another to break down silos, and how we develop solutions. The larger goal: to enable us to move more quickly, innovate more rapidly and stay ahead of our customers’ needs.

 

It’s truly amazing what people — and companies — can achieve when they focus their efforts on enabling change. What’s more, innovation can come from anywhere and anyone. So, to take the first step in enabling a culture of innovation, CIOs should give all individuals a chance to be heard. This will ultimately drive greater efficiency to dramatically improve the bottom line.

 

Adam Elster is Executive VP of the Mainframe & Customer Success Group at CA Technologies.

 

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Innovative Instruction for IT Auditors

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At first glance it may seem that my areas of expertise as an executive coach — soft-skill training and interpersonal communication — have little in common with the engineering and finance backgrounds of IT students. Turns out, however, they are highly complementary.

 

At Temple University’s Fox School Department of Management Information Systems (MIS), administrators hold the innovative idea that increasing social awareness, the ability to self-regulate impulses and enhancing communication skills, will produce better IT auditors—those who are certified to examine IT operations and to safeguard corporate assets. As a result, I am currently teaching a class in a newly formed IT auditing master’s degree program.

Typically, I work with organizations that want to increase the success of their executives, and in turn, business revenue. This usually involves developing emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills among business leaders. I am applying many of these same techniques to my IT students whose jobs it will be to identify holes in IT security and management for their future employers.

 

The Fox School of Business’s MS program in IT Auditing and Cybersecurity— one of only three such programs in the country — is based on ISACA, a global association of information systems professionals. Students take the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam at the end of their studies, which allows them to perform information systems audits and help a client analyze risk, security and business continuity.

 

Based in Philadelphia, the school in general and my class specifically is an amazing place filled with students from all over the world who come here to study and learn. One of my goals is to culturally prepare and acclimate students for the business world, including the interpersonal skills an auditor needs to be successful. The classes include individual personality assessments and real-world feedback about what makes a successful auditor from the head of audit of a major financial institution.. We also practice interviewing skills, what good audit negotiation looks like, and discuss how emotional intelligence plays a major role in working with clients and stakeholders.

 

Learning Subtle Skills

Obviously, the first measure of success as an IT auditor requires excellence in the technical side of the job. But changing the behavior of those who are being audited is also important and involves much more subtle communication and negotiation. How we say what we say, how much we listen to the verbal and the nonverbal language around us, and how comfortable we are asking and disseminating difficult information often determines the outcome of any meeting — and any career.

 

Students learn that an IT audit meeting, which often involves much nuance and potentially negative consequences, is difficult under any circumstances — no business wants to learn it is unprepared for a disaster or a security breach. Therefore, knowing how and what to communicate, adding value to the conversation and trying to be as objective as possible will also determine the success of the IT auditors’ outcomes.

 

Teaching this wonderful, dedicated group of students is a unique and fulfilling experience and it reinforces to me that executive business skills coaching is valuable in many settings.


Innovate to Compete

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Every CIO wants to innovate for the business. But how do you actually do it? Delphi Group Founder and President Thomas Koulopoulos offers some tips.

 

CIOs seeking business innovation have a friend in Thomas Koulopoulos. For the past 25 years, he has provided insights on the direction and evolution of business and technology. Koulopoulos is the Founder and President of global management and advisory firm Delphi Group; the author of eight books, including Cloud Surfing (Bibliomotion, May 2012), The Innovation Zone (Nicholas Brealey, 2011) and Smartsourcing (Platinum, 2006); and the leader of an international master class on innovation. To learn more about IT innovation for the business, contributing editor Bob Violino spoke recently with Koulopoulos.

 

Why is IT innovation for the business so important?

Innovation is fundamentally a relative metric of how well you’re able to compete based on your ability to shape a market. If we look at the companies that are most often held up as icons of innovation — be it Apple, Google, P&G or GE — they all share the ability to not only understand their current customers exceptionally well, but also lead their customers and the marketplace at large to new products or services the market did not know it needed.

 

The key is to create a bond of trust with the marketplace that allows you to conduct regular experiments with new ideas. For example, when Apple introduced the first iPad, few of us really knew what to do with it. For the first year after its introduction, I would ask audiences what they thought the killer app was for the iPad; the consistent response was Angry Birds. We were embracing a technology, and a rather expensive one, with the belief that the value would unveil itself to us. Indeed, it did, but not overnight. This level of trust is the hallmark of a great innovator.

 

If you apply that same thinking to IT, there’s a striking parallel. Innovative IT organizations lead their companies to both technologies and business models that the businesses would not know to ask for, and for which they may not see immediate value. For instance, moving data and applications to the cloud.

 

Is there any downside to being innovative?

When it comes to investing in any sort of innovative competitive advantage, there is risk and concern. IT organizations should mitigate risk by developing a similar bond of trust within the organization. If they don’t accomplish this, IT is marginalized, since it is always lagging in its ability to help differentiate the organization, and the organization suffers, since IT is increasingly the basis for differentiation.

 

Can innovation be learned? If so, what can CIOs and other IT professionals do to be more innovative?

We can all learn to be more innovative. But learning to be more innovative should not be confused with learning to be more creative. Creativity is often touted as the next great area of competency. The fact is, I’ve yet to encounter an even moderately successful organization that lacks an abundance of ideas. So the challenge is not being creative. Rather, it is defining a sustainable process for surfacing, evaluating and executing on these ideas. That’s a process that can be enabled by technology. And more importantly, it’s a process that must be endorsed and embraced by the organization.

 

So how can CIOs foster a culture of innovation within their IT organizations?

Within any organization that has achieved a culture of innovation, two things are consistently obvious. First, the organization goes to great lengths to encourage experimentation, and it accepts the increased risk of failure as part of that experimentation. This does not mean that failure is encouraged; only that it is accepted and not penalized. I recall one CEO of a multibillion-dollar business who, after the launch of a lengthy innovation initiative, told his senior executives, “As you innovate, keep in mind that while our business has a limited upside, it has an unlimited downside.” You can imagine how eager the executives were to go off and innovate after that pep talk!

 

The second thing you always find in an innovative culture is a clearly defined process by which ideas are evaluated quickly, fairly and transparently. We are all very attached to our ideas. After all, they are our ideas. So if you do not go to extremes to convince people that their ideas will be treated fairly and not be co-opted or otherwise absconded with, they will simply not hand them over. In my book, The Innovation Zone, I wrote about one of the most successful innovation programs in place at Partners HealthCare in Boston, which generates nearly half a billion dollars yearly in new innovations. The biggest challenge this program faced was convincing doctors, clinicians and researchers that if they brought a new idea to the table, the idea would get a fair and competent evaluation.

 

How can CIOs more effectively coordinate innovation with their CEOs, CFOs and other business-side colleagues?

CIOs actually have a distinct advantage over almost all of their C-level counterparts: They get to see the entirety of the organization’s capabilities, processes and challenges. IT is essential to the success of every aspect of an organization. This gives the CIO a unique, horizontal view across all silos. Now, that does not mean that a CIO can single-handedly cause a business to change. Great CIOs are adept leaders who can bring unique insight to their C-level counterparts and can act as catalysts for change. But again, this can happen only if they have developed the trust needed to lead the organization.

 

Aside from this issue of trust, what are the biggest barriers to IT innovation? And how can CIOs get around them?

IT-specific innovation is most often stifled by the pressure to cut IT costs. This is a fact of life in virtually every company I work with. It’s not cyclical cost-cutting due to the state of the economy. Instead, companies simply accept that sourcing and cloud-based alternatives should provide the means by which to do this.

 

But do any companies stand out as being particularly innovative, from a technology standpoint, and why? We always hear about the poster children of the current generation, such as Google, Amazon and Facebook. But while these companies clearly use technology to build new business models, many more businesses are making great advances in the customer experience and driving their brands to new heights through technology innovation.

 

For example, fashion retailer Burberry has created a positive customer experience across its entire organization that allows customers to maintain a high-quality experience online, no matter what device they are using. Clothing retailer Lands’ End has developed technology that lets customers create personal avatars that can be used to define their body, and then lets them purchase custom-tailored clothing for a small premium. And General Motors has substantially altered the driver experience with its OnStar in-vehicle security, communications and diagnostics system — in the process creating one of the most powerful automotive brands.

 

How can CIOs use cloud computing, social media and mobile devices to innovate for the business?

CIOs need to focus on three areas. First, educating the organization as to the true risks of each of these technologies. We tend to measure risk against an illusory metric of what is currently in place. For example, we fear security in the cloud, yet at Los Angeles International Airport alone, some 1,200 laptops are lost or stolen every week. Where is the security in that?

 

Second, CIOs need to help the organization understand that controlling all three of these technologies is like trying to control their employees’ diets. People will find ways to get around any controls that IT puts in place, simply to get their jobs done. So CIOs need to keep pace with proliferation, rather than trying to stem it.

 

Third, CIOs should balance tenured and capable operational staff with young, green, uninhibited minds. The behavioral shifts inherent in these new technologies cannot be underestimated. To understand this, you must look through eyes that are untainted by what has been.

"We are at the tail end of an era that has focused almost entirely on the innovation of products and services, and we are at the beginning of a new era that focuses on the innovation of what I like to call ‘behavioral business models."
"The greatest shift in the way we view innovation will be that the innovation surrounding behavior will need to be as continuous a process as the innovation of products has been over the last hundred years."

 

SOURCE: Cloud Surfing, by Thomas M. Koulopoulos  (Bibliomotion, 2012)

 

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Holiday Greetings - and Reading - from Smart Enterprise Exchange

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Here’s a look at a few of our favorite ‘things’-- articles and blogs from 2012, with advice and insights that will carry you confidently into the New Year.…

 

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End the year by re-reading some key tips from the experts at Cap Gemini, Zipcar and Dion Hinchcliffe at Dachis Group. They will help you sharpen your focus on the interconnection between customer experience and operational/IT processes that will get your business on course for a digital future.

 

 

May 2013 bring you peace, joy and a painless IT transformation!

- Paula Klein

 


 

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Happy Holidays! It’s that time of year again – Santa’s uploading everyone’s wish-lists to the cloud and the elves are accessing the Naughty or Nice list from their iPads. With that in mind, my selection for you is Douglas Bartholomew’s look at how companies overcame latency issues with the cloud and big data in “Accelerating Public Cloud Access.”

 

Enjoy!

- Derek Stevens

 


 

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“Data is the new oil” is one of my favorite metaphors for this year and Smart Enterprise magazine covered this important concept with beautiful prose and design. The article points out how important it is not only to collect data, but to turn it into meaningful insights at the speed of the market.

 

Wishing everyone at Smart Enterprise Exchange a wonderful New Year “gushing” with joy and peace.

- Loni Frazita

 


 

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Enterprise IT is at a tipping point, increasingly able to migrate from an enablement position to one of innovation. Our SmartPaper, The Lifecycle of Innovation, explains and illustrates these trends in a crisp, attractive way.

 

Happy Holidays to the Smart Enterprise Exchange community!"

- Mark Hoffman

 


 

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Narrowing down my favorite content for 2012 wasn’t easy, but in “When ‘I’ is for Innovator,” text and graphics present the enormous challenge facing IT leaders now. Read the full article here and perhaps you can start making some 2013 resolutions to bring more innovation into your IT leadership strategy. 

 

Happy Holidays from Smart Enterprise! 

- Denise Dubie

 


 

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One of my favorites from 2012 is the Q&A with Dion Hinchcliffe who succinctly explains the value of social for the enterprise and how IT leaders can help their organization shine. Read The Gains -- and Pains -- of Social Business by Design.

 

 

Happy Holidays to our Smart Enterprise Exchange members.

- Penni Geller

 


 

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A happy, healthy holiday season to the Smart Enterprise Exchange community as we look ahead to more innovative ideas for the New Year. I particularly enjoyed the diverse corporate examples featured in the Smart Enterprise article, Innovate from the Edge.

 

True innovation comes in all sized packages!

- Ellen Lalier

Making Computer Studies the career of choice for students

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This blog originally appeared on CA Technologies Perspectives Today blog

 

As we enter 2013 in the middle of what is variously described as a double or even a triple dip recession in the UK and Ireland, the career path for recent school leavers and graduates is more uncertain than ever. With UK youth unemployment predicted to top one million this year, the prospects of securing the right job are hugely challenging. 

 

The root cause of this problem is the so-called skills shortage, especially in the IT industry. The number of students taking Computer Studies at A-Level continues to fall, for example, and a recent report revealed that some 16 million people in the UK lack basic online skills.

It shouldn't be this way. Computer Studies is one of the most innovative and exciting spaces to work in. The British technology sector is also vital to the UK economy, contributing £140 billion annually (equivalent to 12 percent of GDP). In essence, bright young students who turn a blind eye to the industry should look again. 

Perhaps a lack of real understanding of the industry and its career prospects are holding students back from joining the sector: a recent study by Hotel.com revealed that one in four adults wish they had chosen a career in technology, but a lack of skills was making them think twice. 

From my perspective, it is important that if somebody is passionate about technology and is looking to pave a career in the industry; the opportunities should be there to foster this ambition. 

I am pleased to see an increasing number of technology programmes out there for ambitious young school leavers and graduates. In fact, there are several that I’d recommend. For my favorites as well as my advice to students interested in this field, go to my original post on CA Technologies Perspectives blog.

 

Self-Awareness, Success and the CIO

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As an executive coach working with successful businesspeople, I have often found that the willingness to be introspective, analyze and question who we are, what we want to accomplish and how our thought processes work have a direct impact on business achievement. In fact, it can be the differentiator between someone who can turn failure into success and one who gets bogged down in a negative mindset.


For instance, individuals who have been very successful in one environment but are failing in another often think that changing a behavior that was working so well for many years seems crazy. Yet it’s very usually necessary. CIOs fall into this category because their environments are changing very rapidly, but they often don’t keep up.

For most of us, the ability to adapt, to change our thought processes, to be self-aware and accept that what used to work isn't working now, are difficult things. In a recent article in The New York Times, “Secret Ingredient for Success,” Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield wrote about "single-loop learning," a term originated by Chris Argyris at Harvard.

 

Getting Out of the Loop

Single-loop learning is an insular way of looking at a problem, resulting in doing things the way we have always done them. Only by realizing that this way of thinking isn’t working and will not work in the future, were people able to break out of the loop. Harvard’s Argyris called the new approach "double-loop learning." It is difficult to do. We are so accustomed to set patterns and specific beliefs that leaving our comfort zone feels wrong. We act as if we know what will happen when we think or act differently (e.g., the systems will crash, security will be breached, we’ll lose our job), but we often don't know and, in fact, are usually wrong.

Here's ’s an example. I had a client who, after many years at a consumer product company, had to work under a new manager. For years, my highly successful client had been a quiet but highly respected contributor to the company, with a deep knowledge of the business. He was viewed as a person of integrity and as someone who would get the job done no matter what. He led his team with a "hands-off" style but trusted they would do the job.


When his boss retired, however, he was not considered for that position. Instead, it went to a younger, more socially outgoing individual who was brought in from outside of the company. The new boss did not value the traits that had made this manager successful. My client tried everything that had worked with the previous boss, but with minimal success. After a year of trying the same behaviors (e.g. loop learning), the manager felt marginalized and totally unhappy. He received his first lackluster performance review and his position was in jeopardy. Only then did he decide to change.

 

We focused on self-awareness, new behaviors and new ways of thinking. When he finally was open to new approaches and to examining his beliefs, he began to ask questions that were difficult for him and to accept potentially negative answers. That’s when he broke the loop and things changed for the better.

 

Faulty Assumptions

Initially, my client never had a direct discussion with his new boss. He just assumed he knew what he wanted. However, we soon observed that my client did not know how much or how often the new boss wanted to be kept informed or involved -- so he asked. It turned out that contrary to his old boss, the new one wanted all the details and to be kept in the loop at every turn.

 

This led to other observations and questions about how the new boss communicated. Did he like charts and power points? E-mails, phone calls or face-to -meetings? Was the communication to be lengthy or brief? My client was a detail-oriented, slow talker who preferred the written word to face-to-face meetings. The new boss was the exact opposite, however, so my client learned extroverted behavior and scheduled weekly, in-person meetings with his boss that only lasted 15 minutes.


With a new, executive-presence demeanor, better social skills and an improved outlook, this manager finally felt that he and the boss understood one another resulting in a much more successful year for him, with a good chance for promotion.

New thinking requires boldness and courage because sometimes the ultimate outcome is not what we want to happen. If we are to stay relevant and adapt to change, however, we must continually monitor our reactions to new environments and leave our comfort zones. The world is changing quickly, and technology is changing exponentially. A fresh mindset about our business lives — specifically, becoming self-aware — is a necessity for success.



 

Kerala the perfect to Outsource IT Development

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Kerala, the southernmost state in India, has many unique qualities to be an ideal place for IT development and IT outsourcing. Although, it pioneered the IT development in India by establishing the first technology park at Thiruvananthapuram, the state capital, Kerala was overtook by many other states in the run to bring in more investment. However, the state has overcome the temporary setback and regained the initial momentum. Now, big IT companies have started moving to Kerala to set up offices and campuses. Small to medium IT sector is flourishing. IT industry has identified the immense potential of this small state, which has made wonders in social development. Read more here. . .

New Rules

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CIOs will need these six critical capabilities for continuous innovation and leadership.

 

As members of the C-suite, CIOs play a crucial role as both enablers and leaders of innovation. Success in today’s markets requires speed, agility and flexibility.

 

The convergence of multiple trends — cloud, social, mobile, big data and security — is driving an epic revolution. We have the tools, the platforms and the networks required to innovate at unparalleled speed. We can turn business vision into business reality faster than ever before.

 

Yet a new tool or solution qualifies as an innovation only when it delivers a tangible benefit that helps you perform a task or achieve an objective faster, better and more cost-effectively than before. Otherwise, it’s not really an innovation.

 

Scale and location matter, too. A particular innovation may deliver tangible benefits to some people at some organizations, but not others. Similarly, a particular innovation might be great for large organizations, but prove impractical for those that are small. That’s because innovation models are complex and multidimensional; they’re neither simple nor linear. Like physics, innovation seems to work differently at different ends of the scale. As a result, small organizations and large organizations are likely to approach innovation in different ways.

 

Also, innovation may appear dramatic or mundane, and it may be sustaining or disruptive. Its audience may be large or small, and its margins either high or low. Innovations are sometimes embraced and adopted quickly; other times, more slowly.

 

Will a standard model for innovation emerge? Possibly. But the model won’t be simple. Instead, it will look more like a network or a bundle of synapses. And it won’t be reducible to a binary equation. In fact, I see six distinct capabilities required for continuous IT innovation:  

 

  • Multidirectionality: Modern innovation models will take multiple paths and explore multiple options. They will combine both internal and external resources. Focus and structure are needed, but in a way that’s flexible and resilient. Innovation assumes a certain level of risk, with the understanding that risk is proportional to reward.

  • Inside / Outside Balance: Successful innovation strategies blend traditional R&D with external resources to find creative solutions and serve new markets.

  • Redefined Teams: Innovation requires a new approach to team building. In the past, team members were selected for compatibility and skills. Today, innovation teams can include insiders as well as outsiders, people who can find and leverage the appropriate resources (whether external or internal), people who bring different views and opinions — people who might not even be considered “team players.”
  • Deep Knowledge and Market Aware­ness: Innovation requires deep, extensive knowledge of the competitive landscape. You have to know the competition’s business even better than the competition does.

  • Partnering with the World: For IT innovators, everyone is a potential partner. To create new value for your customers, you must find good ideas wherever they are, then figure out how to make them work within your ecosystem.

  • Speed: Technology and globalization have greatly reduced the length of business cycles. Everything is moving faster, and the time between cycles has shortened dramatically. Leading companies must innovate continuously and quickly. Innovative organizations measure speed in two significant dimensions: speed to market and speed to failure. Both are critical. The faster you innovate, the faster you get new products and services to market. But you can’t have innovation without failure, and the best way to fail is to fail quickly.

 

This is truly the most exciting time for IT. The industry, far from being mature, is still young. People are counting on CIOs to provide leadership. The time for innovation is now.

 

Hunter Muller is Founder, President and CEO of HMG Strategy LLC (hmgstrategy.com), a global provider of thought leadership, peer-to-peer networking and career-elevation services to the IT industry.

 

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Three Alternatives to H-1B Visas

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When it comes to supply, demand and the U.S. IT job market, I’ve been puzzled for many years. Cyclical booms, as well as busts, often stem as much from actions taken by the industry itself as from macroeconomics. When U.S. firms began seeking programming talent from overseas and sending work offshore, for example, it was a sign of the economic times, but it was also specific to the technology sector.

 

The debate over H-1B temporary visas — and their global implications — is again heating up as part of the sweeping legislation proposed to address U.S. immigration reform.

 

According to a recent editorial in The New York Times, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators wants “to expand the popular H-1B category of work visas to 135,000, from 85,000 — a quota that is often reached in a matter of weeks or months every year. The new, higher limit would be allowed to increase or decrease by as many as 10,000 visas a year based on demand for them and government unemployment data.”

 

The visas, granted to foreign workers when jobs can’t be filled domestically, are helpful to the global employment market but are contentious at a time when Americans are clamoring for well-paid employment.

 

Salaries Stay Strong

As reported recently in the Dallas News, “while many Americans saw their paychecks stagnate or shrink over the last five years, salaries for skilled technology workers rose, on average, 15 percent across the nation,” according to the online tech career site, Dice Inc. The average salary for a tech professional such as a software systems engineer, mobile app designer or information security engineer was $85,619 at the end of 2012, according to the news report.

 

Yet high-tech firms, especially in Silicon Valley, are lobbying to raise the quotas and import workers, as described in this news article. I fully understand that the workforce and talent pools are global today, but shouldn’t investment in the domestic workforce be the first alternative to increasing H-1B visas? Specifically, I see three basic ways to get started:

 

  • Improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and funding at all levels.
  • Change perceptions about IT careers among students and younger workers.
  • Retrain and re-skill current workers for new technologies and offer commensurate salaries and benefits.

 

These are not quick-fix solutions.However, many long-time IT workers would happily be retrained to fill the open positions -- even if it requires some coaching as well as new skills. Additionally, a new crop of next-generation professionals is about to graduate from college. Most of them are eager not only to pay back student loans, but to start on high-tech career paths. Both groups of workers may be our next data scientists, application developers and chief digital officers.

 

The Dallas News column goes on to quote Judy Pennington, Director of Human Capital at Deloitte Consulting, as saying: "The way to engage technology folks is to give them something interesting to do, support to do it, IT training if they need it and a coach to help them learn new things." I couldn’t agree more.

 

In my next blog I will discuss ways to stem the STEM problem and also how the current U.S. legislation falls short. Meanwhile, do you believe H-1B visas are a boost to the IT industry? What is the IT job outlook at your enterprise? 

 

 

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

 

 



IT Gets LinkedIn

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New research finds CIOs increasingly turn to social networks for trust, efficiency, relevance and access.

 

Technology leaders looking to make better-informed decisions about IT vendors, products and implementation strategies are increasingly turning to social media for help. So finds a pair of surveys recently commissioned by LinkedIn, the 187-million member social network for business professionals.

 

Nearly 90 percent of IT decision makers visit a social network at least monthly, according to a report LinkedIn published based on the surveys, which were conducted separately by Forrester and Research Now. The report, “IT Purchasing Goes Social: How social networks have transformed the B2B purchasing process,” also states that 85 percent of IT decision-makers use at least one social network for business purposes, while nearly 75 percent have used a social network to engage with an IT vendor.

 

The LinkedIn-sponsored surveys polled 400 North American IT decision makers across a range of industries in 2012. In this case, “decision makers” included not only those with formal IT responsibilities, but also business professionals who are involved with IT projects. The latter group accounted for about 30 percent of those surveyed.

 

LinkedIn emerged as a clear leader. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., was the social network of choice among 95 percent of those surveyed. The main reason is that conversations on LinkedIn are highly relevant to the business needs of its members.

 

As recently as a few years ago, IT professionals used LinkedIn mainly to connect with their peers and subject-matter experts, says Mike Weir, LinkedIn’s Head of Category Development, Technology Industry. But today, both IT and non-IT people are involved in technology decision making. So it helps to have a broad network of experts for information, best practices, recommendations and more. “The need to drive business innovation on a daily basis means you have lots of different stakeholders,” Weir says. “Each person has different needs at various stages of the project.”

 

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LinkedIn Maps, such as the one above, visualize personal networks. Like a fingerprint, each map is unique.

Social networks can help CIOs find the information they need to make good IT decisions by providing a platform for both research and validating decisions. After all, decision making isn’t a linear process.

 

 

Nearly half of all IT decision makers use social networks during key phases of their technology projects, LinkedIn reports. These phases include research, planning, product-selection and implementation.

Socially Relevant

In large part, that’s because IT executives find the social network relevant, trustworthy and efficient. LinkedIn members can gain access to IT vendors they do business with, “like” them, track their products and earnings announcements, and join groups that provide in-depth views of specific technology and business issues. “IT professionals face a new challenge,” Weir of LinkedIn explains. “On the one hand, they have to live within their silo to understand the strategic vision and execute against highly complex projects. On the other hand, they’re also being asked to step outside their traditional function and be business leaders. The trust, efficiency, relevance and access of social networks helps.”

 

In addition, many IT executives use LinkedIn to find background information on people they’re meeting for the first time. Increasingly, a look at someone’s LinkedIn profile has become standard operating procedure when preparing for a meeting. “You want to know whom you’re meeting with, and what that person’s expertise is,” says Weir.

 

LinkedIn isn’t resting on its laurels. In a recent interview with CNET, the company’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, predicted that LinkedIn will soon evolve into a “social graph” that maps professional relationships and knowledge across the globe. Weiner also expects LinkedIn’s product offerings to expand and include activities, such as analyzing skills gaps and creating just-in-time training programs. With members in more than 200 countries around the world, LinkedIn offers the kind of scale and scope IT decision makers need.

 

 

Karyl Scott writes about technology and business from San Diego.

 

 


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The Transformative CIO

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IT leaders are under increasing pressure to keep their business knowledge and leadership skills sharp.

 

Business transformation means fundamental changes to a company’s organization, strategy and vision. It can be driven by external factors such as regulation, competition and consumer demands; or by an internal desire to discover new markets and create groundbreaking innovations.

 

The CIO and the technology resources he or she directs represent a powerful transformative force. But that’s been true for the 50 years that IT management has existed. What’s new is how market-leading companies are defining the role of the CIO, and the extent to which top CIOs are leading business transformation.

 

According to an e-book, Aligning Technology with Strategy (Harvard Business Press, Feb. 2011), companies that most successfully manage their IT investments — including hardware, software, services and staff — generate profits and revenue as much as 40 percent higher than those of their competitors. Factors that distinguish these top performers include collaboration among CIOs and top business executives around priorities and deriving value from IT initiatives, says the book, a compilation of recent articles from the Harvard Business Review.

 

“The benchmarks for the CIO role have changed pretty radically in the past two years,” says Shawn Banerji, Managing Director and Co-head of the Information Officers Practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, a global executive search firm. Market-leading companies are looking for business people with technology expertise who can identify new technologies that will enhance the business. They also want individuals who understand big data and analytics to see what’s happening with personnel and resources, observe consumer trends and anticipate future markets and needs, Banerji says.

 

“Keeping the lights on is still an important responsibility for the CIO, but it’s a baseline,” adds Banerji, who has extensive experience in head-hunting CIOs for major corporations. The best CIOs, he says, are not attracted to organizations where IT is just a functional backbone, but to those where IT is strategic.

 

According to a recent survey of 685 CIOs conducted by  CA Technologies, those IT leaders are still in the minority. In the survey, 16 percent of CIOs said they were always involved in strategic activities, 29 percent were sometimes involved, and fully 55 percent reported never being involved, says George Watt, VP of Corporate Strategy at CA Technologies and co-author of a new book, The Innovative CIO: How IT Leaders Can Drive Business Transformation (Apress, 2012). One of his co-authors, Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, also says that IT leaders need to communicate IT’s business value to all business units.

 

Some researchers believe this is starting to happen. A 2012 report produced jointly by INSEAD, a leading graduate business school, and CIONET, an IT organization of 3,500 European CIOs, says CIOs spend a significant amount of their time doing things other than managing information services. The report, “Three Ways to Thrive: How CIOs are enabling their organizations to grow and strengthen in today’s challenging economy,” identifies three areas as emerging responsibilities for CIOs: collaborating with non-IT colleagues, managing enterprisewide business processes, and working with external customers and partners.

 

Further, of the 188 CIOs surveyed for the report, 37 percent defined their roles as technology-driven, 41 percent as business-process-driven, and 22 percent as client-driven. Nearly 60 percent also say they expect their role to become more client-driven over the next three years, says Nils Fonstad, Associate Director of the INSEAD eLab.

 

The Customer-Facing CIO

Five years ago, it would have sounded strange to hear that a CIO’s duties included working with customers and partners. Now, the customer-facing CIO is in the vanguard of management trends.

 

Cisco System’s Rebecca Jacoby, for instance, is both CIO and Senior VP of the IT and Cloud & Systems Management Technology Group. This means Jacoby runs the IT operations and also heads a customer-facing product group. With both a degree in economics and an MBA, and company experience dating back to 1995, Jacoby has a unique and highly desirable collection of business and technology skills.

 

Another highly regarded customer-facing CIO is Oliver Bussmann, Global CIO of SAP. The INSEAD report states that during his first 100 days at the German software maker, Bussmann developed an award-winning strategy: transform the IT structure from silos into an agile department aligned with the various business groups. Bussmann then went on to launch the “SAP Runs SAP” project, whereby SAP is the first customer of new ERP software products. He then met with more than 250 SAP customers to share his IT department’s experience and best practices.

 

CIOs can enhance their skills and become transformational CIOs in a number of ways. The first is on the job: participating in key strategy initiatives and demonstrating for other C-level executives how new technology and processes can deliver business results.

 

Other approaches involve education, such as an MBA, which takes about one to two years to complete; certificate programs, which are shorter in duration and more targeted; and executive education programs, which focus on tactical business functions, such as financial or change management. Formal MBA programs in the U.S. and Europe stress a T-shaped skills portfolio, which includes vertical skills such as software architectures, data analytics and information security, and horizontal skills such as finance, marketing and customer relationship management.

 

A growing number of graduate business schools have been adding technology skills to the MBA course lineup. Rutgers Business School, located in New Jersey, for instance, added the Master IT Program in 2008. Its main focus is to give both technical and business professionals a grounding in data analytics. “We teach both technical and business analytics,” says Hui Xiong, an Associate Professor who runs the Rutgers program. “In addition, to succeed in this field, students need domain expertise, such as how analytics is used in retail or in pharmacology.”

 

One example of analytics in the healthcare domain comes from Premier Healthcare Alliance, which aggregates huge amounts of healthcare and business data for its member organizations. Premier’s business is organized like a professional society. Members include 2,700 hospitals and 90,000 healthcare facilities. Premier focuses on helping its affiliates transform their businesses through improved performance. “A substantial amount of what we offer involves IT,” says Randy Thomas, the company’s VP of Portfolio Strategy and Design.

 

By aggregating financial, purchasing, clinical and supply chain data, Premier is able to spot patterns and recommend business changes that lower costs and increase efficiency. Member CIOs are crucial in helping their organizations understand how to use this data to bring about process change, Thomas says. 

 

CIOs wishing to deepen their business and leadership skills will find many targeted university programs. The State University of New York’s Institute of Technology, for one, offers an MBA in technology management, an online program that combines business essentials with a technology focus.

 

Another program, the Information Technology Leadership Program offered by the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, provides IT executives with general management and executive-level skills. “For most of its history, IT has been an operational and functional resource, not a strategic [one],” says Peter DeLisi, the program’s dean.

 

For IT leaders in the public sector, the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania offers a Certified Government CIO program to help them respond to changing requirements. The program focuses not on technology, but on leadership skills, strategy setting and business management.

 

Educational programs that provide business and leadership skills help CIOs collaborate effectively with other executives. Business executives need to be involved in conversations about IT, but such conversations should not be about technology. Ultimately, it’s about how the business can leverage information to innovate, inform product decisions, affect the customer experience or create new business models, says Joe Peppard, Professor of Information Systems and Director of the IT Leadership Program at Cranfield School of Management in the U.K. “This is what transforms forward-thinking companies into industry leaders,” he says in a report from CA Technologies entitled, “The Future Role of the CIO.”

 

Another expert, David Houle, author of a new book, Entering the Shift Age (Sourcebooks, 2013), says CIOs can no longer focus only on technology. Instead, he says, CIOs should aggregate the intellectual property of their companies, then make sure it’s dispersed throughout the business. Houle believes the rapid technical and business changes taking place make this knowledge-sharing imperative.

 

MBA: Essential?

So, is an MBA or other advanced degree crucial to CIO success, given the CIO’s growing role in business transformation? “Having an MBA is helpful,” says Marv Ritter, a former CIO and CTO at many large companies, and the holder of an MBA degree himself. “It enables CIOs to speak the language of their business counterparts.”

 

Even without an MBA, CIOs need certain business competencies, argues Ameet Patel, a former CTO at JPMorgan Chase and now a business-transformation adviser to start-ups and other growth companies. First is finance. “You need to understand the numbers and be able to talk the language of the CFO,” Patel says. “The CIO needs to focus on cost and risk mitigation.” As CIOs can be responsible for thousands of employees, hundreds of systems and millions in costs, “They need to explain to the CFO how the IT investment leads to revenue generation,” Patel adds.

 

For CIOs, having a strong interest in emerging technologies and an entrepreneurial spirit can also be important. “When you have a deep understanding of how new technologies can move the company forward, and you combine that with the ability to create, prototype, deploy and iterate, then you have the classic McKinsey case-based approach to looking at complex problems and innovative solutions,” says Patel.

 

In fact, many highly recognized and successful CIOs do not have MBAs. Randy Mott, VP and CIO at General Motors, holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics. Ben Fried, CIO at Google, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

 

Others have advanced degrees, but in fields that closely align to their company’s business. Daniel Lebeau, Group CIO at GlaxoSmithKline, holds a doctorate in nuclear physics. What’s more, in his previous position as CIO at the company’s Biologicals unit, which produces vaccines, Lebeau did not hire anyone with an IT background. That’s because his BioIT group was responsible for business process management. Of the 100 people on the team, only 12 were responsible for IT infrastructure services, and just two had degrees in computer science.

 

To be sure, there are many ways to learn, and many ways that CIOs can gain the skills and influence needed to advance business transformations. CIOs stand at the crossroads of all of critical business data, and all the systems that drive key business processes. CIOs with leadership skills in both technology and business should remain in demand.

Customer Engagement Through Social Media 

 

CA Technologies launched a social network in 2010 that connects customers, partners and employees, enabling them to pose

questions, share expertise, and access a variety of online resources. Called MyCA (communities.ca.com) it represents the evolution of the old-style message board to a much richer, multidimensional environment centered on a community of knowledge.

 

This platform represents a transformation in how CA Technologies engages with customers and provides them with support and insights. It also lets customers help other customers based on their real world experience.

 

CA Technologies took the concept of the online forum, in which technical professionals pose questions, get answers and share code, and turned it into a full online community with blogs, online libraries and thought leadership about emerging industry trends and best practices, says Samuel Creek, a Senior Principal Business Analyst with CA Technologies in San Francisco.

 

CA Technologies has applied the latest thinking around B2B social communities to this effort. According to social media guru Clay Shirky, speaking at a recent industry event (hosted by LinkedIn), companies should no longer think about a straight transactional environment where an order comes in and a product goes out. They need to identify key networking individuals who have lots of useful connections, can share ideas and offer insights that make the social network more valuable.

 

MyCA also has a recognition component that rewards members based on behaviors ranging from answering questions and posting code to reading blog posts and/or responding to them. “It’s a system of social equity that rewards activity and expertise,” says Margaret Brooks, VP of Customer Success at CA Technologies in Memphis, Tenn. Members can collect points and achieve status such as contributor, aficionado and champion. The program is based on the notion that people are geared toward social recognition and are naturally acquisitive, so they want to complete missions and collect points. This facet of MyCA is often referred to as “gamification” because it shares the achievement and reward principles of computer gaming.

 

In addition to publishing weekly statistics on the system, Creek meets with  managers at CA Technologies regularly to spread the word. The result is that several individual departments are researching their own versions of the system. Ultimately, Creek hopes MyCA will provide a virtuous circle of communications between customers and our software engineers. “We need customer insights integrated with product creation, testing, deployment and ongoing usage,” he says. That will help improve products, cut costs and increase customer satisfaction.

 

So far, MyCA is on track: With 35,000 members, 1,000 participate daily and 100 new members sign up every week. – K.S.

 

 

Karyl Scott is a freelance writer in San Diego.


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Making STEM and IT Cool Again

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In my last blog I outlined three alternatives to extending the U.S. H1-B visas for high-tech workers. These included: boosting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education; changing perceptions about IT careers, and retraining current workers.

 

As a good indication of supply and demand gaps, at the RSA Conference in February, the Department of Homeland Security (DOHS) Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, Mark Weatherford, emphasized the need to develop more cybersecurity talent in the United States. Good IT security professionals are in high demand, he told attendees.

 

Weatherford also said DOHS hopes to address the skills gap in the security industry by attracting young people. He urged those in attendance to invest in after-school programs focused on hacking and computer programming. "The government needs to figure out how to make security a little cooler so people gravitate to it," he said. (Read about Mark’s actions while he was CISO of the State of California, here.)

 

Clearly, messages are mixed about choosing an IT career today. InformationWeek’s recent Salary Survey results conclude, for example, that while “application development is widely viewed as a desirable profession ... many developers no longer view the field in a favorable light. As the U.S. economy continues its slow recovery, developers have seen further erosion in benefits, company-paid training, annual compensation ­increases and job security.” (Read more and download the IWK survey here.)

 

Stemming the STEM Drain, Attracting Young People

Insufficient STEM education is partly to blame for the shortage of qualified IT workers — and it’s a problem in other countries, as well.

A new report from the Australian Industry (Ai) group has found a shortage of key STEM skills among the current and emerging workforce that, it says "is holding back Australian employers in their quest to be more innovative, productive and competitive." The report, "Lifting our Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) skills," surveyed more than 500 businesses from across the economy.

 

And Colin Bannister of CA Technologies, recently wrote on Smart Enterprise Exchange about difficulties in attracting young people to tech careers in the U.K. despite the high unemployment. He writes:

The root cause of this problem is the so-called skills shortage, especially in the IT industry. The number of students taking Computer Studies at A-Level continues to fall, for example, and a recent report revealed that some 16 million people in the U.K. lack basic online skills.

 

It shouldn't be this way. Computer Studies is one of the most innovative and exciting spaces to work in. The British technology sector is also vital to the U.K. economy, contributing £140 billion annually (equivalent to 12 percent of GDP). In essence, bright young students who turn a blind eye to the industry should look again.

Colin goes on to cite several examples, such as the eSkills organization, that are “working tirelessly to make sure Britain is getting the technology skills it needs to succeed, as well as encouraging more women to pursue careers in IT.”  

Legislation Falls Short

 

Back in the U.S., senators leading the immigration reform efforts and promoting an expansion of H1-B visas “had the right idea in supporting efforts to increase STEM education in the United States as part of the immigration reform package,” writes The Hill blog.

“But it’s hard to imagine that raising the cap on H-1B visas that allow companies to employ foreigners in U.S. STEM-based jobs will lead to any meaningful improvement in STEM education for U.S. students or in American workers’ ability to compete for these jobs in the future.”

 

“Disappointingly, both the money devoted to U.S. STEM education under these provisions, and the policies attached to them, amount to little more than lip-service to solve the problem of long-term education reform and economic competitiveness,” the blog concludes.

 

These are surely difficult economic times, and digital automation trends are accelerating at alarming rates. Today’s jobs of all types may be replaced by robots, and corporate data centers continue be displaced by the cloud and BYOD trends. That’s why, at this important time, politicians, educators and business leaders must consider all options for investing in the future and creating as many meaningful, well-paid local IT jobs as possible.

 

What are your thoughts? Are you currently looking for an IT job? Share your experiences and solutions with your peers.

 

Alternatives to H1-B Visas: Part 2

 

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

 



IT: Beyond the Final Frontier

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Yesterday’s science fiction is now reality. This demands continuous transformation in IT.

 

Think back to the original “Star Trek” television series. Remember when Mr. Spock would ask the ship’s computer a question, and the computer would immediately answer? After a while, viewers started to believe that’s how computers ought to operate. Four decades later, you can ask your smartphone a question, and it will reply  with not one, but thousands of possible answers.

 

Our expectations for technology are that exponential. Today there are roughly ten billion networked devices interacting with applications and generating waves of data at lightning speeds. The industry estimates that Wal-Mart alone collects more than 2.5 petabytes of data every hour from its customer transactions. This era of devices and sensors and the accompanying proliferation of big data is fraught with potential for innovation — and risk.

 

In response, the IT world has become highly fluid and complex. On one hand, the tightening of economic resources still requires IT departments to do more with less; on the other hand, IT innovations have created a huge shift in the economics around platforms and delivery.

 

Organizations can now develop, scale and capture new markets long before slower competitors even get out of the gate. In this dynamic business environment, one company’s IT innovation or change in cost structure can render its competitors obsolete. Needless to say, IT is today an essential part of the business model and must be integrated into an organization’s core functions.

 

Changing IT Culture

With this in mind, IT departments have to accept that transformation has no end date, and happens at every level of the business. That’s why smart CIOs are working beyond the sphere of IT to become change leaders for the entire organization.

 

IT leadership now requires more than technical expertise; CIOs must be business strategists, capable of orchestrating the technologies, skills and resources required to produce new outcomes and deliver better services to customers.

 

Intermountain Healthcare is a good example. This Utah-based nonprofit system of hospitals, clinics and an affiliated insurer has done a masterful job of managing costs while also improving the quality of services Intermountain provides to its healthcare professionals. IT is highly motivated, because employees know that by finding new ways to get essential information to doctors and nurses, they’re helping patients and saving lives.

 

Or consider Tesco, a U.K.-based retailer that leverages innovative technologies to secure mobile transactions, manage the day-to-day operations of its applications, and monitor its global carbon footprint in support of its aggressive sustainability targets.

 

Organizations like these are harnessing CA Technologies solutions to transition from simply maintaining IT systems to delivering new, innovative services. Whether the business model involves mobile access to vital medical information or allowing retailers to save energy, IT is positioned to lead the organization to greatness. And with more capabilities, more power, and more potential than ever, CA Technologies is poised to help CIOs deliver guidance for the demands of tomorrow.

 

The world of technology is finally catching up with our imagination, and IT must keep pace. As Mr. Spock might say, “In the face of extinction, it is only logical.”

 

George Fischer is Executive VP and Group Executive, Worldwide Sales and Services, at CA Technologies.


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How Will the Next Security, Mobility and Big Data Experts Be Trained?

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Data scientists, security experts and mobile app developers will remain the hot IT career paths for at least the next few years, says a top executive for Robert Half Technology, a leading IT recruitment firm.

 

“The job market will be strong for people who can take data and package it” so that executives can make better business decisions, says John Reed, Senior Executive Director at Robert Half. 

 

While this makes perfect sense to anyone who understands the IT industry, what I really wondered was where and how these skills will be developed. In addition to Reed, I asked several academic CIOs about this, and got some interesting insights.

 

For instance, even though elite universities such as Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, MIT, Stanford -- as well as many liberal arts, business and tech colleges -- offer courses in data analytics, companies are having a difficult time finding skilled data scientists. In fact, 53 percent of the U.S. CIOs surveyed by Robert Half Technology say that “they lack sufficient staff to access customer data and generate reports and other business insights from it.”

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“A lot of companies are growing their own data analysts, hiring people with math and statistics degrees, and teaching them analytics on the job,” Reed told me.

 

And that’s not the only skill in demand for both aspiring and mid-career IT professionals. Along with big data, IT security and mobility, cloud technologies and virtualization skills will be important. Reed’s advice to midcareer professionals is clear: If you are not working in any of those areas now, “Tell management that you’d love to gain some new skills and work with the team,” he says, even if it’s after hours. “You always have to be looking at building your craft.”

 

The Right Mix

Students particularly need to take Reed’s advice to heart. While college computer science departments are doing a much better job partnering with business to provide students with practical experience mixed with academics, U.S. undergraduate education is only a short four years.

 

Beyond technology expertise, companies also want applicants with a commitment to lifelong learning and increasingly, problem solving and communications skills. IT executives are finding it difficult to find well-rounded applicants at all levels, says Mark Schwartz, CIO at BlumShapiro, a midsize accounting firm based in West Hartford, Conn.

 

“Job candidates either have the technical skills but don’t have the communications skills, or they have the verbal skills but lack the technical skills,” Schwartz says. During his own studies for a degree in management information systems at Northeastern University, Schwartz took on numerous collaborative projects and had to make presentations to round out his education.

 

“While we need people with technical expertise, what’s often more important is having an out-of-the-box thinker who can solve problems and communicate to the accountants at the firm,” he says.

 

Hands-on Experience

Curt Pederson is doing his part to prepare students better for IT careers. Before signing on this year as CIO at the University of Portland, Pederson was CIO at Oregon State University (OSU), which has a unique Open Source Lab where students can work.

 

The 16 students in the program receive intensive hands-on experience with Apache, Drupal and other Linux flavors, resulting in three to four years of development and operations experience when they graduate. They also learn to handle internal customers.

 

“The students solved problems, responded to trouble tickets and in many ways were one to two years ahead of most other students,” he says, adding that they all gained confidence and many were recruited by top Silicon Valley companies.

 

Pederson says the program was so successful that it’s now being moved from its home in OSU’s IT department to the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The hope is to expand access to the Open Systems Lab to 100 students, a prospect Pederson says may be challenging because the small size was part of the program’s formula for success. Pederson also plans to provide the students at the University of Portland with a similar experience. Already, roughly half of the college’s 80 computer science students are doing hands-on project work in the IT department.

 

Above all, it seems to me that IT workers today -- and tomorrow -- need to stay as flexible as the mobile workplaces many of them will encounter. And any way they can gain new skills in these hot technology areas will give them an edge.

 

Where are you finding technical talent? Share your experiences with Smart Enterprise Exchange and your peers.

 

 

Steve Zurier is a business and technology writer based in Maryland.

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