IT Projects: Expert Witness, CIO, In-House Counsel & Litigation Forum

CIO strategy: 10 qualities of IT greatness

December 29th, 2008

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:53 am

Categories: IT issues, CIO issues

Tags: CIO, Information Technology, Successful IT Group, Paul M. Ingevaldson, Strategy...

Successful IT groups are resilient, flexible, and highly responsive to organizational business needs. For many CIOs, this goal appears elusive and completely disconnected from the daily grind of servers, users, downtime, and help desks. Despite the difficulty, CIO success depends on connecting the chaotic, often crisis-driven, IT environment to high-level strategic and business priorities that matter to the broader organization.Linking a tactical IT culture rooted in reaction and response to broader strategic goals is a worthy, if difficult, challenge, which requires understanding the areas of intersection between IT and the business. Despite the obstacles, IT must cross this bridge without disrupting its own operational ability to deliver projects on-time and within budget while still achieving planned scope. To be sure, this balancing act requires careful and delicate choreography!

10 tech leaders who could become Obama’s CTO

Previously appeared on November 10th, 2008 posted by Jason Hiner http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=850&tag=nl.e019

As a presidential candidate, part of Barack Obama’s technology policy platform included hiring the U.S. government’s first chief technology officer (CTO). If Obama follows through on this, who is likely to get the job? Here are 10 top candidates.

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama used technology to organize, communicate, and raise funds in innovative ways that gave him an advantage over opponents in both the primaries and the general election. It’s clear that Obama views tech as a powerful catalyst, and with the U.S. facing an unprecedented array of economic challenges, Obama will need to use technology to drive efficiency and institutional transformation.

A part of his policy platform, Obama has stated that he plans to hire the nation’s first chief technology officer (CTO) to play quarterback in driving these changes. A CTO is typically an organization’s top engineer and focuses on outward-facing technologies (see What’s the difference between CIO and CTO) but based on Obama’s policy statements he wants to use the national CTO position to:

• Build a 21st centrury technology infrastructure

• Unite and lead the CIOs and CTOs of various federal agencies

• Architect innovative tech solutions to help solve big problems.  

As a result, Obama is going to need a visionary tech leader who can rally both technologists and standard Washngton bureacrats around a common purpose. It also wouldn’t hurt to bring in a big name — someone who already has a strong reputation that will translate into political capital.

Here are top 10 candidates.

10. Shai Agassi

This former technology head of SAP has the business experience and the interest in larger societal issues to do well as America ’s CTO. However, he’s recently founded his own company,Better Place, to create an entirely new business model and power system to run the electric cars of the future. Because of his passion for that project, it’s doubtful he would want the U.S. CTO gig.

Wicked-cool political Web sites

Originally appeared in Computerworld on 2008-10-29 By Dan Tynan  

(http://blogs.computerworld.com) 

I can't eat, I can't sleep, and I can't seem to pull myself away from the Net. Election time must be near.

While obsessing over politics, I found some wicked-cool sites I had to share with my faithful readers.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote here that YouTube has forever changed our electoral politics]. (I also did a podcast on this topic with Geekazine's Jeff Powers earlier this week. If you've got half an hour to kill, check it out.)

At the techPresident blog, Micah Sifry has put dollars and sense on YouTube's value.  First he asked YouTube metrics company TubeMogul  to calculate how much time YouTubers have spent watching each campaign's videos (not including those submitted by partisans and jokesters on either side). The answer: Obama wins by a huge margin.

Writes Sifry: "The total in absolute time (views * video length):
Obama 14,548,809.05 hours; McCain 488,093.01 hours."

Then Sifry asked political guru Joe Trippi how much Obama's YouTube hours would be worth in actual dollars, using typical TV ad spending as a measure. The answer? A whopping $46 million.

The value of McCain's YouTubing? About $1.5 million. So Obama has gotten about 30 times as much free air time on the Web as his rival. Tells you a lot, don't it?